“And I’m reluctant to leave you with your brother and a ship full of pirates, but this is the situation we have.” Fisher looked away and laced her arms over her chest. “You must warn Demery.”
I pressed my lips closed. My ideals still strained at the thought of siding with pirates against the Navy, but our choices were few.
Fisher went on, her voice low, but determined. “We cannot fight on two fronts, and Ellas has made it clear that if we do not help her, she’ll dispose of us or ruin us. We need Demery. He’s not just a newly commissioned privateer for the Usti. He’s effectively nephew to Queen Inara, and if we sail back into Usti waters without him? You heard her threat. If the Usti are displeased with us, they may just shift the tide of the war—and not in our favor.”
*
Harpy nosed through the dusky hush of the ruined fleet. Soon after our departure from Hart, grey cloud had descended to obscure our surroundings. Fires now speckled the gloom here and there, but Demery did not investigate them.
“Lirr sets fires,” he said by way of explanation. “He’s burning any ships that we might use for salvage. It only means he’s close.”
My Sooth’s sense turned at that, but he would say no more.
As to our Usti companions, they stood sentry at the prow of the ship. Olsa hovered on the edge of the Other and guided us through the landscape by premonition alone, while her husband watched for other threats.
Envy smoldered in my chest. This was one service Sooths could give to their ships, but I’d rarely been able to perform it. Next to Olsa Uknara I was all misplaced instincts and clumsy tumbles into the Other. If Slader had still been alive, I might as well have jumped off the ship and started walking home.
“She’s making you look terrible,” Benedict voiced my own thoughts, leaning against the ship’s rail like a gambler on a bar. “At the very least you could find Mary.”
The familiar way he said her name made my anger flare, but we were on deck in sight of dozens of eyes. Given what Fisher and I suspected about Ellas’s plans and the dark look on Demery’s face when I warned him of them, I should not cause any undue conflict. Particularly with my volatile brother.
I swallowed my temper and closed on him, stopping just close enough for him to feel my displeasure.
“I looked for Ms. Firth before we left Hart,” I reminded him, clearly pronouncing her name. “There are too many ghistings here to pick her or Lirr out, not unless I am very close.”
Benedict maintained his lackadaisical posture. “Ah yes, when you vanished into your cabin for a solid twenty minutes with your young captain. She’s not precisely pretty, but I can see the appeal.”
“Ben. I am broken. She knows, and she was there to ensure I did not become trapped in the Other.”
He straightened and shoved his hands into his pockets, his jaded eyes narrowed against the wind. “I thought the coin solved that.”
“It did. It does. But using it weakens me even more.” I instinctively lowered my voice. It was doubtless unwise to admit vulnerability to my twin, but he already knew I was not whole. “I cannot use it all the time. And if I go too deep in the Other, a day will come when I cannot return. Or something will follow me back and eat me alive.”
“Both splendid options.” Benedict’s expression was opaque.
“Hold!” The whispered word shushed across the deck of the ship, passing from one person to the next, bow to stern.
My twin and I turned. Up at the fore Olsa remained in place but Illya and Demery conferred in low, rapid tones. One wave of the captain’s hand and the crew scurried to trim our sails, slowing Harpy to the pace of the current.
Benedict and I crossed the ship and joined the Usti and Demery. An old woman in black and grey came too, along with Athe, Demery’s second-in-command.
“There’s another ship—a living ship.” Demery pointed northeast into the gloom, between us and the darkest part of the twilight sky.
Benedict drew his spyglass and surveyed the new vessel as Demery and Olsa conferred in Usti, too quick for me to follow. Finally, Ben passed the glass to me. I took it without thanks and looked through.
A huge, three-masted shadow slipped through an open section of sea to the northeast. I touched the Other, and sure enough, Lirr’s strange opalescent light appeared between the blue glow of numerous ghistings, hazed in grey. I could not pick out Mary, though.
“Lirr is there.” I lowered the glass. I nearly asked Olsa what the grey haze meant, but stopped short when I noticed that her eyes also had a grey hedge to them too, trickling into brown irises like smoke. They reminded me of… Mary’s.
I looked at Demery, then Athe, and even the old woman. They all looked at me now, and in their eyes I saw the same grey infiltration.
Grey-tainted lights in the Other. Pirates and a Stormsinger with smoke-edged eyes. I did not need my Sooth’s senses to realize there was more to these two phenomena than I understood.
Benedict stepped in, though I could not decide whether he had sensed my sudden tension or was just impatient. “Now we retreat to Ellas and prepare an assault.”
Demery scratched his short beard and looked at the old woman. “Crow?”
“We’re ready,” she said.
Athe nodded, and I saw her hand drop to a pistol at her belt.
“Good.” Demery turned on Benedict at the same time as Athe drew her pistol and leveled it at my brother’s head. “Let’s get you secured in the hold, young man. Then we’re off to find the Fleetbreaker.”
AN EXCERPT FROM:
A HISTORY OF GHISTLORE AND THE BLESSED; THOSE BOUND TO THE SECOND WORLD AND THE POWER THEREIN
GHISEAU AND HIGH MARINERS may be identified by two means, other than the direct manifestation of their ghisting counterparts. Firstly, a pale halo about the iris, often so subtle as to be disregarded. Secondly, a Sooth may perceive an aura about their bodies within the Other or from the edge of that Other realm. Sooths studied in Adjacent identification may also note other visible alterations around the various mages and mage-adjacent of our world—corruptions, mutations and blessings detailed in this work’s companion volume, A DEFINITIVE STUDY OF THE BLESSED; MAGES AND MAGE-CRAFT OF THE MEREISH ISLES.
FORTY
Plots and Pardons
MARY
I stood in the shelter of a ghisten oak as Harpy’s longboat ground ashore at the foot of a gentle rise, from arctic sea to sleeping Wold. I was subdued, my mind still heavy with the revelations I’d had under the larch.
I was still myself. I felt the same—flexing fingers, breathing lungs—yet I knew everything had irrevocably changed. It was as if I’d woken from a dream in which I’d been convinced I was already awake. My eyes were open. The shackles unlocked.
My mother waited closer to the water, some dozen paces between us. Hair escaped her fraying braid below her cap, grey-streaked locks fluttering in the wind. Her cheeks, perpetually red with cold, curved with a welcoming smile as she saluted.
Pirates leapt out to secure the little vessel on the icy rocks and a group of seven individuals broke away, trudging through the snow to where my mother waited.
Samuel looked up at me as he went. He was bundled in eclectic cold-weather gear and looked his usual sleep-deprived self, but as our gazes met, the corner of his lips tugged in relief.