I needed the cold as an anchor, now more than ever. The Mereish coin was no longer in my pocket, ready to soothe my nerves, dispel my curse and keep me in the human world. It was gone. So was Mary Firth, and with her our only lead to Lirr.
What I told her had been the truth. Lirr was a Sooth, and he would be able to track her in the Other now that he had touched her.
So could I. One brush of our hands when she reached for her wine, and we were irreparably bound.
I stretched my neck one way, then the other, pushing out my frustration in a long, misting breath. My thoughts of the Stormsinger were insidious, and not in the way I needed them to be. I had to find her, not dwell on whether she’d gone to Demery willingly, or the way the firelight played down the curve of her cheek. She was a task, a goal, and a thief.
Anger stirred, along with an irrational feeling of betrayal. I had been kind to her, genuinely tried to do the right thing, and she had stolen from me. I had failed Slader again, and my position on Hart was more tenuous than ever.
Off in the town, a church bell began to ring. With each peal I barreled my emotions away, narrowing my focus to my breath, the cold and the Other.
That second world rushed in, preceded by a vanguard of thin, fragmentary visions and the sensation of falling asleep—my consciousness waxing and waning with every heartbeat. Then, between one breath and the next, an invisible tether snapped and the Other swallowed me like a whale from the deep.
I opened my eyes. Just like last time, Hart’s bulwarks and deck thinned to transparency, and I was alone save for the lantern with its sleeping dragonflies. The Dark Water surrounded me, its surface occasionally punctuated by swaths of moving, shifting light. But this time, I could see the land surrounding the harbor—if anything in the Other could be called land.
Smooth sandbanks and stretches of flooded forest reached as far as the eye could see. There was no ocean at my back anymore, just more shoulders of opalescent sand and tufts of copper-black grasses, pulsating with the light of the free dragonflies that converged there. In the other direction—what would have been the mainland, in the human world—the ghisten trees of Tithe reached into the Other’s bruised sky. Three muted suns cast light and shadow across the Wold. But those shadows were gnarled, twisted things, dancing across the surface of the water, and the trees here had no leafy canopies or rustling boughs.
This was the Dark Water, the Other, where ghisten trees’ true roots spread, ancient, tangled, and full of sapphire ghisting spirits. The creatures lingered and swirled, separated and entwined, weaving the patterns of a daily life I could not fathom, while dragonflies skimmed across the water around them in streams of gold and purple.
The dragonflies in my own lantern stirred and fluttered, perhaps sensing their free cousins through the barrier between worlds. I considered releasing them—the sight of the creatures behind glass had always saddened me—but Slader would just buy more.
I suppressed a shiver and glanced up through the deck, sails and rigging to the sky above Hart. There, the lights of more strange beings drifted through the muted sky like fingers through oil.
There were many more creatures in Tithe than I was used to. They stirred memories of a childhood before I had the coin, when I had spent days lost in a forest just like this, hiding from glowing monsters. After she had let them take my brother and I. After they made us what we… became.
But my coin was gone, and every moment I spent in the Other was a risk. If I was careful, if I was quiet, my presence might go unnoticed. And if I was calm, my tether to my body would remain firm.
I hoped.
I looked back to the sea around me. At the same time, I pulled up a memory of Mary Firth at Kaspin’s, singing the snow to stillness. I recalled sitting across the table from her at the inn last night, her cheeks flushed with cold, lips red with wine. The way she had smiled softly at me through the crowd, before she robbed me of the only thing that kept me sane.
My consciousness fluttered in my skull like the dragonflies in their lantern. I closed my eyes, but the feeling only worsened. My dreamer’s senses converged like a summer storm.
“Mary Firth.” I stated her name and pulled at the memories again. Unwelcome feelings came with them—longing, unease—but I embraced them, letting them blossom and pull my eyes out over the Winter Sea.
A new light appeared on the horizon, vaguely teal-grey against the blackness of the sea. It was faint, a candle’s reflection in a frosted window, but it was there. It sang, an unearthly song at the edge of my hearing. Her.
At the same time, movement caught my attention. I looked down through the deck of Hart and into the sea below. We were just offshore of the Wold and sandbanks, but the Dark Water was deep just below the ship. So murky. So endless.
White light surged through the depths towards me.
I pushed out of the Other and into my flesh. The cabin solidified, walls folding into place as I staggered to my feet. In the dragonfly lantern on the wall, the creatures churned in a chaotic, panicked swirl. For an instant all I could hear was the shushing ping of their bodies against the glass, then the ship’s bell began to ring.
I lunged out of my cabin and hit the bulkhead on the other side of the passage, clawing towards the companionway in the dark.
I came above to a chorus of shouts and a blast of cold wind. The anchor watch ran for the rails and, on the quarterdeck, Fisher grasped at a line and leaned over the water. White light flooded her face, but it did not come from the ship’s lantern.
It came from the sea.
“Mr. Rosser!” Penn called from the forecastle, where he stood precariously close to the rail. His knitted cap, as usual, threatened to pop off his bald head. “What is this?”
“Back from the rail!” I panted, sprinting up the quarterdeck stairs. “Something is trying to follow me back from the Other!”
Fisher did not flinch. Her eyes raked me, taking in my untucked shirt and wild hair. “The kind of thing that can follow you back?”
I shook my head, breathless. “I have no clue. Where is Slader?”
“Still ashore with the harbor master, along with Mr. Keo and Ms. Skarrow.” Fisher named the bosun and gun captain, respectively. Her eyes strayed over the expanse of harbor between us and the docks. The light in the water was constant now, giving her eyes a bleached hue. “Tell me what it is.”
The instinct to flee felt like a thousand ants rushing up my spine, but I quashed it and joined her. Below, light swelled beneath the lightly chopping waves. “I am not sure.”
On the deck of every other ship in port, sailors ran to the rails. On the docks, the small figures of soldiers on patrol stopped to watch, rifles and lanterns in hand, and townsfolk on late-night errands clustered.
Without warning, the light beneath the waves shattered across our hull into hundreds of glowing creatures, each one the size of a cat—sleek, equine and unmistakable.
“Morgories,” I said, dread turning my guts to water. Like myself, morgories were flesh-and-blood creatures that had one foot in the Other world and one foot in ours. They would consume anything and everything in their path—even a ship.
“Quiet!” Fisher called across the deck, raising her voice just enough to be heard by the sailors. She pointed to Penn. “You, Mr. Penn, get below and keep everyone in their hammocks. We wait.”