Lirr smiled, but it wasn’t a malevolent thing. He took a step closer to me, reaching to cup my neck in one, warm hand.
I didn’t let myself flinch, even though my insides screamed to strike out and run.
“Yes,” he said gently. “I do. My most favored crewmembers are ghiseau already, though the bulk of them have yet to be bonded. They wait for the great treasure beyond the Stormwall. But you’ll remember all of that, I’m sure. Won’t you, Tane?”
He was calling me Tane. My eyes filled with his, deep and full and rimmed with grey, and the scent of him surrounded me: cold, salt, musky soap and smoke.
“Who is Tane?” I whispered, though somewhere deep inside me, I already knew the answer.
In the center of the cabin, Randalf vomited on the deck a second time.
Irritation passed through Lirr’s eyes. He shifted his grip on the knife and moved back to the prisoner.
“Get him on his feet.”
The pirates complied. With perfunctory ceremony, Lirr pressed his knife low into the man’s gut. “You were offered greatness, and you rejected it,” he said, then drove the knife in. “Think upon that as you die.”
Randalf didn’t scream. Maybe that was Lirr’s magic at work. Maybe he was too shocked. He only rasped bloodily as Lirr’s crew dragged him from the cabin. Puddles and a smear of scarlet remained on the deck, pungent and cooling.
“Send someone to clean this up when I’m through with Ms. Firth. And tie this fool to the mast, as he tied her,” Lirr told Lewis before the former smuggler closed the door. His eyes slipped back to me, adding as if his words were a gift, “Let him suffer as she did.”
As much as I hated Randalf, I trembled with the violence of it all. But my question to him remained unanswered.
“Why did you call me Tane?” I pressed. “Who are they?”
The door closed. My mother, Lirr and I were left in the cabin with puddles of cooling blood and bile, and the echo of footsteps heading away through the ship.
“That is your name,” Lirr told me. He moved back over to the table and set his bloodied knife on it. “Or rather, the name of the ghisting your mother left inside of you.”
Anne turned from the window, letting out a long, surrendering breath as she did so. “It’s true, Mary.”
My thoughts fluttered through images of scars and ghistings, of Juliette in the water as Randalf’s ship burned, of the reaching hand of the ghisten tree in Tithe, and Harpy watching me.
Sister.
Tane.
“The timing must be right for such a union,” Lirr explained, pulling up the sleeve of his shirt to reveal a long, twisted white scar on his forearm. It glistened in the lanternlight. “Many ghistings are not like these, whose shells you see on my wall. Many do not understand, and they must be burned out. A shard of their wood is then slipped beneath the skin just before the entirety of the figurehead or ghisten tree is destroyed—thus, the spirit is forced into that single remnant. But to dwell in a shard so small? It’s enough to drive a ghisting mad. Eventually they must spread. They all do—to the blood and the bones.”
He held up his scarred forearm. “That is what happened to me, you see. By chance. By providence.”
The fine hairs on the back of my neck rose again. I felt myself move, not towards the door, but closer to my mother. One, instinctual step. To seek her protection? To protect her? There was no divide between the two impulses.
Scarred arm still extended, Lirr held his hand forward, palm up. A ghisting materialized from his flesh, parting from him like a shadow under the waning sun and condensing into a spectral twin. For a moment, two Lirrs stood before us—one a man, one a ghisting.
The ghisting shifted, expanding into the shape of a bigger, broader individual—one with burning, heavy eyes and a face so handsome my breath caught in my throat. But like Harpy, the lines of him were subtle, more like echoes of human features than replicas.
The ghisting stood at Lirr’s shoulder like a guardsman. He inclined his head towards me in respect, and there was recognition in his vague expression, even deference.
Instead of greeting me as sister, he said in a deep, oaken voice, Hello, Tane.
“This is Hoten,” Lirr said. “Do you remember him?”
If the suspicions I’d had before were a thief tapping at the shutters, now they were a battering ram. My consciousness slipped as if I were falling asleep.
A hand closed on my wrist. I looked over at my mother—startled to realize we were of a height now—and wavered back to wakefulness.
“Stay with me, Mary,” my mother ordered, her voice low and gentle.
She sleeps, Hoten observed. The ghisting hadn’t moved, but I felt pinned by his attention. She’s there, but she will not stir. Perhaps if the girl herself slept…
Around us the ship rocked and moaned, and the light cutting through the back windows dimmed.
“This is not the time.” My mother’s voice cut through the cabin. “We’re nearly at the Line, Silvanus.”
The cold air snapped me out of my shock. “It is the time,” I stated, pulling away from her and looking to Lirr. “Tell me everything.”
Lirr raised his voice over the approaching storm and my mother’s glare. “Twenty-three years ago, I gifted your mother with a powerful ghisting. Tane. I took a shard from a great ghisten tree, a willing spirit, and I stabbed her in the heart. Mortal and immortal merged into one powerful creature—but I received no gratitude. Instead, your mother left me. For two decades I searched for her, ever watchful for her light on the horizon. But she hid well and when I eventually found her, Tane was gone. Where? To her daughter, to the child born of her flesh. A child hidden from my sight.”
I couldn’t believe him, not yet, but more questions came. “Why?” I breathed.
“To give our people freedom. To give them the world.” Lirr pointed to the windows and the realm beyond. “I’ve been doing so since your mother left me, but the ships I take, the figureheads I burn—they’re a drop in the sea. Beyond the Stormwall, a thousand of our siblings are trapped, locked in the ice, forgotten and asleep. So I have brought them new hosts. New bodies to take them south in power and liberty. My crew. My prisoners.”
Cold wind was in my marrow now, freezing and cracking me from the inside out. Lirr was bringing hosts for the trapped ghistings, human beings who he intended to stab and bind to an indescribable fate. Did his crew understand what he was doing? Or was Lirr’s Magni power compelling them? The prisoners in the hold certainly were not willing participants.
“More hosts will come, with the pirate hunters,” Lirr continued as if he followed my thoughts, his voice all satisfaction and reverie. “Then our people will be free.”
I felt truly gaunt now, weak and dizzy. He meant Demery and his crew. Samuel, and his. Athe. Widderow.
“You’re going to kill them?” I hissed.
“I will free them,” Lirr corrected. He smiled at me, a smile so sincere and affectionate that I recoiled. “But I cannot do it without you and Tane.”
My body broke. Before I realized I was moving I tore from my mother, bolted for the cabin door and slammed into the passageway beyond.
Boots thundering on wood. A ladder. I pounded up it and threw aside a hatch, knowing there was nowhere to go and not caring. I had to put distance between myself and Lirr and the shell of my mother.