Her mother’s arms come around her, lifting her above the surface. The girl struggles for breath and hangs at her mother’s neck. Her small arms shake.
“You’re fine, Mary,” the mother says, prying her daughter’s hands away and letting her bob back into the water.
The girl flounders. Her toes barely touch the muddy bottom of the pond and she battles to keep her mouth above water, head tilted back. “Mama! I can’t—”
“You can. Hush.” Her mother steps back, increasing the space between them. “Don’t want to wake the miller now, do we? What would he say, finding us half naked in his pond?”
The girl starts to laugh, but she’s still afraid. Rallying, she grabs hold of her fear and lifts her toes from the mud, beginning to pump her legs and move her arms in the rhythm her mother taught her.
Her chin leaves the water. She breathes easier, her muscles warm, and her mother smiles.
The girl begins to smile back, but her eyes catch on the collar of her mother’s shirt. It has come unlaced in the water, showing a slice of ribs and breast and belly. But the girl doesn’t notice those things. Instead, she looks at the deep, knotted scar over her mother’s heart. It’s the size of a coin, a swirl of tight, opalescent skin in the moonlight.
“It looks like the moon,” the girl says, legs and arms still churning.
Her mother smiles and adjusts her wet clothing, covering the scar again. “That it does, little one. Now, race me to the shore.”
The Girl from the Wold is drowning again, many years and miles distant. Frigid water punches the air from her lungs and her lungs demand it back in the same, screaming instant. Her world is one of shadows, lit only by the distant light of a burning ship atop the waves. Her world is solitary, save the figure of a woman with drifts of spectral hair, a childlike face and sea-glass eyes filled with bereaved compassion. Her skin is ghostly, and her skirts are a ripple of tentacles.
A ghisting. The girl has glimpsed these beings before, in the shadows of the Wold, and in the little cupboard where she sleeps. She has even seen this one herself, perhaps.
The creature reaches out in the deeps, places her hands on the girl’s cheeks, and speaks.
Sister. Breathe.
*
EIGHT
Pirates
MARY
Something bumped my head. I flailed, grasping it and hauling until I broke the surface of the water. I raked in air and coughed, clutching my salvation for a trembling moment before I squinted at it.
A rope? Why was I holding a rope? Why was I in the water?
Because I’d jumped off a pirate's ship.
I cried out in shock, whatever insanity that had led me to jump shattered by the cold water.
A salty wave broke over me. I clawed back up into the free air, spluttering and panicking. I could swim—my mother had ensured that—but my skirts were so heavy, the water so cold. My lungs burned between fits of coughing and—
I reclaimed the end of the rope and clutched it fiercely.
“Ahoy there,” called a voice I didn’t know, female and quizzical. Squinting up through wet eyelashes, I could just make out her form at the rail of a ship, lantern light spilling down one side of a hard, olive-skinned face. “Hold fast and we’ll lower a ladder.”
“No!” I shouted, despite myself, the need to live and the need to stay away from Lirr colliding like waves against the hull beside me. “I’m not—You will not have me!”
“I’m trying to save you,” the woman chided. She had a light accent, something warm and lilting. “Would you prefer to drown?”
“No! Yes!” I shrieked. Some rational part of my mind informed me that I was hysterical, but if there’d ever been a situation that warranted hysteria, this was it. “That’s why I jumped off the bloody damn ship!”
More heads appeared down the rail. Dozens of sailors looked on, conferring and pointing.
“She wants to drown,” the woman informed one of the figures, who drew up beside her in a tricorn hat. “Jumped off Lirr’s ship, she says.”
Lirr’s ship? So, this ship was… someone else’s? How many ships were out here?
“Ms. Firth,” the newcomer called. It wasn’t the pirate, Lirr. This was James Demery, from Kaspin’s auction. “There’s no need to die tonight.”
Confusion overwhelmed me.
“Where are the pirates?” I shouted, voice cracking. How long had I been in the water? Where was the light of the burning Juliette? And her newly freed ghisting with her sea-glass eyes and the floating hair… She was gone too.
Gone. They were all gone. The sea around me was devoid of light save the glow of this vessel’s lanterns. There was no wreckage, either, no tangles of rope or charred wood.
New panic spiked through me, along with a healthy dose of bewilderment. My eyes stung—emotion and cold, stinging seawater. What had happened to me?
“Where are the pirates?!” One of the bystanders mimicked my question, and a laugh rippled down the deck. “We’re all pirates, lass.”
I’d gone from one ship full of criminals to another. I clutched the rope and murmured a weepy, “Damn.”
“Come aboard and I’ll answer all your questions.” Demery gestured and a rope ladder toppled over the side of the ship, quickly occupied by two men. They started to descend with the surety of acrobats.
I hadn’t the strength to swim away. The rope was the only thing between me and drowning, though the cold was so deep in my flesh now, I could hardly feel myself holding it.
“Ms. Firth,” Demery’s voice became cooler, “Silvanus Lirr is gone, likely believing you dead. And if that is the end you desire, so be it. But you can make that decision tomorrow, once this night and its terrors have passed.”
Something inside of me, knotted and frantic with tension, loosened. He meant those words, or at least, I thought he did. And if he didn’t? I couldn’t afford to care.
The last of my will faded and when the pirates reached the end of their ladder, I held my hands towards them. One dropped into the water and pulled me in, locking a strong arm around my waist and helping me onto the first rung. I didn’t even care when he shook my sodden skirts out of the way. The second pirate watched, hanging above us with a mop of dark, curly hair in his eyes. Then the three of us, painstakingly, began to climb.
I collapsed onto the deck in a shivering, dripping mess. The crew gathered in, curious as hounds. Demery crouched down beside me and the woman I’d seen earlier hovered at his shoulder in men’s trousers and a thick winter coat.
“My name is James Elijah Demery, and this ship is the Harpy,” the captain said. “This is my first, Athe Kohlan. You’re safe here.”
The woman nodded, her eyes flinty. She was in her thirties, easily six feet tall with broad hips, broad shoulders, and a mismatched collection of men’s clothes. But there was no mistaking her femininity; her features were striking, with high cheekbones, a smooth jawline and honey-dark eyes, twined with grey and lined with thick black lashes. Her hair was black too, and showed a hint of stubborn curl despite the severity of the braid she’d bound it in. Those features, combined with her darker skin, made me suspect she had Sunjani in her blood, at least by one parent.