Fifty-One Tempest Sisters

FIFTY-ONE

Tempest Sisters

MARY

M y world became song and chaos and wind. My voice merged with my fellow Stormsingers', led by hard-eyed Slorach and the occasional orders of Admiral Solace. Our voices bled into numerous harmonies that urged the rain back towards the Mereish Fleet and an ever-thickening crown of slate cloud and churning wind.

As fierce as my indignation towards the Navy was, I felt a certain kind of freedom as I lilted and roared and sent my voice to the sky. A release. A revelry that made my blood surge through my veins and my lungs savor every breath of salty, livid air.

The rising of the Black Tide was intoxicating. I felt as though I were drawing close to a hearth on a cold winter's night, though rain still lashed my scalp and my damp hair clung to my throat. Power saturated me like heat seeping through frozen flesh, leaving room for one, singular goal.

To let that power free.

My voice began to slip out of concert. I closed my eyes, pulling new threads of wind to me. I tasted each one, sensing their possibilities.

Aboard the ships all around us, other Stormsingers sang their own occasionally discordant chants to the sea and sky. Many fought contrary winds and swaths of rain from the Mereish Stormsingers— first a wave of tearing squalls then familiar banks of fog, creeping across the waves before the enemy fleet. Their every sail was full of unnatural wind—and that wind, I decided, to steal from them.

The other Aeadine Stormsingers pulled a new, fresh easterly, and the Aeadine Fleet began a gentle, arcing advance towards the Mereish.

" Come as the winds come ," the women around me sang. " When forests are rended ."

" Mother, mother, oh mother of mine ," I sang in harmony, my voice softening as I drew into myself. Tane flickered across my skin like a winter chill. " Deep in forest and woodland shrine… "

Guns began to boom, but I did not flinch. My eyes were closed, but I could still see the wind and a mist of fine, twisting rain. I saw, too, the clouds boiling across the sky—the sky above both fleets now brimmed with coming wrath.

" Come as the waves come, when Navies are stranded ," my companions sang.

I felt someone take my arm. I ignored them, continuing my own song. " Our bows will hide you, our roots grow deep… "

Someone pried the hand from my arm and I heard a heated exchange. Then the space around me broadened—full of wind now, instead of bodies and voices.

I opened my eyes. The other Stormsingers had moved away, leaving me in a semi-circle with my back to the stern railing. Their eyes were on me, and, slowly, they began to echo my song.

Wind swirled between us, its strength growing with each passing moment.

" In our shelter, find your sleep ," I sang.

Behind the Stormsingers I saw the grim faces of Admiral Solace and Lieutenant Barlowe—Adler was nowhere to be seen. Beyond them stood a line of red-coated backs and primed muskets, separating us from the rest of the ship.

Beyond all of them, the space between the fleets—the black, choppy waves full of Otherworldly lights—grew ever shorter. Swaths of fog eddied, thickening with gunsmoke and muting flashes of cannons into pulses of orange and red.

" Leaf and branch and root and vine ," I fixed my gaze and will across the water, on the Mereish ships. The other Stormsingers' voices twisted with mine—amplifying my power and carrying my words far farther than they could have ever traveled alone.

" Bend no knee to the march of time… "

The rainstorm began to cede to me—to us, to our choir of power and influence. I felt its last resistance give way in a rush and swirl, and the air on my face grew suddenly warm.

Distantly, I was aware of Admiral Solace bellowing orders. The songs of my fellow Stormsingers faltered, as did the movement of our ship.

I carried on as the first cyclone touched down on the waves. Water exploded upwards in stuttering plumes as the whirlwind skimmed the surface—one plume, two, then a waterspout shot from sea to sky in a terrifying, marrow-curdling roar of water and wind. It crashed through a Mereish ship with steady indifference and plunged deeper into the fleet, drowning the sound of cracking wood and screaming sailors.

The youngest Stormsinger shrieked in horror and clapped her hands over her mouth.

Something inside me faltered then. I saw my mother's harrowed eyes as she recounted her time with the Navy, of breaking fleets upon the water and sending thousands to a watery grave. This was the future she had tried to protect me from.

Tane felt it too. She rippled under my skin and her light hazed my eyes—I knew that light was visible now. My eyes shone in the human world, just like the Otherborn creatures that combed the sea between the fleets.

Another Stormsinger gave a startled cry. Some of the soldiers turned, and Admiral Solace stared at me with an uncertain intensity that, strangely, filled me with satisfaction.

" Pay no heed to winter's chill ," I sang, though my voice was immediately swept away by the wind. I met the gazes of my fellow weather mages, urging them to maintain their song, to lend me their power. Half continued, their voices stronger than ever. " The axes of men or the blood they spill ."

Another cyclone surged up into the sky at my beckoning, then another and another. The thunder of cannons joined with the roar of wind and water, the hum of taut lines, the crash of hulls through water and the snap of sails. Across the ship, sailors whooped and cheers drifted to us from other vessels, even through the chaos.

Then we entered cannon range. Marines closed more tightly around the Stormsingers, a physical wall of flesh protecting us from marksmen, while still allowing us full view of the fleets.

I gave a breathless, hitching laugh as a fifth and sixth cyclone surged towards the sky, water chasing wind and bearing a moaning deluge of hail. The sky was my cathedral and the cyclones its pillars, surrounded by fog blooming with muzzle flashes and fire, and a bruised backdrop of indolent daylight.

