My mouth felt dry. “Will Tane wake them? I can’t pretend to understand all this fully but… I think Hoten was right. Tane is still asleep, herself. At least, for the most part.”
My mother looked into my eyes, as if she searched for someone else inside them. “Lirr intends to force the matter.”
Dread turned into gooseflesh on my arms. “How will he do that?”
She looked away. “Fire. Lirr will force Tane out of you, and she will be drawn back into her tree. Then the Wold will reawaken. But we will not let that happen.”
The dance of the flames in our stove was suddenly threatening, ominous, and full of portent.
For a few heartbeats I couldn’t speak, then I nodded slowly. It wasn’t that I’d accepted the threat against my life—it was simply too huge, too horrible and strange, for me to grasp. “I see.”
“We can talk more in the morning,” she said, more gently. “We’ve time, Mary. I’m not leaving you again. And Lirr will not harm you. You’ll fight. We’ll fight. But for now, you should rest.”
“You should sleep too,” I pointed out. I could see the fatigue about her eyes. “I can wake you in a few hours.”
My mother smiled, crooked and brimming with real, calming warmth. “No. You may be grown, but I’m still your mother. You sleep first.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but she held up a hand.
“Give me this, Mary. I’ll wake you in a few hours.”
Though I knew that was a lie, I gave up.
I curled up on our makeshift bed, turning my back to her and looking out into the cold darkness beyond the firelight. I scrubbed at my cheeks and clenched my eyes shut, warring between fatigue and worry for my mother, and the need to rationalize all I’d learned.
Tane. Ghistings. Lirr, plotting my death.
Finally, fatigue won out. My mother began to sing softly, and my world blurred.
“The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark overtake thee, asleep in the arms of the slow-swinging seas…”
*
The Stormwall ended in a swirl of snow, backed by twilight and the shushing of snowflakes against my hood. Pure, gentle air caressed my face and I paused, my view of the new world beyond still partially obscured.
“This is it, Mary,” my mother said. We stood close, bundled not only in our own clothing but commandeered layers of coats, scarves and hats from the wreck where we’d spent the night. We had satchels too, packed with flint and tinder, bottles of meltwater, hardtack and jerky that had survived years frozen in the storm. She had her axe too, carried in mittened hands, and I had a knife I’d found among the wreckage. “From here on we move quickly, stay out of sight, and speak as little as we can.”
I nodded. The last at least wouldn’t be difficult—we’d hardly spoken since I woke up that morning to find her dozing at my side, axe across her knees, fire burning brightly. I still had my questions, but as far as revelations went, I’d already bitten off more than I could chew. All morning I’d imagined Lirr burning me alive.
My mother seemed grateful for my quiet. She forged north through the wind and snow, thoughts locked behind squinting eyes. She looked marginally lighter than she had aboard Lirr’s ship, but her stride had the air of a forced march, and her determination was a jaded, tight-jawed thing.
Part of me still wanted to press her, to unravel the story of her last sixteen years, to bring it into the light of day and somehow… make her whole again. But what could I say? And did I truly want to know all that my mother had done and become to earn Lirr’s trust?
The world expanded between one breath and the next. We stood in an endless network of islets and hulking black boulders, crowned with snow and ice. Waves took shape between shores of ice and snow and barren rock. Far distant, the sun trailed her skirts across the rim of the horizon, veiled behind a distant snowstorm.
“We called it the Second Sun,” my mother said, eyeing the orb. “It never sets or rises. It only ever moves along the horizon, in a perfect circle.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I muttered. “It’s morning, that’s why it’s so low.”
Anne eyed me. “Child, when has the sun ever risen in the north?”
I turned, reorienting myself along the line of the Stormwall. The wall ran east to west, but the sun, as my mother had said, was firmly north.
“So it is,” I murmured. “But how?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“The Other has strange suns, doesn’t it? Is this… like that?”
My mother shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine, child.”
Mystified, I led her through the last of the snow. The world filled with golden twilight, radiating from the muffled sun and reflecting off blankets of white, sheets of ice and the quiet waves between.
I shivered, but not just because of the alien sun. There was more than rock, ice and waves under the Second Sun’s meager light. There were ships.
They spread as far as I could see to north, east and west, like dice tossed from a giant’s cup. In and out of the water they lay in various levels of silhouette. Some were little more than ragged mastheads above the sea while others were entirely beached, sheeted with ice and piled with drifts of snow. Spiderwebs of rigging and sail fluttered, and waves slapped against long-empty hulls. It was beautiful and eerie: a graveyard of ships.
We walked for what felt like a day, though the Second Sun simply swept along the horizon at unchanging elevation. My mother hummed to the wind and I joined her, keeping the frigid wind off our skin and the snow from our path.
The farther we went, the more portentous our surroundings became. We picked our way across bridges of ice and rounded the wrecks of ships from every nation and age of sail. I began to spy vessels with burned figureheads, and my skin crawled as I realized these were Lirr’s work, over twenty years ago.
The weather turned. The wind kicked up and the Second Sun passed behind the Stormwall, its light becoming even weaker, a coin glinting from the bottom of a darkened well.
“Why did you leave the Wold?” my mother suddenly asked, shifting her axe to her other shoulder. “Did someone in the village discover you’re a Stormsinger? Did they turn you in?”
I avoided her gaze. I’d been putting this story off, but now seemed as good a time as any. “No, no… I was supposed to marry. A soldier, a good man. He was sent off to war before he could find us a home and broke off the engagement. So father’s new wife sent me to Jurry, to Aunt Eliza, to find another match.”
Anne stopped walking. She blanched with anger, and the axe at her shoulder made the expression truly intimidating. The wind began to coil around us, drawing a rush of snow over the rocks beneath our feet. “He what?”
“He waited fifteen years,” I said, resolving that would be my only defense of the man. “The entire town said you were dead. The priest said you were dead.”
“I don’t care about that.” Anne gestured sharply, slapping my words aside, though her eyes were overbright. She did care, but she was trying not to show me. “I knew you’d left the Wold for some reason—Lirr wouldn’t have seen you otherwise, and we wouldn’t have left the South Isles. But your father let her send you away? You let her?”