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Lanterns in the Snow

MARY

The key to learning how to fight is not maiming your instructor, even if you happen to resent them for wholly valid reasons.” Grant passed me a stick roughly the length of a dagger. He kept its twin in his own hand. “So use this, please. I will ask Demery to find you something more suitable later, but fornow…Takeit. Mary?”

I grudgingly took the stick. Demery had given us the cabin for an hour to begin my lessons, but even with only Grant’s eyes to see me, I still felt absurd in trousers and a hitched-up petticoat, with loosened stays and a man’s shirt belted over the top.

“Fingers like this to start.” Grant showed me how to grip the hilt of the knife. “Yes, good.”

I slowly complied. I knew I was being petty, but it didn’t change how I felt. Every time I looked at Grant, I remembered the feel of the Stormsinger’s gag in my mouth. The madness of isolation. The helplessness of locked doors. Not knowing what fresh threat the next day would bring.

But his scarred cheeks reminded me that he hadn’t come out of that unmarred, either. His movements were a touch stiff, too, as if he’d injuries beneath his loose shirt and waistcoat.

I reined myself in and imitated his grip. “What’s next?”

An hour later, I was bored, of all things. We’d spent the entire time shifting grips and stances, over and over until I wanted to lunge at Grant, just to make him move more quickly. But my hands grew accustomed to moving about my fake dagger, and my strained muscles affirmed my need for training.

“Good,” Grant said. “Very good. Tomorrow we’ll do the same and I’ll arrange for some pistols.”

I nodded, shoving my ‘knife’ into my pocket and raking frayed hair back into its simple knot at the back of my head. “Then I’ve winds to summon.”

“AndI’ve…”Grant looked around the cabin, frowned when he saw nothing distracting. “Well, your back to watch.”

I sang Demery a rather feisty southerly and spent the rest of the day trying to keep it under control with a simple, repetitive song. We were nearly into the second turning of the Bountiful Moons now, and the rough waves and sudden squalls made it clear that, as far as weather went, I’d been spoiled aboard Randalf’s ship. The three Bitter Moons of deep winter were coming. The world would shed her sheltering leaves and cede us to a baleful wind and driving snow and ravenous sky.

Despite my bravado and promises to Demery, I wasn’t fit to face that turbulent season on the water. Yet.

The waves rose, choppy and capped with white. Snow clouds hemmed us in as the sun dipped towards an early slumber, and even the southerly wind brought a bitter, lung-cracking cold.

I turned my song to dismissing the clouds, but my throat ached. I accepted a flask of hot, honey-laced coffee from Grant, so tired that I felt only dull gratitude as I clutched it between my mittened hands and let steam tickle the fine, frozen hairs inside my nose.

“Not going well?” Grant inquired.

“No.” My eyes drifted to the rail, where Demery, Athe and Bailey conferred. The wind tore most of their words away, but the glares Bailey kept shooting me were clear enough. “From the look onhisface I’m going to get dumped on the nearest cay.”

“You brought winter down on Whallum a month early,” Grant said, mystified. His disbelief consoled me, somehow. “You are very powerful.”

“My mother forbade me to sing,” I admitted, though I immediately regretted it. Was my situation so dire that I was confiding in the highwayman? But there was no taking the admission back. “She forbade me to sing so I wouldn’t get carried off and sold by brigands.”

Grant smiled humorlessly. “Ah, you are subtle. Are you sure you were not kept quiet because of Lirr? Sooths can track Unnaturals in the Other, can they not? Perhaps never singing made you harder to find. Lirr only reappeared after you sang in Whallum.”

I frowned, perturbed by the thought. “I doubt that. Besides, I thought Sooths needed to touch a person to track them?”

Grant shrugged. “I haven’t a clue.”

Despite his dismissiveness, we were both quiet for an instant. The wind blew, hot coffee cooled on my tongue, and Demery and the others still conversed.

“Out of curiosity, where was Lirr before Whallum?” I asked.

“South Mereish Isles, they say.”

“That’s what, a month’s journey?” I eyed the horizon without really seeing it.

Grant calculated for a moment. “Give or take, depending on which island you’re coming from. Let us say an average of five weeks.”

Five weeks. Five weeks before Lirr appeared in Whallum was not when I sang at the gallows, but when I left the Wold. When my stepmother banished me from the shelter of my home and forest, and I’d stepped out into the world for the first time.

Could it be coincidence that that was precisely when Lirr would have departed the Mereish Isles? Presuming he hadn’t been somewhere else, first.