EPILOGUE
One year later
Brynn O’Malley, her husband Sean, and little Maeve Kathleen, snug in her father’s arms, took a walk around Black Swan Fountain at midnight. Maeve was a little fussy, and nothing calmed her like a stroll in the night air.
They’d scattered Sean’s mother’s ashes in the fountain, at her request, and Brynn knew that each of the O’Malley men, at different times and never together, of course, came out here and brought flowers with them. She smiled as she caught sight of a bouquet of lilies wrapped with a gold ribbon.
Yeats had been here recently, then.
“Now, now, love,” Sean said, soothing their daughter. “Hush, my wee lass.”
He sat down on the bench she thought of as “theirs” and glanced up at Brynn. “A bit of help here?”
Brynn laughed to see her big, rough, powerful husband conquered by the tears of a tiny baby. She reached out to take her daughter and cuddled her miraculous, beautiful, wonderful child close to her heart.
“Let me tell you a story, my sweet girl. Once upon a time, more than a thousand years ago, a girl sang to the moon,” she began, looking into the gently glowing red-gold eyes of her husband, the man she would love and cherish forever. “But this is not that story.”
Sean leaned close and kissed her, sweetly lingering until Maeve fussed at them to pay attention to her again.
“Ours is the story of the woman who loved a fire demon,” Brynn continued. “And the man who loved a swan, and how, thanks to your daddy and your grandma, the curse of the black swan will never, ever have anything to do with you.”
SALVAGE
A Tale of the Iron Seas
MELJEAN BROOK
To Cindy, who let me save my brain by writing this story, and who miraculously hasn’t killed me yet.
ONE
When Georgiana came across her good-for-nothing cheating bastard of a husband washed up on the beach with a bullet in his side, she considered leaving him for dead. Then she wrapped both hands around his iron wrist and dragged him up to the house.
Despite the tiny mechanical bugs that lived inside her body and enhanced her strength, hauling him wasn’t easy. Big Thom, everyone in town called him. Taller and broader than any other man of her acquaintance, her husband deserved the appellation. But Georgiana had other names for him.
Always-Gone Thom. Empty-Hearted Thom. Abandon-Her-Bed Thom.
Not that his cold heart or her bed mattered now. Georgiana’s hopeful expectations for their marriage and her burgeoning love had wilted the first time he’d sailed off and left her alone. All remaining affection had withered to ashes during his most recent absence, which had passed without any communication from her husband—just an occasional bit of money in an envelope stamped with his ship’s seal, and no note to accompany it. Georgiana hadn’t needed the funds, but there had been days when she’d have given anything for a single word from him. Now nothing he ever said could soften her heart toward him again.
If he’d sent even one message, she might have attempted to carry him up the stairs to the seaside entrance of the house. Instead she dragged his body up the steps and listened to the four solid thunks.
One for each year he’d been gone.
She had lit the stove before setting out on her morning walk. Georgiana usually welcomed the cozy warmth after the brisk ocean air, but while sweating and flushed with exertion, the kitchen seemed stifling and cramped. Her shoulder muscles burning, she pulled Thom through the entrance, leaving a trail of seawater, blood, and sand. Her mother’s hand-knotted rugs slid across the stone floor with him, bunching under his head and shoulders. Her bottom bumped into the table before his boots cleared the door.
The big, heavy dolt. She let go of his wrist. His arm dropped to the floor, his sodden gloves and woolen coat muffling the clink of iron against stone.
Where to now? Unwrapping her scarf, she eyed the door leading to the second level. The bedchamber she’d shared with him was up there, but she’d closed that part of the house years ago. It made no sense to open the upper floors now, and her husband wasn’t worth the effort of hauling him up the stairs or the expense of heating the rooms. She would put him in the single bedchamber downstairs, then send him on his way the moment he was well enough to walk out of it.
That wouldn’t take long. Thom was infected by the mechanical bugs, just as she was. They’d have him on his feet within a day or two.
After shedding her coat and gloves, Georgiana bent for his arm again. The iron forearm beneath the wool sleeve was thicker and more solid than she expected. His prosthetics were of the skeletal kind, resembling metal bones. But perhaps his iron arms always felt bigger than they appeared. Georgiana didn’t know. She’d only seen them once, after walking in on Thom while he’d been changing into the nightshirt he’d worn to their wedding bed. He almost always wore gloves, as well—not for warmth, but with a lightly oiled lining to prevent exposing his jointed iron fingers to the rusting effects of the salty sea air. She’d seen his hands only a few more times than his arms. And although she’d often rested her palm upon his coat sleeve, which had given her some idea of the shape beneath, she’d never had to wrap her fingers around his wrist and drag him around before.
The bedchamber stood on the opposite side of the kitchen. With her skirts swinging around her booted feet, Georgiana huffed her way past the table and stove and through the door. Once inside, she let his heavy arm drop again.
Soaked and bloody. Thom wasn’t going into the bed like that. She stripped the quilts down the mattress, then covered the sheet with towels.
Thom needed to be stripped, too. She reached for his cap, damp but warm. Too warm. Heat radiated through the knitted wool. Tugging it off, she laid the backs of her fingers to his forehead.
Burning.
Oh, no. No, no, no. When she’d first found Thom on the beach and rolled him over, she’d touched his face. His skin had been cool. Not now. And the bugs wouldn’t heal this—they created the fever. It only happened rarely, and with severe wounds. The tiny machines worked so hard to heal him that they overheated his body. Infected men and women almost never sickened or died from anything but old age, unless an injury killed a person faster than the bugs could heal him. But bug fever was often fatal.
Rushing to the window, Georgiana threw it open. Frigid air swept inside the room. She flew back to Thom’s side. She needed ice, opium. His temperature had to be lowered, and the drug slowed the bugs. They wouldn’t repair his wound as quickly, but the opium might keep the healing from killing him. He probably only lived now because his body had lain half-submerged in the freezing ocean water.
She tore open the buckles of his coat, her mind racing as quickly as her fingers. A few blocks of ice were stacked in the ice house, but she would have to send a wiregram to town for more. The physician could bring opium.
But she had to get Thom undressed first. She wrestled the thick coat down his arms and tossed it aside. A woolen fisherman’s gansey lay beneath, the gray weave soaked in blood. She yanked the pullover up to his chest, taking his linen shirt with it and exposing the bullet hole in his side.
The small wound had stopped bleeding. Carefully, she turned him. The bullet’s exit had done more damage, the injury larger and more ragged, but no blood seeped out. The edges had already healed.