The first touch of fresh air on her face was miraculous. It was like the sun breaking out from behind clouds, after the stifling, fetid wetness of the hold. Above her, the wide-open sky. For a moment she just drank it in.
And then she saw the deck. The black flame had penetrated here too, parts of the deck scoured as though burned with lashes of fire, its planking shattered and uneven. There were screams from the riverbank, shouts, people pointing. A terrible groaning of wood behind her, and she spun to see the mast was falling – a second later it smashed onto the deck, sending rope and bits of planking flying, the whole ship starting to tilt.
She ran. Below her feet, the deck was sloping. The Sealgair was going down. Cries of ‘Take the rope!’ and ‘Jump!’ from the foreshore didn’t help her, not with Tom to drag across the deck. And then—
‘Tom!’ Captain Maxwell’s voice was calling her from the railing, and she felt a rush of thankfulness. She stumbled gratefully towards him as his hands took the weight of Tom’s body from her, pulling him down a makeshift gangway towards the pier, with her following, until finally she stepped onto dry land.
Relief, so great she wanted to dig her fingers into the dirt and pebbles of the foreshore, as if to prove to herself that it was real. That she had done it. That she was here.
She sank to her knees, next to where Maxwell had laid her brother.
‘It’s all right, we’ve got him.’ She heard that as if from a distance. ‘Tom, come on, Tom,’ Maxwell was saying, and Tom chose that moment to cough and start to come around. ‘Violet?’ he said in a roughened voice. ‘Violet?’ and Maxwell answered, ‘She’s right here, Tom.’ As if from far away, Violet could hear Maxwell saying to her, ‘You did well, getting him off the ship. Simon will be pleased when he hears all you’ve done.’
Simon will be pleased. And that was what she had wanted. To impress Simon, to be like Tom.
But she just sat there, wet, exhausted and dripping, on the foreshore next to them.
It should have been finished, but she knew it wasn’t.
The bank was thronged with men and women shouting, crying, crowding around those plucked from the water and staring across at the Sealgair. She heard voices exclaiming I saw it, black flame, the murmurs across the crowd in all the languages of the docks, miracolo, merveille.
‘There was a boy who took up the sword …’ a voice beside her was saying, and with a shock, she recognised the man who had called her a rat as he’d dragged her by the scruff of the neck. He’d been saved, just like all the others. She thought of the boy in the hold, his bruised face. She wondered which of these men had beaten him, whom he had also saved. He had saved everyone on the ship. But not himself.
She stood up.
The Sealgair’s bulk was listing in the water, untethered. Gangplanks had fallen away, and there was a gap of more than ten feet of water between the hull and the pier. The gap was widening.
She knew what she had to do.
For so long all she had wanted was to prove herself – to Tom, to her father, to Simon. But there were some things more important than that.
Violet took the ship in her sights, ran, and jumped.
It was like jumping back into hell, after having made it out the first time. The Sealgair was a deserted wasteland. It groaned dangerously, the mast broken, the deck cracked, planking splintered and protruding. Cargo barrels were smashed and scattered. Half of a ripped sail was hanging across the deck.
She swallowed down horror as she descended the stairs into the hold. Images of black fire played behind her eyelids – she expected it to burst out at her at any moment. But inside, the hold was dark, and almost fully flooded, water pouring in to swirl ice-cold at her chest. She pushed through it, half swimming, past the overturned crates, past the wreckage and signs of the fight.
The boy was still chained, and alone now, in the watery hold. He was breathing carefully, staying quiet in the dark with his head up, as if, even alone, he was trying not to show he was afraid.
He was still holding the sword, but she saw that he had found some way to lock it into its sheath, the same mechanism that must have restrained it before the crate burst open.
‘You can let go of it,’ she said. His knuckles were white where they gripped the sword. ‘Let it go. Let it go down with the ship.’
After a moment he nodded and threw it, and she watched the gleaming, wavy length of it sink into the water.
Around her, the hold was dripping, the water at chest height and rising. It would not be long now before the rushing water filled every last space of air and dragged the Sealgair under. When she looked at the boy, she could see in his eyes that he knew he had no way out, chained to a drowning ship. He looked back at her with his dark eyes. ‘You shouldn’t have come back here.’