Fifty My Boys

FIFTY

My Boys

SAMUEL

H ow could you let this happen?"

The door slammed behind me, rattling the glass in the window and causing the wood in the fireplace to crumble in a plume of sparks. Sparks wafted over the ornate black screen and into the candlelight that illuminated my uncle at his desk.

Admiral Rosser set his quill aside and rose. I knew that look— the guardedness and calculation. He was trying to figure out which twin I was, and I supposed that, wild-haired and enraged as I was, I must have looked more like Ben than ever.

"Control yourself," Admiral Rosser commanded. "This was out of my hands."

"‘Out of your hands'?" I repeated, advancing. "Admiral Solace overruled you?"

"Sit down, Samuel."

"Are you not equals?" I demanded, planting my palms on the desk and leaning forward. "Do you have no voice? Did you even try to defend her?"

"Sit down!" The command came so sharp and so firm, my knees bent—just a fraction. I shoved the chair away, and it toppled with a satisfying clatter.

Admiral Rosser stepped back from the desk, thumb to his temple, fingers digging into his forehead as he took a deep, calming breath. " Hart is a fine ship, Samuel. But we cannot waste a Fleetbreaker on him. Mary must sail with Solace. With any luck, they will fracture the Mereish before they are in range of our guns. This matter is larger than you or I or one witch, and duty demands sacrifice—you are the last person I should need to explain that to."

His words drilled home, angling towards the supposedly selfless, stoic convictions I had once based my life upon—and still longed to, in a withering corner of my heart. But the idea of Mary carried off without her consent, stolen into the hands of the very same people who had used her mother and lost her to pirates… that could not be borne. Least of all not when my own uncle, whom I had trusted and whom Mary had revealed Tane to, stood complicit.

"I give you my word, she will be returned to you after the action." The admiral began to round the desk, abandoning the shelter of its divide to face me. Encouraged by my silence, he continued in a lower voice, "There is no more natural feeling than the desire to protect and keep those you care for. But this is war, Sam. Your Mary could save us all, given the opportunity. So we shall give it to her."

"If she is killed—" I started but could not finish.

My uncle stepped no closer, but the hard edges of his face softened a fraction. "I can make no guarantees. But I will ensure she is freed after the battle. You have my word."

I resisted the urge to scoff. My head was aching—a warning of Hae's searching or simply a physical response, I could not tell. The Dark Water waxed and waned with every beat of my heart and the natural lights of the port outside the windows transformed into the illuminations of every ghisting, mage, and lurking monster in range.

I felt for Mary instinctively, merged with the blur of other Stormsingers' lights aboard Recompense .

Visions came, assaulting me in quick succession. I foresaw a ship with red sails, looming over me. I saw a serpentine, Otherborn beast burst from the fabric of the sky and cannon embossed with scenes from myth drifting downwards, past the trees of a submerged forest. I glimpsed death and destruction in a hundred ways, and Mary's singing voice threaded through it all.

Cool metal pressed into my hand, and I blinked, swaying. My uncle stood before me, clasping my hand around my coin. His eyes were round, the pomp and practicality of his station abandoned.

"Samuel?" he asked, patting the side of my face as a father might. For an instant he was my father, visions twisting with memory.

My father with one hand cupping my cheek, one Ben's.

Take care of one another, my boys.

My uncle released me, and the Dark Water, along with the visions, retreated.

For once, Admiral Rosser was nearly speechless. "Samuel… you need a physician."

"I need Mary," I replied, my coldness undercut by the fact that I had to steady myself on the desk. "And I must return to my ship."

"I will do all in my power to free her, after the Black Tide has waned and the threat passed," the admiral vowed, yet again. "It will be mere months, Samuel."

"Months?" I tossed back. I pushed myself upright and stepped towards the door, propelled by the need to be alone, to separate myself from the admiral and the confusion of emotions he elicited. "I will reclaim her after this battle. The Tides be damned."

I did not linger to hear my uncle's counter.

To my shock, Ben stood in the darkness of the hallway. Dark Water lapped around the heels of his boots, and his head was cocked to one side.

"You heard?" I asked as he turned on his heel and fell into step with me. I spoke low so as not to alert my uncle, the lush carpet muffling our footfalls and, distantly, at the edge of my perception, a slosh of water.

"I did," my brother returned. "Though I am surprised you are laying the blame so thoroughly on Uncle, instead of raging at Charlie and I for not being there."

"Do not tempt me," I warned. "She should have been safe, regardless."

"Then you are truly going to let this go?"

"No," I growled. "But Hart will take his place in the lines. If Recompense 's Stormsingers can stop the Mereish Fleet without a gun fired? So be it. But I doubt it will be so."

We did not speak again until we were in the cool damp of the street. The weather was shifting, though whether it was natural or not was impossible to know. Snow fell for the first time in a week, heavy and thick with moisture, already turning to sleet.

