More cannons boomed. I had half a heartbeat to see their muzzles flash, half to realize they were firing at us, then shrapnel blasted the beach. My elation flickered, burned, and turned to ash on my tongue.
Men and women fell. Penn screamed and buckled into me, just in time to save us from certain death. We hit the ground in the shelter of a huge ghisten yew as bullets and shards of metal peppered into the other side.
I landed on my wounded arm. Pain burned all the way into my skull and I gasped a breathless curse. The last of my elation fled, boiling down to a hard, clean focus—and a bright, searing pain.
“Saint, what is this?” Penn cried, half growl of agony, half terrified plea. “Why’s she firin’ on us?”
Something was horribly, terribly wrong. I forced myself to move past the pain and peered out from under the branches.
The long guns were quiet now, but the twilight was not. Men and women screamed all down the shoreline, dying and bloodied and broken. The lanterns I had seen still floated on the water, but they were too high, and too far apart for Harpy’s.
There, in the spot where Demery’s ship should have been, was Lirr’s great warship.
We had run right into our own trap. How had they known? How had they taken control so quickly?
“Guns down and hands up.”
I looked up the barrel of a musket. Blood thudded in my ears as I stared up into a pirate’s face, and raised my hands in surrender.
FORTY-FOUR
Lirr’s Rat
MARY
The forest around the larch filled with Lirr’s pirates, shadows coalescing into men and women, guns and machetes. There was no sign of Lirr himself, but fear made me want to claw out of my own skin. I battled it, standing beside my mother as pirates formed a half-circle around our fire, and I was proud when my hands did not shake. I was both terrified and in control.
“Surrender now, Fleetbreaker,” someone called. “Cap’n wants you two alive, but he don’t need you whole.”
I raised a hand in signal, and muskets cracked from the treetops. Pirates dropped and staggered, crying out and cursing. Others scattered for shelter, throwing themselves behind ghisten trees or the hulls of wrecked ships. One even fled for Tane’s larch, scrambling up her rocky perch before a shot picked him off. He hit the ground with a sickening crack.
But half a dozen pirates still charged. They rounded the fire and threw themselves at my mother and I with reckless, howling determination.
I held steady until the pirates were within four paces, chin lowered, pulse fluttering. Then I reached beneath my layers of clothes.
Four pistols leveled at the oncoming threat—two in my mother’s hands, two in mine. We fired in unison. The pistols bucked, muzzles flashed, and three pirates went down.
Anne immediately shoved one pistol back through her brace and drew her cutlass. The other pistol she flipped, holding it back along her forearm as a shield. Then she threw herself into the fray.
She met our attackers with a witch’s feral scream and a flurry of deft slashes. The wind came with her, an extension of her own flesh—throwing icy snow into the faces of our enemies as she blocked, cut and thrust with tight, rapid movements.
I had no time for awe, no time to watch her and the wind and their uncanny union or envy her skill. I had my own part in this plan.
It took all my strength to turn my back on her—on the mother I’d lost and found and might lose again. But I did, turning with purpose towards the distant Harpy, and I ran.
The Ghistwold folded in around me, snow crunching and cold burning. My breath rasped as I pelted in the direction of the western shore, leading any pursuers straight through the heart of the Wold and a corridor of death.
A muzzle flashed behind me. I instinctively plunged sideways into a snowbank, only to find my foot snared on the icy crust beneath the powder.
I crawled free with a curse, but I’d lost time. Pirates closed in. Lirr stalked out of the trees in the midst of them, illuminated by the horizontal light of the Second Sun. He wasn’t alone—three people fled before him, Demery’s or Samuel’s crews, I couldn’t tell.
Whoever they were, they weren’t ghiseau. They fell so easily. Lirr shot one in the belly, and I was close enough to see the horror in her eyes. The second buckled under his companion’s weight, and Lirr kicked them both down. He left them on the ground as he stabbed the third, slashing their knees with brutal efficiency.
I felt a moment of baffled dread. He wasn’t killing them, though he easily could. Yes, the belly shot was a mortal wound, but not one that would kill with any speed. Why?
My thoughts fled as a pistol flared. The second victim pointed his smoking pistol towards Lirr’s head, elation in his eyes. There was no way the shot could have missed, not at that range, but Lirr barely flinched. Instead, he rested his sword below the shooter’s eye, and twisted its tip into his skull. His scream rang loud through the trees, rising and falling in unfettered horror.
It still echoed as Demery’s folk loosed another volley from the treetops. Lirr’s oncoming pirates scattered, plunging into the shelter of trees.
Lirr left his dying victims and advanced on me just as I freed my foot. I took off in a stumbling run, but the snow was so deep. I hit a drift and sank in again, cursing and panting in my panic.
Lirr grabbed the back of my coat and hauled me around. There was blood in his hair, smeared across his face, but he seemed unaware of it.
“Mary,” he grunted in a perfunctory greeting and started to drag me back the way I’d come. I shrieked like a feral cat and beat at him until he shook me so hard my neck cracked and my vision blackened. Magni power flooded into me at the same time—dizzying and stifling.
“Stop. Fighting,” he growled.
A musket cracked. I blinked blearily, and Lirr jerked as the shot buried itself in his collarbone—joining the bloody blossoms of more than one other lead ball. He didn’t fall, but his power wavered.
I slammed my elbow into his and knocked his grasping arm wide. His attention snapped back to me and his cutlass flashed in his free hand, aiming for my legs, but I’d already pulled my knife.
Charles Grant would have been proud. We hadn’t often fought knife against cutlass, but I was already inside Lirr’s guard, driving the blade through his heavy coat into his thigh—once, twice, three times. Then I moved to his arm, slashing it open as I jerked free. He roared and I felt Magni power lance after me again—but it shuddered, weakened by his pain.
I fled into the trees, sprinting in the direction that felt like the shore, struggling through drifts, my breath ragged in my lungs. Sweat caked my face and cold seared every inch of my exposed skin.
Two cannon shots rang out, one on the heels of the other. They echoed all around me, distorted by trees and ice and muffling snow, but I recognized the signal to retreat.
I almost stopped running, shock coursing through me and muscles quaking with urgency. Something must have gone wrong at the beach, but what? I was the crux of the plan and here I was, waylaid but still heading towards my goal, Lirr in close pursuit.
Unless something had happened to Harpy.
I forced myself to start running again. Get to the shore. Get to the ship—that’s where my mother would be headed. Even if everything had gone to hell, Athe must still have our retreat and I could escape Lirr.