“See my freedom,” Hoten said with the man’s mouth. “See all I can do. Come, my siblings, good Mother. I will take you to see the world, and it will be ours.”
Tane rejected the offer, as did all the other trees of the Wold. But many of the ghistings beyond her reach, the ones her roots had not yet saved, took Hoten’s proposal. Others rejected it but had no power to stop the ghisten man. He burned their wooden flesh and drove their final shards into his screaming crewmates.
Some of these creations lived. Their souls complemented one another and they grew strong. Others went mad. Some slept and did not wake. Some simply did not change. The remainder died, both human and ghisting vanishing into nothingness.
Death. Ghistings did not know death, not until that day. But by Hoten’s hands, they learned.
When they entered human flesh, they became mortal.
Tane tried to stop Hoten, to stop the death and the suffering of her children, and even the humans—for she learned compassion for them. But this new creature Hoten, this hybrid, could not be harmed by her spectral hands or reaching roots. He was more than man, more than ghisting, and death would not come to him easily.
Finally, when every human in his possession was spent, Hoten returned to Tane. He brought with him two dozen of his surviving creations, and one last human woman.
The woman smelled of the Other. A Stormsinger. She was bloodied and beaten, barely conscious as he shoved her to her knees in the shade of the Mother Tree.
“I have saved the best for you.” This time when the man spoke, it was no longer Hoten. He and this host had mingled now, and together they were someone new. “A powerful mage, Mother. Please. Come with me.”
The prisoner turned glazed eyes up to Tane, palms braced on the earth, battling not to collapse. But she did not look away. She stared at the tree and as she did, challenge edged into her eyes.
That challenge, that strength, was something Tane knew well. It was the same strength that had driven her through the Stormwall, stretched her roots across the frozen world and founded a new Wold. Tane and this woman—they were alike.
“We will return south,” the Hoten-man said, turning to address all the trees in the Wold. “And I will bring another crew back. I will bring them and slaughter them, until every one of you has a host. Until every one of you is free from your wooden prisons and the Dark Water.”
Horror gripped Tane, and she realized what she must do. She could not stop Hoten as she was. She had no legs to give chase, no hands to kill with. But with the woman’s hands and a weapon, she could find a way to end this. She could protect her Wold.
Again, she looked into the woman’s eyes, and saw her own stubbornness there. Their souls, she thought to herself, were not so different. The melding would succeed.
It had to.
Tane willed herself from the shell of her tree into a single shard. It was a struggle, a feat of will even for her, but she succeeded. And as she went, the Wold quietened. Leaves began to change from green to brown, red, yellow and burgundy. They fell, drifting on the wind. Ghistings still lived within the trees, but they slept. The snow and the cold swept in as the summer died, and winter swallowed the Wold.
The Stormsinger did not scream or beg as Hoten took the shard of the Mother Tree and prepared to strike. Her chest shuddered and her hands shook, but she faced him.
Hoten stabbed the shard into her chest, and Tane’s world changed. Blood, rushing. Heart, beating. Lungs, shuddering. Tears, streaming. Then, blackness.
Sleep. Tane slept and dreamed, within the woman’s body. She slipped between the Other and the human world, unable to root on either side. There were moments of clarity, but though Tane could remember she had a purpose, she could not recall what.
Time passed. Untold, unmarked time. Then, Tane noticed another presence. It was small and fragile, a tiny light in the Other and a new, fluttering heartbeat in the human world. But it was not strong. It was fading.
A child. Tane recognized the life for what it was, and instinct pulled her towards it. She wrapped around it, strengthened and sustained it. She bound herself to that new life and soothed her.
As the girl grew within her mother’s womb, Tane awoke a little more. There were moments of blazing power, of fear and fight and storms. In those moments Tane would stir, and she and the Stormsinger broke fleets upon the water.
When the child was born, Tane went with her. The child’s mind filled her own and she grew with her, living and breathing, feeling and thinking and learning. Part of Tane remained dormant, listless and absent, but she was near a Wold, and both she and the girl found solace there.
Tane belonged among the ghisten trees, and so the girl did too. They were the Girl from the Wold.
It was not until they left the Wold that Tane began to strain against her rest. The girl needed her then, and Tane felt her fear.
Then, on a night of fire and death, Tane fully awoke, for a time. She saw Hoten again, and she knew only to flee to the water, dark and familiar. To another ghisting, with wide eyes and a fan of spectral hair. Juliette.
Sister.
Together, they found the bonded soul of one of her daughters. Harpy. Then, with the girl safely in the hands of Harpy and her host, Juliette slipped away again, and Tane slumbered once more.
Other ghistings came and went, each tugging her along the path towards permanent awareness. Tane did not force the change—she knew Mary could not endure the shock. So she took her time, slipping to the forefront only when Mary slept or drifted, or would have greatly suffered without her intervention.
Now, with the arctic wind on her cheeks and her own Wold before her, Tane finally, fully awoke.
*
THIRTY-NINE
Captain Fisher
SAMUEL
Harpy emerged from the Stormwall into the twilight of a foreign sunset. I watched her limp across the water through Fisher’s spyglass, retrieved from her chest in the captain’s cabin. Mine had been lost in the storm, and Fisher herself still had not been found. Nor had Defiance emerged from that wall of death.
I could not say which absence affected me more greatly—Fisher, or Benedict. They and the hundreds of other lives we had lost were something I could not permit myself to feel, not when I was commanding officer aboard a nearly derelict Hart.
As to the dozens of other wrecked ships, scattered across the ice and rock and slow-moving channels all around us? They were another weight entirely, eerie and foreboding as tombstones in the perpetual twilight—a warning that unless we were able to rig a new mizzenmast, we were already one of them.
Harpy slid into the shelter of our peninsula. She was battered and low in the water but intact, her deck positively crowded with pirates in the light of two lanterns. Conversation and shouts drifted to my ears across the twilit, glassy water, interspersed with creaking lines and rustling canvas.
No, they were not all pirates. The Navy’s striped trousers among them and… Benedict, Ellas and Fisher clustered on the quarterdeck.
Relief hit me like a boulder, colliding with my exhaustion and leaving me weak in the legs. I braced against the rail, battling to stay composed as they climbed into a longboat and struck out for Hart with James Demery.
My twin lived. Fisher had not died.
I was not alone.
We met in the main cabin. I drew curtains over the windows and lit a lantern, bathing the company in warm, welcome illumination.