“Well! You just proved you have come from the Saviour Ship! People of the sea know Armina too well! She is the only true descendant of the Saviour and Lady Parsana! The only people who deny this are the ignorant residents of the Saviour Ship!” he explains. Tirad is furious for having been called ignorant. He shouldn’t have said anything and kept his mouth shut. But he needs to understand what Pejhan is saying to him. All this seems too obscure and strange to him. Perhaps Parsana’s exile sentence was true and she was sent to this ship and that’s why this ship is named after her. But what about Armina? What did he mean by the ‘descendant’? He wishes Dalia was awake and could help him understand what this man was saying. He goes over to Dalia and shakes her until she opens her eyes. Dalia sits up and looks at Pejhan in wonder. Pejhan shortly glances at her and addresses Tirad again.

“I have come to take you with me to Armina. She will decide!” he says and waits for them to follow him out. As they walk out of the cabin door, the girl comes to them horridly. She turns to Dalia.

“I’m sorry… He lost a lot of blood when we were cleaning his wound… His heart stopped!” she says with a shaky voice.

Chapter 27

Narivan lies on the table with a face as pale as the white bubbles of the waves. There is a lot of blood on the floor that Asin’s assistant is cleaning. His wound is open but nothing can be seen except for the flown red blood.

“It looks like a knife cut… It was too deep and had become badly infected… I’m so sorry!” Ashid says but without any sorrowful tone. She covers the body with a stained blanket. She seems ignorant to the death. Tirad thinks perhaps she has seen too much of it before that she is not moved by it anymore.

“I will prepare the body to be thrown to the sea… It should be ready by the time you get back from Armina,” she continues, as she steps towards the door with the same disinterest. Dalia can hardly walk. Tirad had never seen her so broken like this, not even when her mother was beaten to death by the Saviour Island women, when Mart tried to attack her on the boat or when they had thrown out the naval guard into the sea. She seems to have changed from a lively playful dolphin to a slow and small turtle. She is looking down and takes slow and heavy steps. Tirad wants to comfort her. She jumps into his arms and cries, murmuring, “What am I going to tell Asin?” within her sobs. Pejhan leads them to the floating bridge.

“Don’t take fast steps… You should walk slowly with the least tremble…” Pejhan explains and asks one of the ship guards to go with them. He says the guard goes first, and then Dalia and Tirad should follow her. But they need to keep an appropriate distance. Dalia stops before the bridge and whispers in Tirad’s ear.