I fired again. This time an enemy musket ball clipped my forearm and I cursed, dropping back behind the boulder. Another shot slammed into the rock with a spattering of dust.
I flexed my hand against a backdrop of white snow, trying to make out the damage in the weak light. There were two tears around the elbow of my coat where the shot had passed through and I felt trickling blood, but I could still move my hand. The pain of it was distant, blurred by my racing heart and the bitter cold.
More muskets cracked and I looked left, following their sound deeper into the Wold. Our targets were following the path we had planned for them through the heart of the forest to Mary, then to the western shore—where they would be trapped between Harpy’s guns and our advance.
“Get ready to move,” I grunted to my companions, reloading my musket as quickly as I could manage. “We push.”
Word passed down the line and, clutching my wounded arm to my side, musket angled towards the snow, I crouched.
“Ready?” I whispered. “Move.”
We broke cover, our boots punching through fresh powder in a low, steady jog. Flakes still drifted from the sky above, though the unnaturally fat clusters summoned by Mary and Anne’s song had given way to something closer to hail, hard and fine and shushing off our clothing.
We ducked into the cover of a wrecked ship, masts lying horizontal across the forest floor. A low-spreading, immense hawthorn burst from its equine figurehead and arched over us as we ducked under the masts and around the far side of the ship.
“Hold,” I called.
We fell into a line in the shadow of the hawthorn, shoulder to shoulder with muskets leveled and breath drifting. I nudged my sweaty cap back from my forehead and watched the night for any sign of movement, but the world seemed impossibly still. No bloodshed, no pirates. Just blankets of white and shadowed trees in the perpetual dusk.
Two cannon shots rang out, one after another.
Disbelief ricocheted up my spine. That was Harpy’s signal for retreat, but our assault had barely begun.
“Somethin’s gone wrong,” Penn, his own cap slid up into its usual impish point, muttered beside me. “Run for the ship, boss?”
Dread cloyed at me—I could think of several reasons why Demery would signal the retreat, and none of them were good. Perhaps Lirr's ship had arrived unexpectedly, Harpy was about to be taken, or Mary had…
No, I could not think of her. I had to keep focused on my task and trust her to do hers.
“To the shore!” I called in the wake of the cannons.
I barely spoke loudly enough to be heard by my companions, but it was enough to give us away.
Muskets and pistols cracked all around, pops and flashes in the night. A hawthorn branch over my head exploded and ghisten light burst in the gloom, swirling and churning over the tree.
I lunged into a run. “To the shore!”
Pirates and pirate hunters answered my call. We stumbled and leapt, bolted and jogged as, in the murk, the muzzles of Lirr’s muskets went dark. Reloading.
“Go, go, go!” I roared, grabbing a nearby man—boy, big eyes, bloody cheeks—and shoving him into motion. “Move!”
We were a dozen paces on before the muskets cracked again. The boy, a pace away from me in the night, lost the back of his skull in a mist of blood and hit the snow with a wordless tumble.
There was blood in my eyes, panic in my mouth, but I could not cry out—or at least, if I did, I could not feel it. My mind snared on the boy’s last moments, the fear in his young face. But my body did not stop moving. It could not, even when the Other reared.
Instead of punching through snow, my feet splashed through the shallow waters of the Wold’s Other side. I kept on, straining against that second world and praying I would sprint right back into my own flesh. I was not too deep, not yet, and I sensed I was still moving in the human world. But not for much longer.
I had to get back. I strained, willed and fought. I reached for the coin but my wounded arm would not work.
The Dark Water became clearer. Blue lights ignited around me. Roots of ghisten trees arched above my head, twisted and tangled. Fae dragonflies swirled in a roar of wings and darting light, and in the water beneath me the white glow of morgories converged on my boots.
I cursed and ran for the nearest tree, a huge birch with roots that reared out of the water into a small island.
My feet barely left the water in time. I threw myself at the birch, scattering a hundred dragonflies from its rolls of bark as I pressed into them.
Morgories reared out of the water at my heels. There were dozens of them, snapping at the water that dripped from my boots. The heinous mingling of feline and equine, they bared layers of serrated teeth and unfurled their plumes in waves of fine, feathery fins. The fins shook like leaves, misting about their heads, and their blazing white eyes already tore the flesh from my bones.
I tried to return to my body. I strained and I pulled, I reached for the coin, but I was too deep in the Other.
Horror crashed over me. I was a child again, six years old and trapped inside my nightmares. Trapped by a cup of milk I had trustingly taken from my mother’s hands, even though it tasted like rotted fruit and sour wine. Trapped by the foul magic the Black Tide had told her would make me more powerful, even while Benedict lay in the bed beside me, bandaged and healing from his own ordeal—the one that had shattered his mind and made him what he was. The ordeal I had failed to stop.
The morgories shrieked. The sound clawed at me like a physical force. I felt a shapeless sound tear from my throat.
In my ears, I heard a boy’s shrill, sobbing scream. But I was not screaming. I was roaring, a furious, final bellow of horror and rage and a hundred other fragmented emotions.
The morgories fled. I was left standing on my root island, spine to the birch, as the creatures scattered into the Dark Water. Dragonflies escaped too, and I stood alone for a ragged, panting instant.
Passages from the Mereish book of ghistlore flickered through my head. I had devoured as much as I could of the tome in the final hours before the battle, and now my mind tried to etch out the significance to what I had just done. But my blood was too high to think clearly.
Somewhere distant, my fingers closed around the coin. I snapped back into my limbs to find someone trying to haul me upright beneath a sleeping, winter birch. Snow melted on my skin and filled every crevice of my clothing, susurrating into my eyes.
I blinked like a man reborn. Beyond my companion, the canopy of the Wold had thinned. The edge was in sight. I was back, I was alive, and we were almost to the shore.
“Sir!” Penn saw my eyes open and staggered back. “Thought I’d lost you! Are you injured? Got to move, now, sir, now!”
My breath hitched in my throat and emerged as a chaotic laugh. I sounded like Ben, but I did not care. The monsters had fled from me. I had fallen into the Dark Water, the worst had happened, and I had emerged unscathed.
Penn’s eyes rounded in unease. “Boss?”
“Run, Mr. Penn!” I shouted, finding my feet. Gunshots cracked in the frigid dusk but I felt immortal, my muscles fluid, my blood hot and my will like iron. The pain in my arm was nothing, a mere flicker on the edge of my consciousness.
Together, we ran until a ship’s lanterns glistened in the gloom. Harpy. Ahead of us, the rest of our crew burst out of the Wold onto the open shoreline.