I bumped back into the wall. The cool stone jarred me and I rallied, clearing my head with a force of will. “Thank you,” I breathed.
He nodded but did not lower his arm, still guarding me from the hall and Lirr’s cloying influence.
“What do you want to do?” Samuel asked, and it was that question, even more than the sincerity in his eyes, that made me trust him. He was a risk, but so was every other option I had. At least with Samuel, I had his coin for leverage.
Gunshots broke the air, two, then four, followed by a shout that I knew came from Grant. Demery was making his move.
“There’s a smuggler's anchorage north of the city. Lirr’s ship may be there, with my mother.” I added impulsively, “Help me rescue her.”
“But Lirr is here,” Samuel countered. He looked torn. “I have to stop him.”
Disappointment made my throat thick. “Then distract him so I can escape.”
“You cannot go alone,” he protested.
I ducked under his arm and grabbed the curtain, letting a slice of light fall across our faces. I shrugged, knowing he was probably right, but I was unwilling to give up. “What else am I supposed to do?”
For a timeless second Samuel looked at me and through me, indecision written across his features. Then he nodded.
Before I could lose my nerve, I slipped outside and plastered myself to the wall. Lirr was tucked into another alcove on the other side of the passage, his pirates on the floor or hunkered behind benches and side tables.
Voices roared. I looked the other way and saw Demery and Grant charging towards us, Usti muskets abandoned for swords.
Lirr’s eyes pinned me to the periwinkle plaster. “Stay where you are.”
I felt a rush of compulsion with his words, and for the third time that night, my rationality fled. I thought I’d been prepared, but my legs locked, even as my mind screamed for me to move. I felt like an insect, impaled on a naturalist’s card. I tried to do as Samuel had said, holding in my mind the truth of what Lirr was, that this compulsion was not my own, but my body responded too slow. Too slow.
Samuel stepped out of the curtain behind me, leveled a pistol, and shot Lirr. No sooner had spark met powder than he threw himself across the corridor, cutlass in hand, and attacked. Lirr fired back, missed, and flipped his own pistol across his forearm as a shield as he drew his cutlass. He deflected a thrust to the chest and stabbed at Samuel.
Blades clashed and ground. Samuel slammed into Lirr’s chest and knocked his pistol flying.
Lirr’s power wavered as he hit the wall, and my consciousness reared. With invisible teeth and nails I tore at his control, shredding it and grasping the last untainted thought I’d had.
Run.
My legs released. I bolted, snatching up my skirts and leaping over a dead pirate. Another’s arm snaked out to grab my ankle but I dodged, nearly slipped in blood, and skittered around a corner.
I looked back, heart thundering in my throat. Samuel was obscured by half a dozen pirates, and Demery and Grant flitted through the melee.
Then, to my shock, the pirate hunter burst from the chaos and charged towards me. “Go, go!”
I took off, shouting over my shoulder as he caught up. “What about Lirr?”
Blood glistened on Samuel’s cutlass. He glanced back, indecision plain in his eyes, but he forced himself to look ahead.
“He’s wounded. Badly,” he said as we burst through an open doorway and passed a clutch of screaming servants. “You are more important right now.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I took it.
Hallways. Doors. Soldiers waving us in the right direction. Cold blasted my face, my lungs burned and we burst out of the palace gates onto the Boulevard of the Divine. People stared as we made for the broad sweep of the canal and the bridge to the Knocks, feet pounding, clothing fluttering.
The streets were packed with revelers, lit by lanterns and braziers as the city celebrated. Light spilled from taverns and brothels, fire dancers leapt through the streets, and musicians played raucous tunes as we traversed the Knocks and diverted onto a road heading north. Eventually the celebrants filtered away, and we sprinted across a bridge into the military quarter.
Just as the masts of the harbor came into sight, Samuel tugged me left.
“What? What is it?” I whisper-shouted, trying to find my feet in an alleyway entirely sheeted with ice. Instead, I slipped and smashed my knee off the slick cobblestones.
Samuel’s response was a ragged curse. His boots slid, legs locked, and for a rambling heartbeat it looked like he’d found his balance. Then his long legs shuddered like a newborn colt’s and he hit the ice.
“Samuel!” I scrambled for the nearest snowbank, finding footing in snow so cold it squeaked beneath my boots. I’d barely noticed the temperature in our flight, but the night was freezing and I only wore my gown. My cloak remained at the palace. “What are you doing?”
“If we go that way, they are going to catch us.” Rosser staggered upright in the opposite snowbank, one hand on the wall, the other reaching to me. There was a brightness to his eyes, an intensity that demanded my attention. “Lirr is going to cut us off at the gate out of the city.”
“How do you know that?” I gaped at him. “I thought you injured him!”
“I did, but he is moving again,” he said, his own shock and unease at the statement clear in his face. He snatched my hand across the ice. “I am a Sooth, Mary. I know where you can hide. You are no use to your mother captured.”
Shouts and pounding footsteps filled the quayside, reverberating off stone and ice and wood and water. Samuel was a Sooth? A Sooth and a Magni, twins? No wonder Samuel had spoken so knowledgeably about Lirr’s abilities.
Implications pestered me, but there was no time for them. “I have to try to get to her,” I protested. “There must be another way.”
“There will be,” he said, and it sounded like a vow. “Once you are safe.”
Footfalls came closer. Regret coursed through me, but he was right.
I slapped my hand into his and we fled as fast as our staggering and slipping would allow.
An alleyway. A yawning, open gate. We flickered through patches of arctic shadow and wan lantern light, Rosser turning each corner as if he’d known these streets his whole life. Only once did he hesitate, coming up short against a warehouse’s huge double doors. Then he sprinted across the street, bundling me down another alley and up a flight of exterior stairs.
A bridge stretched high over the street, bracketed by buildings at either end. We flattened ourselves against the walls on our side, holding our breaths as pirates sprinted through the streets below. Usti soldiers followed them a second later, bellowing and cracking off a pair of musket shots. Pirates whooped and fired back.
Frigid wind bit at my exposed skin as we crept across the bridge and I wilted, panting, into the gloom on the other side.
“Where?” I only had breath for one word.
“The shipyards,” Rosser wheezed, nodding to where the bridge passed around the building and out of sight. Sweat sheened his face despite the bitter cold, and his cheeks, above his beard, were burned red. “Right there.”
“Why?”
“Ghistings.” He straightened, panting. “Figureheads, for the ships. They will hide you in the Other. From Sooths, at least for a time. Lirr is so close, I fear it may not work. But there is no other hope.”