Page 2 of Dark Water Daughter

“I doubt we’ll be standing before the Saint,” I murmured. I pressed my bound fists to my stays, trying to hold my watery stomach in place. Could he hear my heart pounding? I was sure he could. “I’d think this hatch would drop us straight to Hell.”

“Speak foryourself…”He left the sentence open-ended, waiting for my name. “Elizabeth?”

“Mary,” I admitted, though I was not sure why I bothered. I glanced at the justice, who was now reading an extensive prayer for mercy upon the damned.

I realized the justice had not named the man at my side, nor listed his crimes.

“Good day to you, Mary,” my companion said pleasantly, as if we were at a dinner party. “I am Charles.”

“Good day to you, Charles.” I laughed a little, a hysterical sound that was more of a choke. I blinked hard. The world felt less and less real with each passing moment. The wind was socold—myskin pinched and muscles clenched. The other prisoners were so quiet, their despondent eyes fixed on my face.

Surely this was a dream. Surely there wasn’t a noose around my neck, or a black-coated figure waiting next to the gallows with his hand on a long, iron lever.

My eyes dragged down to the hatch beneath my battered boots and Charles’s buckled shoes.

“Mary,” Charles repeated, hesitantly this time. Looking up, I saw his knuckles were white and knotted together in the buttons of his coat. The only other part of his skin I could see was a thin strip between bag, noose and cravat, which was flushed red with cold and anxiety. “Couldyou…causea distraction?”

Suddenly terrified the guards would notice us conversing, I stared over the courtyard.

“Pardon me?” I hissed.

“I’vesome…smalldetails of an escape plan. But I’m short a distraction,” Charles informed me, his voice still pleasant, if tight. “You see, I’ve a great deal of debt, to a great many individuals in this city, including several soldiers at this fort, all of whom will lose money if I die today. Hence the bag to dispose of me anonymously. Still, word has gotten out and the soldiers have agreed to open the riverside gate if I can get myself there. I will bring you along, if you can cause a distraction.”

The wind tugged strands of brown hair into my eyelashes. I drank it in, letting it open my lungs with a sparkof…wasthat hope? No, hope had no place here.

Regardless, the wind and the spark began to form something I hadn’t let myself feel since that day under the yew when I was a child. It was arresting and reckless, visceral and instinctual.

Sorcery.

“I can,” I said, a little hoarsely. “But why would you take me with you?”

“Because you are not Abetha Bonning, notorious highwaywoman, murderess, and mistress of Lady Adale Debeaux. And, criminal I may be, but I cannot abide you dying in her place.” Charles spoke faster now, racing the justice to the end of his prayer. “So, if you could please scream and confess to be quick with child, I would be greatly indebted.”

Declaring that I was pregnant might provide a distraction and even gain me a temporary stay of execution, but the wind was inside me now, and I could do much better than that. It meant breaking my promise to my mother, risking a fate supposedly worse than the noose. But the will to live burned hot in my chest.

“Then make yourself ready.” I filled my lungs, right down to the bowl of my belly, and began to sing. “With her pistols loaded she went aboard. And by her side hung a glittering sword.”

The wind whisked the justice’s papers into a suddenly stormy sky. Grey clouds billowed like an underground spring, layering and darkening with each passing second. The wind turned arctic and the prisoners scattered with startled cries, while the justice clutched his hat to his head and shouted at the stunned guards around the yard.

I barely heard Charles choke, “You’re a bloody damnStorm—”

I kept singing, “In her belt two daggers: well armed for war.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the redcoat on the wall point his musket atme—justas he was joined by half a dozen other soldiers, their double-breasted uniforms blotches of scarlet against the darkening sky.

A warning bell began to ring, but I barely heard it. The frigid wind rocked me, snapping my skirts and tearing my hair loose from its knot. “From her throat a soulless cry, ‘But by my voice you all shall die, but by my voice you all shall die.’”

Sleet hit with hurricane force, battering my face and turning to snow. Darkness came with it, thick and eerie, but I grinned a wild grin. This was power. This was what I’d been denied all these years, rushing across my skin and turning my thoughts clean and sharp.

All too soon the wind stole my breath and my song died, but it didn’t matter now. The storm was here, and it raged.

A voice shouted in my ear, “With me!”

Charles. Right, it was time to run.

My hands were still bound but I grabbed the noose, jerked it over my head, and seized Charles’s arm. We stumbled together towards the edge of the gallows, hunkering against the rain and potential musket balls. He leapt to the muddy ground, then hishands—miraculouslyfree—wereat my waist. I jumped.

My feet crunched into freezing mud and we bolted. Other bodies shoved past us, faceless in the chaos, but I clasped Charles’s hand in mine. I would not be left behind.

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