"I was promised glory when this is over, Sam," Ben prompted, evidently moved on from our previous discussion. "And a new chance at life."

"Will you settle for notoriety and a chance at life?"

Ben eyed me askance. "What would I be notorious for?"

"Hopefully valor. Possibly treason. Because I will not leave the Anchorage without Mary back aboard my ship."

Ben considered this, then shrugged and pulled off his hat, turning his face into the sleet as if it were a summer breeze. "So be it."

* * *

Bitter rain sheeted from the sky as Hart took his position in a small flotilla of privateers and pressed merchants at the far south of the Aeadine lines.

Damp clung to my clothing, hair and beard, and my oiled coat did little to stop its pervasive chill. Despite the applications of various Stormsingers, it had yet to disperse—solidifying the conclusion that it was Mereish in design. I listened to the threads of their voices on the wind, but none belonged to Mary.

The rain not only shortened our line of sight and ensured every sailor in the fleet was miserably wet, but it threatened to spoil powder—even moisture-resistant Usti gunpowder, sealed in its red wood barrels. The deck was slick. Around me, hands threw down buckets of sand, and Ms. Skarrow oversaw the preparations of the long guns, while Mr. Penn instructed our sharpshooters and Mr. Keo strode the deck. At the stern, Poverly reported to Ms. Echings, and together they ran a series of colored flags up the mizzen. We were ready.

Similar flags went up from the other ships in our company, all bright and new and yet hardly visible in the downpour. Nomad lurked nearby, black hull blurred against the rain-mottled waves. The former pirate vessel's ghisting was partially manifest, slipping over the wood of its cloaked figurehead like luminescent, indigo oil. Hart himself was in full manifest, lingering on the waves before his figurehead, just as I lingered behind it at the fore. His tines spread wide as the branches of a winter oak, impervious to the rain, and his sea-glass eyes were fixed west as he pawed the waves.

Drake , our leader, was a two-masted naval brigantine of red and gold. His namesake ghisting—a great serpent with multiple sets of shuddering wings, just like the beast I had summoned upon our escape from Ostchen—coiled around the mainmast in the same manner as his figurehead entwined the fore of the ship from keel to rails to bowsprit, which was capped with a wild-eyed draconian head full of teeth and frothed with rage. As I watched, a boy ran the length of the bowsprit and hung over the beast's gilded head. A second later, flames sparked—bright one moment, then dimmed in a plume of smoke. The boy retreated, leaving thick, dark-grey smoke to eddy from the figurehead's jaws despite the rain.

"How dramatic," Grant muttered at my side, admiration leaking through his scorn. He was fully armed with sword, pistols and musket, but hardly looked himself with his usually fine clothing abandoned in favor of a dour oil coat and neckerchief.

Across the fleet, more ghistings awoke. This was not uncommon in the face of battle, but the degree of manifestation was beyond anything I had seen. Every ship-bound ghisting was in some stage of exhibition, their shifting, spectral lights joining the illumination of ships' lanterns in the human world. A handful of Otherborn creatures, too, lurked in the sea, a scattering of blood-red huden and a distant swirl of white morgories, flocking through the deep like sparrows across a stormy sky. An impling crested the top of a great man-o'-war's mizzenmast, chased by a vaguely ursine ghisting. At will, it fizzled from the human world and back to the Other.

Other than that impling, I could hardly say which world the creatures truly resided in. I lingered perpetually on the edge now, suspended both by my curse and by the inexorable, blurring pressure of the true Black Tide. Even my talisman, resting passively against my sweaty skin, could not keep me rooted.

The Black Tide had come, and the fabric of the worlds was paper-thin, as was my grip upon the waking world.

"Ben," I said lowly.

He did not acknowledge me, though he had drawn up behind Grant and I. His power lingered around him in a perpetual cloud, crimson as bloodmist and visibly agitated, swirling in an unseen wind.

"If I should become trapped in the Other, see me to my cabin and take command," I said because, for all else that my brother was, he was a competent strategist and commander.

"Of course," Ben said, unflinching.

"And ensure Mary does not remain in the hands of the Navy."

Rain pounded on the deck and dripped off the brim of his hat. "That is no small request."

I nodded. "I am aware. Still, after all I have done for you, do this for me."

"You speak as if you are dying, Samuel. You will come back."

Grant looked at me too, unspeaking and subdued.

My voice did not waver, though my admission should have panicked me. "Perhaps."

Before the conversation could go further, a cannon fired in the distance. The Mereish, testing their range. I flicked my gaze along the front line of Aeadine ships, all massive warships with a hundred or more guns, but was much too distant to see the splash.

Another gun cracked in response, this time from the Aeadine Fleet. I saw its muzzle flash and even fancied I heard the whistle of the shot, audible over the creaks and rustles of nearly one hundred ships.

Then the singing began.