Page 117 of Dark Water Daughter

The farther we went, the more portentous our surroundings became. We picked our way across bridges of ice and rounded the wrecks of ships from every nation and age of sail. I began to spy vessels with burned figureheads, and my skin crawled as I realized these were Lirr’s work, over twenty years ago.

The weather turned. The wind kicked up and the Second Sun passed behind the Stormwall, its light becoming even weaker, a coin glinting from the bottom of a darkened well.

“Why did you leave the Wold?” my mother suddenly asked, shifting her axe to her other shoulder. “Did someone in the village discover you’re a Stormsinger? Did they turn you in?”

I avoided her gaze. I’d been putting this story off, but now seemed as good a time as any. “No,no…Iwas supposed to marry. A soldier, a good man. He was sent off to war before he could find us a home and broke off the engagement. So father’s new wife sent me to Jurry, to Aunt Eliza, to find another match.”

Anne stopped walking. She blanched with anger, and the axe at her shoulder made the expression truly intimidating. The wind began to coil around us, drawing a rush of snow over the rocks beneath our feet. “He what?”

“He waited fifteen years,” I said, resolving that would be my only defense of the man. “The entire town said you were dead. The priest said you were dead.”

“I don’t care about that.” Anne gestured sharply, slapping my words aside, though her eyes were overbright. She did care, but she was trying not to show me. “I knew you’d left the Wold for somereason—Lirrwouldn’t have seen you otherwise, and we wouldn’t have left the South Isles. But your father let her send you away?Youlet her?”

“Let her?” I shoved my hood back from my forehead, as if the cold air could help me put my words together. “I didn’t have a choice. And how was I to know Lirr was hunting me? Father certainly never told me.”

Anne stared into the distance for a long moment, her breath misting before her. “He didn’t know,” she said finally. “I never told him the ghisting went to you. But I did tell him to never, ever, let you leave the Wold. That should have been enough. How did Kaspin get to you?”

I was still rankled by her implication that I’d willingly left the village, but I pushed past it. I gave a strangled, huffing laugh. “I was mistaken for a notorious highwaywoman, robbed a few travelers, was captured and sentenced to hang, then sang my way off the gallows and was sold off to Kaspin by a dandy called Charles Grant.”

The swirling wind hushed, leaving us in a bubble of stillness.

“You survived all that,” she said, “even though you’d never left that backwater village?”

I nodded, a kernel of pride blossoming in my chest. “I did.”

Abruptly she wrapped one arm around my head and kissed me, half on the forehead, half on the brim of my hat. I froze, startled and blinded by unexpected tears.

She held there for a moment, clasping me to her and simply breathing. Tension trembled through her, as if she fought an internal war, and lost it. She started to pull away.

Before she could let go, I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her close. I heard a thump as she rested the head of her axe in the snow, one hand still limp at her side. She angled her face away from mine, leaving us temple to temple, and I felt her fight a sob. I felt the conflict in her, the shuddering grimace of emotion that could no longer be ignored.

I closed my eyes, giving her as much privacy as I could without letting her go.

“I survived,” I whispered. As much as I wanted to crumble, as much as the reality of my broken mother terrified me, I managed to keep my own tears at bay. I was not a child anymore. This was her moment ofconsolation—notmine. “So did you. And we’ll survive this too.”

My mother inhaled shakily and released the breath again in a long, steady gust. Then she pulled back, cupping my cheek in one hand, and looked into my eyes. Hers were red-rimmed, her cheeks streaked with tears, but she smiled. I smiled back, small and sad.

“We will,” she vowed.

***

The nextday—orrather, when the Second Sun emerged from the Stormwall in thesoutheast—anisland came into sight. It sat at the heart of the ruined fleet, blurring the edge of the endless grey-gold sky.

I reached into my satchel and pulled out a salvaged spyglass. Then, placing its cold sight to my eye, I held my breath.

The island held a Ghistwold. A sleeping winter forest grew from and between the bodies of beached ships, rooting in their figureheads and erupting from man-made shells into leafless ash and elm, oak and birch and poplar. Some of the ships were little more than piles of snow-caked, bleached wood, while others were more recent, their hulls intact and threadbare sails snapping in the wind. The trees were huge, grown to unnatural size despite the arctic world, the lack of daylight and the impossibility of growing seasons.

As we drew closer, I began to sense the ghistings within those trees. By the time we entered their meager shade I could hear them murmuring in wordless slumber, drawing my attention here and there. But none of them spoke to me, deep in their rest.

Shadows stretched towards us across the snow at unpredictable angles, branches like claws and trunks like pillars of night. I slowed, my heart trammeling against my ribs. I’d the sense of a traveler coming home in the dead of night; a stranger in her own home, her family asleep and unaware of her presence. This ash. That elm. I knew each one distantly, intrinsically, but they were oblivious to me.

I wanted them to wake up. I wanted their leaves to unfurl and their roots to creep across the ground. I wanted to see their spirits flit through the cold light of the Second Sun and hear their voices speak.

The golden larch grew on an outcropping of rock in the center of the sleeping Wold. Thick roots reached from beneath the snow, latticing the rock and plunging into the earth below. High above, her vivid boughs were encased in ice.

“This is her tree,” my mother murmured, setting down her axe. “Tane’s tree.”

I lowered my satchel and looked up into the branches. Golden boughs drooped under a windblown sheath of ice and snow, and I felt the tree’s emptiness. There was no ghisting here.

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