Page 130 of Dark Water Daughter

The morgories shrieked. The sound clawed at me like a physical force. I felt a shapeless sound tear from my throat.

In my ears, I heard a boy’s shrill, sobbing scream. But I was not screaming. I was roaring, a furious, final bellow of horror and rage and a hundred other fragmented emotions.

The morgories fled. I was left standing on my root island, spine to the birch, as the creatures scattered into the Dark Water. Dragonflies escaped too, and I stood alone for a ragged, panting instant.

Passages from the Mereish book of ghistlore flickered through my head. I had devoured as much as I could of the tome in the final hours before the battle, and now my mind tried to etch out the significance to what I had just done. But my blood was too high to think clearly.

Somewhere distant, my fingers closed around the coin. I snapped back into my limbs to find someone trying to haul me upright beneath a sleeping, winter birch. Snow melted on my skin and filled every crevice of my clothing, susurrating into my eyes.

I blinked like a man reborn. Beyond my companion, the canopy of the Wold had thinned. The edge was in sight. I was back, I was alive, and we were almost to the shore.

“Sir!” Penn saw my eyes open and staggered back. “Thought I’d lost you! Are you injured? Got to move, now, sir, now!”

My breath hitched in my throat and emerged as a chaotic laugh. I sounded like Ben, but I did not care. The monsters had fled from me. I had fallen into the Dark Water, the worst had happened, and I had emerged unscathed.

Penn’s eyes rounded in unease. “Boss?”

“Run, Mr. Penn!” I shouted, finding my feet. Gunshots cracked in the frigid dusk but I felt immortal, my muscles fluid, my blood hot and my will like iron. The pain in my arm was nothing, a mere flicker on the edge of my consciousness.

Together, we ran until a ship’s lanterns glistened in the gloom.Harpy. Ahead of us, the rest of our crew burst out of the Wold onto the open shoreline.

More cannons boomed. I had half a heartbeat to see their muzzles flash, half to realize they were firingat us, then shrapnel blasted the beach. My elation flickered, burned, and turned to ash on my tongue.

Men and women fell. Penn screamed and buckled into me, just in time to save us from certain death. We hit the ground in the shelter of a huge ghisten yew as bullets and shards of metal peppered into the other side.

I landed on my wounded arm. Pain burned all the way into my skull and I gasped a breathless curse. The last of my elation fled, boiling down to a hard, cleanfocus—anda bright, searing pain.

“Saint, what is this?” Penn cried, half growl of agony, half terrified plea. “Why’s she firin’ on us?”

Something was horribly, terribly wrong. I forced myself to move past the pain and peered out from under the branches.

The long guns were quiet now, but the twilight was not. Men and women screamed all down the shoreline, dying and bloodied and broken. The lanterns I had seen still floated on the water, but they were too high, and too far apart forHarpy’s.

There, in the spot where Demery’s ship should have been, was Lirr’s great warship.

We had run right into our own trap. How had they known? How had they taken control so quickly?

“Guns down and hands up.”

I looked up the barrel of a musket. Blood thudded in my ears as I stared up into a pirate’s face, and raised my hands in surrender.

FORTY-FOUR

Lirr’s Rat

MARY

The forest around the larch filled with Lirr’s pirates, shadows coalescing into men and women, guns and machetes. There was no sign of Lirr himself, but fear made me want to claw out of my own skin. I battled it, standing beside my mother as pirates formed a half-circle around our fire, and I was proud when my hands did not shake. I was both terrified and in control.

“Surrender now, Fleetbreaker,” someone called. “Cap’n wants you two alive, but he don’t need you whole.”

I raised a hand in signal, and muskets cracked from the treetops. Pirates dropped and staggered, crying out and cursing. Others scattered for shelter, throwing themselves behind ghisten trees or the hulls of wrecked ships. One even fled for Tane’s larch, scrambling up her rocky perch before a shot picked him off. He hit the ground with a sickening crack.

But half a dozen pirates still charged. They rounded the fire and threw themselves at my mother and I with reckless, howling determination.

I held steady until the pirates were within four paces, chin lowered, pulse fluttering. Then I reached beneath my layers of clothes.

Four pistols leveled at the oncomingthreat—twoin my mother’s hands, two in mine. We fired in unison. The pistols bucked, muzzles flashed, and three pirates went down.

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