My skin prickled in foreboding. Lips sealed and heart thumping, I glanced from Lirr to my mother, searching for any clue as to what Randalf meant.
I saw little concern in my mother’s face. Only regret, and a distant preoccupation. We might as well have been somewhere else, her and I, somewhere devoid of pirates and Randalf and his looming death.
Because death, I was sure, was where this encounter would end. There was a predatory calm about Lirr, combined with a flippancy that told me how little he cared for Randalf’s life. The man’s supposed destiny, though? That riled our captor.
“You heard this young man’s screams, perhaps?” Lirr gestured to one of the half-dozen pirates still present in the room, and they came forward.
The pirate was none other than the young sailor who’d taunted and fed me back on the deck of Randalf’s ship, with his blond hair and lean smile.
He didn’t look like a prisoner. His cheeks were flushed with health and his expression was easy as he observed his former captain. He was a pirate now, armed and arrayed as well as anyone else in Lirr’s crew.
But I sensed more than that, as I looked at him, and somewhere in the back of my mind a key slipped into a hidden lock. I blinked, and something… changed. Was the young man’s outline blurred, or was it a trick of my eyes?
My other senses shifted too. If I hadn’t known better, I would have said I felt the presence of a ghisting, here in the cabin. Was Lirr’s ship ghisting here, hazing the air around Randalf’s former crewman?
I searched the cabin for other hints of the spectral creature. But though my sense of the creature grew stronger, I didn’t see it, and when I looked back at the crewman, the haze was gone.
“Lewis!” Randalf gaped at the younger man, until his surprise transformed into rage. “You traitorous little shit, you filthy—”
“I’m no traitor,” the sailor replied to Randalf, though his eyes were on Lirr. His speech was different from when I’d met him, I realized, his tone and diction subtly altered. “Captain, may I show him?”
At a nod from his new captain, the young man began to remove his outer clothes. His scarf came first, then he unbuttoned his coat and the front of his shirt. He settled his shoulders back and pulled the collar wide, revealing a scar on his chest. Right over his heart—a knot of opalescent, ruined flesh, pale as the moon.
My eyes flew to my mother. I remembered a dozen nights in a millpond, learning to swim. I remembered the very same scar, over her own heart.
Anne Firth turned back to the windows and began to sing, gentle and low. I couldn’t make out her words, but the wind eased, and the tilting of the deck steadied. There was preparation in that action, and it chilled me.
“I’ve received a blessing, Captain Randalf,” Lewis told his former captain, letting the collar of his shirt fall back into place. The scar disappeared. “I wish you hadn’t sacrificed your own.”
Whatever control Randalf had managed to keep so far, shattered. He tried to battle to his feet, and though most of his words were vulgarities, I shared his disbelief.
“What is he talking about?” I asked Lirr.
“Do you see them?” Lirr pointed to the pieces of figureheads on the bulkhead. “Their husks. They once housed ghistings, Mary, but not anymore.”
I had no idea what connection this had to Lewis and Randalf, but I didn’t let my confusion show. “Ghistings are bound to their wood. How could they leave it?”
Lewis and several of the other crew turned to watch me, and a chill ran up my spine. That sense of a ghisting’s presence prickled at me again, but stronger. Diverging, perhaps. Separating.
Suspicion awoke at the back of my mind, nudging me like a thief testing locked shutters.
“Where did the ghistings go?” I asked, very carefully.
Randalf made it to his feet. “You madman, you bloody damn mad f—”
Lirr’s patience with the other captain came to an end. He closed on the prisoner in a stride, grabbed his hair, and pulled a knife.
The next time Randalf screamed, Lirr shoved the knife into his mouth and held it there. Randalf’s shrieks took on a fevered pitch. Blood plumed, lips split like butter, teeth jarred, and his tongue divided.
I staggered back, covering my mouth to stop from vomiting. My mother continued to stare out of the window, unaffected.
Then there was too much blood for screams. Randalf choked. The knife cut deeper as he shuddered but Lirr still held it in place with a remorseless, steady hand. I felt his Magni sorcery then, reaching towards the prisoner.
Randalf quietened. He raked in thin, wheezing breaths through his nose. Blood ran over his lips, chin, throat and clothes in a steady, scarlet trail, but he did not move again. His eyelids fluttered closed in dazed, ensorcelled contentedness.
“The most common way to free a ghisting is to destroy the wood in which it lives,” Lirr told me, knife still held, Randalf still bleeding. “By fire, or great lengths of time. Most people know this. Once its wooden flesh is gone, the ghisting is set adrift, eventually to return to the Other.”
Lirr’s eyes ran to the wall and its array of broken figureheads. “But some do not wish to return to the Other. Some want more of this mortal world, of flesh and blood and desire. The strongest and most determined can even leave their wooden flesh before it’s consumed, and pass on into other hosts, with help. These pieces here on the wall, they’re remains of several such ghistings.”
My skin crawled and my mind inched closer to understanding, but I walled it out. No. He couldn’t mean…
Lirr continued, “The Mereish know more of these things, but the Aeadine? Our ignorance is both willful and pitiable, but I will change that. Mary, have you heard of the ghiseau?”
I recalled the Mereish pirate captain, throwing the word at me when Demery took her ship.
“I’ve heard the word,” I said.
“Do you remember what it means?”
“No.” I fought not to watch as Randalf had entered another choking fit, eyes still sagging with bewitched calm, but Lirr appeared unbothered. “Ghisting?”
“It’s what the Mereish call the High Captains of their fleets,” Lirr replied. “The ones whose flesh and blood are bound with a ghisting. The ones who share their bones.” With this, he pulled the bloody knife from Randalf’s mouth and used it to point to Lewis and his other crewmen. Randalf sagged forward, vomiting blood.
“And that is the blessing I give to those who please me,” Lirr continued. He toed Randalf with a boot and frowned, his displeasure clear. “Whether or not they value such a gift. But this one… he’s gone too far, even for my mercy.”
Lirr’s words were as unsettling, just as horrific, as the sight and smell of the blood. There was no lie in his eyes, nor those of his crew.
Lirr believed it. They believed it.
They believed they’d been bonded with ghistings.
I glanced at my mother. She still stared out the window, humming, but her fingers dug into her upper arms like claws.
“You’re saying…” I struggled, forcing myself to look back at Lirr and his dripping knife. Blood clung to his fingers, pooling around his fingernails and in the creases of his knuckles. “That ghistings can inhabit human beings? That you… do this to people?”