Fifty-Five Flotsam

FIFTY-FIVE

Flotsam

MARY

I sank at a leisurely pace, dragged down by the weight of my clothes and bracketed by increasing pressure. The drum of my heart and the rush of bubbles was all I could hear, and, though fear lanced through me, I forced myself to calm. I would not drown. My life came from another world, just like the roots of a ghisten tree.

I flexed my jaw to pop my ears and began to methodically work at the buttons of my coat, all the while blocking out my memories of the other Stormsingers, dead or alive, and the reality that Admiral Solace's flagship had fallen with the aid of her own people.

I had to get to Hart , to Sam. But first I needed to be able to move freely.

I tore off my coat, neckerchief, boots and stockings. Once the coat was free the water ceased to drag so forcefully, and I began to kick upwards in my trousers and shirt. My braid drifted around my shoulders and loose locks tickled at my face. They reminded me distantly of tentacles, and the last time I had leapt from a ship—out of the clutches of Silvanus Lirr and into the company of the kindly ghisting, Juliette.

I could see Recompense 's hull from this depth, side-by-side with the Mereish vessel who had boarded her. Debris and bodies floated everywhere in between, already bumping together in islands of grim flotsam.

Dancing orange firelight ignited the waves. And below them… I spied islands. Not just shoals hidden by the waves, but islands of the Anchorage, complete with drowning trees whose branches brushed the bellies of the ships. I saw a cottage with waving garden plants, the thatch of its roof beginning to fray and lift with the currents.

A piece of cloth drifted past—a woman's lace cap.

The Black Tide had taken the Aeadine Anchorage, and the battle had already drifted from the western sea into the eastern.

A swarm of white lights surged towards me out of the deep.

Tane!

Hold fast.

Tane manifested just as the morgories arrived. The ghisting erupted from my frame as cat-sized, vaguely equine creatures of feathered ruffs and endless teeth surrounded me in a chattering, boiling rush. I felt their cries in my bones, in my frozen lungs— jittering, rattling, a horrible combination of teeth and hunting, hungry moans.

But Tane, too, encircled me. She enveloped me in a spectral body much larger than my own, a goddess of the deep with skin like eddying smoke. She moved with me as I spun, trailing ethereal flesh, and most of the morgories retreated.

One lunged in, snapping for my face. Tane's massive head descended with equal speed. She bit at the morgory like a wolf, and in that moment her aspect was lupine, a vague suggestion of elongated head and pointed ears and snarling teeth.

The morgory twisted, but too late. Tane's ghisten teeth plunged into the other creature's flesh and it seized, then flickered out of existence. I heard—I felt —a muffled rush and the water contorted, as if suddenly being pulled through a punctured hull. Into the Other.

Then Tane retreated. The rupture between worlds closed once more, and the water stilled.

The remaining morgories vanished off through the fleet in panicked ribbons of light. I was still gaping at the place where that single, attacking morgory had been a moment before.

I didn't know you could do that .

Nor did I. But this is the Black Tide , was Tane's simple reply. She began to shrink, retreating until she outlined my body in a shallow, nearly invisible layer of pale indigo-grey light.

I thought of Sam and Ben and the pending ritual, and the apprehension that crackled through me was too strong to bear. How much time did we have? Was Hart still afloat?

I turned in the water, scanning for more murderous Otherborn creatures. Aside from a few manifest ghistings around their ships, every other had fled.

Well then , I steeled myself. Let's find Hart.

I surfaced some distance from Recompense . But sighting Hart was no easier above than below. I was in a maze of battling and burning ships. Smoke stung my eyes, and the air was full of the crack of cannons and the roar of fire and the screams of combatants, the ringing of bells and the moan of wood.

"Tane," I said aloud, itself a testament to how shaken I was. "Can you sense Hart at all?"

No, best to start swimming.

So, we swam. I passed other survivors in the water, swimming for wreckage or milling longboats. An Aeadine sailor spied me and beckoned from a boat, but to their confusion I waved them off and kept my own course.

Once, in the distance, I saw morgories swarm again. This time there was no ghisting to intercede for their intended victim, and a floundering woman shrieked as she was encircled by white light and boiling waves. To my relief—and, perhaps, hers—she was quickly consumed and vanished beneath the water.

An indistinct roar turned into the crackle of flames, the moan and whine of overheated timbers and the hiss of steam. A burning Mereish frigate emerged from the miasma, too close, too fast. Heat came with it, waves and waves of it, and I barely ducked under the water before flaming debris peppered the place where I'd been.

"Shit, shit, shit," I panted as I resurfaced, still so close my flesh threatened to sear. I was losing control of my fear, despite Tane's near indomitable ability to keep me alive. I was lost. No part of me wanted to be in this water, wanted to be swimming frantically away from burning ships and watching morgories eat people alive. "Shit!"

Cannons boomed. My teeth jarred. A length of bar shot whirled over my head and impacted with the burning frigate, taking a spar and a tangle of rigging and sail to the deck. Sparks plumed. The finer shriek of canister shot followed on its heels, and, though I could not see the carnage it wrought on the deck of the ship, I heard the pain it brought.

Then, through the chaos, I saw Hart. He charged across the waves, away from a vessel whose bowsprit was all I could see, given the jumble of ships and monsters between us. Ghisten light flared as he met the charge of another ghisting, a great bull, and the two locked in battle.

Another ship drifted between us, blocking the sparring ghistings from sight, but I knew where to go now.

I started swimming.