Page 10 of Dark Water Daughter

The Stormsinger stared at him in abject horror. I felt much the same.

Kaspin chuckled. His cheeks warmed now, greed and glee glinting in his eyes. “Well, well. Demery? Rosser? Any final offers?”

Demery emptied his cup and set it down with a hollow thunk. His expression was contained, but there was a glimmer of murder in the way he looked at Randalf. “No, sir.”

My dreamer’s sense roared, and this time there was no stopping it. It buffeted and pulled at me, threatening to drag me out of the room entirely and into that Otherplace—theone where dreams walked, ghisten spirits ruled, and my soul was irreparably tethered.

I saw the Stormsinger’s face in a winter wold of ice and snow, windburned and desperate. Then she was not one, buttwo—herliving, breathing human image mirrored in spectral shadow.

I grasped the worn coin in my pocket so tightly that my palm nearly split and the embossing on its face, three serpents biting one another’s tails, stamped into my skin. The roar dampened to a hushed moan, then faded altogether.

Relief coursed through me, though it was a sour thing. I had just glimpsed the Stormsinger’s future, and whatever it meant, I could not change it.

“Any more offers?” Kaspin prompted again, looking to me. When no one spoke, he leaned over to top up Randalf’s cup with a soft clink and a stream of amber liquor. The deal was done.

I stood up with a scrape of my chair and started for the door, ripping my eyes off the Stormsinger. I had lost her, and that bothered me more than anticipated. Empathy, guilt, and a touch of longing coiled through my chest. But none of it mattered. I could not change what happened in this room, any more than I could change my own past.

“Mr. Rosser,” Kaspin called, “I do have other assets which might interest your captain. Perhaps you would stay and take a drink with me?”

“I will be going,” I replied with a tight smile. My eyes alighted one last time on James Demery, who watched me with an inscrutable expression, and my dreamer’s sense coiled again. I ignored it. “Good day to you all.”

With that, I left. And I did not look back.

The Girl from the Wold

The girl from the village between the Wold and the slate hills knows that the ghisten trees have souls. She has grown up in their shade, and sees them for more than their twisted, gnarled trunks and spreading canopies, which refuse to bow to the seasons as normal wolds do. She has marked the way their shadows sometimes stretch from unseen suns, and how, every so often, their leaves stir without wind.

The girl’s summers, short though they are on the edge of the Winter Sea, are full of birdsong and bare feet in moss. Long winters bring the hush and creak of snow-laden boughs, the burble of buried streams, and here and there the rustle of leaves from a rebellious ghisten birch, green in defiance of the cold. She breaks the ice and drinks from those hidden streams, nourished by the same water that nourishes the forest, and eats the berries that grow between twisted roots. She belongs in the Wold.

And when she puts her small palm to the trunk of the yew, behind the inn where her family lives, she thinks she can hear a whisper. The tree has a soul, she knows, a soul drawn up through the dirt and clay and stone. It is a soul from another world, with other suns and seasons. A soul now housed within oak and elm and yew.

That soul is called a ghisting.

***

FOUR

The Company of Smugglers

MARY

After a fortnight locked in a room, being in the company of Kaspin, Speck, and their guests had tattered my nerves.

My only forays consisted of two ill-fated escapes. One ended in Speck tripping me before I reached the stairs, then carrying me back to my room like a screeching child. The other ended in a lush parlor, where, distracted by a gaudy portrait of Kaspin over the fireplace, I hadn’t managed to pry open the frozen window before the inn wife strode in and punched me in the stomach.

Finally, as I sat at Kaspin’s meeting, gagged and beset by appraising gazes, tension spread across my shoulders like cracks in ice.

I tried to ignore the men. It did not matter who they were or what they said. It didn’t matter that the one called Randalf struck me as slimy and despicable, that James Elijah Demery seemed oddly familiar, or that the young pirate hunter looked at me with what might have been sympathy. I did not have a choice in who took me, and they would all bring their own kind of hell.

Randalf came to fetch me that night with an escort of a dozen toughs. He set a chest down at Kaspin’s feet with a thud and opened it to reveal more solems than I’d seen in my life.

Meanwhile, Speck wrapped a cloak around my shoulders and patted me on thecheek—orrather, on the Stormsinger’s mask, which was still locked over my jaw.

“Mayhap we’ll see one another again, dove,” Speck murmured as he pulled the hood over my head, casting my face into shadow. “Don’t miss me too much.”

I kicked his shin.

“Bitch!” He hopped backwards, but before he could retaliate, Randalf tugged me out into the winter night. I flashed Speck a smug, slit-eyed look as I went, but there was no heart to it.