UNDER THE PEPPER • 3
That was no comforting thought. For seventy years she would have to avoid that fish, whatever it was. Except she couldn't, not as a midshipman, nor a lieutenant. Not even if she made captain; you couldn't dictate what admirals put on the tables in their flagships. Every time she encountered it, another piece would fall into place. She would see the grain of the table. She would hear a voice, mother or father. She would be able to tell what those instruments on the wall were for, and once she knew that, she would realize the wicked magic they had worked. Audrey knew they had been engineers. She knew, from what her adoptive mother had said, that the Navy had tried testing some new magical weapon on that ship. Audrey had tried hard not to add two and two, but over the years the conviction had set solid. That nameless couple had dragged their own ship to the bottom of the sea. And if they had invented something like that, it was where they deserved to be. Audrey rubbed at the scars under her uniform, the five long lines that dragged from her shoulders down her ribs. She could feel them now, tingling slightly. All she could remember of the wreck was blood and terror and then-Lieutenant Grandbell pulling her from the water. It had been the remotest chance that Audrey had been saved. And she knew—not as an academic article, but she knew, in scar and bone, that the memories torn from her had lead to that ruin. That if they ever returned, they would drag her down again, and there would be no salvation. She would never reach seventy years. But Captain Grandbell wouldn’t understand that. All she knew was that she had found a girl half-dead in the wreckage of another ship. Audrey couldn’t possibly tell her that the child she had saved had been born of evil. She could only pray that the cook caught a different sort of fish next time.