The sea stank of death.

  It lapped gentle against the jagged shore, hiding bloated hands in its foam, fingers curling around barnacled stone as if begging for salvation. Lark didn’t look at them. He couldn’t. Not yet.

  He lay half-shielded beneath a crooked arch of rock, wrapped in what remained of his sodden coat. Salt clung to his lashes. His leg pulsed with pain in time with the tide, wrapped tight in kelp strips soaked in some greenish oil that smelled like mint and rot. Azalea hadn’t said what it was. She didn’t say much of anything.

  She sat further down the cove, waist-deep in tidewater, hair white like spider silk, eyes glassy with thought. One of the bodies had washed up again. A young man, his face half-gone, the rest still caught in a scream. Azalea was singing.

  Not the wail of sirens that shattered wood and dragged sailors screaming to the deep. This was lower, quieter. A hum, like a lullaby. It sounded ancient, somehow. She had dragged the corpse out with her bare hands, feet slick and webbed as she moved over rocks without slipping once. Lark closed his eyes.

  He dreamt of the brig again. Mara coughing blood into her sleeve. Chains rattling. The moment the wheel turned beneath his hands, and the spray of the sea tasted like triumph—and guilt.

  He didn’t know how many days passed since the shipwreck. Maybe three, maybe more. He was too tired to count. Azalea built a fire of driftwood and sea-lichen when the wind grew cold, and brought him meat that looked like fish but tasted like nothing he’d ever known. When he could sit up, she finally spoke.

  “You’re lucky,” she said, crouched beside him, her silver tail curling along the stones, it was healed now. Deep black scarring running up the left side. Like some kind of lightning tattoo. “She would’ve eaten your heart while you screamed.”

  He blinked at her, voice hoarse. “Wouldn’t be the worst way I’ve been kissed.”

  Azalea’s lip twitched. Not a smile. But close.

  “She was young. Reckless. We don’t let them linger near the rocks, but the storm must’ve drawn her. Your blood, too.” Her eyes flicked to his bandaged leg, then to the older gashes in his shoulder and ribs. “I dragged three bodies out last night. That makes twenty-seven. Humans don’t last long in cold water.”

  “Didn’t last long in a ship either.”

  She looked at him for a long time, then reached into the satchel beside her, pulling out a dull knife and a chunk of sea-root. As she peeled it with steady hands, she said, “I thought you’d scream more.”

  He scoffed. “I’m trying to leave a mysterious impression.”

  “You’ve succeeded in leaving a trail of wreckage.”

  The silence between them stretched, not cruel, just… there. Heavy. Tangled.

  Later, when the tide rolled out, Azalea showed him how to boil sea-root over a stone flame, turning it into a poultice that numbed the ache in his leg. He hissed at the sting, and she almost—almost—winced.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “Tell me a story,” she said that night, after he finished gagging down the last of the stew she insisted he eat.

  Lark blinked. “A story?”

  “Yes. You humans always have them. I want to know why you’re like this.”

  He huffed. “What part?”

  “The dying. The singing. The swearing. The crashing ships for the hope of a woman’s voice.”

  He considered, and the fire cracked as the wind howled low through the cove’s mouth, but it was warm here. Safe. He settled back and began.

  “Alright. Once upon a time, there was a bard. Not a very good one. He’d broken three lutes, slept with too many strangers, and had a tendency to steal food from market stalls when he got too hungry.”

  Azalea listened, still and quiet, her chin on her hand.

  “He met a Monk in this tavern once. Big, broody, half-orc sort. Carried a spear and frowned for fun. The bard thought he was the most honorable man he’d ever seen, which wasn’t hard, because the bard had just gotten himself on the bad side of a pretty angry sorceress—common theme I know. And the Monk had to step in to save his hide.” A pause. He stared at the flames.

  “He would’ve liked you. The Monk, I mean. Thalen always had a thing for being silent and deadly, like you.”

  Azalea’s voice was softer than before. “Are they still with you?”

  Lark shook his head. “Somewhere far. Or close. I don’t know. We parted for awhile, I lost them.” He breathed.

  “I lost a lot of things.”

  She didn’t say sorry. Azalea didn’t do apologies. Instead, she offered her own story. She told him things in pieces, like shells left on the tide. Neatly.

  “The sea used to be soft,” she said. “Before the Storm King. Before the curse. We were nymphs, born of foam and current. We sang only for joy. We danced in tidepools and guided sailors home.”

  She spoke of Irdia, the first siren—once a sea nymph in love with a god too wild to love her back. Atherion, the Storm King. When she dared to leave him for another—some say the mortal prince of Velmorien, he cursed her bloodline with the hunger. Changed her voice into a weapon, her beauty into bait, her children into monsters.

  “We are what she became,” Azalea murmured. “Hunters. Wives of the storm. And the ocean never forgets betrayal.”

  She told him how young sirens often lost themselves to the curse. That some never came back. “The hunger can rule you,” she said, “if you let it.”

  Lark asked if she’d ever lost control.

  She didn’t answer.

  Instead, she said, “I dragged three of the bodies deep this morning. They were bloating.”

  “You didn’t have to,” he said.

  “Yes, I did.”

  They spent nights by the fire. The cave was always damp, but Lark grew used to it. Azalea dried his clothes when she could. His hair, tangled and salt-clumped, was gently combed by her fingers one night while he dozed. He didn’t ask why. She didn’t offer an explanation.

  He started to talk. Not about the pain, not yet, but about his life. Taverns he’d played in. Villages he’d barely escaped from. How he once sang a curse into a nobleman’s wine and escaped by disguising himself as a statue.

  Azalea blinked. “A statue?”

  “It worked. For three. whole. hours.”

  He told her about Maravelle. About her daughter. His voice cracked when he said Mara’s name again.

  “She believed in people,” he said. “Even when she had no reason to. She kept telling me I had something good in me. That I could be more than jokes and music.”

  Azalea studied him carefully. Her eyes gleamed like fish-scale under the moonlight seeping through the cracks above.

  “Do you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

  Later, she told him about the undertow. The great current of the deep sea that could pull whole ships beneath, if summoned. Some sirens could call it. Few could survive it.

  “Why tell me all this?” Lark asked, one night, when the fire was just embers.

  She looked at him like it should have been obvious. “Because you’re the first man I’ve met who talks more than he bleeds.”

  He laughed, weakly. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me in weeks.”

  They lay beside each other that night. Not touching. But close. Her skin smelled like salt and ash, his like sweat and rot. He felt unworthy of being beside something so beautiful.

  She asked him for yet another story, as if she enjoyed his tales beyond the shoreline. As if there was something more to life than merely surviving.

  He told her how Thalen once punched a dragon square in the jaw for trying to devour Gus. And how Eira, Thalen’s lover, nearly caught Lark’s arm tuft on fire the first time they crossed paths.

  She laughed. It echoed softly through the cave, and for a moment, Lark forgot the taste of coppery blood in his mouth.