I followed his gaze, each shallow breath fogging from my lips. My crew and Demery’s pirates, many of whom had suffered in the carnage on shore, were hauled into sight. Clots of other prisoners came with them, men and women I did not recognize, haggard and stumbling and linked by long chains—the captives from Lirr’s hold, I imagined.
Charles Grant was among those Lirr’s loyalists dragged into sight. His glassy eyes stared out at the forest as they set him down against a boulder and left him there, slumped and silent. He was pale as sun-bleached canvas, a shard of wood embedded in his throat.
He ought to be dead, judging from that wound and the amount of blood on his clothes. So should dozens of the other wounded around him. But their chests rose and fell, and Grant’s glazed eyes blinked every so often.
Fear clawed up my spine. Had Lirr already bonded them? Had that shard held a ghisting?
The pirate himself emerged from the forest after his subordinates who had borne Grant. He had Mary by the back of the head, her arms bound before her. He barely glanced over the assembly before he jerked her towards the larch’s great rock and shoved her upwards. She’d been divested of most of her outer clothing, leaving her in her trousers and a thick wool shirt.
Run, I willed to Mary, but her movements were lethargic. One blink into the Other told me why. There, on the edge of worlds, I saw Lirr’s eyes hedged with red—full, bloody, violent red.
His influence spread as I watched. The whimpering of the injured faded and his loyalists tracked his progress up the rock with worshipful eyes.
Lirr was in the height of his power, here, at the end.
“Lirr!” Anne’s voice called from the other side of the fire.
It took all my strength to look away from Lirr and find the older woman. She was here. Mary was here. Lirr was here. So where were Demery and the Usti and Athe? Had anyone escaped Harpy?
Benedict. I tried not to think of him, locked in Harpy’s hold as the ship went down, or as Lirr’s pirates tore through her hatches.
“Lirr!” the Fleetbreaker shouted again, her voice rife with hatred. “I’ll kill you, I’ll—”
Her cry broke off as several pirates grabbed her and wrestled a Stormsinger’s mask over her face. She screamed into it and the air around us shuddered. Snow kicked up, swirling into the fire with a shushing hiss.
Lirr ignored Anne, dragging Mary to a stop at the foot of the larch. Firelight filled their faces and cast their shadows onto the broad tree trunk at their backs.
A second figure stepped from Lirr’s frame. A ghisting, tall and broad and looming.
Beside me, Penn started to curse then slipped into a prayer instead.
I had known this was coming, but I felt the same instinct to pray. As Demery had said, Lirr was ghiseau too. But knowing the truth and seeing it were two vastly different things.
“Some of you have waited decades for this day,” Lirr began, raising his voice above the roar of the bonfire.
His ghisting, Hoten, slipped to Mary’s other side and watched the pirate with an intense gaze.
“Some of you have yet to understand the blessing you will receive,” Lirr went on. “I’ve many siblings to be freed once this forest awakens and burns, and it’s you who will have the honor of joining with them. I give you this prize without cost—save your trust, and gratitude.”
Lirr’s pirates cheered, the raucous, blood-hungry cry of revelers at a hanging. My mouth was dry, the pain in my arm forgotten as Lirr’s influence wafted over the heads of the assembly. A lifetime with Benedict had hardened me to Magni power, but even so I barely resisted it. My heart thundered, and desire pulled at me—desire to please him, to be like him.
Ghiseau.
My skin crawled.
Mary had retained enough of herself to glare at him and say something I could not hear. He grabbed her bound wrists and prodded her to the edge of the larch’s rocky perch, right over the roaring bonfire. Firelight played across Mary’s face and her shadow grew taller on the trunk of the great larch. Then Lirr’s shadow passed over it, swallowing it, and he laid heavy hands on her shoulders from behind.
“Return to your tree and your children, Tane,” Lirr said, expression cool and intent. “Or let the fire free you from this world.”
I needed no vision to foretell what would happen next.
Lirr’s hands softened on Mary’s shoulders, and he pushed.
The drop into the bonfire was short. Mary hit the blaze in a burst of dancing sparks and the dozen gut-melting cracks of—wood? Bone?
I heard Anne howl into her gag, but could not see her anymore. I lunged to my feet, only to be kicked back down by a pirate. A boot connected with my skull and the world momentarily faded.
The Dark Water sensed my distraction and erupted all around me, shallow and cool. The light of the fire faded but ghistings lit up the night like torches, sapphire ghistings, indigo ghistings, ghistings edged with grey and attached to human flesh. Lirr’s loyalists. Lirr.
Mary. She struggled to her knees, here in the Dark Water—or rather, her reflection did, teal and grey and swirling. There was no fire here, no blazing heat. But she burned brighter than the fire ever could, and as she did, a new visage overlaid her.
Another being manifested in Mary’s flesh. At first, the ghisting was a mirror image of Mary herself, as perfect a replica as Benedict was of me. Then she began to change. She aged and hardened—into Anne, into someone else, someone with angular features, lithe limbs and a drape of captured moonlight.
I could still see Mary through her, and she screamed. She fought towards the edge of the fire but something pushed her back—swords? Rifles?
“Mary!” I shouted. I tried to thrust myself back into the human world, but I was stuck. I could not reach the coin in my pocket, not with my hands bound.
My eyes filled with Mary and her ghisting, and the memory of the flames. How long would she survive? How long before the flames took her?
I was helpless. Again.
No, not helpless. Passages from the Mereish book welled again in my mind, and this time their meaning was clear—uniting with the memory of the morgories I had banished.
I staggered upright in the Dark Water and began to shout, still straining at my ropes. Lights flickered beyond the Wold as Mary burned, oranges and umbers appearing between sapphire and grey all around us, until the Wold had as many lights as the night sky.
The ghistings turned to me, first. Then the fae dragonflies converged, the murmur of their wings turning to a howl as they closed around me like a sea spout and cut Mary from my sight. I felt a momentary panic as she vanished, but I had one last hope—a wild, reckless hope—and I intended to use it.
“Come!” I demanded of the Dark Water. “I am here, come to me!”
A new light appeared through the trees, bloody orange and dreadfully swift. Elation swelled in my chest and crashed into panic; I had seconds before they arrived.
Back in the human world, one of my straining hands broke free from my bonds. I seized the coin in my pocket.
I lurched back into full consciousness, gasping and sweating. Pirates and prisoners watched in rapture as Lirr faced the larch tree. The fire still blazed, too high and dense to see Mary through.
There was no way she still lived. I knew that, but rejected it, and as I did, I heard the voices.