Siren Ch. 07

"I collapsed at some point, but my husband delivered each blow the priest instructed him, believing to the last that it would save his wife from the wickedness in my soul. It took a fortnight for me to be able to stand, two more before he began trying again." Kenna's hand clenched and she dared glance at Roland's face. "When he began bedding me again I knew it was only a matter of time before I failed to produce a child and he took me back to the church.

"His company called him to Belfast to help manage the purchase of three more ships and I insisted on coming with him. I told him that the dark forces of the devil were waiting for him to leave so they could reclaim me. He, of course, believed he was the only one who could save me so he brought me with him to the city. I sent word to my sister that he had died before I'd carried it out."

Her face grew sad, though Roland saw no repentance or guilt there. "I poisoned him slowly so that it seemed as though he was ailing. I began before we even left for Belfast. By the time he died there was no suspicion of me. I buried him and told them all I was going back to my village. I found a ship that was set to sail and bought my passage with coins I'd been hoarding away for years. A week later we set sail." She looked back at Roland, "and three weeks later your ship attacked."

Roland was intent on her face. "You don't regret his death," he said, puzzling over something. She shook her head. "So why your guilt?"

Even as he asked he understood, but again Kenna stole herself from allowing her silence to answer for her. "I do not regret choosing myself over him, despite his earnest belief in the goodness of his actions. I know survival is a difficult instinct to ignore and I don't fault myself for it." She paused. "I am an empty vessel, one without the ability to fulfill the purpose for which I was made. It was not his fault I am barren."

"But you were ailing when you first arrived on this ship," he prompted her.

"Indeed, I have suffered pangs of my conscience. I do wonder if it was not my intended fate to suffer under him for the uselessness of my womb," Roland's face darkened and she reassured him. "Despite being taught by the church and my betters to accept these types of punishments, it is not an outcome I have ever accepted. Your Captain Dougray can attest to that."

A strange lightness blossomed in her chest, ripples of it flowing up the back of her neck and across her cheeks until her lips gave way into a smile she'd long forgotten. She looked up at Roland, finding him staring back at her, his head tilted to the side slightly. Kenna did not deny the next wave as it bubbled up as laughter and she felt her voice freed. Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes and through her wavy vision she saw Roland get up and come around the table to her.

He turned her chair and crouched before her. His hand brushed her wet cheeks, and he placed a soft kiss on her still smiling lips. But the well of relief was shallow, in its wake panic at her complete unveiling burst through.

"With this knowledge," she said, her chest rising and falling with the effort to keep her new distress at bay, "will you find yourself ill-disposed to continue claiming a woman in name alone?" Is this what she had been reduced to? Fearful that her captor would release her of all things? But she knew too well her survival rested on his desire to keep her. He could be rid of her easily, confess the truth to Abbott who would have the crew up in arms against the Siren, so inhuman she could not carry a babe. And she would be gone and his ship would be divided no longer.

She may have betrayed herself to her own death, and yet she could not imagine taking it back.

Roland kissed her again, ignoring her tears as he had always done. "Every time I believe you to be a woman much wiser than most men, you insist on reminding me that you have yet to accept that which I have made clear to you again and again." She wiped her cheeks and looked at him as he spoke, anxiety and hope weaving themselves together inexorably whenever he said those words: "You're mine, Kenna."

The storm inside her settled preternaturally, she stared at him with wide eyes as she felt two opposite and equally intense things at once. The first, her heart soaring after his declaration that he would accept her broken body as he had before he knew of it, that he would not condemn her as she had been before. Her affection burst forth into full bloom.

But, with the second, the words slammed a door on that joy almost as soon as they'd engendered it. She would never have a choice in this, he would never allow her freedom beyond his desires; she would remain property. There would be no new independance discovered in the New World as she had secretly hoped. She would be just as much his prisoner as she had been her husband's.

Roland saw it all, her eyes open and vulnerable to him as she reeled through her various responses. He kissed her again. She was his now, and with time she would come to accept it. A woman who had killed two men who stood between her and freedom? The thought barreled into his victory unbidden. This is a woman who will simply learn to live with it? He silenced the doubt, for now. He would eventually find a way to bind her to him irrevocably; after all he was closer now than he had ever been.

A whistling sound shrieked through the quiet in the room. Roland jerked away from her as a splash sounded close to the ship. The hammering at the door began as he reached it and Stephen's red face greeted him on the far side.

"The Navy," he panted, "They're on top of us."

*****

Hello again lovely readers.

So first a footnote: "The King Stork" is a fairy tale I had a picture book of when I was a kid (this is what happens when you have a medievalist for a parent) and, while I abridged it here, I didn't make up the more gruesome details.

Check my bio page for updates on the progress of the story.

Thanks so much for reading! You guys are wonderful.