I bolted, blood roaring in my ears, and stopped just under the limp figure. “Helena!”
There was no reply and I stared, open-mouthed, into the snow. A young man’s face blurred over me, short hair frozen to his cap, arms dangling. He was unconscious, and he was not Fisher.
My thoughts skipped wildly. I had to find the woman, now, but I could not leave this man to die. The sailors around him had already scattered, fighting to keep themselves aloft in the tempest. Perhaps they had not even seen their comrade fall.
“Man in peril!” I bellowed to them, pushing my hat back and pointing to the injured crewman. The wind stole my words away but I kept shouting. “Secure him, now!”
There was no time to see if anyone heard me. I staggered as a rogue swell struck Hart. Screams rose above the howl of the wind and the whole ship moaned a timber-cracking, gut-melting lament. Ghisting light skittered across the hull as Hart labored to right the vessel. Everywhere sailors clung to whatever they could, while the dangling crewman swung like a pendulum above them all.
I found my balance and struck out for the ratlines. The sooner I got the fallen sailor to safety, the sooner I could find Fisher and stop my vision from coming to pass.
But my feet found no purchase on the wave-washed deck. My body went one way, my feet the other. I fell hard and scrambled for an anchor, but I was already sliding towards the opposite rail and an abyss of black, roiling sea.
Forget Fisher drifting alone into the depths of the Winter Sea. I would be right there with her.
A hand seized my sleeve. I instinctively twisted, grabbing whoever had caught me—a slim wrist, and a forearm like iron.
Fisher hauled with all her strength. I scrambled along with her and seized the forecastle rail just as the deck leveled out.
I fell upwards, onto my knees and into the rail. Pain cracked through my shoulder and head.
“Fuck,” I groaned into a sudden, brief hush.
“You all right?” Fisher panted, still clutching my wrist. Her voice sounded overloud, despite the pain in my head. The wind had suddenly, completely quieted.
I gripped her arm in return—probably hard enough to bruise, but she held on with the same ferocity. She had lost her hat and her black hair had come loose, hanging past her jaw in frozen shanks. Her cheeks were scalded with cold, her lips dry.
“Samuel?”
My earlier vision flashed back to me, drowning her words.
“You must go below.” Ignoring a badly bruised shoulder, I kept a grip on her forearm and staggered upright. I pulled her with me, my eyes straying to the injured sailor, still hanging from the yard. “Mr. Keo and I will manage.”
Fisher found her feet and flashed me a perplexed look. “I will not. Oh, Saint!” Halfway through her rebuttal, she saw the man suspended from the rigging. She tore away, sprinting past me to the shrouds and swinging up into the lines.
I shouted after her and began to follow, but the Other welled close, paralyzing me on the edge between worlds.
The vision came again, quick and fast. A storm and howling wind, Fisher’s body hitting the waves like a cadaver landing in a gravedigger’s cart.
But she did not fall. The Other came to me in fits and starts, and in my brief moments of lucidity I glimpsed her straddling the yard, joined by two topmen—the most skilled sailors. Together, they hauled the injured man to the shrouds. There they began to descend, all while the Other roared through me.
When the wave came, I could not discern which world it was in—the mortal or the Other. Huge and unfathomable, it loomed over our larboard as Fisher and her comrades scrambled down.
I tried to shout a warning, but my mouth would not open. My fingers scrambled uselessly in my pocket and I screamed at my muscles to loosen, to move—
The Other retreated. Relief made me stagger and gasp, but the reprieve was fractional.
The great wave remained, real and ravenous and looming. It frothed over the heads of Fisher and the three sailors as they hastened for the deck.
I hit the shrouds and grabbed Fisher’s wrist just as the sea swallowed us in a rush of frigid, brutal force. Salt burned in my nostrils, my eyes, inside my screaming mouth. Up and down lost all meaning. Sailors clutching the ratlines with desperate fingers, their bodies swinging out, then floating. Rope gouged into my shoulder, my cheek, my chest, but I hauled Fisher close and did not let go. I felt one of her arms lace through the shrouds before me, clinging right back.
I could not breathe. All I knew was icy water, Fisher’s grasp and the rough ropes. I braced, willing my body to stone as the water raged, the ship trembled and the Other tugged.
Then the wall of water vanished. Horizontal sailors dropped back against the shrouds, drenched and choking. Some quarter of my consciousness not occupied with coughing counted them—one, two, three, and Fisher, still locked in my grasp. Not one had been lost, even the injured man, protected by his fellows.
Suddenly the deck rocked in the opposite direction, lifting Fisher from the sea. I hauled, shouting, blood hammering behind my eyes with the strain. Her free hand seized a line, her boot found the rail, and she toppled into me.
We hit the deck, all elbows and obscenities. Sailors dropped around us, frigid water splattering around their boots and shoes and knees.
I forced myself upright. Fisher started to follow, but sagged back to the deck. A sailor rushed to help her and she fended him off.
“Hold up!” she croaked, windburned face caked with freezing hair. She clutched an arm to her chest. “Gently, you fool! My arm—I landed on my arm.”
The hammering of my heart slowed another degree. Just an arm. Just an injured arm. She was alive.
“Here.” I offered her a hand, hoping the seawater excused the hoarseness of my voice. “Let me.”
She glanced at the proffered fingers, then pressed her good hand into them. I helped her carefully to her feet and gathered my wits to say something, to try to express my relief that my vision had not come to pass.
“The wind’s gone,” Fisher said.
I looked up, startled. Yes, the sea roiled and the ship moaned and cold made every inch of my flesh ache, but the wind had vanished.
Stormsinger.
I grabbed the nearest sailor, Penn, who had lost his customary hat. “Help Lieutenant Fisher below, quickly now.”
“As you say, Mr. Rosser.”
Fisher shook her head at Penn’s offered shoulder and something in her eyes struck me. Hurt? No. Terror. A haunted, empty fear that I recognized well. The Winter Sea had nearly taken her, and she had just realized how close to death she had come.
The vision passed through my mind a third time—silence, distant waves, drifting hair. A fresh ache lodged in my chest. I had stopped the vision from happening. The danger was over. Why, then, did it still feel so potent? Was there more to be seen, another threat in the near future?
Of course there was, I chided myself. We sailed the Winter Sea. The feeling was just another symptom of my brokenness, and perhaps an overattachment to Fisher. One she would not welcome. We were not, after all, friends.
“I’m quite all right, Mr. Penn,” Fisher said to the sailor in question, straightened and pointed to the injured crewman. “Help him. I’ll manage.”
I gave her a short smile, hoping she could not see the lingering anxiety behind it. She gave me an exhausted nod, her gaze glancing off my face, then turned away and started issuing orders.