Our voices began to split, harmonies twisting in a near-discordance so unsettling, so lovely, every hair on my arms stood on end.

A great warship cut between us and the Mereish Fleet—one of the Aeadine's massive first-raters, with her towering masts and a figurehead of a female warrior, her six great wings clothing the fore of the ship as Hart's tines enclosed his. The warship loosed a full broadside, and, through the billow of gunsmoke, I saw the mast of a not-so-distant Mereish frigate sway in a tangle of rigging and sail.

I pinched my eyes closed, focusing on my song alone. Tane's light still shone, though, and her awareness continued, filling me with a rush of more inhuman observations: the Otherborn beasts in the water beneath us, the mind of the Recompense 's ghisting, whispering to Tane through the wood beneath my feet. I glimpsed a purple beast with skeletal wings, sweeping over the dim reflections of ghisten ships in the Dark Water, and a dittama landing on our bowsprit.

Mary!

Tane forced my eyes open as three of the marines, their wall of red coats still barring me from the rest of the ship, turned. The first one—pretty and round-cheeked—raised her musket.

Directly at me.

I saw the conflict in her eyes for the briefest instant. But when her finger closed on the trigger, marked by a ring with an obsidian rendering of the new moon, there was nothing conflicted about it.

I threw up my arms and turned aside. The musket ball, bound for my head, tore through one hand before searing across my bicep and the side of my neck. As it passed I felt the muting power of a Mereish talisman—then it was gone, and Lieutenant Barlowe bundled me onto the deck. All I could see was her blue jacket and clamor of bodies, and all I felt was the burning, blinding pain in my open wounds.

When I could see again, horizontal and still cluttered with boots, I saw two other Stormsingers dead upon the deck. The thin woman who had tried to greet me was missing the back of her head. The other, Slorach, clutched uselessly at her back, choking through a lung full of blood. It gushed from her open lips and dripped to the deck in viscous threads.

"Get below!" Lieutenant Barlowe said in my ear. She jerked me sideways, still keeping me in the shelter of her body. "Move!"

But we were trapped at the stern. The quarterdeck had broken into melee, swords flashing and bodies roiling.

I found my feet and backed against the rail. Tane was already at work, dulling my pain enough for me to begin to navigate my thoughts.

"Ess Noti," I breathed to Barlowe, who had situated herself directly in front of me. I had no doubt of it, though the logistics, the fine details escaped me just then. Distantly, I felt my cyclones still tearing through the Mereish Fleet—extensions of myself, hounds on leads as thin as silk threads. They were straining, and I needed to regain control. "That woman, that soldier, she was wearing a ring with a new moon. The Black Tide Cult? But the musket ball was Ess Noti."

Whether Barlowe had been informed of either the Ess Noti or the Black Tide Cult's threats was unclear. She repeated, "We must get you below. As soon as I tell you to move, follow me and keep low."

"No," I replied. Fear was a distant and irrelevant thing, now separate from my body. No part of me could countenance leaving the wind, not when I had felt so much power, so much potential. Even if the Ess Noti were at work, that was not my task. "I can do more above. The Black Tide and the Ess Noti, Barlowe. What are you going to do about them?"

Barlowe signaled to two marines. They broke the line and advanced.

"Take all of the mages below," she added, gesturing more marines towards the remaining Stormsingers—Elsher and the perpetually crying girl.

The ship rocked with an explosion, and the world seemed to pause, caught on a startled breath. An Aeadine brigantine to our right, just visible through the rain and fog, shattered from the belly out. Fire burst in a blaze of orange and red, searing itself into my staring eyes. Debris shrilled in every direction—audible, if rendered ineffectual by the distance.

Barlowe's voice was slow to pry through my ears, despite the fact that she was shouting not a pace away. "Escort her below! You! Fetch me the Fourth Lieutenant. Where is the admiral?"

The marines took my arms as, out in the Mereish Fleet, one of my cyclones collapsed in a deluge of water. It crashed over a small ship and sent it rocking so fiercely sailors toppled into the sea like dolls from an overturned trunk.

We remaining Stormsingers were led away—only three of us now. We were halfway down the quarterdeck stairs when a second explosion shook the ship, this one so close everyone ducked—save me. Shards sang through the air, one skimming so close to my head that I felt the rush of wind.

Distantly, I knew I'd lost control of all my cyclones, but I was too shocked to grasp them again. Past my blood-soaked sleeve, I saw fragments of sail flutter to the waves next to another Aeadine ship—this one with almost the entirety of her forecastle blown away and bleeding fire. Frantic sailors ran up her masts as the ship yielded to the sea, her hatches spewing as much water and flotsam as men and women.

I barely had time to assess my companions—one guard scrambling to help another, who clutched a long shard in his thigh—before shots cracked across Recompense 's deck. Screams rekindled, and a nearby soldier with the red collar of a Magni collapsed in a spray of blood. A shriller shriek accompanied the stumbling form of the young girl. I'd no time to see her injuries before she was swept below decks with Elsher.

For an instant, a feeling of solitude struck me—every eye was somewhere else. I could jump ship now. Surely, I had no real loyalty to the other Stormsingers, no hope of freeing them in any lasting way. I could still fight the Mereish from Hart .

Then I remembered the power of the cyclones, the churn of all our voices in concert. How much had been Tane and I, and how much had been them?

I felt another shot strike the rail beside me and plunged below after the other Stormsingers.