Free The Skybound Sea by Samuel Sykes

her?”
    “What?”
    “Go in there and open her throat.” She scowled at the door. “She’s too dangerous to leave alive.”
    “Granted, but that’s not for us to decide. Lenk thinks she still might have—”
    “
Lenk doesn’t know them
,” she snarled, whirling on him. “He thinks they’re savages. The only reason he hates them is that they’re more longfaced than
his
little savage.
I know them
.” She jabbed a thumb at her chest. “I know what they’re capable of.
I
know what they do. I know how foul and utterly—”
    “You think I don’t?” he interjected. “You think I haven’t seen what they’ve done?”
    “I don’t
think
anything about you,” she said. “I know you, too. I know you’re scum.”
    He knew why she knew, too. Just as he knew he couldn’t deny it.
    “And I know that
you
know
nothing
about them.” She turned on him now, turned a face cold and trembling upon him. “Because
you
came too late to stop it from happening. Because
you
did nothing to stop it from happening and because you … you …”
    Asper was an honest woman. Too honest to survive, he had once thought. Her face wasn’t made for masks. Her face fragmented with each moment it trembled, cracking and falling off to reveal eyes that weren’t as cold as she wanted them to be. There was fire there, and honest hate.
    “Everything … everything that happened to me, what Sheraptus …” She winced at the name, clenched her teeth. “He
violated
me … and then … then, my arm—” Her face trembled so violently he had to fight the urge to reach out and steady her. “And with it all, after all the secrets about it and allthat happened with him, I thought at least I had you, at least I had someone to …”
    A curse would have been nice. Spitting in his eye would have been workable, too. The sigh she let out, though, was less than ideal.
    “I
needed
you … and you shoved me away, like I was … like I was unclean.
Trash
. And now you won’t even look at me.”
    And Denaos wasn’t looking at her now. He was looking at her forehead, at the hut door, at the sand and the unbearable sun. Her eyes were too hard to look at, too shiny, too clear; he might see himself in them.
    “You don’t need me.”
    “You’re the only one who knows this,” she grabbed at her arm, “
any
of this. Do you have any idea how long I’ve—”
    “
Yes
.” He looked at her now. “Yes, I know what it’s like to wait that long. And yes, I know what happened to you and I know what’s happening to you.”
    “Then why won’t you?”
    “
Because I’ve seen it before
.” He clutched his head. “I know why you threw yourself at me because I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen women, children,
people
get torn apart like you did. I’ve seen them carry worse things and think that they have go into the arms of someone, anyone, just to tell it. But it can’t be anyone, Asper, and it can’t be me.”
    Not entirely true. There was a lot she could tell him, a lot he needed to tell her. But what, he did not know. How exactly a man went about telling a woman he had seen what women do after being violated because he had watched it happen was beyond him. He neglected to tell her that. That, he reasoned, was slightly better than lying.
    “I am not a good man. I am not what you need.”
    She stared at him for a moment. He never saw the blow coming. It was only after she had struck him, sent him reeling, that he admitted she might be better with masks than he thought.
    “No one tells me what I need,” she said. “Certainly not a man hiding cowardice behind more cowardice.”
    She stalked off silently, swiftly, leaving him alone with his conscience.
    Could have gone better
.
    True
, he admitted.
    She might hit you less if you actually talked to her, you know
.
    That sounds really hard
.
    Good point. Want a drink?
    Wanted one, yes. Needed one, yes. He needed many things at that moment. The most important of which became apparent