Page 104 of Dark Water Daughter

My brother’s eyes found mine, giving his last words to me alone. “Andthatwill be your legacy, my dear brother.”

THIRTY-FOUR

The Fleetbreaker

MARY

My mother’s voice guided us through snow so fine it hung suspended in the fog.Herfog. She called warm wind over the frigid, icy northern seas, and used it to shroud Lirr’s warship from sight of Hesten’s ice-crusted walls.

I raked in a shivering breath as Lirr’s ship emerged from the miasma.Nameless. The vessel was huge, a proper warship with two gun decks and a ghostly figurehead. The figure had no distinct face or form, just a human shape wrapped in windblown cloth.

I drew the cloak I’d been given tighter. The night was eerie, the ship unnerving, and Lirr close enough to touch; but within moments, I’d see my mother again. That knowledge gave me strength and frightened me and dredged up a hundred emotions in between.

Pirates dipped their oars into the water and Lirr stood to grab the bottom of a rope ladder. All the while my mother’s voice sang from above. “But where are your fields and where are your lands, and where in the world does your bridal bed stand? Where in the world does your true love lie, with whom you will live and die?”

Anne Firth waited on deck, clad in a worn brown coat over worn blue skirts, her chin buried in a scarf and her greying hair bare to the wind. The healthy, working woman’s frame I remembered was almost gone, lost to leanness. But that leanness went further than narrow limbs and stark cheekbones. Her eyes, turning towards me now, were devoid of emotion. Even despair. She was a rock in a stream, an iceberg adrift in the Winter Sea.

Her song finished, and my cold and exhaustion faded to irrelevance. It was her. My mother. The woman who had swum with me in millponds and wandered through the Ghistwold on midsummer evenings, sunlight in her hair and her hand enfolding mine. The woman who had ridden away on a rainy day, never to be seen again.

She was here, living and breathing, and looking at me as though I were a stranger on the street. My heart stuttered at the blankness in her eyes, momentarily replacing it with the reactions I hadexpected—tears,joy, grief, regret. Her crying my name, pulling me into her arms.

She did none of those things. Her eyes lingered on my damp, impractical gown and windburned cheeks, then she turned to Lirr.

“Her cabin is ready,” she said and strode away across the deck. Fog immediately obscured her.

My eyes burned as I watched the murk close between us, part of me asserting that this couldn’t be my mother. My mother loved me. My mother protected me. But this woman? She had barely seen me.

Lirr’s fingers took my upper arm and I squinted at him, battling for composure and control. I needed to brace for whatever was coming next.

“Give her time,” he said lowly. He spoke in my ear, his voice a consoling, nearly paternal rumble. “I think in her heart she’d given up on ever seeing you again. I think, perhaps, she thinks it would have been for the better.”

I swallowed tightly. “Would it have?”

The pirates began to chant, and the wood beneath my feet shuddered as the anchor started to rise. Lirr’s hand left my arm, but instead of stepping away from him, I looked into his face, waiting for my answer.

“You’re here for the good of us all,” Lirr replied. He nodded to his crew as their voices rose in time and the rattle of the anchor chain battered the fog. “You and Tane.”

Tane. The name resonated, strange and yet oddly familiar. Hadn’t Harpy said that, once?

“Tane. What is that?” The question left my lips before the way he’d used the word struck me. As if it were a name. A person.

He shifted to look directly down at me. The breadth of his shoulders and his pensive expression filled my vision, blocking off the deck and the fog and the presence of my mother, somewhere on the forecastle. His lips held the hint of a frown, and his grey eyes a mild, distant intensity.

“You remember her,” he said, as if testing the statement.

“Tane?” I clarified. The intensity of his gaze unsettled me, as did the revelation that Tane was a person. “No. Harpy said it, once.”

“Ah.” Disappointment flickered through Lirr’s face. “What else did she say?”

“Lirr.” My mother’s voice cut through the fog. My heart fluttered and we both turned, looking up at the shadow that was the Fleetbreaker. “Not now. Leave her.”

Leave her. The command in my mother’s voice shocked me as much as Lirr’s obedience. He gave me a look that promised our conversation was not over, then waved to a nearby pirate and passed me off. He climbed the forecastle stairs to Anne’s side.

My mother sang a quick line and the wind picked up. A whistle piped, sailors began to chant and haul, and several sails opened with a thunder of canvas.

My new handler tugged me towards the open grating midship. Just as the pirate and I disappeared into the companionway, the fog lightened, revealing my mother and Lirr standing on the forecastle. They were conspiratorially close, their backs to me, he leaning down to listen to whatever she had to say.

Then the shadows and lanternlight below decks cut them off, and I was in the belly of the ship, prisoner once again.

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