AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Anne turned her hollow eyes on me. There was contradiction in that look, briefly, then all was obscured in a veil of determination.
“Of course, child,” she conceded.
My swelling heart twisted. I swayed towards her, desperate for the feeling of her arms around me, but sensed my touch would be unwelcome.
Anne braced against the roll of the ship and lifted the axe high, blade up, flat down.
She swung at the gunport with all the force she could muster. I cringed at the sound but the storm swallowedit—onecrack in the middle of dozens of strains and pops and moans. The lock clattered to the floor and Anne adjusted her stance, eyeing the ice around the hatch. She swung again, connecting right on the frame of the hatch itself. Ice cracked, shards fell, and wind gushed around the edges.
Anne swung a third time and the gunport swung outward with a creak. Wind and storm light blasted into the cabin and I glimpsed a lurching sea, dark sky and swirling snow. And was that land? An island within the Stormwall? It was so close the ship seemed about to crash into it, skimming down an ice-rimmed shoreline as only a ghisting-possessed ship could. Hoten might live within Lirr, but he could obviously still interact withNameless.
“I drove the ship as close as I could, but we’ll have to swim the rest of the way!” Anne shouted over the roar. She was pulling her coat off, revealing a brace of weapons and cannisters beneath. She shoved her axe through, across her back, and bundled the coat under one arm. “You’ll freeze up when you hit thewater—donot let yourself panic. Breathe. Can you do this?”
I hurriedly grabbed my own, donated cloak from the strings of my hammock and bundled it under one arm. I was doubly grateful I’d changed out of my impractical gown.
Then I remembered I was not the only prisoner aboard Lirr’s ship. My conscience twisted at the thought of escaping while they languished, fodder for Lirr’s schemes, but I knew there was nothing we could do for them now.
This was our moment. We had to go. “Yes!” I said. “No, but yes!”
Anne paused, and for an instant, she simply looked atme—trulylooked, seeing, sensing, taking me in. Her urgency ebbed in place of unspoken things, then a bleak smile slashed across her face. “Then swim, girl. I’ll be right beside you.”
I gathered every scrap of my courage and grinned back, sudden and strange and a little bit savage.
I joined my mother in front of the portal. Dark water raged, the ship rolled, and my mother’s hand pressed into the small of my back.
Before she could push me, I jumped. There was no fall, no screaming drop into the waves. The ship rolled and the water was already there. It swallowed me whole.
I didn’t gasp, even though my lungs should have seized. I didn’t panic, though the cold was bitter and blinding, and I knew this act was beyond suicidal. I slipped silently into the water and kicked out, fighting the weight of my clothing. My mother dropped beside me, the waves retreated, and we made for the shore.
We shouldn’t have made it, but the sea itself came to our aid. One swell after another bore us along until the last rushed us onto a shelf of ice. It deposited us like half-drowned flotsam on an arctic shore.
I grabbed my mother’s hand. She stumbled to her feet, and together we ran.
Ice, cracked and piled like scales. Snow, lashing my face. Eyelashes, frozen. Muscles, seizing. Another crashing wave chased our boots as we hit the body of the island and stumbled into the shelter of a boulder. Curling, horizontal icicles grew from the leeward rim like claws, but we found reprieve in their embrace.
“We did it!” I grabbed my mother’s arm, gasping and laughing all at once. Stray hair froze to my throat and my hands burned with the cold, but I felt wildly alive. “You’re mad!”
“Just desperate, and lucky,” Anne replied, holding my shoulders in return. Her face was pale and her grin was raw, and the axe over her right shoulder glistened with fresh ice. “This island stretches north, out of the Stormwall. We’ll hunker down there and wait for Elijah.”
Elijah? “You mean Demery?” I shouted over the wind. “How would he find us?”
“He will.” Anne looked away for a long moment, breathing deeply, then pushed herself to her feet and started off, as if following an instinctual compass.
“What about Lirr?” I followed her. “He can still track us.”
“He won’t think to look for us for some time. And with any luckNamelesswill sink. Even if it doesn’t, I’ve a place to hide us. You.”
“Where?”
“The same place I hid you all your life,” my mother replied. “A Ghistwold.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
The Second Sun
MARY
The first shelter we came across was a wrecked ship, lying on its side like a child’s discarded toy. Its horizontal masts reached towards us through the storm, shredded pennants of sail snapping and ice-laden lines singing eerily in the wind.
