Melianarrheyal

  ~*~

  The wind does not cease. I wait for it. I wait for Ty. Either the wind must stop, or he must find some way to free me of this curse – and soon. I cannot wait like this. I cannot live like this. Something must stop.

  At last Ty says: “I have an idea, though I don't know if it will work.” He tells it to Ler, and apparently she agrees it is worth trying, for soon Ty and Rih and Ahl are all standing before me, eying me warily. Ahl is the married man on the ship, the one who was annoyed at my screaming when nothing was there, and he has a weak talent for conjury himself.

  Therrin and the rest of the crew are there too, watching, to see how it will go. I hate their eyes on me, but I cannot flee.

  “What are we doing, then?” asks Rih.

  “Can you make us see the curse?” Ty asks.

  “Certainly.” He does. The demon in my eye seems not to know how to interpret this: there is something on my skin, covering me, moving, and I know that it is the curse, and I know that it is black, but it does not look like blackness. It hurts my mind to look at it.

  “It's not solid or anything,” says Rih. “It's just blackness.”

  “Good enough,” says Ty. “Now Ahl, if you can: make an elemental from this curse, and lift it from Arrek.”

  At first Ahl does nothing. He says: “As soon as I let it go, it will only fly back to him; or if it does not, the curse will stay wherever it lands.”

  “That is why I shall summon a demon and bind it to the curse, as soon as it is no longer with him,” says Ty.

  This is the third conjuration of some size he will have done in very little time. I hope it is not too much. I don't know how hard it will be for him; I know nothing of conjury.

  Ahl draws a few symbols, and the curse comes away from me slowly. It seems loath to let me go, but it is pulled off bit by bit. I can feel it moving. The parts of my body that are clean feel new and fresh and naked, and there is a tingling in the parts that are still cursed.

  At last I am free of it and it floats above me, a cloud of the strange moving blackness that does not look black.

  Now Ty draws his own symbols in the air around him, and as he does the curse flies down to the deck and it takes a new form: a young woman wearing a dress, but all black, so black that she looks like a flat shadow seen against the sun. But the demon in my eye knows that she is as round and as real as she ever was. For that is what it looks like: like her, like her shadow.

  I cannot bring myself to look away.

  “Is that the curse, then?” asks Therrin. “Hello, Curse!” She waves at it, but the curse gives no response.

  “It won't answer,” says Ty. “Yes, that's the curse. It has no voice, and no true will. It has nothing but an instinct to come to an end, to finish. It can do that by attaching to the noblewoman it resembles, I think, for I expect she dreams of herself each night already. But it has no way to find her, except to continue to follow Arrek.

  “It is still bound to him, I think. But it shan't attach to him again. It is safe now.”

  “Make it go away,” I whisper. The demon in my eye sees everything around me, but only the curse seems real in my mind. It looks like her. It moves like her. It does not breathe, and when it walks the lengths of its strides don't match the distance it covers, but it places one small foot just ahead of the other and it swings its shoulders a little just as she always did.

  “I can't,” Ty says with a touch of ire in his voice. “I can't tell it where to find the flower, and until it finds her it cannot disappear. Think of it this way: it may be of use. It has no mind to be fooled by numbers or directions, so it will remember whatever it is told once, and may know the way even if all the land looks the same. It needn't eat or sleep, so it can always stand guard. And if the flower does catch us up, it will slow her before she reaches us. It is a good defense, if nothing else.”

  I shake my head. I look away. I will not look at it. I must forget it is there. It looks so like her that I cannot help but to think of her when I see it. And I must not think of her. I must not. I must forget.

  But the dreams are gone now. Sometimes she still flits through them, quick and horrible, but she is no longer the only thing I see, and she does not always wake me even when I do see her. I am still afraid to fall asleep, but after a while I am able to use my bed again.

  The curse-thing follows me, so that I cannot help but to see it. It is never more than ten paces away from me. I try to look away, for whenever I look at it I am so afraid that I feel sick. If I could close my demon-eye, it might be easier to wait blindly for land; as I cannot, I turn my gaze upward much of the time, or out at the sea.

  The first night after it was removed from me it stands in the corner of our room, silent and dark as a shadow. I don't dare blind myself with the eyepatch while it is there. At last I wake Therrin, and beg her to help me; she speaks to it on my behalf, asking it to stay outside this room at night.

  At least it listens when spoken to, though I myself will not speak to it. It departs silently, and it does not show itself in our room again. I am still afraid, but no longer so afraid that I cannot sleep, weary as I am.

  With sleep I grow better accustomed to this ship, and the wind ceases to sicken me. Perhaps I have no reason to live, but now – so long as I do not look at the curse – I no longer have a reason to die. So I do not leap overboard, however afraid I may be. I must be strong, I tell myself. I am Arrek, and I am not hiding, and I will be strong. I was strong enough to run; now I must be strong enough to live.

  But I am very afraid, and whenever I see the curse I know why it is, really, that I am not leaping: not because I wish to live, but because I am afraid it might follow me.