“You heard?”I asked as he turned on his heel and fell into step with me.I spoke low so as not to alert my uncle, the lush carpet muffling our footfalls and, distantly, at the edge of my perception, a slosh of water.
“I did,” my brother returned.“Though I am surprised you are laying the blame so thoroughly on Uncle, instead of raging at Charlie and I for not being there.”
“Do not tempt me,” I warned.“She should have been safe, regardless.”
“Then you are truly going to let this go?”
“No,” I growled.“ButHartwill take his place in the lines.IfRecompense’s Stormsingers can stop the Mereish Fleet without a gun fired?So be it.But I doubt it will be so.”
We did not speak again until we were in the cool damp of the street.The weather was shifting, though whether it was natural or not was impossible to know.Snow fell for the first time in a week, heavy and thick with moisture, already turning to sleet.
“I was promised glory when this is over, Sam,” Ben prompted, evidently moved on from our previous discussion.“And a new chance at life.”
“Will you settle for notoriety and a chance at life?”
Ben eyed me askance.“What would I be notorious for?”
“Hopefully valor.Possibly treason.Because I will not leave the Anchorage without Mary back aboard my ship.”
Ben considered this, then shrugged and pulled off his hat, turning his face into the sleet as if it were a summer breeze.“So be it.”
***
Bitter rain sheeted from the sky asHarttook his position in a small flotilla of privateers and pressed merchants at the far south of the Aeadine lines.
Damp clung to my clothing, hair and beard, and my oiled coat did little to stop its pervasive chill.Despite the applications of various Stormsingers, it had yet to disperse—solidifying the conclusion that it was Mereish in design.I listened to the threads of their voices on the wind, but none belonged to Mary.
The rain not only shortened our line of sight and ensured every sailor in the fleet was miserably wet, but it threatened to spoil powder—even moisture-resistant Usti gunpowder, sealed in its redwood barrels.The deck was slick.Around me, hands threw down buckets of sand, and Ms.Skarrow oversaw the preparations of the long guns, while Mr.Penn instructed our sharpshooters and Mr.Keo strode the deck.At the stern, Poverly reported to Ms.Echings, and together they ran a series of colored flags up the mizzen.We were ready.
Similar flags went up from the other ships in our company, all bright and new and yet hardly visible in the downpour.Nomadlurked nearby, black hull blurred against the rain-mottled waves.The former pirate vessel’s ghisting was partially manifest, slipping over the wood of its cloaked figurehead like luminescent, indigo oil.Hart himself was in full manifest, lingering on the waves before his figurehead, just as I lingered behind it at the fore.His tines spread wide as the branches of a winter oak, impervious to the rain, and his sea-glass eyes were fixed west as he pawed the waves.
Drake, our leader, was a two-masted naval brigantine of red and gold.His namesake ghisting—a great serpent with multiple sets of shuddering wings, just like the beast I had summoned upon our escape from Ostchen—coiled around the mainmast in the same manner as his figurehead entwined the fore of the ship from keel to rails to bowsprit, which was capped with a wild-eyed draconian head full of teeth and frothed with rage.As I watched, a boy ran the length of the bowsprit and hung over the beast’s gilded head.A second later, flames sparked—bright one moment, then dimmed in a plume of smoke.The boy retreated, leaving thick, dark-grey smoke to eddy from the figurehead’s jaws despite the rain.
“How dramatic,” Grant muttered at my side, admiration leaking through his scorn.He was fully armed with sword, pistols and musket, but hardly looked himself with his usually fine clothing abandoned in favor of a dour oil coat and neckerchief.
Across the fleet, more ghistings awoke.This was not uncommon in the face of battle, but the degree of manifestation was beyond anything I had seen.Every ship-bound ghisting was in some stageof exhibition, their shifting, spectral lights joining the illumination of ships’ lanterns in the human world.A handful of Otherborn creatures, too, lurked in the sea, a scattering of blood-red huden and a distant swirl of white morgories, flocking through the deep like sparrows across a stormy sky.An impling crested the top of a great man-o’-war’s mizzenmast, chased by a vaguely ursine ghisting.At will, it fizzled from the human world and back to the Other.
Other than that impling, I could hardly say which world the creatures truly resided in.I lingered perpetually on the edge now, suspended both by my curse and by the inexorable, blurring pressure of the true Black Tide.Even my talisman, resting passively against my sweaty skin, could not keep me rooted.
The Black Tide had come, and the fabric of the worlds was paper-thin, as was my grip upon the waking world.
“Ben,” I said lowly.
He did not acknowledge me, though he had drawn up behind Grant and I.His power lingered around him in a perpetual cloud, crimson as bloodmist and visibly agitated, swirling in an unseen wind.
“If I should become trapped in the Other, see me to my cabin and take command,” I said because, for all else that my brother was, he was a competent strategist and commander.
“Of course,” Ben said, unflinching.
“And ensure Mary does not remain in the hands of the Navy.”
Rain pounded on the deck and dripped off the brim of his hat.“That is no small request.”
I nodded.“I am aware.Still, after all I have done for you, do this for me.”
“You speak as if you are dying, Samuel.You will come back.”
Grant looked at me too, unspeaking and subdued.
