They laid the girl on a pallet in the fo'c'sle, tucked up out of the wind. I brought a blanket myself and a cup besides, waved the others off before they could start staring.
"Arry," I said, lowering myself beside her. "You hurt?"
She kept her eyes on the boards. "No."
I waited a breath. "Drink."
She took the cup and swallowed too fast. It caught her, and she turned away, coughing once, hard, as if she meant to choke it down out of spite. When she looked back, her eyes were bright and angry, and she blinked as if the light bothered her.
I pulled the blanket higher. She didn't thank me.
"Bread first," I said. "We'll see about stew."
She tore a piece and ate it standing, as if sitting might be a mistake.
After a while she said, "That bird."
Not a question.
I waited.
"The one in the sky," she added, eyes on the hatch. "The burning one."
"I don't know what he is," I said. "I know who he is."
She looked back at me then. "Does he mind you?"
"Sometimes."
That seemed to satisfy her more than anything else.
"He burned men," she murmured.
And I kept my silence.
She worried the crust between her fingers, then stopped eating altogether. The blanket was pulled tight around her shoulders now, bunched in her fists.
"If I say I want to go back," she said.
I did not answer at once.
"Not tonight," I said finally. "The tide's wrong, and so is the dark. You sleep."
Her chin lifted. "I didn't say I'd sleep."
"That's your choice."
She watched me the way a cat watches a hand.
"I don't know you," she said.
"That's true."
"I didn't ask to come here."
"No."
Silence stretched. The ship creaked around us.
I set the cup down where she could reach it. "If the ship throws you, brace there." I tapped the post once and stepped back.
She did not thank me. She did not look away either.
When I turned, she was still sitting upright, blanket clenched in both hands, eyes fixed on the dark as if daring it to move first.
----------------------
My cabin door stuck on the swollen frame. I leaned into it with my shoulder until the wood gave and I stepped inside.
I stopped at once.
The room was wrong.
Marks scored the boards, not the wild tearing of an animal, but lines cut with care. The bench. The chest. Even the floor beneath the porthole. Some shallow, some deep, the grain splintered where the strokes had bitten too hard. They wandered, then straightened, then wandered again, as if the hand that made them had learned as it went.
Writing.
I forgot to breathe.
I went down on one knee without meaning to, fingers hovering uselessly in front of me. The words were scattered, broken where space ran out, pressed small in corners, dragged long where the boards were clear. Some letters had been cut twice, corrected with ugly insistence. In places the wood was darkened, blistered, as though it burnt accidently.
I could not take it in all at once. My eyes slid from mark to mark, catching pieces and losing them again.
A warning.A promise.A name I knew too well, half-seen and gone before I was ready.
My hand moved on its own.
I touched the board where the letters bit deepest.
ELIA.
The name burned beneath my palm, though the wood was cold. My breath left me in a sound I did not recognize.
My fingers drifted, searching, until they found the other.
AEGON.
I pressed my hand there too, harder than before, as if pressure might keep the letters from fading, as if that could anchor the world where it stood. My chest tightened until it hurt to draw breath. Fool's instinct. Child's instinct. I did not pull away.
Around the names, the rest of it blurred. The talk of darkness, of return, of blood and fire and time, too much, too sharp, all at once. I could not hold it. I did not try.
I stayed there a long while, kneeling in the wreck of the room, my palm on those two names, until the ship's creak and the wash of the sea found me again.
-----------
A shout tore down the deck.
"Fire!"
Boots hammered. Someone knocked over a barrel. Another voice barked for water and was answered at once. A bucket went past my shoulder, slopping brine across the planks.
I dragged the cabin door wide.
Smoke crawled out low and bitter. Two men were already there, one flinging water hard and fast, the other beating at the boards with a scrap of wet sail. Steam hissed. The glow dulled but did not die.
"Not there." I said, stepping in. "You'll soak her through."
They heard it. The older sailor shifted at once, setting the bucket aside. "Ballast," he called. "Sand!"
Someone came running with a tub. The sand went down by the handful, pressed flat and firm, worked into the grain where the heat still bit. The hissing faded to a sour stink. Smoke thinned.
I left them crouched there and climbed back to the weather deck.
He stood by the rail near the quarter, broad-backed and dark with soot, wings folded in tight. The east was paling. He did not turn when I came up.
I went to stand beside him.
For a while there was only the sea and the creak of timber.
"How much of you don't I know?" I said.
He shifted once. His beak tipped toward the line where night was loosening on the water. Then he looked back at me, held it a heartbeat, and faced the light again.
I followed his gaze.
The sun edged up, thin at first, then stronger.
"All right," I said.
Behind us, men stamped out the last of the smell and muttered over scorched boards. Ahead, the day took hold.
He stayed on the rail.
So did I.
Nothing promised. Nothing spoken.
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