And I? An irrational yearning wove through my ribs, smothering my breath as surely as Mary had smothered the wind outside. I wanted, more than anything, to hear her voice again. To see the sun break through the clouds and the snowflakes drift to her unnatural song. That power. That peace—imagined, or real.
Kaspin’s voice broke the silence. “Mr. Rosser, need we wait for your companion to begin?”
“Begin?” I repeated, still disoriented. “No, no.”
Kaspin eyed me, then ducked his chin. “Then let’s open with one thousand five hundred solems.”
“Five hundred,” Randalf said, turning up his nose. “She strikes me as untrained. Stilling a breeze and calling a storm are one thing. Dispersing a storm and maintaining a fair wind for a voyage? Those are another.”
Kaspin looked to Demery.
The pirate laced his arms loosely over his chest. “One thousand five hundred,” he affirmed.
Now, Kaspin turned his eyes to me.
My throat felt thick, the number poisonous on my tongue. I forced myself to look at Randalf again, at Speck and Kaspin and Demery, and reminded myself again that the singer would be better off with us.
That was not my only motivation, though. That voice. That song, and the way it had affected me. I wanted to help her. I needed to—even if my only means was contemptible.
“My captain is prepared to offer two thousand,” I said.
“I’ll raise to two thousand five hundred,” Demery countered calmly.
Silence overtook the table. Randalf sucked at his teeth, obviously unhappy with the price. Kaspin refilled his cup with a soft clink and sat back, expectant.
As to Mary herself, she paled even more. She blinked hard and her face locked into an expressionless façade.
Demery noticed. “You’ll be well treated on my vessel, Mary. I run a clean ship, no drinking, no fighting, no gambling. A cabin of your own.”
“Puritan pirates,” Grant muttered from his gloomy corner, though I could not say if anyone else heard him. “Laud them.”
“The witch isn’t here to be wooed,” Kaspin said. “Three thousand, anyone?”
“Four thousand,” Randalf burst out, spitting the words as if they were broken teeth. “Four thousand bedamned solems.”
My heart hit the floor beneath my boots. Kaspin’s hand froze on his cup and Demery slowly twisted to regard the smuggler.
“What exactly, Mr. Randalf, do you smuggle?” the pirate asked. His tone was benign, but I saw the frustration behind his eyes. My guess? He could not afford to outbid that.
I could not, either. I fingered the worn coin in my pocket to calm myself, running the numbers in my head. Slader could not pay more than three thousand. One could buy an entire ship for four thousand solem weight.
“I deal in pineapples, for the most part,” Randalf said, still looking disgusted, but our shock had soothed him. A touch of arrogance tugged at the corner of his mouth. “You wouldn’t believe what the rich sots on Jurry will pay to carry around a pineapple at their parties, or just how fond Her Majesty is of pineapple syrup in the mornings. But they do not keep, which is why I need a weather witch, and my last one drowned herself. Fair winds, fresh cargo, good business.”
The Stormsinger stared at him in abject horror. I felt much the same.
Kaspin chuckled. His cheeks warmed now, greed and glee glinting in his eyes. “Well, well. Demery? Rosser? Any final offers?”
Demery emptied his cup and set it down with a hollow thunk. His expression was contained, but there was a glimmer of murder in the way he looked at Randalf. “No, sir.”
My dreamer’s sense roared, and this time there was no stopping it. It buffeted and pulled at me, threatening to drag me out of the room entirely and into that Other place—the one where dreams walked, ghisten spirits ruled, and my soul was irreparably tethered.
I saw the Stormsinger’s face in a winter wold of ice and snow, windburned and desperate. Then she was not one, but two—her living, breathing human image mirrored in spectral shadow.
I grasped the worn coin in my pocket so tightly that my palm nearly split and the embossing on its face, three serpents biting one another’s tails, stamped into my skin. The roar dampened to a hushed moan, then faded altogether.
Relief coursed through me, though it was a sour thing. I had just glimpsed the Stormsinger’s future, and whatever it meant, I could not change it.
“Any more offers?” Kaspin prompted again, looking to me. When no one spoke, he leaned over to top up Randalf’s cup with a soft clink and a stream of amber liquor. The deal was done.
I stood up with a scrape of my chair and started for the door, ripping my eyes off the Stormsinger. I had lost her, and that bothered me more than anticipated. Empathy, guilt, and a touch of longing coiled through my chest. But none of it mattered. I could not change what happened in this room, any more than I could change my own past.
“Mr. Rosser,” Kaspin called, “I do have other assets which might interest your captain. Perhaps you would stay and take a drink with me?”
“I will be going,” I replied with a tight smile. My eyes alighted one last time on James Demery, who watched me with an inscrutable expression, and my dreamer’s sense coiled again. I ignored it. “Good day to you all.”
With that, I left. And I did not look back.
The Girl from the Wold
The girl from the village between the Wold and the slate hills knows that the ghisten trees have souls. She has grown up in their shade, and sees them for more than their twisted, gnarled trunks and spreading canopies, which refuse to bow to the seasons as normal wolds do. She has marked the way their shadows sometimes stretch from unseen suns, and how, every so often, their leaves stir without wind.
The girl’s summers, short though they are on the edge of the Winter Sea, are full of birdsong and bare feet in moss. Long winters bring the hush and creak of snow-laden boughs, the burble of buried streams, and here and there the rustle of leaves from a rebellious ghisten birch, green in defiance of the cold. She breaks the ice and drinks from those hidden streams, nourished by the same water that nourishes the forest, and eats the berries that grow between twisted roots. She belongs in the Wold.
And when she puts her small palm to the trunk of the yew, behind the inn where her family lives, she thinks she can hear a whisper. The tree has a soul, she knows, a soul drawn up through the dirt and clay and stone. It is a soul from another world, with other suns and seasons. A soul now housed within oak and elm and yew.
That soul is called a ghisting.
*
FOUR
The Company of Smugglers
MARY
After a fortnight locked in a room, being in the company of Kaspin, Speck, and their guests had tattered my nerves.
My only forays consisted of two ill-fated escapes. One ended in Speck tripping me before I reached the stairs, then carrying me back to my room like a screeching child. The other ended in a lush parlor, where, distracted by a gaudy portrait of Kaspin over the fireplace, I hadn’t managed to pry open the frozen window before the inn wife strode in and punched me in the stomach.
Finally, as I sat at Kaspin’s meeting, gagged and beset by appraising gazes, tension spread across my shoulders like cracks in ice.
I tried to ignore the men. It did not matter who they were or what they said. It didn’t matter that the one called Randalf struck me as slimy and despicable, that James Elijah Demery seemed oddly familiar, or that the young pirate hunter looked at me with what might have been sympathy. I did not have a choice in who took me, and they would all bring their own kind of hell.