Page 107 of Dark Water Daughter

The other was my mother. She stood before the windows. The light filtering through the foggy glass was pale, pastel and cool on her skin apart from a shaft of pure arctic light that cut across her face through an open pane. It bleached the darkness of her eyelashes and softened the lines around her eyes. She looked almost ethereal then: the sorceress. The Fleetbreaker.

Her eyes fell on me but she didn’t move, arms laced loosely under her breasts and heavy coat open to show her worn bodice.

It’s an act, I reminded myself, but her lack of emotion was a fist in my gut, and Randalf’s impending punishment did little to soothe me. I drew the same blankness she wore over myself and stood off to the side.

“I offered you mercy.” Lirr stood in front of his prisoner. He, too, had cleaned up since our departure from Hesten and now wore a fresh shirt, tucked into breeches. His coat and waistcoat lay over a chair and his brown hair was bound into a short braid at the nape of his neck. “I fed and kept you. This rebellion, Captain Randalf, it does not befit one with your grand destiny.”

“Destiny?” Randalf choked. “Destiny! To be butchered? Dragged off like the others? I heard their screams, you bastard, there’s nomercyhere. What did you do with them? Eat them? Sacrifice them?” Randalf’s voice rose into a shriek at the last words, hitching and tumbling into hysterics. “I heard them, I heard them! What did you do?”

My skin prickled in foreboding. Lips sealed and heart thumping, I glanced from Lirr to my mother, searching for any clue as to what Randalf meant.

I saw little concern in my mother’s face. Only regret, and a distant preoccupation. We might as well have been somewhere else, her and I, somewhere devoid of pirates and Randalf and his looming death.

Because death, I was sure, was where this encounter would end. There was a predatory calm about Lirr, combined with a flippancy that told me how little he cared for Randalf’s life. The man’s supposed destiny, though? That riled our captor.

“You heard this young man’s screams, perhaps?” Lirr gestured to one of the half-dozen pirates still present in the room, and they came forward.

The pirate was none other than the young sailor who’d taunted and fed me back on the deck of Randalf’s ship, with his blond hair and lean smile.

He didn’t look like a prisoner. His cheeks were flushed with health and his expression was easy as he observed his former captain. He was a pirate now, armed and arrayed as well as anyone else in Lirr’s crew.

But I sensed more than that, as I looked at him, and somewhere in the back of my mind a key slipped into a hidden lock. I blinked, andsomething…changed.Was the young man’s outline blurred, or was it a trick of my eyes?

My other senses shifted too. If I hadn’t known better, I would have said I felt the presence of a ghisting, here in the cabin. Was Lirr’s ship ghisting here, hazing the air around Randalf’s former crewman?

I searched the cabin for other hints of the spectral creature. But though my sense of the creature grew stronger, I didn’t see it, and when I looked back at the crewman, the haze was gone.

“Lewis!” Randalf gaped at the younger man, until his surprise transformed into rage. “You traitorous little shit, youfilthy—”

“I’m no traitor,” the sailor replied to Randalf, though his eyes were on Lirr. His speech was different from when I’d met him, I realized, his tone and diction subtly altered. “Captain, may I show him?”

At a nod from his new captain, the young man began to remove his outer clothes. His scarf came first, then he unbuttoned his coat and the front of his shirt. He settled his shoulders back and pulled the collar wide, revealing a scar on his chest. Right over hisheart—aknot of opalescent, ruined flesh, pale as the moon.

My eyes flew to my mother. I remembered a dozen nights in a millpond, learning to swim. I remembered the very same scar, over her own heart.

Anne Firth turned back to the windows and began to sing, gentle and low. I couldn’t make out her words, but the wind eased, and the tilting of the deck steadied. There was preparation in that action, and it chilled me.

“I’ve received a blessing, Captain Randalf,” Lewis told his former captain, letting the collar of his shirt fall back into place. The scar disappeared. “I wish you hadn’t sacrificed your own.”

Whatever control Randalf had managed to keep so far, shattered. He tried to battle to his feet, and though most of his words were vulgarities, I shared his disbelief.

“What is he talking about?” I asked Lirr.

“Do you see them?” Lirr pointed to the pieces of figureheads on the bulkhead. “Their husks. They once housed ghistings, Mary, but not anymore.”

I had no idea what connection this had to Lewis and Randalf, but I didn’t let my confusion show. “Ghistings are bound to their wood. How could they leave it?”

Lewis and several of the other crew turned to watch me, and a chill ran up my spine. That sense of a ghisting’s presence prickled at me again, but stronger. Diverging, perhaps. Separating.

Suspicion awoke at the back of my mind, nudging me like a thief testing locked shutters.

“Where did the ghistings go?” I asked, very carefully.

Randalf made it to his feet. “You madman, you bloody damn madf—”

Lirr’s patience with the other captain came to an end. He closed on the prisoner in a stride, grabbed his hair, and pulled a knife.

The next time Randalf screamed, Lirr shoved the knife into his mouth and held it there. Randalf’s shrieks took on a fevered pitch. Blood plumed, lips split like butter, teeth jarred, and his tongue divided.

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