There were a few stories about sirens that Andy could remember.

The first being Eli’s which she did not want to think about anymore.

The others were stories her father told her after long weeks at sea. Her mother didn’t approve of any of them, but her father would let Andy sit up with him after her mother had fallen asleep. He would tell her the stories just as his crewmates had with a lantern between them and a mug of rum in one hand and his pipe in the other.

“He said his grandfather almost caught one. He said he swept one up on his boat by accident, but he let her go.”

“Aren’t you supposed to sell sirens?”

“You don’t have to. He could have gotten a pretty penny for her, but he got something better. He got to marvel at this thing, alone. He got to go home and be the only man in his village to have seen a siren. It was like he kept her for himself. And that was worth more than any money, Andrea.”

“Was she pretty?”

“Oh, she was as beautiful as his mother, his wife, and his daughter combined.”

Her father had sketched crude drawings for her while he told the stories. The top half was always a woman, the bottom half always a fish. Though, her father told her, they could easily change their form. They could change from fish to humans. Some said they could even change into birds and swoop down on sailors from the sky.

“But you shouldn’t get close to one. Not if you can help it.”

“Why not?”

“They can be temperamental things. For every man that gets to walk away, another three get pulled into the water.”

“What happens to them?”

“Well, we don’t know. They can’t come back up and tell us, can they? I was told the sirens eat them.”

“But then how do people sell them to the Navy?”

“They get lucky. Or they get cruel.”

If only her father could have seen her pulling a siren off a rock in the middle of the ocean. It would have been a grand story for him to tell his crewmates. He would have set it up perfectly, as he did all his fishing stories, with alcohol and lanterns and his pipe.

Martin laid his knuckles over Andy’s temples. She could barely feel him next to her. She was in her own, suffocating world, memories of her father fading as she opened her eyes. Her frozen limbs had thawed and began to burn. Her bones felt like they had shattered inside her. Everything about her body felt wrong.

It was almost as unbearable as she felt weeks ago.

Through all of the pain and burning, she looked around her cabin. Martin sat next to her, falling into the shadows. He moved with the fleeting light. He dipped in and out of her vision as yellow light swung back and forth.

She rolled her head down on her pillow. There was a spot of light, a lantern hanging from the ceiling, what seemed to be a mile away. At the end of the long stretch of room, in the light, was a fainting couch stolen from some fancy naval captain.

Andy’s eyes strained to try to focus on the lump on top of it. She didn’t remember leaving anything on it. Not anything that big.

She squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them, her eyes were covered in just a little less water and grime. The edges of her vision were a little less blurred. The couch came into focus.

The siren was wrapped up in a ratty blanket. She was unconscious and gagged with a rag between her teeth and wrapped around her head.

Andy tried holding out her hand towards her, to point at her. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t ask why the siren was in her cabin. But moving her arm made her swollen joints flare up in pain, like every nerve inside ruptured. She whimpered, weakly, pathetically.

Martin took her wrist and laid her arm by her side.

“Don’t move,” he said.

He began pulling jars out of his bag. It was a dirty, old Gladstone. The leather was discolored and had cracked in some places. Whenever he opened it, a little bit of the exterior would flake off. He had had it for so many years and there were no longer any chances to replace it.

Martin scooped a salve out of a jar and began rubbing it into Andy’s bare shoulders. Martin worked the salve in her elbows next and then her wrists and then her hands. It smelled of foul herbs and left her skin greasy.

Martin began working the salve into her ankles and then up to her knees. He had diligently covered her in it every day when she was ill. Andy couldn’t remember if it helped any. Most of her memories of her illness were hazy from fever. But she could always remember Martin being by her side every day, tending to her.

“Stay put,” Martin said. He finished massaging her hips. “If you move, you’ll only make yourself more ill.”

He laid the blankets back over Andy. He was so nauseatingly caring. Andy almost hated it.

Andy waited for the siren to move. She was so far away, and Andy couldn’t see well at all. It was hard to tell if she was shifting around on the couch or if the waves were rolling her. Andy couldn’t see if she looked any better than she had when they brought her on board.

The siren, surely, wasn’t dead. If she were, the crew wouldn't have dumped her in Andy’s cabin. They would have wasted no time in dumping her overboard before she began to decay. Unless Tobi had cooked up some plan for her corpse. Unless he thought they could still use her as a bribe for the Navy. If they could pack her up in salt and preserve what they could just in case they needed her.

