I felt something hit the rail at my side and grabbed it instinctively. I felt flesh, soft and icy—Fisher? No, too big for Fisher—then the water retreated. I had just enough time to snatch a breath of air before it closed over us again.
Time lost all meaning and the Other crept close. Visions and memories assailed me, some old, some new. I recalled the day I had seen Fisher drown in another storm not so long ago. I glimpsed Mary’s face, her damp hair in disarray, facing John Randalf in a darkened hallway. I saw Lirr, setting a ship aflame against a backdrop of barren rock and swirling snow.
Hart leveled out and water rushed away. Spluttering and gasping, I found myself clutching the helmsman, Kennedy, like a muscular doll in a world of unexpected, rocking calm. The sky above was still a haze of blowing snow but the waves had given way to gentle swells. The ship listed under the fallen mast; we were still afloat. For now.
Around us, low islands and dense swaths of ice spread as far as I could see. It was already dusk, though we had entered the Stormwall mid-morning.
“We made it through.” I let Kennedy go, suddenly weak. I looked for Fisher, but spared the sailor a searching glance. “Mr. Kennedy, are you well?”
“Yes, sir,” he panted, sitting back and staring across the ship. “Thank you, sir.”
“My pleasure,” I rasped. I turned salt-stung eyes across the deck and pushed myself to my feet. The other helmsman was collapsed against the wheel, holding on for his life—a situation reflected in a dozen others. Only a dozen, though. There ought to have been two dozen on deck. And Fisher.
Panic momentarily blinded me. No. Fisher could not be gone. The vision of her drowning—I had thwarted it, I had saved her. That had been another day, another time.
“Captain Fisher?” I called, hoping against hope that she would appear from a hatch or behind a web of tangled rigging. She did not.
I staggered from one rail to the other, searching the water for survivors. But there was no one in sight. Waves rippled, ice drifted, and the Stormwall raged on at our backs.
My throat thickened. “Can anyone see the captain?”
“Nay, sir!” someone called.
“She went overboard, sir,” the other helmsman said with a voice raw from shouting and the cold. He coughed and met my eyes, his creased with horrible certainty. “I saw her fall, Mr. Rosser. The waves took her.”
All sound faded except for the beating of my heart. One-two. One-two. Blood thundered against my temples, laborious and stilted, and my breath was gone.
Fisher was dead, and I was in command.
Part of me wanted to despair, to grieve and curse. It turned in upon itself and pulled a curtain closed. The part that remained was numb and empty, a void where only fact and action remained.
I heard my voice say, “I see a peninsula up ahead with calmer waters on her lee—get us there before this mast sinks us. Mr. Keo, get below and bring me a report. Bring me Ms. Skarrow too, if you can. Ms. Fitz! That longboat is still intact? Find and pull whoever you can from the water. If Captain Fisher is alive, we will recover her.”
The Spirit in Her Bones
The Girl from the Wold can no longer stay awake. The ship rocks and the wind howls, but she slips away. Her mother’s songs play at the edges of her mind—bold and demanding, assured in her control of the Stormwall’s ceaseless rage.
A man—a ghisting—appears. She does not need light to see him, softly glowing as he is. Nor need she open her eyes. He passes through the wood of the wall and watches her sleep, wisps of him still licking at the wood at his back.
Tane? he asks. He is not listening. He does not know I am here.
I will not do it, Hoten. The voice is not the girl’s, but it comes from her.
Hoten’s voice hardens. You must see it now! You see what we can be, what we can do.
Her response is calloused, imperious. What I see is a weak, wayward son.
Hoten’s form flickers and billows larger. I did this for our kind. What have you done? You left them to sleep until their roots turn to dust. Trapped forever.
Better they sleep than to become like you.
Hoten approaches the hammock, putting out one hand to stop its swaying. The girl feels the hand distantly through canvas, blankets, and the fog of slumber.
I will awaken them, Hoten vows, his voice low and deadly. Whether or not you’re willing to help. I’ll burn your vessel and water your tree with her blood until you wake.
I would wake and destroy you, she that is not the girl responds.
Hoten leans in, so close that his breath would pass across the girl’s lips, if he had lungs.
Then do it, Mother.
*
THIRTY-SEVEN
The Crossing
MARY
I awoke to the muffled roar of the Stormwall. Threads of dreams chased me and I’d no will to get up, so I lay in my swinging hammock for a long while, battling stray emotions and reliving my conversation with Lirr and my mother.
Ghistings, within human beings? That was unheard of. This wasn’t even the realm of folklore or raving old men. Everyone knew ghistings were bound to wood or nothing at all.
But Hoten had appeared from Lirr, not the wood of the ship. Harpy had called me Tane. Ghistings spoke to me and I felt drawn to them.
My mind produced a dozen memories of strange, inexplicable experiences I’d had since leaving the Wold. They unsettled me, making me doubt myself all over again. I’d leapt off Lirr’s ship, but hadn’t drowned. I’d found Demery instead, rescued by a ghisting. The way visions that had passed between me and the tree in Tithe, my incident in the bath, and how Demery’s conversation with Harpy had refused to root in my mind, as if someone covered my ears.
“Tane?” I whispered to the raging, roiling dark, dreading that I might receive an answer.
There was no response.
Hours passed. The weather worsened again, the lull that had allowed me to sleep long past. I’d no light to see by as I sat braced in a corner of my little cabin, my hammock swinging wildly and the contents of my stomach long strewn across the floor. But it was too cold to smell the bile.
Suddenly, the door opened. My mother barreled inside and clicked the barrier shut behind her, a swinging lantern in hand. Her gaze was as grim and haunted as ever, but so full of determination that my heart slammed in hope.
“We’re getting off this fucking ship,” my mother said. My eyes dropped to her side, where she shifted an enormous woodsman’s axe into two, shaking hands. “Back away from the gunport.”
I fumbled around to the other side of the room. My blanket-laden hammock smacked me in the head but I hardly cared.
“You were pretending,” I breathed, trying not to cry, trying to be dignified. I was a grown woman, not a red-eyed child, crying for her mother to come home.
Anne turned her hollow eyes on me. There was contradiction in that look, briefly, then all was obscured in a veil of determination.
“Of course, child,” she conceded.
My swelling heart twisted. I swayed towards her, desperate for the feeling of her arms around me, but sensed my touch would be unwelcome.
Anne braced against the roll of the ship and lifted the axe high, blade up, flat down.
She swung at the gunport with all the force she could muster. I cringed at the sound but the storm swallowed it—one crack in the middle of dozens of strains and pops and moans. The lock clattered to the floor and Anne adjusted her stance, eyeing the ice around the hatch. She swung again, connecting right on the frame of the hatch itself. Ice cracked, shards fell, and wind gushed around the edges.