Page 40 of The Flame and the Forsaken

Horrified, she watched him lose his grip on the ropes and go rolling down the deck and slam into the side wall. “Erran?”

He didn’t respond... or move.

“Oh, no, no, no. No, no. Feck. Feck.Erran!” She tried to lock the tiller to go to him, but the next wave struck the ship, swallowing her and everything around her in a flood of bedlam. Her throat burst with seawater and she sputtered, gripping the tiller with all she had.

When she finally opened her eyes, the wave had passed, but the deck was engulfed. Water seeped down the drains, but it would overwhelm the bilge, which would need draining soon or they’d capsize.

This is why I need a crew.

But she’d hardly finished that thought when another wave slammed the ship from behind and carried her away. She flailed, scrambling to grab ontoanything, but she may as well have been sailing through air.

Mariel slammed into something hard, and it knocked the breath out of her. She heard a horrific cracking sound and saw the mast splitting in the center, the top careening right for her. She shielded her head, but a rush of current carried her away just in time for her to watch the wooden pole slam into the sea.

In breathless horror, she saw the ship’s bow list toward the water, and she realized she was watching theMistwitchlosing her battlefromthe sea.

“Erran,” she yelped, but there was no sign of him. He was probably dead, like she would soon be. If she’d been better prepared, if she’d understood this Eastern Shelf, if she’d?—

Her world was muffled by another swell that pulled her under. She stopped fighting. It was only making it worse. She was losing the battle either way, but if she conserved her energy?—

An explosion of light engulfed her eyes when a dazzling pain struck her dead in the chest. Her arms wrapped around a thick plank from the ship and she held tight to it, wheezing fractured, gulping breaths that were half air and half water, praying to Guardians she didn’t quite believe in, as the sea issued its eternal reminder that it answered to no one.

Chapter7

You and Violence

Brilliant, dazzling beams of light danced off the world, reflecting a thousand tiny rays of magic. Mariel was in another realm, a place where fear and starvation and inequity weren’t even words another would recognize, where there was only joy and plenty in endless array.

Mariel laughed, because it was what her heart told her to do. But after, the most unsettling sensation followed, a cloying mouthful of foamy, salty nightmares.

She turned her head and the beauty disappeared. The light turned blinding, obscuring her sense of bearing. An ebbing roar brought her back toward her new, shifting reality, a hint of truth. Warm, wet sand gritted against her cheek... her thigh. Her feet slid through it as she tried to sit and make sense of how fast and completely everything around her had changed.

Her doubling vision made her to swoon into the suction of the sand. Water tugged at her toes and ankles, and she slid in the direction it beckoned. A great pain in her chest made itself known and then other, smaller pains followed as both body and mind awoke to what was real.

Mariel propped herself up with one hand. Her eyes scanned the horizon. To her right was a lush, hilly area, entirely foreign and strangely enticing. She wanted to go there, to climb up into the many shades of emerald and lose herself to the purity of nature.

To her left was a stretch of endless coastline and?—

A ship.

Her ship.

TheMistwitch.

Mariel went to stand, but her knees buckled, sending her skittering sideways until she recovered her equilibrium. Her stare was fixed on theMistwitch, on a slowly forming story she wished desperately she could erase and write again.

The ship appeared mostly intact, but the bow was almost entirely submerged in the sea, lifting the stern like a whale’s tail. The mast was cracked down the center, the top sail drooping alongside the bottom one.

Like a punch to the gut, she remembered everything. The dramatic cliff diving escape. The sudden wave. The capsize. Losing Eran somewhere in the melee.

She whipped her head around in search of him, but all it did was send her head into a swimming mess. She hobbled down the beach in the direction of the ship, her heart plummeting with every step. He’d been unconscious when the wave had swallowed them, and even in her state of disarray, she knew what that meant.

“Erran!” she screamed, but only a raspy squeal emerged. She cleared her throat, thrust her arms at her sides to project her voice above the sea, and called for him again. The defeat in her voice eclipsed any hope she’d clung to. If he was dead, it was her fault. “Erran!”

The effort was exhausting. She closed her eyes and worked her breaths into something manageable, and tried once more. “ERRANDIL, IF YOU DON’T FECKIN’ ANSWER ME, I’LL KILL YOU MYSELF!”

All around her, pieces of wreckage drifted in and then out with the ebb tide: planks, pieces of rope, and an axe. A sob formed in her throat, and her hands flew to her neck to trap it there, because she couldn’t afford any lapse, however transitory, when she was in the greatest danger of her life.

No one was coming. No one knew where she was.Shedidn’t even know where she was.

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