Anne swung a third time and the gunport swung outward with a creak. Wind and storm light blasted into the cabin and I glimpsed a lurching sea, dark sky and swirling snow. And was that land? An island within the Stormwall? It was so close the ship seemed about to crash into it, skimming down an ice-rimmed shoreline as only a ghisting-possessed ship could. Hoten might live within Lirr, but he could obviously still interact with Nameless.
“I drove the ship as close as I could, but we’ll have to swim the rest of the way!” Anne shouted over the roar. She was pulling her coat off, revealing a brace of weapons and cannisters beneath. She shoved her axe through, across her back, and bundled the coat under one arm. “You’ll freeze up when you hit the water—do not let yourself panic. Breathe. Can you do this?”
I hurriedly grabbed my own, donated cloak from the strings of my hammock and bundled it under one arm. I was doubly grateful I’d changed out of my impractical gown.
Then I remembered I was not the only prisoner aboard Lirr’s ship. My conscience twisted at the thought of escaping while they languished, fodder for Lirr’s schemes, but I knew there was nothing we could do for them now.
This was our moment. We had to go. “Yes!” I said. “No, but yes!”
Anne paused, and for an instant, she simply looked at me—truly looked, seeing, sensing, taking me in. Her urgency ebbed in place of unspoken things, then a bleak smile slashed across her face. “Then swim, girl. I’ll be right beside you.”
I gathered every scrap of my courage and grinned back, sudden and strange and a little bit savage.
I joined my mother in front of the portal. Dark water raged, the ship rolled, and my mother’s hand pressed into the small of my back.
Before she could push me, I jumped. There was no fall, no screaming drop into the waves. The ship rolled and the water was already there. It swallowed me whole.
I didn’t gasp, even though my lungs should have seized. I didn’t panic, though the cold was bitter and blinding, and I knew this act was beyond suicidal. I slipped silently into the water and kicked out, fighting the weight of my clothing. My mother dropped beside me, the waves retreated, and we made for the shore.
We shouldn’t have made it, but the sea itself came to our aid. One swell after another bore us along until the last rushed us onto a shelf of ice. It deposited us like half-drowned flotsam on an arctic shore.
I grabbed my mother’s hand. She stumbled to her feet, and together we ran.
Ice, cracked and piled like scales. Snow, lashing my face. Eyelashes, frozen. Muscles, seizing. Another crashing wave chased our boots as we hit the body of the island and stumbled into the shelter of a boulder. Curling, horizontal icicles grew from the leeward rim like claws, but we found reprieve in their embrace.
“We did it!” I grabbed my mother’s arm, gasping and laughing all at once. Stray hair froze to my throat and my hands burned with the cold, but I felt wildly alive. “You’re mad!”
“Just desperate, and lucky,” Anne replied, holding my shoulders in return. Her face was pale and her grin was raw, and the axe over her right shoulder glistened with fresh ice. “This island stretches north, out of the Stormwall. We’ll hunker down there and wait for Elijah.”
Elijah? “You mean Demery?” I shouted over the wind. “How would he find us?”
“He will.” Anne looked away for a long moment, breathing deeply, then pushed herself to her feet and started off, as if following an instinctual compass.
“What about Lirr?” I followed her. “He can still track us.”
“He won’t think to look for us for some time. And with any luck Nameless will sink. Even if it doesn’t, I’ve a place to hide us. You.”
“Where?”
“The same place I hid you all your life,” my mother replied. “A Ghistwold.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
The Second Sun
MARY
The first shelter we came across was a wrecked ship, lying on its side like a child’s discarded toy. Its horizontal masts reached towards us through the storm, shredded pennants of sail snapping and ice-laden lines singing eerily in the wind.
The main hatch was jammed, so we found a crack in the hull and crawled inside. The howl of the wind muffled and I sighed in relief, settling my feet on what had once been the outer hull.
We picked our way farther into the shadows. This wasn’t a warship—there were goods instead of guns piled around us and I felt no ghisting in its wood. I also spied seamen’s chests, crates and bundles among the refuse, but no bodies. An unarmed merchant of this size wouldn’t have had a large crew.
“Here!” I spied the pipe of a woodstove deeper in the ship and clambered stiffly over a pile of debris.
Dimly illuminated by another crack in the hull, I tossed a crate into the shadows to reveal one of the large stoves that would have kept the crew warm, back when they were alive. Its chimney was gone and it was on an angle, but it looked otherwise intact.
Twenty minutes later, thanks to flint and tinder in one of my mother’s cannisters, warmth bathed us from the stove’s open door. Smoke drifted up and out through cracks in the hull and we strung lines to dry our outer clothing, leaving us in our shifts and breeches.
I watched my mother as we settled in, weighing my need to know more about Lirr and ghistings with the lingering shadows around her eyes. Finally, when I saw her shoulders relax slightly, I spoke up. “I need to know if what Lirr said is true. About the ghistings.”
Anne leaned forward to rest her forearms on her knees, staring into the stove. “It is.”
I rubbed at my windburned cheeks and sunk onto a crate near her. “So this Tane… is inside me?”
“Yes. But it’s not that simple.” My mother’s indecision was clear in the twist of her lips. “How much did Demery tell you of Bretton?”
“That you all sailed with him, and he had a horde of treasure beyond the Stormwall. That you killed him.”
She nodded. “That’s all true. But did he tell you that we actually made it beyond the Wall, and that our ship wrecked there?”
I shook my head.
My mother added another piece of broken wood to the fire and poked it about. Light flared across her features, turning her blue-grey eyes nearly translucent.
“The fires from our stoves spread and the ship was consumed,” she said. “It took the magazine late, giving most of us time to escape, but Lirr was caught in the explosion. He was peppered with shards, shrapnel—including, we would later discover, a shard from the figurehead, Hoten’s host. The next day Lirr’s wounds were healed and he’d changed. He was more aggressive, more driven, though we didn’t know to what end.”
I steeled myself. “Hoten had taken him?”
Anne nodded. “Lirr claimed Hoten fled the burning ship, right into his bones. Hoten himself was too weak to appear yet, but Lirr was so different, so insistent. He tried to drown himself to prove that he was no longer ‘a mere man.’ He survived, unaffected by the water.”
Drown himself. Unaffected by the water. Just like me.
“Samuel—Mr. Rosser, the pirate hunter—claimed that he mortally wounded Lirr at the palace,” I said, wetting my lips. “Can he not be killed?”