“He’s very sweet,” Selena said. “Whistle, I mean.”
“He likes you. They all do, but him especially,” Sebastian said. “He’s spent most of his shore-leave allowance on a gift for you. Try not to laugh when you get it.”
Selena looked down at her mug of cider. “I would never do that.”
“Sorry. I should have known better. Of course, you wouldn’t laugh at him.” He took a long pull from his own mug and saw her watching him. “What?”
She crossed her arms. “I’m trying to decide if you meant to insult me or to pay me a compliment.”
“Neither. Just making an observation.”
“You think being kind is a weakness?” she asked.
“No. I think making yourself weak in order to be kind is foolish.”
Selena smiled tightly. “It takes more strength and will to be kind than it does to indulge in anger or hate.”
Sebastian snorted. “Is that what they teach you in your pretty Temple? Try taking that out in to the world, onto the seas full of cutthroat bastards and see how far the strength of your kindness gets you.”
“I take that out into the world every day, Captain,” Selena said. “That is my duty as an Aluren. To wade into seas full of ‘cutthroat bastards’ and staunch the blood of their violence with healing.”
“That’s all very well and good, but sometimes you have no choice but to spill blood yourself. Sometimes, it’s either you or them, so what do you do then? You don’t wear that sword for nothing.”
“And I use it when I have to. As I did on Uago, where we met.”
“Where you hacked off a pirate’s arm and then turned around and healed him?”
“I had a chance to take a bad situation and make it better. I was weakened in body for a time, but that passed. What doesn’t pass is the memory of violence and bloodshed wrought at my hand. The fewer of those I carry, the better.”
You don’t carry them, Paladin, he thought, you bury them.
Sebastian glanced over to where Whistle sat with the rest of the crew. The boy grinned his crooked-tooth grin at them both.
“People laugh at him,” he muttered. “I’ve heard them, on shore-leave or at the market on other isles. They think he’s slow or stupid. He’s not. He’s a good kid trying to survive in this bloody shit-stinking world without a voice. And he does it with a loopy grin on his face.”
“Ah, so Cur is not the only one who is protective of him,” Selena said with a smile.
He shrugged. “I’m the captain. He’s part of my crew. It’s my job to look out for him if I want to keep my ship sailing the way it ought. Doesn’t matter anyway. People will be cruel to him no matter what I do or don’t do. That’s just Lunos for you.”
“There is much that is ugly and cruel in this world,” Selena agreed, “but there is much that is beautiful too. Surely you’ve seen beauty in your voyages?”
My atoll, he thought. And you. The thought slipped into his mind like a cat through an open door.
Selena was waiting for a reply. “No, not much,” Sebastian said.
She glanced about the room, gesturing to the people in it. “For every cutthroat pirate there are dozens—hundreds— of good people who would treat Whistle with kindness were they to meet him. It’s only the bad who draw the attention, or demand it. It is what the Bazira rely on to swell their ranks and why the Aluren struggle to fill theirs.”
“What do the Bazira rely on?” Sebastian asked, his voice low.
“The impression that the bad and ugly outnumber that which is good and honest, and that it’s simply easier to succumb,” Selena said. “Hopelessness. It is the Bazira’s greatest weapon.”
“Is that why you became a Paladin? To bring hope to people?”
“Yes,” she said, answering his sarcasm head-on. “It has been my sincerest endeavor since childhood, when the Two-Faced God Heard my desire to ease pain and suffering.” She gestured to the other side of the room. “Look at Boris. His face is scarred and some might think him ugly. But he is alive and he can still provide for his family. Is that not a beautiful gift the god has given me?”
Sebastian set down his mug with a clank. “How you can sit here, wearing some cold ugly hole in your chest, and still feel like you are blessed, is a bloody mystery.”
He thought Selena might grow angry or upset at his words but she sighed.
“I have wrestled with that for long years,” she said. “I still do but—”
“Wrestled with it?” Sebastian asked, incredulous. “Aren’t you angry? Don’t you want to…I don’t know—”
“Make others suffer as I have?” she finished. “In the beginning, when the wound was new, I was…unwell. I did things that would shock you, I’m sure, to imagine me doing. Not murder. No, most of the damage I did was to myself.” Her eyes grew cloudy with memories and then she threw them off. “Healing and Ilior. Those things saved me.”
“You seem too calm. I wouldn’t be.”
“I have to be. The wound is terrible. More terrible than I can describe or that you can imagine. Your worst idea of it will not come close to meeting its reality.” She set her mug down. “I can’t afford to be angry, Julian. Or weep when it strikes me to. Or draw my blade when I feel I’ve suffered enough…” She took a shaking breath and he watched her hands tremble before she hugged herself to still them. “If I do any of those things, I am lost. I will fly into a rage from which there is no end, or weep to rival the oceans, or simply succumb.” She shook her head. “No, there is a better end and I must find it.”
I have wept. I have killed enough to drown in the blood, and still my rage knows no end. Sebastian’s thoughts tried to coil backwards, to that day long ago, during the war. The day he found his father and Mina…He pushed the memories away—buried them— before they could see the light of day.
The Paladin had cast her gaze to the fire. “So here I am, on a quest of Skye’s devising to murder two people I have never met. Because of hope. I am loath to do it, no matter they are Bazira. But there’s no other way and I can’t…I can’t wear the wound much longer.”
Sebastian held up his hands. “So in the end, it’s either them or you. Just like I said. Right?”
“I’ll do my best, when the time comes,” she said. “What else can I do?”
Sebastian thought he could hear Mina laughing at him from whatever corner of his mind she haunted. His mead’s sweetness had been pleasing before. It was cloying now, and he set it down. The bard played a softer melody on his lute and sang a song of a sailor’s tragic love for a mermaid who could never be his.
“Don’t listen to me,” Sebastian muttered. “It’s none of my business.”