Surely this was a dream. Surely there wasn’t a noose around my neck, or a black-coated figure waiting next to the gallows with his hand on a long, iron lever.
My eyes dragged down to the hatch beneath my battered boots and Charles’s buckled shoes.
“Mary,” Charles repeated, hesitantly this time. Looking up, I saw his knuckles were white and knotted together in the buttons of his coat. The only other part of his skin I could see was a thin strip between bag, noose and cravat, which was flushed red with cold and anxiety. “Could you… cause a distraction?”
Suddenly terrified the guards would notice us conversing, I stared over the courtyard.
“Pardon me?” I hissed.
“I’ve some… small details of an escape plan. But I’m short a distraction,” Charles informed me, his voice still pleasant, if tight. “You see, I’ve a great deal of debt, to a great many individuals in this city, including several soldiers at this fort, all of whom will lose money if I die today. Hence the bag to dispose of me anonymously. Still, word has gotten out and the soldiers have agreed to open the riverside gate if I can get myself there. I will bring you along, if you can cause a distraction.”
The wind tugged strands of brown hair into my eyelashes. I drank it in, letting it open my lungs with a spark of… was that hope? No, hope had no place here.
Regardless, the wind and the spark began to form something I hadn’t let myself feel since that day under the yew when I was a child. It was arresting and reckless, visceral and instinctual.
Sorcery.
“I can,” I said, a little hoarsely. “But why would you take me with you?”
“Because you are not Abetha Bonning, notorious highwaywoman, murderess, and mistress of Lady Adale Debeaux. And, criminal I may be, but I cannot abide you dying in her place.” Charles spoke faster now, racing the justice to the end of his prayer. “So, if you could please scream and confess to be quick with child, I would be greatly indebted.”
Declaring that I was pregnant might provide a distraction and even gain me a temporary stay of execution, but the wind was inside me now, and I could do much better than that. It meant breaking my promise to my mother, risking a fate supposedly worse than the noose. But the will to live burned hot in my chest.
“Then make yourself ready.” I filled my lungs, right down to the bowl of my belly, and began to sing. “With her pistols loaded she went aboard. And by her side hung a glittering sword.”
The wind whisked the justice’s papers into a suddenly stormy sky. Grey clouds billowed like an underground spring, layering and darkening with each passing second. The wind turned arctic and the prisoners scattered with startled cries, while the justice clutched his hat to his head and shouted at the stunned guards around the yard.
I barely heard Charles choke, “You’re a bloody damn Storm—”
I kept singing, “In her belt two daggers: well armed for war.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the redcoat on the wall point his musket at me—just as he was joined by half a dozen other soldiers, their double-breasted uniforms blotches of scarlet against the darkening sky.
A warning bell began to ring, but I barely heard it. The frigid wind rocked me, snapping my skirts and tearing my hair loose from its knot. “From her throat a soulless cry, ‘But by my voice you all shall die, but by my voice you all shall die.’”
Sleet hit with hurricane force, battering my face and turning to snow. Darkness came with it, thick and eerie, but I grinned a wild grin. This was power. This was what I’d been denied all these years, rushing across my skin and turning my thoughts clean and sharp.
All too soon the wind stole my breath and my song died, but it didn’t matter now. The storm was here, and it raged.
A voice shouted in my ear, “With me!”
Charles. Right, it was time to run.
My hands were still bound but I grabbed the noose, jerked it over my head, and seized Charles’s arm. We stumbled together towards the edge of the gallows, hunkering against the rain and potential musket balls. He leapt to the muddy ground, then his hands—miraculously free—were at my waist. I jumped.
My feet crunched into freezing mud and we bolted. Other bodies shoved past us, faceless in the chaos, but I clasped Charles’s hand in mine. I would not be left behind.
A soldier snapped into sight, his red coat leached of color in the snow and the shadow of the courtyard wall. I cried out, staggering like a newborn colt in mud, but the soldier only fell into stride and waved at one of his comrades, who opened a hefty outer door.
Mud turned to cobblestones. We barely slipped through the door before it slammed shut again. A cacophony of echoes harried us through a stone passageway, our footsteps and ragged breaths filling the empty space.
Charles hit another door with a grunt. It held and I panicked, terrified that it was locked, that soldiers would come, muskets would fire and—
The door crashed open. Charles ducked through and the storm swallowed us again with whirls of wind and sleet.
A stone quay lined the fort here, with the river and the outskirts of the port city of Whallum beyond. Four squat, fully enclosed riverboats rocked at their moorings, one with a lantern lit, two dozen oars pointed skyward and an open door. Charles sprinted towards it and I followed.
Right before we reached the boat, Charles shouted through the tempest, “You can keep running, or come with me!”
My skirts stuck to my legs, threatening to trip me with every step, and cold crept into my bones. I clenched chattering teeth and squinted at him. “What?”
He turned to me. “I cannot promise you will be safe in that boat!” I could barely see his unfamiliar face in the storm, even inches away from my own. But I heard the tension in his voice.
I turned my gaze to the boat, then past it. A path laced away around the fort walls, slick with mud, slush, and rivulets of water. I could take it, but I’d no idea where it went. I also had no idea what lay inside that boat, except the morally dubious people to whom Charles, a stranger, was indebted to.
Lightning flashed. I glimpsed Charles clearly for the first time, disheveled blond hair plastered across the large, almost feminine eyes of a man in his mid-twenties, with soft cheeks and a smooth jawline. Not an unappealing face, but one far too gentle for a criminal. Fine snowflakes whisked behind him and snagged in his hair.
The temperature dropped with each passing moment. By now, everyone in the city would know there was a weather witch on the loose.
“Mary! Answer me!” Charles shouted. “We haven’t much time!”
I could have run. I should have run. But before I knew it, my choice was gone.
Two men lurched out of the boat’s hatch and dragged us inside.
STORMSINGER—An individual, most commonly a woman, who can control the wind and weather with her voice. A Stormsingers’ Guild was founded in 1221 and abolished in 1693 by Queen Maud II after the loss of the Aeadine Anchorage in the War of Unhallowed Saints, a naval conflict in which the Stormsingers refused to participate. Sentenced to indentured servitude for treason to the Crown, all members of the guild were officially absorbed into Her Majesty’s Royal Navy, though many subsequently fell victim to villainy. See also WEATHER WITCH, WEATHER MAGE, WINDWIFE.