Chapter Text
He no longer tasted salt. A lifetime of briny winds and sweat had desensitised him to it. His tongue didn’t feel its tang. The gritty layer was a part of him, and his wounds no longer noticed the burn. That’s why he didn’t fear the tears. They, too, were salt. They were of the sea and joined it again: all part of the cycle, same as blood.
But there were no tears now, no release from the torment of dying. Careened in seething hot water, he just lay there, forehead wedged against the side of the tub as they scrubbed him clean. Lice, they said. Disease and foreign matter. Even in this place for the exiled and dispossessed, they needed to eliminate the outside. To protect themselves, to prevent contamination. To make sure nothing of Flint and his world remained.
And so he rose from the tub a dead man. What Silver hadn’t managed to do, these mute washer women had. He was stripped of his protective layer, skin smarting like a new-born. His laundered clothes itched and crackled, strained in new and unfamiliar places. They seemed to belong to someone else. Someone larger, someone taller. Someone whose loss was his strength.
They led him through the house, and he let himself be led. A dead man couldn’t feel, couldn’t remember. He was a wandering bark, lost and windless. Sunlight sliced through the slats as he walked, sought to pry him open. But he crept into the darkness of his mind, hiding where no hope could reach him.
Just a short wait now. On the other side of that door was a gallows, not a sanctuary. Surely that was the ultimate triumph of the man he’d called friend—had called more in the innermost recesses of his dreams. What that friend couldn’t do with his own two hands would finally be done the traditional way. Flint’s body would swing, and the silken tether to his soul be cut.
The door flew open, and the sound of wind tied a knot in his throat. Wind, that fickle mistress who’d dictated his life for so many years: here it swept unheeded through layers of trees and grass. A raging tiger at sea, in this place she was merely a playful kitten, offering a sweet smell of greenery, the damp smell of earth. He took a step outside. The scene was tranquil, implausible. A dreamscape of mellow labour, a vision to taunt him: so like the idea he had once shared with—
The iron teeth of his will slammed shut. That name must not be thought. But a silver tongue had done what no sword had managed: had wormed itself inside, had made him weak. His soul was dead from the wound, and now his body must follow. Where was the noose? He longed for it. He was ready.
The scrape of metal down by his hands would have drawn his gaze, but for a strangeness in the calm tableau. A click made something loosen around his wrists, but his eyes were locked on an anomaly, a white shape as incongruous as it was familiar. The figure was nondescript, or should have been, but something about it was eerily recognizable. A dangerous recognition, like a knife in the dark. Another lie, the trick of a mind worn down by deceit. The ultimate revenge of a man who just had to twist the blade before he saw Flint dead.
But what supernatural influence could Silver wield, to stage such a mummer’s farce? Was his vindictiveness so boundless that he’d employed an actor of that exact stature and colouring just to break the spirit of his erstwhile companion? As Flint warred with the thought in his mind, there was a shift in the man’s body, as if he knew he was being watched. An awareness made physical. And now—
Flint’s heart—he had a heart, still, after all this? Or was it someone else’s?—stuttered in his chest, because now, the man slightly inclined his head in a way no one else on this godforsaken earth could. A gesture so minute only James could detect it. James, who had died long before Flint. James, who should have no say in what happened now. James, who took a step towards the apparition because hell, he'd always been helpless to resist the beauty of a false promise.
The place where his heart should be—had been, was going to be—sputtered and ached with the kindling. No trace of salt in the wound now, all of it washed away in that wooden tub, but instead the grit and soil of this landlocked place sought a way inside his veins. The white-clad man turned. Features came into view, features that had slowly dissolved in James’ memory and become mere islands in a sea of oblivion. Now they reconnected and settled in a pattern so impossibly real that James’ knees would have given out if not for the way his eyes were anchored, keeping him up.
He had to know. Had to make sure it wasn’t so.
And he who had walked the rolling boards for as long as he could remember could hardly keep his balance as he picked his way through the narrow aisle of ploughed earth. His body was disproportionate, unbalanced. As if his chest, straining to contain his heart, was too heavy and would drag him under. While he walked, the apparition stared at him, white against the richness of the earth. A ghost, perhaps, but a ghost of flesh and blood. Flint was not so gone that he didn’t know the difference between a breathing man and a corpse. And something about it was real. He couldn’t deny it. Not even his dreams could conjure such a fitting symbol: the colours of his life, like pieces on a chessboard, their opposites laid bare. There was his previous life, alive and angelic, and here he was, as black as sin.
But the contrast was deceiving: for all its threatening darkness, the black was always overlaid with the white of surrender, the truth of bones, the slash of steel. And oh, how Silver’s steel was twisting now, the reality perhaps more deadly than the lie. For each step, it bored deeper into his chest, pinned him to his fate. For each step, the distance lessened, and the witness of Flint’s scars must come into focus. Was this the moment he should raise his colours—before he came too close? When was the time for truth, to stop the prize from running, from mustering resistance?
Too late: the hooks caught hold. Their bodies crashed together. Arms slammed into ribs, knocked the breath from his lungs. A hard collision, sending ripples of pain through his wounds. An embrace bulging with muscle, sharp with bone. There was no comfort in it, only panic-stricken euphoria, nauseating in its intensity. Air creaked through his throat. His chin grinded against fabric and dirty skin as he inhaled the smell of midday sweat. It was real, unbearably real, but he would only have this for a minute, then it would disappear. He had to crush it while it was his, destroy it with his own two hands before someone else beat him to it.
Gripping the skull of the man in his arms, his fingers trembled with the memory of twisting Gates' neck. His most horrendous sin, and yet far from the only one that would banish him from this mirage of a Paradise. But then the man moved, and he felt hot breath on his face, and something else was happening: a seeking of lips, a bristle of beards, a wet slipping and the impact of teeth. The echo of a lost time, the creak of a headboard, of legs caught in a snarl of sheets and the stifled giggles of a whole world opening up in the secrecy of a nobleman’s darkened bedroom.
Thomas!
Salt filled his eyes, welled over. He clung to the living ghost, a mixture of rapture and despair rending his hull. This reunion would end in ashes, he knew, as the tears ran down his cheeks and mingled with the dust on Tomas’ shoulder. I’m salting his earth, came the wail from the depths of his soul. From the sea I have come, a destroyer, to lay waste to all he has built.