The Navy was always looking for sirens to study. Every year flyers were hung up around seaside towns offering an award to any fisherman or merchant who returned home with one. The award was a very handsome amount of money that always seemed to increase. When new flyers were spread around towns, everyone packed extra fishing nets and ropes and claimed themselves to be perfectly capable of snagging a siren.

But few men had ever actually been confirmed as selling one. There had been maybe one or two sirens caught every half-century. Andy, after all, had been on the water for years and had never seen one. Her father had fished for decades and only had crewmates’ stories to tell.

Which made Andy wonder if the sirens knew about the Navy’s deals. Human civilians rarely saw sirens, but it didn’t mean that the Navy wasn’t poaching and catching sirens on their own. It didn’t mean that the siren population could have been slowly dying while humans went about their days not even thinking about them.

But it also didn’t mean that the Navy was finding sirens on their own. After all, if they had had luck on their own, they wouldn’t pay so much if a civilian happened to catch one. What Andy was most curious about was if their threat to turn their own siren over to the Navy would be a threat at all. Maybe she would laugh in their faces. Maybe she wouldn’t even understand. There was also always the chance they didn’t speak the same language.

Andy couldn’t make sense of it in her boiling brain. There was absolutely no way of knowing how much the sirens even knew about human life. And thinking about the Navy brought back unwanted memories of knives plunged through hands and dirty inns.

Ultimately, Andy had no intention of handing her over to the Navy. She wanted to speak to the siren and she didn’t want to help the Navy in any way even if it could save her life. If anyone would threaten the siren, it would be Tobi. And it would be very satisfying to watch Tobi’s plans crumble. She knew that he was building it up in his head already.

The power he could have over the siren—the money he’d get if they turned her over. Andy wouldn’t let it happen. She had never particularly wanted to meet a siren before, but now that she had, she wasn’t going to let go of her until she got her answers.

***

Martin never wanted an apprentice. He wasn’t much of a teacher. If he needed an extra set of hands, he would bark orders at a crew member at random. Sometimes even at Andy. That evening, whichever evening it was, he had Jonny hold a bowl under Andy’s arm.

Martin propped Andy up in her bed and held her by the wrist. He readied his lancet and made an even cut below the inside of her elbow. Andy winced. Blood welled up immediately and streamed down into the bowl.

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Jonny held the bowl steady. He caught every drop of Andy’s blood. Andy hoped he didn’t enjoy the sight of her blood too much.

Andy looked up. The siren was awake and watching her. Her eyes were dark. Andy got sucked into them. She tried looking at anything behind them beyond pure, raw exhaustion. And curiosity. Andy felt like she was being studied, like the siren was watching her as she watched the siren.

Sweat began to break out all over Andy’s body, chilling her immediately. She struggled to breathe.

“I don’t feel well,” she said, laying her head back on the pillows.

The familiar sensation of lightheadedness came back. Martin pressed a cloth to her arm, pushing down on the cut. Her lips were numb. Her limbs were cold. Blood rushed into her ears.

“Captain? Captain?”

She opened her eyes. Jonny leaned in front of her. His bearded face was only inches away. Martin stood over her still, packing up his bag. Her arm had been wrapped up.

Bastard, Andy thought.

She must have fainted quickly. Martin patted her shoulder.

“Rest,” he said.

She didn’t want to. She wanted to throw her fists at Martin and pound his arms. She didn’t want him to leave her alone, not with Jonny still standing there, holding her blood, so close to the siren who was probably so vulnerable. She wanted Martin to help her get to the siren, to swim through the fog of her fever so she could ask her if she was okay, if she needed help, and how she got wrapped up in the fishing net in the first place.

But she felt heavy and weak, and her body didn’t let her get up and fight. She fell asleep in her sweat-drenched clothes, a pounding between her ears, trying to focus again on the siren still watching her.

***

Andy slept through the fourth day of her fever, unaware that it was the third day. When she woke up on the fifth day, she felt like she had been in bed for weeks.

Her body didn’t ache as much. The deep, splintering pain all over her body had been replaced by a dull throb. She took in deep, easy breaths. She propped herself up on her arms and looked at the fainting couch. The siren sat there, watching her. It had been real. She was real. Andy had a hundred things to ask her if she could understand them.

The siren was dressed in a shirt that might have once been white but was now a dingy yellowish color. Her hair had been pulled back and was tied at the base of her neck.

