“So this is your response?”Faucher demanded.His expression was one of betrayal, of all things.“To all I have told you?”
“Not at all.You and I need to speak of many things, but later.”I pointed my sword at him before I turned on Mr.Penn, Benedict, and Grant.“Run up our colors and secure the ship.”
Penn saluted, and Grant sketched a bow in response.
“Captain,” Ben returned, planting Faucher’s hat on his head as the man and his loyalists were led below.The rest were already either being corralled into the hold, accompanied by flying fists and last bouts of resistance, or sent over the side to the tenuous mercy of dumped longboats.
“If you will pardon me,” I said, cleaning off my cutlass with a handkerchief.“I must seek out Mr.Hae.”
FIFTY-FIVE
Flotsam
MARY
Isank at a leisurely pace, dragged down by the weight of my clothes and bracketed by increasing pressure.The drum of my heart and the rush of bubbles was all I could hear, and, though fear lanced through me, I forced myself to calm.I would not drown.My life came from another world, just like the roots of a ghisten tree.
I flexed my jaw to pop my ears and began to methodically work at the buttons of my coat, all the while blocking out my memories of the other Stormsingers, dead or alive, and the reality that Admiral Solace’s flagship had fallen with the aid of her own people.
I had to get toHart, to Sam.But first I needed to be able to move freely.
I tore off my coat, neckerchief, boots and stockings.Once the coat was free the water ceased to drag so forcefully, and I began to kick upwards in my trousers and shirt.My braid drifted around my shoulders and loose locks tickled at my face.They reminded me distantly of tentacles, and the last time I had leapt from a ship—out of the clutches of Silvanus Lirr and into the company of the kindly ghisting, Juliette.
I could seeRecompense’s hull from this depth, side-by-side with the Mereish vessel who had boarded her.Debris and bodies floated everywhere in between, already bumping together in islands of grim flotsam.
Dancing orange firelight ignited the waves.And below them… I spied islands.Not just shoals hidden by the waves, but islands of the Anchorage, complete with drowning trees whose branches brushed the bellies of the ships.I saw a cottage with waving garden plants, the thatch of its roof beginning to fray and lift with the currents.
A piece of cloth drifted past—a woman’s lace cap.
The Black Tide had taken the Aeadine Anchorage, and the battle had already drifted from the western sea into the eastern.
A swarm of white lights surged towards me out of the deep.
Tane!
Hold fast.
Tane manifested just as the morgories arrived.The ghisting erupted from my frame as cat-sized, vaguely equine creatures of feathered ruffs and endless teeth surrounded me in a chattering, boiling rush.I felt their cries in my bones, in my frozen lungs— jittering, rattling, a horrible combination of teeth and hunting, hungry moans.
But Tane, too, encircled me.She enveloped me in a spectral body much larger than my own, a goddess of the deep with skin like eddying smoke.She moved with me as I spun, trailing ethereal flesh, and most of the morgories retreated.
One lunged in, snapping for my face.Tane’s massive head descended with equal speed.She bit at the morgory like a wolf, and in that moment her aspectwaslupine, a vague suggestion of elongated head and pointed ears and snarling teeth.
The morgory twisted, but too late.Tane’s ghisten teeth plunged into the other creature’s flesh and it seized, then flickered out of existence.I heard—Ifelt—a muffled rush and the water contorted, as if suddenly being pulled through a punctured hull.Into the Other.
Then Tane retreated.The rupture between worlds closed once more, and the water stilled.
The remaining morgories vanished off through the fleet in panicked ribbons of light.I was still gaping at the place where that single, attacking morgory had been a moment before.
I didn’t know you could do that.
Nor did I.But this is the Black Tide, was Tane’s simple reply.She began to shrink, retreating until she outlined my body in a shallow, nearly invisible layer of pale indigo-grey light.
I thought of Sam and Ben and the pending ritual, and the apprehension that crackled through me was too strong to bear.How much time did we have?WasHartstill afloat?
I turned in the water, scanning for more murderous Otherborn creatures.Aside from a few manifest ghistings around their ships, every other had fled.
Well then, I steeled myself.Let’s findHart.
