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My body broke. Before I realized I was moving I tore from my mother, bolted for the cabin door and slammed into the passageway beyond.
Boots thundering on wood. A ladder. I pounded up it and threw aside a hatch, knowing there was nowhere to go and not caring. I had to put distance between myself and Lirr and the shell of my mother.
Snow blasted into my face as I scrambled up onto the deck, earning stares and shouts from a dozen nearby pirates. I took the forecastle stairs two at a time, avoided reaching hands, and skidded to a stop at the very fore of the ship.
The rail pressed into my hips and I dug my fingers into its ice-covered wood. Spray froze on my cheeks and eyelashes and the cold raked my throat with each, panting breath, but when I looked at the ocean before the ship, my breath died all together.
The Stormwall filled my eyes as far as I could see. Snow and cloud stretched from sea to heaven like carded wool, fraying here and there in tendrils of cloud. They crept south across the waves, reaching, stretching, and ominous. Already the seas were rough, choppy swells capped with white and clashing currents.
Part of me braced, knowing that at any second rough hands would haul me back below. But I couldn’t take my eyes off the storm, or my mind from the gut-melting revelation of my own condition, the ship’s fragility, and the fact that we were leading Demery and Samuel to certain death.
My mother drew up a pace away, on the other side of the bowsprit. She looked from me to the Stormwall, her face pale and her eyes hollower than ever.
“I’m sorry, Mary,” she told me, just loud enough to be heard over the wind and the waves. “I’m so sorry.”
THIRTY-SIX
The Stormwall
SAMUEL
Harthit the Stormwall with a groan of wood and the howl of hurricane winds. Waves clapped against the hull, chunks of ice battered us and I held fast to my line, tethered to the mizzenmast. It was hard not to lose myself in the horror of the roiling waves or the blackened sky, but I kept one eye on our two burly helmsmen and the other onDefiance.
Benedict’s ship forged ahead of us, her weather mage barely audible. She was Aeadine, aging and thin, but her voice didn’t match her frame in the slightest. It was bellowing and rich, more declaration than melody. But to all appearances, the Stormwall was not listening.
“It’s not working!” one of the helmsmen shouted to Fisher, who stood at the quarterdeck rail, staring down the center of the ship with her stance wide, palms braced on the rail like a battlefield general. The helmsman’s huge muscles strained as he and his fellow fought the wheel. “Cap’n!”
“Hold fast!” Fisher shouted, braced against the roll of the ship.
A wall of snow gusted across the helmsman’s pleading face as he looked back at me, flakes catching on his pale eyelashes. There was a question there too, the same one that had been in the crew’s eyes since we left Hesten.
Are we going to die, Sooth? Have you foreseen it?
“Hold course, Mr. Kennedy!” I called.
Kennedy still looked desperate, but he turned back to the spokes and said no more.
Harpysailed off our larboard bow, far enough to lessen the danger of dashing into one another, but close enough to benefit from Ellas’s Stormsinger. The smaller ship had her sails trimmed to nearly nothing but she still strained,relying—likethe rest ofus—onher ghisting to keep the ship in one piece.
Beyond her, through alternating curtains of snow and sleet, I could still glimpse clear Usti waters. There, two of the Usti queen’s ships watched us vanish into the Stormwall, ready to report back to their monarch if our courage failed.
Our courage would not fail. Minemight—itwas currently floating around somewhere in my wateryguts—butI had not foreseenHart’s destruction. I had even slipped into the Other last night to check, Fisher at my side and the Mereish coin at the ready.
Now, safe waters vanished. The Stormwall completely engulfed all three ships, and we forged our way across the Line.
Minutes crept into hours. Ice thudded off the hull like an irregular heartbeat and my breath froze in my beard and eyelashes, rimming them with frost. Fisher, myself and the crew rotated frequently, attempting to thaw frozen hands in the close darkness below decks. It was too rough for fires, though, and to cook, so our only light was dragonfly lanterns and our only consolation shelter from the wind.
I rejoined Fisher on deck after one of my turns below. She grabbed my sure line and bound it to the mizzenmast next to her own, cinching the knots tight.
“Isn’t so bad, now!” she shouted so close to my ear I would have been deafened in any other weather. “That Stormsinger’s managing!”
I squinted in the direction ofDefiance, but the snow was thick enough to blur them from sight. I could hear Ellas’s Stormsinger a little more clearly now, though. The wind had eased. “Seems to be.”
“How are the crew?”
“Vomiting and pissing themselves,” I returned. “But starting to believe we’ll make it.”
A fresh blast of winter wind stole our breaths, so she only nodded in reply. We stood in companionable silence as the Stormwall raged, the Stormsinger sang, and Hart flickered through the snowy deck beneath our boots.
