The name Siren followed Freya Helvar around like a curse from the moment her powers first manifested in a raid on her village. With the image of her father's charred corpse and her brother's disgusted face on her mind, she is hauled to the Little Pa...
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TWO MONTHS FREYA spent on that ship. Eight weeks of boredom and melancholy, interrupted only by the occasional visits Matthias made. The numbness in her mind long spread to her heart and the rest of her body, and she rarely even bothered to eat or drink the water brought to them unless Henrik bade her to. He was the only person there she ever talked to, save for Matthias. His beard and hair had grown longer, but Freya convinced him to at least attempt to braid the scruffy brown locks so they wouldn't tangle more than they already were.
He'd let the young Suli boy do it for him, happy to have gotten even a tiny smile out of the child. Even the braids didn't help him now. They were rarely allowed to wash, and when they were there was no bath prepared, and they only wiped themselves down with a wet rag. Freya's hair was as oily and tangled as Henrik's, but it had a finer texture, so she could at least comb it out with her fingers if she tried enough. Sometimes she wondered why she bothered. What good did it do to look neat and well-groomed when she stood trial for the crime of existing?
You've done horrible things, she told herself, you're not like the rest of them, you deserve to be punished. But could it be considered a crime to want to live in a safe space? Was taking the life of a man truly a sin when he was aiming down his scopes at you? She wasn't ashamed of all she'd done, but she was aware that nothing would wash away the blood sticking like tar to her hands.
She didn't bother to tell Matthias of her thoughts. He wouldn't understand, and they would only argue again. Or maybe he would, but he would still stand firm in his belief that Grisha were abominations. That they were not meant to exist. At the start of her captivity, the knowledge that her brother thought that about her would've rendered her a useless, weeping girl curled up in a ball in the corner of her cell, burying her face in her knees so the other prisoners wouldn't see. Now it only left a strange feeling of emptiness inside her, like an unfinished map with a blank space in the centre.
It was a feeling that came whenever she saw him strutting around in front of his drüskelle brothers, acting like he didn't care one bit for her, sometimes even sneering an insult she pretended not to hear. It was rooted in dismay and frustration but bled away to a grim acceptance. Whenever she looked at him in those moments, a Fjerdan saying played at the edge of her mind, begging for her to speak it out loud.
The water hears and understands. She did understand him and the way he acted despite the way it made her teeth grind and her heart clench. She would ignore it and hide the pain it caused her if it meant he felt better about the hours he spent beside her, only so she would see him in the long and lonely days spent in the cell. That didn't mean it didn't hurt. Those same feelings always reminded her of the second part of the saying. The water hears and understands. The ice does not forgive.
Could she ever forgive him for what he was doing? For what he actively participated in? She thought of the rain battering down on the corpses in Mosava, of the way the earth soaked up the blood and turned soft and red. The blinding pain of Harshaw digging through her abdomen to fish out the bullet was permanently engraved in her mind. The fear that followed after, as she waited and drifted and Harshaw inched closer to death, was an even deeper wound. Who had been the cause of it all? Drüskelle soldiers that kidnapped Grisha children.
