“I know who you are, girl,” the inn wife said brusquely. Like the maid earlier, she spoke my language with a light accent, and I began to wonder—mildly embarrassed at my own lack of Usti—if everyone in Tithe spoke Aeadine. “Go have a seat and I will have something sent over. Your sir should be along any minute.”
I opened my mouth to ask who she meant by my ‘sir,’ but the woman vanished back into the kitchen. The answer was apparent, anyway, if uncomfortable. She meant Demery, and assumed I was his mistress.
A pirate’s mistress. Well, that was safer than being a Stormsinger—though the positions often overlapped.
I turned, scanning the company for an empty table. There was one near a window, drafty but unoccupied. I tugged my short coat tighter around my shoulders and made my way over.
I settled in. The chatter and hum of the room seeped into my bones, drawing me unexpectedly back across the sea, to the inn where I’d spent my childhood. There, the patrons had been villagers, shepherds and foresters and road-weary coachmen, rather than wealthy merchants and petty officers from various ships. The rumbling babble had been Aeadine, rather than the strange mix of tongues I heard now. But it still felt like home.
I eased back in my chair, hardly minding the curl of wind that seeped in around the shutters. Just for a moment, I could imagine that I was back in the village, between the Wold and the hills.
That, naturally, was when James Elijah Demery sat down before me with two cups and a bottle of very dark, fine wine. “Ms. Firth.”
“Captain Demery,” I returned. I was cautious but unafraid of him, surrounded as we were by the honest folk of Tithe and the whisper of the ghisting-riddled island.
“You seem much recovered,” he commented. I noted the pistols at his waist as he opened his coat. “That’s good to see. You’ve not been bothered by anyone, I take it?”
“No one,” I returned smoothly, but something in his posture made me glance around. I realized the occupants of the next table had their chairs and boots positioned to block my path to the door—or anyone’s path to us.
One of them, a stocky sailor stuffed into a fine frock coat and wig, waved daintily and grinned a gap-toothed grin.
“There’s a Mereish warship in port.” Demery noted the direction of my gaze and leaned across the table on his elbows. “I thought it best to increase your security.”
“Or to make sure I didn’t run?”
“Are you going to run?”
The question, and the reality that I was surrounded, left me unexpectedly exhausted. “I want to be left alone,” I mumbled. And I want to find my mother, though I still can’t believe she’s with Lirr.
“I could never forgive myself if I left you alone, Ms. Firth.” Demery’s voice was soft, carrying just between the two of us. “It’d be as good as killing you. Abandoning you in a foreign port, hunted by Silvanus Lirr?”
“Hunted because he supposedly has my mother?” I shook my head. “If I’m going to believe you, I need to know more than that.”
Demery examined the bottle of wine and popped out the cork. “Well, I’m unsure how to convince you, but she is with him. You saw the man with your own eyes?”
“He said nothing of my mother,” I replied, my voice much steadier than I felt with memories of Lirr’s attack and butchery so close. Did I dare tell Demery what Lirr had said about knowing me? Would he be able to explain it?
“Well, whatever transpired between the two of you doesn’t change these facts: he has your mother and he’ll come for you again.” The pirate poured two cups of wine and slid one towards me. There was no amusement in his eyes, no taunting or toying. “His interest in her—and subsequently you—is old, stretching back to our youths. We used to sail together, you see. Back when we all crewed for a man called Bretton.”
My mouth fell open. I no longer heard the inn, the chatter and the footsteps and the clink of glasses. I barely noticed the curl of the wind through the shutters beside me, wafting over my throat and cheek in consolation. All I saw was Demery, and all I heard were his words.
“Bretton?” I repeated. I’d heard the name before, though the memories attached to it were vague—overheard conversations between my parents, perhaps. “Who was he?”
Demery tapped the side of my cup. “Have a drink and settle in, Ms. Firth. I’ll make this as short as I can, but you’re pale as bone.”
I took the proffered wine and pulled it close. “Tell me.”
“Bretton was a pirate from the Cape,” Demery began, the low rumble of his voice making up the edges of my world. “He docked in Kalsank some twenty-five years ago, fitting out a crew. Kalsank was the port to do that, in those days, and to find place on a free ship, being far enough from the eyes of all the navies—Capesh, Cape being the closest to Kalsank, Mere and Aead. That brought sailors like me to the island too.”
“What about my mother?” I asked.
“Bretton already had her aboard, along with Lirr.” Demery’s lips tightened into a thin, crack of a smile. “She, naturally, was his singer. Lirr was his Sooth—to warn of the storms that Anne was to dispel and so on, working in concert, as was the way. Anne was young, barely sixteen. Bretton wasn’t a kind man, but your mother was fierce, and it was her that began to stir the crew to mutiny. Bretton had an endeavor in mind, one with a grand prize at the end. He, your mother and Lirr had seen it before. The wreck of a Mereish treasure fleet. It was agreed that we’d see the venture through before slitting Bretton’s throat.”
I watched the rings on Demery’s fingers glint as he continued. “Bretton never found his great riches again. He went too far with your mother one night. She killed him, on the edge of the Stormwall.”
Gooseflesh rippled down my arms. My mother had killed a man, at sixteen? That was a grim thought.
“Why was Bretton near the Stormwall?” I pressed. The Stormwall was a region of the Winter Sea shrouded in legends and myth—a great storm that stretched across the far north without beginning or end. The stories said summer never came beyond the Stormwall, and the world was forever locked in ice.
Not that there were many stories, since most who ventured into the tempest never came out again.
“Because his hoard was on the other side, and it’s still there.” The pirate held my gaze. “We took Bretton’s ship. Lirr saved your mother’s life during the confrontation, and she was finally free of her chains. He took command and declared we would continue Bretton’s mission and claim his prize, but the ship was too damaged. The war was heating up again as well, what with Aeadine trying to take the Mereish North Isles and fleets in every direction. So we sailed for quieter waters to lie low and recoup.”
At the table next to us, Demery’s crew dealt out a game of cards.
“No one knew where Bretton’s prize was except your mother. Lirr had seen it, of course, but couldn’t find the way alone. The Winter Sea is, as you know, a volatile place, but as the Stormsinger, your mother was privy to all the navigational details.” Demery held my gaze, both gentle and forceful, and I knew whatever he would say next would be personal. “But your mother fell in with one of the crew, a tar, a nobody called Joseph Grey, and decided she wanted a quiet place to birth and raise their child. Lirr was jealous. Furious. Refused to let her go and put her back in chains.”