“About what?”
“Hesten Port.”
Widderow frowned, jowls draping over her collar. “Fine. Ms. Firth, do the last two crates yourself and bring me the ledger. Do not smudge those numbers. Understood?”
I nodded, setting down the book, inkpot and quill on a barrel. Widderow left. Footsteps faded as I moved to one of the crates the woman had indicated, unlatched it, and carefully leaned the lid against the bulkhead. Grenados packed in straw lay before me, just waiting to be filled with powder and hurled at enemies.
I stared at them, remembering the attack on Randalf’s ship. A man swinging from the rigging, piss and blood dripping from his twitching toes. Then I imagined lobbing a grenado into Lirr’s face and felt marginally better.
I released my breath and stared across the chamber, holding ill memories at bay. I would not live in fear. I finished taking down Widderow’s numbers and passed back through the ship quickly. Down a passageway, up a steep stair, and onto the gun deck.
Harpy’s dozen guns were stowed after last night’s show of force and the space had reverted to living quarters, home to some fourscore pirates. A quarter were at work somewhere about the ship but the rest were at their leisure, asleep in hammocks, lounging between the guns, talking and mending and whittling and singing and all the other things men and women did to pass the time. I passed one particular hammock, swinging and bracketed by a pair of naked, hairy, female legs. I fixed panicked eyes on the deck and hurried on before I could see—or hear—anything else.
Closer to the fore of the ship, I saw Grant’s coat slung over the lines of a full hammock. Bundling Widderow’s book and inkpot under one arm, I poked at the canvas cocoon.
“Mr. Grant,” I said, poking him again. “Grant. Charles!”
A nearby pirate caught my eye, sitting on top of a lashed gun. She squinted at me over the sock she was darning, the overly domestic image juxtaposed by the cannon, her worn men’s clothes and the shaved sides of her head. What remained of her hair was braided from the nape of her neck up to her forehead, and there it was folded over itself and pinned with two long wooden hairpins behind her skull.
“Slap ’im,” she urged. She indicated a rounded portion of the hammock, roughly where Grant’s legs connected with his body.
Heat spread across my cheeks, though I couldn’t decide whether it was from the woman’s suggestion or the continued memory of dangling legs.
I shoved at the hammock. Its steady swinging disrupted. “Charles Grant!”
Still nothing.
“That one sleeps like the dead. Slap ’im, I said,” the pirate insisted, her face lit with a wicked grin. “Do it, witch.”
I shook my head sharply. “I will not.”
“Fine.” Before I could protest the woman stood and shouldered past me. She gave Grant’s backside a firm, full-palmed slap.
Grant came awake with a flail and smacked his head off a beam. “Fucking shit-bucket boat!” He wilted back into his hammock, clutching his forehead.
I stifled a snort with the back of one hand and several nearby pirates laughed uproariously.
My amusement died when Grant’s squinting eyes fell not on the offending pirate, but on me. The other woman was already back at her darning, a look of startled innocence plastered across her face.
She winked at me.
“Saint, Mary!” Grant half fell out of the hammock, shirt askew and trousers—thank that same Saint—intact. I’d seen entirely enough legs for one day. “What do you want?”
“That wasn’t me!” I protested.
“Oh, it was,” the sock-darning pirate said sagely. She waved a knitting needle at me. “This one’s predatory, Bonny Grant.”
Grant stared at me again, flabbergasted.
“It wasn’t me,” I started to protest again, but half a dozen nearby pirates contradicted me. I gave up, blushing furiously, and raised my chin. “It’s past noon. It’s time for my lessons.”
“What you need,” Grant growled, shuffling around me and shoving his shirt into his breeches. “Is a lesson in manners.”
“Says the half-dressed man who slept past noon,” I quipped.
Grant eyed me, brows rising. “What’s gotten into you?”
“Lessons,” I reminded him, still crimson, and strode away down the deck.
*
Over the next ten days, I battled the wind. Occasionally I made headway—the weather shifted as I willed it and Harpy flew over the waves as pirates cheered and the wind lashed my cheeks. But my control was inconsistent, and when the skies darkened with oncoming storms, Demery banished me back to the cabin. It was safer, he claimed, for the pirates to manage natural weather than rely on my unpredictable magic.
Storms upon the Winter Seas, however, were long and frequent. My stomach, which up until now had been unperturbed by the sea, finally gave in to the increasing severity of the tempests. I had two choices as to how to pass the time—sit in my little cabin, worrying away the hours and throwing up the contents of my unsettled stomach, or spend them with Grant, gambling and throwing up the contents of my unsettled stomach.
When I was alone in the darkness, my thoughts turned to Lirr and my mother and the future. So I chose Grant more and more. It was not that I’d forgiven him, but I had no other choice. There was camaraderie in our misery and general uselessness, and when I returned from another bout of retching, he’d crack a resigned smile and pass me a flask of water to wash out my mouth.
We continued our lessons when the seas were calmer. My muscles ached less and began to recall the stances and movements Grant had taught me. I learned to manage a pistol and took to it well. We began to properly spar too, and in the brief spaces when I managed to stop laughing or mocking myself, I found a new confidence in that skill. I was by no means proficient, and I knew I’d be trounced by a trained opponent—but it was the confidence I needed most.
I was no longer defenseless.
On the eleventh day, another tempest wrapped around us. Grant and I tried to play cards, but staying in our chairs was impossible. Eventually Grant staggered back to the gun deck and I retired to my cabin, taking one last look at the eerie stormlit windows and clinging snow before I closed the door.
Darkness stifled me. The quiet was loud, riddled with creaking and moaning, howling and roaring. It blended in my skull as I braced myself in a corner, choking down familiar anxiety and praying that this wouldn’t be the night Harpy joined the graveyard of ships on the bottom of the Winter Sea. But that night, the silence and fear felt different.
Perhaps it was the closeness of death. Perhaps it was the keen, piercing sense of my own fragile life, of each misting breath and every beleaguered heartbeat. Perhaps it was my recent successes with Grant’s lessons.
Whatever it was, I felt a shift within myself. Apprehension retreated, and a blind, dire courage took its place.
I was a Stormsinger, after my mother. I might have been silenced for sixteen long years, but I had my voice and the power to calm this storm, somewhere inside me. I simply had to do it—before it killed me, Harpy and her crew.
I opened the door and staggered across the cabin, climbing uphill as the ship lurched forward. By the time it tilted back, I braced my hands on the frigid windows. The wind seeped in, finding the barest cracks and edges, and through the frosted glass I saw the ice-caked balcony and menacing, dark waves.