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Hallways. Doors. Soldiers waving us in the right direction. Cold blasted my face, my lungs burned and we burst out of the palace gates onto the Boulevard of the Divine. People stared as we made for the broad sweep of the canal and the bridge to the Knocks, feet pounding, clothing fluttering.
The streets were packed with revelers, lit by lanterns and braziers as the city celebrated. Light spilled from taverns and brothels, fire dancers leapt through the streets, and musicians played raucous tunes as we traversed the Knocks and diverted onto a road heading north. Eventually the celebrants filtered away, and we sprinted across a bridge into the military quarter.
Just as the masts of the harbor came into sight, Samuel tugged me left.
“What? What is it?” I whisper-shouted, trying to find my feet in an alleyway entirely sheeted with ice. Instead, I slipped and smashed my knee off the slick cobblestones.
Samuel’s response was a ragged curse. His boots slid, legs locked, and for a rambling heartbeat it looked like he’d found his balance. Then his long legs shuddered like a newborn colt’s and he hit the ice.
“Samuel!” I scrambled for the nearest snowbank, finding footing in snow so cold it squeaked beneath my boots. I’d barely noticed the temperature in our flight, but the night was freezing and I only wore my gown. My cloak remained at the palace. “What are you doing?”
“If we go that way, they are going to catch us.” Rosser staggered upright in the opposite snowbank, one hand on the wall, the other reaching to me. There was a brightness to his eyes, an intensity that demanded my attention. “Lirr is going to cut us off at the gate out of the city.”
“How do you know that?” I gaped at him. “I thought you injured him!”
“I did, but he is moving again,” he said, his own shock and unease at the statement clear in his face. He snatched my hand across the ice. “I am a Sooth, Mary. I know where you can hide. You are no use to your mother captured.”
Shouts and pounding footsteps filled the quayside, reverberating off stone and ice and wood and water. Samuel was a Sooth? A Sooth and a Magni, twins? No wonder Samuel had spoken so knowledgeably about Lirr’s abilities.
Implications pestered me, but there was no time for them. “I have to try to get to her,” I protested. “There must be another way.”
“There will be,” he said, and it sounded like a vow. “Once you are safe.”
Footfalls came closer. Regret coursed through me, but he was right.
I slapped my hand into his and we fled as fast as our staggering and slipping would allow.
An alleyway. A yawning, open gate. We flickered through patches of arctic shadow and wan lantern light, Rosser turning each corner as if he’d known these streets his whole life. Only once did he hesitate, coming up short against a warehouse’s huge double doors. Then he sprinted across the street, bundling me down another alley and up a flight of exterior stairs.
A bridge stretched high over the street, bracketed by buildings at either end. We flattened ourselves against the walls on our side, holding our breaths as pirates sprinted through the streets below. Usti soldiers followed them a second later, bellowing and cracking off a pair of musket shots. Pirates whooped and fired back.
Frigid wind bit at my exposed skin as we crept across the bridge and I wilted, panting, into the gloom on the other side.
“Where?” I only had breath for one word.
“The shipyards,” Rosser wheezed, nodding to where the bridge passed around the building and out of sight. Sweat sheened his face despite the bitter cold, and his cheeks, above his beard, were burned red. “Right there.”
“Why?”
“Ghistings.” He straightened, panting. “Figureheads, for the ships. They will hide you in the Other. From Sooths, at least for a time. Lirr is so close, I fear it may not work. But there is no other hope.”
Ghistings, hide me from Sooths like Lirr? Like Samuel himself? Demery had mentioned Juliette concealing me after the attack, but I hadn’t understood until now the extent and uses of that power.
We hastened along the bridge, which joined the top of a wall around the back of the building. On one side, the backs of warehouses cast the shadow of winches, pulleys and ropes. On the other side, the wall dropped down into Hesten’s vast shipyards, descending all the way to the frozen waters of the bay and the distant bulwark of ancient, sheltering stone walls.
Ships of various sizes slept in cradles, some nearly finished, others looking like the ribs of felled giants, topped with fresh snow. Masts cut up into the bruised sky, sailless and spiderwebbed with ropes. Masses of timber and other materials were stacked everywhere beneath canvas and numerous buildings lay dark, waiting for warmer days and a flood of hands and shipwrights.
But the ghistings? They were not asleep. My eyes flew towards a flutter of life, hidden behind the walls of a stone warehouse.
A gate barred our path. Rosser kicked it open and I ducked through, preceding him down a staircase to ground level. We joined a badly maintained path through waist-deep drifts of snow and were halfway across the yard before I wondered where the guards were. But there were gunshots in thestreets—theirattention wasn’t in here.
The warehouse rose above us and our path ended at a heavy door. Rosser growled, jiggling the padlock and scanning for another entrance.
I ran ahead, peering around the side of the building. A smaller door sulked in the shadows.
“There!” I pointed.
Rosser passed me, eyeing the barrier. Without further deliberation he threw his shoulder into it. The impact echoed loud in the quiet, but the door didn’t move.
