Linn looked out and saw a graveyard.
The ocean before them was littered with wreckages of ships, their broken hulls jutting out of the sea like rib cages, torn sails trailing the black waters like hair. Linn had the impression that they were looking at rows upon rows of tombstones.
There was utter silence from onboard their ship as the crew processed this. Only, far off, there came a strange, whistling sound, cutting through the wind, steadily growing louder.
A second shout rang out from their crow’s nest. A shout that made Linn’s blood freeze.
“CYRILIAN SHIP! TAKE COVER!”
Linn had just turned to Kaïs when a bright light shot across the waters before them.
—
Their ship exploded. The ocean was infinitely colder and darker than Linn remembered. The impact drove nearly all the air from her lungs, sucking her into an abyss black as night.
Under here, there were no stars.
Time seemed to slow. Linn twisted, and in the depths, she found phantom flashes of sight: the night lighting up in sparks of fire, the crack of wood splintering, the groans of their entire ship as it sank. The blur of sky and flames and sea as she was flung into the night; the slap of her body against water.
There was a sharp, consuming pain in her left leg. Her lungs felt pinched; she needed to swim, to breathe.
Linn kicked, but with one arm still recovering from her injury, her balance was off; she veered wildly in one direction, then another, unable to gain control.
Linn struck out again, pulling herself forward with broad strokes of her good arm as the Water Masters had taught her as a child.Move with the current.
But this was the open sea, and the currents tossed and turned around her in all different directions, battering her like a leaf in a gale. She had no idea which way was up and which way was down, and there wasn’t the slightest sliver of light here to guide her.
Linn called to her Affinity, searching, searching for her winds. Yet here, buried deep beneath the waves, she was a whole world away from them. Suffocating slowly.
No,Linn thought, still grasping for a hint of her winds. She had not endured so much and survived for so long just to drown at the shores of her homeland, on the precipice of a war she still needed to fight.
Her world was growing fuzzy, her tether to her Affinity slipping from her mind. There was pressure around her chest, as though something had cinched around it. She was feeling lighter. Her world seemed to grow bright—and then it burned, flaring shades of ugly orange and searing reds.
The world tumbled back in all its messy, swirling colors, the sharp rocking of waves and screams of dying men.
“Breathe,” commanded a deep voice by her ear, and Linn suddenly found that she was vomiting water, then gasping in breaths, gulping down lungfuls upon lungfuls of cold, acrid air, choked with smoke.
She knew that voice. Shaking, she turned to its owner, his silver gaze reflecting the flames of their sinking ship.
“I’m going to swim,” Kaïs said. “Can you hold on to me?”
She clung to his shoulders. The water was like ice, the cold squeezing Linn’s muscles with every passing second until she was numb. Behind her was the fading orange glow of their ship, its light dimming until it flickered out. Then it was just her and Kaïs, making their way forward in the dark. She was pressed against him, their hearts beating the same prayer, the rhythm of their breaths blending into the sound of the sea.
She could sense the fatigue in each stroke of his powerful arms, in the way the ocean easily knocked them back and forth.
Something loomed out of the sky before them. Beneath the ghostly light that seeped through the clouds overhead, the shape of a ship emerged.
Linn thought she would weep from relief. “Kaïs,” she croaked. “A ship.”
“Something’s wrong.” He spoke softly, as though not wanting to be heard.
In that moment, the moon slid out from behind the clouds. Its light swept over the pale blue of the sails, the sigil of a roaring white tiger fanning out from multiple ships anchored silently in the bay.
Cyrilian ships. Not just one—but an entire fleet.
For a few moments, Linn forgot to breathe. She sensed Kaïs’s shoulders tense beneath her palms, heard his intake of breath. The barrelman aboard their ship had called out to them with this information the second before they were attacked.
What were Cyrilian ships doing here?
