Audemus Dawnspark

Thalassophobia

“Are you going to help me, or not?”

Khida frowned at him, which was not to say that her face had been exactly cheery before: her cherubic cheeks had been made taut by the downturned line of her mouth and the deep furrows caused from her crinkled nose.

The form his doting had taken with the little girl involved gifts, mostly: fripperies his sticky fingers had collected, books on interesting (This descriptor was not always shared by Melisande, with her strange sense of censorship. What was inappropriate about a history book regarding the liberation of Khaz Modan from the Bleeding Hollow? The vivid descriptions of battle wounds were very true to life.) subjects, crystalline sculptures that had been faceted into small animals, but — until now — never a fish.

A very fresh fish, mind, with still-bright eyes and florid pink gills, preserved in packed snow for less than a few hours time. The only catch he had managed before the abrupt loss of his fishing pole, now likely collecting rust at the bottom of Baradin Bay.

“Can’t somebody else do this?” She was the picture of disgust, apparently not at all impressed with the learn-by-example method of how to bring a catch from sea to plate. Scales flecked the surface of the wooden kitchen island, and she wavered a safe distance away. “They look like toenails.”

“Yes, they could,” He tried his best not to laugh, but a droll, lopsided grin worked its way over his features. Her mouth split into a sunny, gap-toothed mirror.

When had she lost one of her milk teeth?

He finished scaling the bream, pushing the waste into a pile that did look rather unappealing. “And yes, they do. But we’re bonding.” A lift of two flaxen brows, so expressive even in her young age, showed that she wasn’t especially convinced. That was okay: neither was he.

He saw the way she eyed the blade, though — a double-edged dagger more suited for the wet haven of a pulsing artery than the cold belly of a fish — and he offered it to her, handle first. Little fingers wrapped around the stacked leather grip, and she held it at arm’s length like she’d just been given a stick. “Come here,” He instructed, and just as little feet shuffled over to the island’s edge, emboldened by her newest possession. “I’ll teach you how to fillet it.”

Head and entrails, blood and pin bones; what was left over was a pair of meaty — albeit roughly cut — filets, and the beaming child who had done most of the work herself. A surge of paternal pride had him planting a kiss to the flyaway strands of platinum hair at her crown, and after the affectionate embrace, she obediently moved to return the weapon to him.

He hesitated.

“Do you want to keep it?”

Her look was uncomprehending, not an idea that she had even considered would have been offered. He knew she had begged for something like it, that she’d seen the older wards with their wooden toy weapons and their dulled metal ones, and that she longed for one to call her own. She was still young, but to him, it seemed all the better of a reason. She was vulnerable.

To think that the weapon she held between slack fingers likely cost more than the sum someone had once determined her life had been worth.

“To protect yourself,” He supplied.

“Miss Melisande says swordfighting is not ladylike.” Petulant, two small lips pursed into a tight line that indicated she didn’t agree with the assessment but had been on the losing side of more than one argument regarding it.

“Tch.” His hands, still wet from the cool tap and that he hadn’t spent the time to dry off, squeezed her fingers more tightly around the handle, closer to the crossguard. In her fist, it looked more smallsword than dagger, but he wouldn’t give any credence to the parallel. “It’s not a sword. And I think you’ll find that what's considered ladylike is probably dependent on who you ask. Look, like this.”

He brought her elbow in closer to her body, guided her through the movements of a basic compound attack that looked more like a slow flail. She huffed, unimpressed, when her grip slackened as a result of her wrist being pulled into the motion of a feint and the dirk went clattering to the ground.

“It's too small,” She complained. “I need a bigger one.”

“Nonsense.” He squatted to retrieve it from the kitchen cart it had fallen beneath, and met her eyes when he pushed it back into her hand. “You just haven't learned how to wield it. It’s the perfect size to defend yourself — I'll teach you how.”

She looked dubious. “If you say so.”

“I do. You’ll learn why, too.”

“Why what?”

Her gaze, seaglass green, looked like the ocean.

This kitchen, salt reek from the cleaned seabream, smelled like the ocean.

“Why sometimes, you don't need something big to protect yourself. How sometimes, it's much easier to hurt someone when they've gotten too close.”

His mind, uncharted and aphotic, thought unceasingly of the ocean, but tried very hard not to think about the nasty things churning beneath the depths.