She did none of those things. Her eyes lingered on my damp, impractical gown and windburned cheeks, then she turned to Lirr.
“Her cabin is ready,” she said and strode away across the deck. Fog immediately obscured her.
My eyes burned as I watched the murk close between us, part of me asserting that this couldn’t be my mother. My mother loved me. My mother protected me. But this woman? She had barely seen me.
Lirr’s fingers took my upper arm and I squinted at him, battling for composure and control. I needed to brace for whatever was coming next.
“Give her time,” he said lowly. He spoke in my ear, his voice a consoling, nearly paternal rumble. “I think in her heart she’d given up on ever seeing you again. I think, perhaps, she thinks it would have been for the better.”
I swallowed tightly. “Would it have?”
The pirates began to chant, and the wood beneath my feet shuddered as the anchor started to rise. Lirr’s hand left my arm, but instead of stepping away from him, I looked into his face, waiting for my answer.
“You’re here for the good of us all,” Lirr replied. He nodded to his crew as their voices rose in time and the rattle of the anchor chain battered the fog. “You and Tane.”
Tane. The name resonated, strange and yet oddly familiar. Hadn’t Harpy said that, once?
“Tane. What is that?” The question left my lips before the way he’d used the word struck me. As if it were a name. A person.
He shifted to look directly down at me. The breadth of his shoulders and his pensive expression filled my vision, blocking off the deck and the fog and the presence of my mother, somewhere on the forecastle. His lips held the hint of a frown, and his grey eyes a mild, distant intensity.
“You remember her,” he said, as if testing the statement.
“Tane?” I clarified. The intensity of his gaze unsettled me, as did the revelation that Tane was a person. “No. Harpy said it, once.”
“Ah.” Disappointment flickered through Lirr’s face. “What else did she say?”
“Lirr.” My mother’s voice cut through the fog. My heart fluttered and we both turned, looking up at the shadow that was the Fleetbreaker. “Not now. Leave her.”
Leave her. The command in my mother’s voice shocked me as much as Lirr’s obedience. He gave me a look that promised our conversation was not over, then waved to a nearby pirate and passed me off. He climbed the forecastle stairs to Anne’s side.
My mother sang a quick line and the wind picked up. A whistle piped, sailors began to chant and haul, and several sails opened with a thunder of canvas.
My new handler tugged me towards the open grating midship. Just as the pirate and I disappeared into the companionway, the fog lightened, revealing my mother and Lirr standing on the forecastle. They were conspiratorially close, their backs to me, he leaning down to listen to whatever she had to say.
Then the shadows and lanternlight below decks cut them off, and I was in the belly of the ship, prisoner once again.
*
They were allies, Lirr and my mother. I couldn’t conclude anything else, standing in the quiet cabin where I’d been stowed.
My prison was a temporary thing, thin paneled walls constructed around one of the long cannons near the stern of the second gun deck. The weapon was bound in its cradle behind a locked port, with a lonely hammock swinging overhead in the light of a small, iron stove.
I sat on the gun, its metal frigid through my skirts, and wrapped my arms around myself. How could my mother and Lirr be allies? What had he done to her to break her, to bring her to the point where the presence of her own daughter hadn’t drawn a second glance?
Was it his magic, overriding my mother’s will as he and Benedict had done to me, back at the palace?
But it was he who’d answered to her, not the other way around.
I clawed through childhood recollections and turned over what I’d seen today, trying to rationalize the two sets of memories. I couldn’t—my mother and this woman were different people.
But sixteen years had passed. I’d been a child when she left, sheltered from my parents’ pasts and the Winter Sea by village life and the Wold. Maybe this was who she’d been all along.
I was not a child anymore, but I felt like one right now—small and confused, frightened and unsure. I resented that feeling, but it tormented me as the ship hit open sea, water began to roar past the hull, and my mother’s frigid, ensorcelled wind pried through the cracks around the hatch.
“It’s an act,” I finally said. Speaking the words aloud strengthened me, pushing my fear back to a manageable level. “It’s an act. She’s doing this to protect me. She has a plan.”
I just had to figure out what that was.
Hours crawled past. I fidgeted and paced around my little cabin, eyeing the door and hammock. I was exhausted and my muscles shook with cold and fatigue, but I didn’t consider sleeping. Someone would come for me soon—likely Lirr, if I’d understood the promise in his eyes.
It was evening before the door opened. I straightened from my seat on the cannon and faced two pirates. They were both women, one younger than I and the other a few years older. Both wore trousers like everyone else aboard, though one had a posture that betrayed stays beneath her heavy clothes and the other a slouch that suggested she’d never worn them at all. They were armed too, one with a long knife and the other with a hatchet.
I stared at them, remembering the horrors aboard Juliette and at the Frolick. These women looked so normal, so human. How could they have participated in such atrocities?
“Come with us.”
I did not move, nor speak. But leaving my cabin put me closer to my mother, so I eventually unfolded from my perch and followed them into the close, dark corridor.
They led me through a deck populated by swinging hammocks, up to the first gun deck, then back again to the stern of the ship. Small rooms, narrow passageways and multiple ladders threatened to disorient me, but I mapped every step.
We passed through a door. Heat and the scent of baking bread struck me as soon as the barrier opened, identifying the galley before I saw the rows of cupboards and barrels. There was a steep ladder-stair to one side, capped by a hatch, and another beneath it leading down. A half-barrel of steaming water stood before the stove.
I looked at my guides in confusion. “A bath?”
“Aye.” The younger woman pointed to a stool piled with clothes. “Bathe and put those on. They’re not so fancy as you seem used to.” With that, she eyed my ruined gown with amusement. “But your tits won’t freeze off.”
I instinctively covered my breasts. “I… Fine.”
They retreated through the galley door. Just before it closed, the older one stuck her head in. “I’d be quick about it, lass. Cook was none too pleased being evicted, but all opposites at the thought of you being naked in his kitchen.”
They closed the door, sparing me the need to reply. I patted my cheeks to dispel their sudden redness and looked at the bath, tempting and hot. This felt too kind. There had to be a hitch, a trap.
I glanced at the ladder and the hatch above it. It didn’t appear to be locked, so I doubted it led anywhere useful. Still, was it worth trying to slip off and find my mother, or should I take advantage of the bath and clothes?