Cali tipped her head to the sky, startled by how quickly it had blackened. Murky clouds swirled above as if the sky itself was being churned and whirled.
“I don’t know how this happened, Cap,” the orc bellowed over the howling storm.
“Sailor’s Graveyard?” Bonnie called back as she made her way up to the quarterdeck, the salty spray slicking her hair to her face in dark slashes.
Gert relinquished the wheel with a grim face. “Not for another several leagues.”
“Then this is a storm that came out of nowhere?”
Her quartermaster gave her a side-eye glance. “The sky was clear and the water was calm.”
The women exchanged a knowing look that made Cali think this wasn’t entirely unexpected. The bow of the ship reared back, the ropes flailing and the hull shrieking, before it slammed back down and knocked almost all the sailors off their feet. Only Bonnie remained standing, and that was because she had an iron grip on the wheel.
Cali stayed on all fours for a beat, her soaked hair dripping brine into her eyes. She smoothed it back as she used the quarterdeck railing to heave herself up, blinking hard as the salt burned her eyes.
“Maybe Arabella wasn’t as appeased as we suspected?” Gert said, as she staggered back to standing, her hands braced on her knees.
Bonnie’s lips were a white line as she shook her head. “This isn’t mermaids.”
“Then what?” Seraphina called back, her long fingers curled around the ship’s rail like tentacles.
“Or who?” Bonnie said, her gaze landing on Cali. “If I had to guess, our siren friends are impatient.”
“They can control the weather?” Cali asked.
“If it’s close enough to their domain,” Bonnie shouted over a crack of lightning. “It’s one way they get ships into their clutches.”
Gert expelled a torrent of curses as the ship’s bow climbed up another wave, crested it, and dropped hard enough to rattle Cali’s teeth. If she’d known that all the creatures in the sea were moodier than a troll who’d missed a meal and more vengeful than a wounded goblin, she would have never come.
A groan from behind made her turn to see Thrain braced in the entrance to the stairs leading below deck.
“Grognick’s beard,” he mumbled, holding a hand to his mouth. “It’s worse up here than down below.”
Bonnie made a point of avoiding Cali’s gaze, as she jerked her head toward the dwarf and then elbowed Gert in the ribs. “Tie him up.”
Twenty-Four
“He’s not goingto throw himself overboard,” Cali said, watching Gert loop a thick length of frayed hemp around Thrain’s middle. She wasn’t sure of this, but she felt she should lodge some sort of complaint to keep her friend from being tied up.
“I promised Marvella I’d help her scrub the pots,” Thrain protested, his arms pinned to his sides as rope unwound itself from a pole and encircled his chest. “She’ll wonder where I’ve run off to, you know.”
Cali blinked in surprise at the self-coiling rope, although she shouldn’t have been startled that Tris was eager to save Thrain from himself and the sirens. What was surprising was the fact that Thrain hadn’t noticed, although he was focused on arguing.
“Marvella will survive,” Gert said flatly. She gave the rope a firm tug and stepped back to examine her work. “So will you, which is the point.”
“I don’t need to be tied up like a?—”
“Dwarf who can’t be trusted not to throw himself at the sirens?” Gert patted him once on the shoulder, not unkindly. “You do.”
A dark wave hurled itself over the bow while lightning shredded the sky in angry white gashes. The hull screamed in protest—not the usual creak and groan of wood, but something more desperate that made Cali’s damp fur stand on end.
“He was perfectly fine with the mermaids,” Cali called to Bonnie. “He didn’t throw himself overboard for Arabella.”
“Arabella isn’t a siren,” Bonnie said, swiping her wet hair from her face.
This gave Cali pause. It was true that she’d never encountered a siren, and neither had Thrain. The dwarf had a tendency to fall hard and fast, and she’d prefer if that wasn’t over the side of the ship. None of that made her feel better about seeing her friend bound to the mast of the pirate ship.
Rain pelted the deck as The Cruel Mistress was propelled from wave to wave, like a flat stone skipping roughly across the surface of a pond. The hull moaned with each bone-shuddering impact, and Cali sensed that Tris was as scared as she was, which was not comforting in the least.