Andy sat up and put her feet on the floor. She tested her strength and slowly pushed herself up to stand. All was well. She took a step. Her hips creaked and resisted moving, but she pushed through it.

By the time she reached the siren, she was out of breath and her legs shook. She sat on the edge of the table that sat across from the fainting couch. She pushed all of the junk on top of it aside. Nothing was important. Mostly junk Andy had quickly grabbed from other ships. Old documents, a paperweight, a few broken pens.

The siren didn’t move. She watched Andy. They stared at each other for a minute. Andy reached out for her, but the siren pulled away as her hand came closer to her face.

“I just want to take this off,” Andy said.

She reached behind the siren’s head and shoved her finger into the knot. The gag fell loose. The siren opened her mouth, and Andy pulled the rag out. The siren licked her lips with a wince. The corners of her mouth were cracked and dried.

Andy threw the gag aside. There was no need for it. Andy knew, deep down, that the siren wouldn’t hurt her. There was no need to. It would have happened by now, Andy thought. If she were strong enough, if she were malicious enough, she wouldn’t have sat in that room, on that couch, for so long. Besides, her father's warning has been that sirens were temperamental. Not inherently vicious. Andy just had to stay on her good side.

The siren held up her hands. Her wrists were loosely bound with rope. Andy worked it loose quickly. Whoever had tied it must have had mercy for there were no marks left behind. Whoever tied it, Andy believed, knew she wasn’t any threat.

Andy could see now that the siren looked a little more human and a little less dead. Her face was covered in healing, small scratches, but it had recovered a healthier pallor. The biggest change was her tail. It was gone. Andy could see two lumps under her blanket and assumed she had sprouted legs. As the myths said, the siren could shapeshift.

“So,” Andy said. She was nervous. She didn’t know what to say to a siren. She didn’t know if the siren could even understand her. “How are you feeling?”

Andy had never asked anyone how they felt before. It was a cringe-inducing question. It didn’t sound genuine, either, coming from her.

“I’m fine,” the siren said.

“Oh! You can speak English? You can speak human languages?”

“Obviously.” The siren didn’t seem amused.

In her head, Andy suspected that the siren would be passive and helpless. Andy had imagined herself as her hero and that the siren would be grateful for her. But she seemed indifferent. Almost like she didn’t want to be bothered. Which was a shame because Andy had never wanted to speak to someone so much before.

Part of it was because she was a siren, and Andy was curious. Another part was because she thought the siren was very beautiful and talking to her would let Andy look at her longer. It was as simple as that. Andy liked pretty women, and that was apparently not limited to human women.

“I was told a story once about a siren," Andy said. She wanted it to be clear that she knew a thing or two about sirens. Or that she had at least heard about them. "Apparently she was beautiful. But she ate someone."

The siren stared at her, mouth opening to form a response but then closing again. Finally, she settled on, “I think that was just a story.”

“Probably was.” Andy leaned back and sighed, trying to make it appear that she wasn’t bothered by the siren’s dismissiveness. “The man who told me wasn’t the most trustworthy. He said he saw a siren peel back their face and eat a man whole with six rows of teeth.”

"Does it look like I have six rows of teeth?"

"Well, not right now."

“Maybe that man was lying because he was the one who killed and ate that man.”

“Humans don’t eat other humans,” Andy said. Then, she quickly corrected herself. “Some humans do. But not this one never did.”

She wasn’t sure the reason for Eli’s lie. Maybe Eli had killed someone and blamed it on a siren if it was before his pirating days, if he was still young. Or maybe the whole story was fabricated. Maybe the friend hadn’t existed at all. Eli liked attention, and he liked lying.

Eli was dead, though, so there wasn’t much reason to think about it for long.

"I know other stories," Andy said.

"I don't want to hear them."

The door to Andy’s cabin opened. Pinkey walked in holding a jar of thick, white salve. He looked startled when he saw Andy and the siren sitting together. Andy didn’t know her door had been unlocked and that her crew had been letting themselves in and out. Martin probably allowed it, not realizing how dangerous it was. Tobi probably encouraged it, knowing exactly of Andy’s fears.

“Captain, you’re awake,” Pinkey said. He lifted the jar. “The doctor told me to bring this in for her.”

Andy looked at the siren. She threw her blankets aside. She wasn’t wearing any bottoms. Andy couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The nasty gashes up and down her legs had already scabbed over. The worst was still red and puffy, but it looked like she was healing at an exceptional rate.

“You can leave it with me,” the siren said.

