The muddied mingling of colors clarified, each color separating into individual strands, still entwined but whole in their own right.The fae dragonflies around us surged and brighter lights began to close—morgories, I knew, among other monstrosities.
We had to leave, and not just because of the creatures closing in.Enisca put a hand to her chest, clearly straining, and caught my eye.She nodded once, her expression ill for want of air, and gasped.
The solidity of her form vanished, transitioning into a red haze.But I hardly saw.
Samuel, Ben and I all shuddered back between worlds.Water clapped over my head.I struck out, flailing—not to save myself, but to find Samuel.Limp, unconscious Samuel.
I surfaced and raked in a frantic breath.For an instant all I could do was fill my lungs—they were bottomless, ravenous, and burning.I tried to claw the hair from my face but my eyes stung with saltwater and I couldn’t see, couldn’t find—
A strong hand seized me by the collar.It jerked me forward until I bumped into a piece of wood—wreckage.I clung to it, instinctive as a newborn babe.
Benedict did not let go, holding me on one side of a drifting spar while, on the other, he held Samuel’s shoulders above the water.Samuel, whose eyes were slowly opening beneath a hedge of sodden hair.
“Thank you,” I tried to splutter, but ended up coughing instead.I fumbled to wrap my arms around the spar.
“Do not drown,” Ben rasped.His power came with it, lending strength to my limbs and clarity to my mind I hadn’t had before.It felt different—clearer, truer—and his voice was not entirely devoid of emotion.If anything, he sounded overcome.
“Saint.”Samuel coughed.He fumbled weakly for the spar too, and Ben pulled him closer, bracing him against the wood.
I reached across to grab his hand, and he grabbed mine in return.His face was deathly pale and creased with pain, and I tried not to think of his wound bleeding into the water.
“What happened?Where isHart?”he asked.
I twisted, blinking stinging eyes as a bank of smoke blew across us.We were alone between unfamiliar ships, save for the spar, trails of rope and patch of tattered sail.Hartwas out of sight, Samuel was bleeding into the sea.And Enisca was gone.
“We need to get you to a surgeon,” I said to Samuel, eyes flicking between the nearby ships.The smoke was thickened with fog, forming a dense miasma.Two vessels in sight were disabled, one burning.Another appeared to be Aeadine and mostly intact, but was swarming with Otherborn beasts.The screaming of her crew was muffled, not only by the fog but by the roaring of the fire and wash of the waves, as if a boundary had been set between us and her horrors.
“I can search forHart,” Benedict said.“I can still swim.”
“No.”Samuel seized his wrist.His expression was thick with bewilderment, disconnected, but, as he looked down at himself, memory must have slowly returned.He paled even further—as impossible as that seemed—and he grasped the spar more tightly.“Something is coming.Stay together, at all costs.”
A horrific screech chased his words.A heartbeat later a spindly, bone-limbed monstrosity of Otherborn flesh plummeted out of the sky—straight down upon us.
FIFTY-EIGHT
The Fog of War
SAMUEL
Tane manifested, standing atop the waves with her arms thrown out in defense.Mary dropped beneath the water just as claws tore the waves where she had been into frothing furrows.The winged beast shrieked in frustration and swatted at our spar, sending it spinning before the creature swooped back into the sky.
Only Ben’s iron grip kept me above the water as our tenuous raft bobbed and jarred.I felt immeasurably weak, beset by a pain so all-encompassing that I hardly felt the sting of salt in my wound and my eyes.My memory was fragmented, but my Sooth’s Knowing was there to fill in the gaps.
Hae’s shot.Struggling back on deck and collapsing in sight of Penn and Fisher, who must have seen me safely delivered to my cabin.Then… blood and binding threads in the Dark Water.
How I had come to be in the water was beyond me, but that hardly mattered now.
“Mary?”I rasped, attempting to twist and survey the waves around us, but I was thwarted by a shock of pain.
Mary resurfaced between Ben and I, and I nearly let go of the spar in relief.
“Thatthingis wearing a collar.Did you see it?Sam?”She panted.“Where did it go?”
“Hae,” I concluded, dread assailing me.A thin hope that I had killed the man and simply forgotten was extinguished.
Ben pointed straight up to where the beast circled, preparing for another pass.“Can you stop it?”
Not with my voice, that I knew.The edges of the world had blurred again, but this time with fatigue instead of the Dark Water.
