What in God’s holy name?
She didn’t let herself clutch the wheel as tightly as she wanted, lest it break. She told herself that an absence of magical sight was the last thing she needed to worry about. It had been a while since she’d bothered, and there was the chance she’d done it wrong, or perhaps the spirits who made such things possible wouldn’t come near a lightning storm. Toinette had never tried invoking them in such circumstances before.
She had more urgent considerations. Lightning was flickering through the clouds above, and growls of thunder followed it, growing steadily louder. Toinette eyed the motion of the sky, looked at the rising waves, and made a decision.
“No outrunning this one, damn the luck,” she called to Marcus. “Strike the sail and drop the anchor. We’ll try to ride it out.”
She didn’t wait to see the order carried out. Toinette knew her men, and knew that Marcus would ride herd on Raoul if need be. She turned back to the wheel. A hard, spitting rain began to fall, blowing horizontally into her face. TheHawkrocked from side to side.
The first stab of lightning hit the sea about a hundred feet off. It lit up the sky, which had otherwise turned dark as midnight. Everything looked vivid in that second of illumination. The restless sea stretched far out ahead of theHawk, with nobody and nothing for hundreds of miles, as far as Toinette could tell.
They were alone in the storm.
* * *
It hit them hard and suddenly, one long scream of Nature roused to fury. Toinette was no stranger to storms, even to perilous ones, but this outdid everything she’d seen, everything she’d even heard of, save for the tales of men who’d been to the Indies. Lightning struck again and again, turning the sea around them into blue-green flame for a few seconds at a time. The thunder rolled in constant baritone to the higher voices of the wind and the sea, but all were rendingly loud.
Soaked, breathless, Toinette clung to the wheel. Even with the anchor, theHawkcould capsize without a steady hand, and Toinette knew very well that she might do so even with one. Ships were wood and men were mortal, and she was close enough to a man to fail. She’d done that before, but never with others’ lives at stake.
The ship rolled from side to side, and waves beat at the hull with fierce, wet noises. A few washed over the sides. More followed, swamping the deck, and behind Toinette the men ran back and forth with buckets, throwing the water back overboard. It was a perilous business. Cries and oaths rang out as someone slipped; from the tone, she didn’t think he’d gone over the rail. Toinette had learned to identify such things.
She couldn’t have named the moment when she knew they were losing. Time lost meaning in any storm, and this one made her half forget it ever had existed, that there’d ever been a normal world outside the pandemonium of wind and water.
Her arms ached. She thought,We’re not likely to come through this one. That was everything she could muster of words, since all else was simple instinct to clutch and stand and turn. She probably should have prayed, but she couldn’t remember anything past Ave Maria or Pater Noster.
Then the mast went up in a blaze of lightning. Even with her back turned, Toinette saw the strike: it filled the world. A shriek followed, human but inhuman, as men sounded in the final extremes of agony. She couldn’t turn to see who it was, nor shut her eyes in sympathy, for the ship, unbalanced, rolled in that moment and only the full extent of her strength kept it from overturning completely.
A hand grasped her shoulder. She snarled.
“Change.” Erik stood behind her. Of course it was Erik. Anyone else would have known not to approach her. She was doing the only thing she could do, for whatever difference that made. “We need to change.”
Words flooded back, borne on anger like a tide. “I’m not a rat, damn you, whatever else I am. I’ll not leave my crew!”
“No!” he shouted back, straining to be heard over the storm. “One on each side—keep the ship upright!”
Toinette’s first instinct was to say that he knew nothing of ships or the sea—but she did. And his notion might work.
Moreover, nothing else likely would.
“Get Marcus,” she said.
In an eyeblink, her second-in-command was there, blood sheeting down his head but upright and otherwise unharmed. “Take the wheel. Try to keep the men calm. We won’t hurt you. I’m sorry.”
“What?”
There was no time for explanation, but old habits were strong in Marcus. He grabbed the wheel as Toinette left it, and didn’t let go of it to catch her as she ran to the rail. He shouted as she leapt.
She didn’t hear the sound he made when she transformed.
Seven
Pounding waves grasped Erik and pulled him down. The water was dark, cold, briny where it seeped into his closed mouth, and heavy. He’d never thought of water as heavy before. It weighed on him like lead.
Water slowed the shift too. His muscles twisted, expanding around bones that grew and changed. Claws slid from his hands and feet. His neck rippled outward, vertebrae multiplying; spines sprouted from the back of it. Erik felt it all, as he hadn’t done since years before he’d come to manhood. His lungs burned through it, lack of air blurring his vision, until his wings sprouted and let him thrash his way back to the surface.
There he gasped the storm-ravaged air. Above him, on the tilting deck of theHawk, the sailors were crying out in panic. Erik hoped that Marcus could calm them. For a mercy, none of them had tried to attack him yet.
He swam awkwardly sideways toward the ship, learning to move with the waves as best he could. Filling his lungs in case he sank further than he intended, he let his body fall downward, then rise, taking the weight of theHawkalong his right side.
