#there's also a lot of me nerding out about how fenris's lyrium ghost actually works
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Blood and salt (4/5)
The Eyes of Nocen – 9:37 Dragon
They might be too late. There’s no need to say it, not with repairs and storms (bile-fear and creaking screams and Merrill will not throw up) and time crawling up her back. Merrill knows what it is like to be too late when you are only a day’s walk away.
(Keeper. What did you do?)
Sailing is shiftier than walking. Isabela takes the wheel most days. It distracts her, Merrill thinks. Keeps her from looking too closely at Griffon and seeing the world of things she could change, if the ship was hers.
(“I don’t think I’m anyone’s first mate for long,” she’s said, smile rueful, the two of them tucked in against the wall, legs tangled together, Merrill’s arm going to sleep between their bodies.
“You didn’t have to stay,” Merrill whispers. “That wasn’t—I didn’t expect—“
“—you need to expect more, sometimes,” Isabela says.
“But not from you?” )
Merrill spends her days talking. Rigger Sam and Sam in the galley and hedgewitches from Antiva through to the edges of Rivain who swear they can capture weather in glass, so that all she need to is break it for a swifter wind, or a hard drag back into calm. Her own magic starts to feel more like rope than veins. She looks at her own hands and sees the callouses that made Isabela proud approval through her want, the first time Merrill lets them drag over her skin.
(“I can feel where those hands have been, sweet thing.”)
She finds rumours of magisters the way she traced faults in glass. Concentrated fury that makes time slip and tea go cold, which is poor of her, because Sam does work very hard to heat it. But they might be too late, and Merrill dreams about drowning.
Splinters in her flesh and the deck splitting like the end of the world, water thick with churned sand and blood as rope snarls her ankles and her ribs cave in, her hand still holding tight to a body she cannot recognise, skin swollen and numb as her body presses—strains—breathes—
--she wakes up silent and covered in sweat. When she walks out on deck, feeling water-beneath-wood-beneath-blood-beneath-skin, Isabela is the port railing with a crooked smile and moonlight catching on all her edges.
She moves before Merrill can touch her, reaching up into the rigging for the central mast and hauling herself up so that ropes groan and mutter like old men. Merrill follows, hands quick, the swaying movement like and unlike the trees she’s climbed as a child, reverberations from Isabela’s steps fizzing through her up to the elbows.
“No such thing as fear sweat up here,” Isabela says.
“That’s a bit silly, isn’t it?” Merrill moves higher, overtaking Isabela and laughing a little as the other woman reaches out to tug reproachfully on her belt. “What if you look down and think ‘oh dear, I am going to fall to my death?’ I know I did. All the time. For months.”
“And look at you now.”
“I don’t—I get so much wrong, Isabela.”
Isabela scowls. “You’re not the one who handed Fenris over to slavers or said: ‘sure! Take the bitch, she’s caused me no end of trouble.’” A pause. “You also didn’t steal a big shiny religious text from big angry religious people to sell to Tevinter.”
“I—“
Isabela places a warm hand on her ankle. “—shut up, kitten.”
“No.”
Isabela blinks at her, but Merrill is tight-wound and shaking, forcing herself up a few more feet until there is more sky than rope in front of her. “No,” she says again. “I won’t shut up, and I am sick of people—trying—to—”
Merrill’s nose is dripping. There is salt in her mouth. “Don’t ever tell me to shut up, Isabela,” she manages, “But please put an arm around me so I don’t fall off? I haven’t—sleep is hard. This is all terribly…”
Isabela fits am arm around her, lips pressed to Merrill’s shoulder, hair snarled and falling down over both of them, tickling Merrill’s skin. They both, she thinks, need a wash. But her pulse is steady, and Merrill lets her eyes close, her body slump forward even as she keeps her grip in the rigging.
“I’m sorry, Isabela says.
“People always tell me to shut up,” Merrill says. “I’m tired of it. I’m tired.”
“Hawke didn’t deserve you,” Isabela mutters.
“Do you think she deserves any of us?”
“Your clan didn’t deserve you.”
Merrill winces through a laugh. “If they thought they did, I’m sure they’d be very frightened.”
Isabela’s groan vibrates through her body.
“Fenris might be dead,” Merrill whispers. “Everything takes so long. That was the one good thing about Hawke, don’t you think? She sped things up.”
“We’re plenty fast, kitten,” Isabela says. “I’ll fight with you. I don’t—“
“—don’t what?” Merrill asks, straightening under Isabela’s hold, one curled-in part of her at a time.
“…want to leave you,” Isabela mumbles. And Merrill doesn’t even hear a yet.
Danarius’s people sail through the Eyes of Nocen in winter storms, and Merrill is ready for them. It’s the easiest way into Qarinus, and she does not need Isabela’s lazy, people will always choose the easy way when they can, sweet thing, to know that it’s true.
“If they come, I need you to cut people,” she tells Isabela. “As many as you can. It doesn’t have to be deep.”
Isabela’s expression is unreadable when Merrill tells her this, rain dripping off her scarf and hair and into her boots, but she touches two fingers to her temple. Half a salute.
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#blood and salt#dread pirate merrill#merribela#fenris#this one is gory as hell folks#trauma mention#a lot of blood#but that's in the title#there's also a lot of me nerding out about how fenris's lyrium ghost actually works#angst with a happy ending#my fic#my writing#writing aus is my favourite thing
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