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The main hatch was jammed, so we found a crack in the hull and crawled inside. The howl of the wind muffled and I sighed in relief, settling my feet on what had once been the outer hull.
We picked our way farther into the shadows. This wasn’t awarship—therewere goods instead of guns piled around us and I felt no ghisting in its wood. I also spied seamen’s chests, crates and bundles among the refuse, but no bodies. An unarmed merchant of this size wouldn’t have had a large crew.
“Here!” I spied the pipe of a woodstove deeper in the ship and clambered stiffly over a pile of debris.
Dimly illuminated by another crack in the hull, I tossed a crate into the shadows to reveal one of the large stoves that would have kept the crew warm, back when they were alive. Its chimney was gone and it was on an angle, but it looked otherwise intact.
Twenty minutes later, thanks to flint and tinder in one of my mother’s cannisters, warmth bathed us from the stove’s open door. Smoke drifted up and out through cracks in the hull and we strung lines to dry our outer clothing, leaving us in our shifts and breeches.
I watched my mother as we settled in, weighing my need to know more about Lirr and ghistings with the lingering shadows around her eyes. Finally, when I saw her shoulders relax slightly, I spoke up. “I need to know if what Lirr said is true. About the ghistings.”
Anne leaned forward to rest her forearms on her knees, staring into the stove. “It is.”
I rubbed at my windburned cheeks and sunk onto a crate near her. “So thisTane…isinside me?”
“Yes. But it’s not that simple.” My mother’s indecision was clear in the twist of her lips. “How much did Demery tell you of Bretton?”
“That you all sailed with him, and he had a horde of treasure beyond the Stormwall. That you killed him.”
She nodded. “That’s all true. But did he tell you that we actually made it beyond the Wall, and that our ship wrecked there?”
I shook my head.
My mother added another piece of broken wood to the fire and poked it about. Light flared across her features, turning her blue-grey eyes nearly translucent.
“The fires from our stoves spread and the ship was consumed,” she said. “It took the magazine late, giving most of us time to escape, but Lirr was caught in the explosion. He was peppered with shards,shrapnel—including,we would later discover, a shard from the figurehead, Hoten’s host. The next day Lirr’s wounds were healed and he’d changed. He was more aggressive, more driven, though we didn’t know to what end.”
I steeled myself. “Hoten had taken him?”
Anne nodded. “Lirr claimed Hoten fled the burning ship, right into his bones. Hoten himself was too weak to appear yet, but Lirr was so different, so insistent. He tried to drown himself to prove that he was no longer ‘a mere man.’ He survived, unaffected by the water.”
Drown himself. Unaffected by the water. Just like me.
“Samuel—Mr. Rosser,the piratehunter—claimedthat he mortally wounded Lirr at the palace,” I said, wetting my lips. “Can he not be killed?”
“He can, but not easily,” my mother admitted. Her upper lip twitched in a stifled sneer. “I would have put a knife in him already if it was that simple. Short of complete immolation, he and Hoten must be separate when the act is done. If Lirr is killed while Hoten is absent, Hoten willfade—notbe freed, but truly die. So they rarely stray far from one another.”
I pondered this for a quiet moment. “Am I the same, then? And Lirr’s crew?”
Anne dropped her gaze back to the fire. “Yes. Some ofthem—perhapsa quarter of thecrew—arealready bonded. Most are waiting to take on ghistings trapped beyond the Stormwall. Lirr has presented that as a great honor.” Her voice fell away for a moment and when she spoke again, her voice was softer. “I supposethis…unnaturalimmortality is a comfort to me, in a way. So long as Tane is within you, neither of you can come to harm.”
“Short of burning alive,” I pointed out.
Cavorting firelight reflected in my mother’s eyes. “Yes. If too much of the host’s body is lost, the bonded ghisting will be forced to separate, and then it will die. But Tane is powerful enough to have left her tree willingly, so it remains whole. If her hostis…lost…shewill simply be drawn back to it. Or so Lirr believes. He’s counting on it.”
A chill passed over me. I understood what that meant, in a cold, dull way, but could not look it in the eye just yet.
We sat for a silent moment, then I forced my thoughts back to my mother’s tale. “What did Bretton do? About Lirr?”
“Bretton wouldn’t believe him. Bretton was an idiot.”
“What about you?” I asked. “Lirr said Tane was in you. How did that happen?”
“We found another ship, one we could repair. There are hundreds of wrecks in and beyond the Stormwall, and many, many ghistings within them. It took weeks of salvaging and working, to make it seaworthy.” My mother worried at her ring finger as she spoke, touching the groove where a wedding ring had, until recently, left its mark. “I noticed Lirr often disappeared during that time, and the other pirates started to change, one by one. We would see fires at night, in the distance, but the crewmembers we sent to investigate always arrived too late. Someone was burning the figureheads of the wrecked ships.
“Elijah Demery and I discovered the truth together, one night, creeping out in the dark after Lirr. Lirr and Hoten had found themselves a purpose. They harvested shards from the other wrecks, then burned the figureheads. The shards became the last vestiges of the ghisting’s host, and Lirr then buried them in the hearts of Bretton’s crew while the rest of us slept. They became possessed, like him. Some willing, some not. Neither ghistings nor humans had achoice—thebinding was immediate. Demery didn’t escape it.”
“He has a ghisting,” I summarized, a little awe creeping into my voice. “Harpy?”
