He nodded. “Precisely. Back in Whallum within a month and a half, and Her Majesty will have pineapple syrup for Festus.”
Her Majesty? I had a hard time believing that a man like Randalf supplied our monarch with anything. I drank a little more to cover my skepticism.
Whallum wasn’t a place that had ever sparked hope in me—or anyone else, I suspected—but now it did. Our return would be the ideal time to make an escape and try to find my way somewhere safe.
Safe. I turned the word over, trying to see if it would shape itself into something substantial. I envisioned sunlit windows and rustling green leaves. A harpsichord, under my fingers. A home.
My mother, standing at the back door.
My heart dropped. Where was she? She was all I had left in the world now, and I didn’t even know if she was alive.
I had to find her, but I’d need to earn Randalf’s trust before that could happen. And I’d need to survive.
“I’ll get us there,” I said, trying to sound confident, and gave him a vague smile. I set down my cup and reached for the bread again.
Randalf seized my wrist. He jerked me towards him, and I barely stifled a scream. The tabletop dug into my ribs.
“Don’t you look at me like that. Like you think I’m a fool.” His breath gusted across my face, thick with rum and vinegar. His nails, chewed to the quick, still bit into the tender flesh of my wrist. “Have some respect. I paid a lot of money for you, and I’ll earn it back one way or another.”
“You’re hurting me.” I knew the words sounded pathetic, but they leaked out, anyway. I tugged back, wishing there weren’t tears in my eyes, wishing I weren’t so frightened and exhausted. Where was my anger? Where was my rage? Lost to hunger and the winter wind.
“I’ll do it,” I assured him, breath thin in my lungs. “I swear.”
Randalf glared at me, preparing some new threat behind his narrow eyes.
The ship’s ghisting, Juliette, materialized behind him. Tentacle skirt flowing and eyes wide, she hovered in absolute silence beside the windows. Randalf didn’t even notice, though the quality of light in the room tinted a subtle blue.
“If you fail,” Randalf started to warn, “you’ll beg me for a night tied to the mast, just to escape the—”
Behind him, the ghisting pointed out the window. Where our pursuer’s lantern had hung like a distant star not long ago, now there was nothing at all.
And I heard a song. Someone sang, distantly, boldly, and I knew that melody in the marrow of my bones. There was another Stormsinger out in the night.
Randalf followed my gaze and stood suddenly, dropping my wrist. “Saint of—”
Thunder cracked over the waves, barely muffled by the hull. I froze, poised over the carnage of my meal as the sound merged into an ominous whistle. That had to be—
Randalf’s hands went limp at his sides. He stared, helpless, as the ghisting vanished in a swirl of spectral light, and the cabin exploded.
*
Hands held me upright. My head was a blur of pain, thoughts stuttering between instinctual terror and dreamy haze. The latter was far more welcoming, curling through my thoughts like smoke from my father’s pipe. I leaned towards it.
Water hit my face. I staggered back into consciousness with a shrieking gasp, the sound drowned by a chorus of laughter.
My back hit something solid. A mast? The hands holding me loosened and I sagged, gasping in lung-rattling shock.
I blinked away water and saw a wall of strangers, alternately shadowed and outlined by a blazing fire at their backs. Beyond them knots of men and women spread across a broad deck, laughing and moving and clustering and bearing crates, bundles and barrels. I saw prisoners here and there—on their bellies, on their knees, being interrogated. Bled.
A rope sung, a noose went taut, and a gargling man swung above my head with a weighty squeak of hemp. His cries suddenly cut off, leaving only the frantic scrabbling of nails against the noose as he swung.
I didn’t scream. I was too stunned, too deep in my horror.
Nearby, another of Randalf’s crew was pinned to the deck. I recognized the cuts on his face from where I’d smashed the lantern across it—the fool who’d left the hatch open, and nearly let me escape. More figures, new figures, crowded around him. A pirate with dark hair assessed the lash marks on his back, sticking his fingers callously into the wounds as the sailor howled. Then his tormentor casually flipped his victim onto his back and slit open his belly with a short, curved sword.
I saw the coils of the man’s insides bulge out of the wound and begin to spill, accompanied by a wash of blood. I saw him shriek and spasm, his eyes glassy in shock. I saw those coils trail behind him like rope as strangers hauled him to the side of the ship and tossed him overboard.
With his departure into the waves, the pirates dispersed. Light glinted off their weapons—a random assortment of cutlasses, machetes, pistols and muskets, all held or slung with a victorious nonchalance. Their skin colors and clothing choices reflected no specific people or nation. Not Northern or Southern, no Mereish or Cape, or Aeadine or Usti.
Pirates. The word slapped my wits back to life and I wavered forward, ready to run, but my feet refused to coordinate. I staggered right into a waiting pair of arms. More figures converged, slinking in behind me and circling like wolves.
The woman that had caught me murmured in my ear, “That’s no way to greet a lord. Stand tall and mind your manners, now.”
She thrust me upright and this time, I found my feet. My captors—the pirates—parted to allow a man through. He was of medium height, dark-haired with a short beard and an athletic form beneath buckskin breeches and an open coat. He wore a cravat but no waistcoat over his shirt, exposing a handsbreadth of tanned chest. He carried a cutlass, slick with blood, which he passed off to a nearby pirate.
I’d just seen that weapon slit open the beaten man’s belly, and the realization made my throat clot with bile. Off to the side I heard a steady drip, and looked up to see the man they’d strung from the yard had ceased his twitching. The smell of piss and blood wafted to me.
I bent over and retched on the deck, spilling half-digested beans, fish and bread before my captors’ boots.
The man who’d held the cutlass neatly stepped out of the way and paused, waiting for me to stop heaving. I coughed and spat and choked on a sob, blinking up at him through tear-filled eyes and shanks of messy hair.
“The ghisting escaped, Cap’n,” the pirate who'd taken the man’s sword murmured, though the words didn’t root in my mind right away. I was still spitting bile and trying to find my balance.
The newcomer looked displeased. Firelight still cast his face into shadow, but this close I could make out his features—steel-grey eyes, a man in his mid-thirties with a fine jaw and a face that wasn’t so much handsome as demanding.
Power. I recognized his unnaturalness on an instinctual level. It was like what I felt when near Randalf’s ghisting, or in the Ghistwold. But this was rawer and sharper, tainted with iron—human and hateful.
He saw the recognition in my eyes and held my gaze. My thoughts scattered like ants as he closed the remaining space between us.
“It’s you.” His voice was a summer wind, cutting through the cold and brushing across my cheeks.