Pinkey’s eyes widened, and he held out an accusatory finger at her. “You’re talking! Has she been talking to you, captain?”

“Of course, she has.”

“We tried getting her to talk. We stuffed our ears with cotton and took off her gag, but she just looked at us with those big eyes. Tobi told us to keep the gag on her if she wasn’t going to cough anything up. I figured she didn’t understand anything.”

The siren glanced between Andy and Pinkey. She didn’t seem bothered. She held out her hand for the jar.

“All those times I’ve sat with you and just chatted, you knew exactly what I was saying?” Pinkey asked.

“Yes,” the siren said.

“Then why didn’t you say anything back?” Pinkey lowered his voice. “I would’ve taken that nasty rag out for good.”

“I didn’t want to interrupt.”

Andy could see that Pinkey wasn’t truly upset. The siren had such a smooth way of talking, it was hard to be mad at her. Andy suspected that it could have been her siren powers but then thought better of it. Pinkey was also easygoing. He seemed to get a little kick out of interrogating her.

The door opened again. Martin let himself in and immediately cast a dark look at Andy.

“You shouldn’t be up,” he said.

“And you shouldn’t be coming in and out of my quarters with my permission,” Andy said.

“And let you boil alive from your fever?”

Martin joined the three of them and took Andy by the elbow. Andy pulled out of his hold.

“I’m talking to our guest,” she said. “It’d be rude of me to ignore her. I was just about to ask her for her name and if there were any accommodations we might provide for her. I’m trying to be a good host.”

“I’m sure you are. Back to bed.”

Pirates weren’t supposed to rest, yet Martin always insisted on it. If Andy had her way, she would be back on the deck. Martin took her elbow again.

“Do you have a name?” Andy asked, quickly.

“Syan.”

“Syan,” Andy repeated, wanting to say it over and over again. “I’m Andy.”

Martin glanced Syan over, mildly surprised by her talking. But he recovered quickly and pulled Andy to her feet.

“I’ll be on my way,” Andy said to Syan. “But if you need me, you know where to find me.”

Syan nodded, smiling just a little. Almost like she didn’t want to but couldn’t help it.

Martin sat Andy back in bed. He went through his examination of her, checking her joints and temperature, and pulse. Andy looked over his shoulder and watched Syan. She rubbed the salve from the jar into the wounds on her thighs. When she tried to bend down to reach her calves, she suddenly winced and sat back up.

Pinkey gently pushed her back and took the jar himself. Like an expert, he covered her legs and feet in a generous amount of salve. Her skin was shiny and whitewashed when he was done. He sat next to her, and she lifted her shirt to her ribs, revealing thick lines of healing gashes that stretched almost entirely around her waist. Pinkey scooped out more salve and began smoothing it out over them.

“How long has he been doing that?” Andy asked. Pinkey seemed to know what he was doing.

“He said he wanted to help her the morning after you brought her onboard. So, four days, is it? Maybe five. The days, they all seem to blend together.”

“Why is she even in here?”

“There was no other place to put her, and Tobi said that since you were obsessed with her, she might as well stay with her.”

“I’m not obsessed with her.”

Pinkey helped Syan to lay back down. She seemed so tired all of a sudden. She accepted all of Pinkey’s help pulling the blanket back over her legs. Her head fell to the side. Her mouth was turned down in a frown. Her eyes looked almost sad, her brow was pinched so.

“What’s going on with her?” Andy whispered. “How are her legs totally fine?”

“They’re not,” Martin whispered back. “I suspect there’ll be some permanent damage. Her wounds went deep.”

“But she looks healed.”

“Ah, she does look fine on the outside.” Martin looked up from his examination of Andy’s knees. She could see a smile under his beard. “Maybe I’m just that good of a doctor.”

“No,” Andy said, “it has to be something else.”

“Sirens must heal quicker than us humans. I’ve heard sea creatures can do remarkable things to mend themselves. Like a starfish that can grow its leg back after it’s been severed.”

“She’s not a starfish.”

“That’s an outstanding observation. Come, lay down. I can see you’ve worn yourself out.”

Andy was feeling a bit tired, but she wanted to stay up longer. She could push herself. She wanted to keep an eye on Pinkey and talk to Syan more. Still, her head sunk into her pillow. Her eyes grew heavy. There was a mild throbbing growing behind her temples.

“You can enjoy your company later,” Martin said.

“I’m not enjoying her. I’m putting up with her presence and interrogating her.”

“You can tell yourself that.”