Page 108 of Dark Water Daughter

I staggered back, covering my mouth to stop from vomiting. My mother continued to stare out of the window, unaffected.

Then there was too much blood for screams. Randalf choked. The knife cut deeper as he shuddered but Lirr still held it in place with a remorseless, steady hand. I felt his Magni sorcery then, reaching towards the prisoner.

Randalf quietened. He raked in thin, wheezing breaths through his nose. Blood ran over his lips, chin, throat and clothes in a steady, scarlet trail, but he did not move again. His eyelids fluttered closed in dazed, ensorcelled contentedness.

“The most common way to free a ghisting is to destroy the wood in which it lives,” Lirr told me, knife still held, Randalf still bleeding. “By fire, or great lengths of time. Most people know this. Once its wooden flesh is gone, the ghisting is set adrift, eventually to return to the Other.”

Lirr’s eyes ran to the wall and its array of broken figureheads. “But some do not wish to return to the Other. Some want more of this mortal world, of flesh and blood and desire. The strongest and most determined can even leave their wooden flesh before it’s consumed, and pass on into other hosts, with help. These pieces here on the wall, they’re remains of several such ghistings.”

My skin crawled and my mind inched closer to understanding, but I walled it out. No. He couldn’tmean…

Lirr continued, “The Mereish know more of these things, but the Aeadine? Our ignorance is both willful and pitiable, but I will change that. Mary, have you heard of theghiseau?”

I recalled the Mereish pirate captain, throwing the word at me when Demery took her ship.

“I’ve heard the word,” I said.

“Do you remember what it means?”

“No.” I fought not to watch as Randalf had entered another choking fit, eyes still sagging with bewitched calm, but Lirr appeared unbothered. “Ghisting?”

“It’s what the Mereish call the High Captains of their fleets,” Lirr replied. “The ones whose flesh and blood are bound with a ghisting. The ones who share their bones.” With this, he pulled the bloody knife from Randalf’s mouth and used it to point to Lewis and his other crewmen. Randalf sagged forward, vomiting blood.

“And that is the blessing I give to those who please me,” Lirr continued. He toed Randalf with a boot and frowned, his displeasure clear. “Whether or not they value such a gift. But thisone…he’sgone too far, even for my mercy.”

Lirr’s words were as unsettling, just as horrific, as the sight and smell of the blood. There was no lie in his eyes, nor those of his crew.

Lirr believed it. They believed it.

They believed they’d been bonded with ghistings.

I glanced at my mother. She still stared out the window, humming, but her fingers dug into her upper arms like claws.

“You’resaying…”I struggled, forcing myself to look back at Lirr and his dripping knife. Blood clung to his fingers, pooling around his fingernails and in the creases of his knuckles. “That ghistings can inhabit human beings? Thatyou…dothis to people?”

Lirr smiled, but it wasn’t a malevolent thing. He took a step closer to me, reaching to cup my neck in one, warm hand.

I didn’t let myself flinch, even though my insides screamed to strike out and run.

“Yes,” he said gently. “I do. My most favored crewmembers areghiseaualready, though the bulk of them have yet to be bonded. They wait for the great treasure beyond the Stormwall. But you’ll remember all of that, I’m sure. Won’t you, Tane?”

He was callingmeTane. My eyes filled with his, deep and full and rimmed with grey, and the scent of him surrounded me: cold, salt, musky soap and smoke.

“Who is Tane?” I whispered, though somewhere deep inside me, I already knew the answer.

In the center of the cabin, Randalf vomited on the deck a second time.

Irritation passed through Lirr’s eyes. He shifted his grip on the knife and moved back to the prisoner.

“Get him on his feet.”

The pirates complied. With perfunctory ceremony, Lirr pressed his knife low into the man’s gut. “You were offered greatness, and you rejected it,” he said, then drove the knife in. “Think upon that as you die.”

Randalf didn’t scream. Maybe that was Lirr’s magic at work. Maybe he was too shocked. He only rasped bloodily as Lirr’s crew dragged him from the cabin. Puddles and a smear of scarlet remained on the deck, pungent and cooling.

“Send someone to clean this up when I’m through with Ms. Firth. And tie this fool to the mast, as he tied her,” Lirr told Lewis before the former smuggler closed the door. His eyes slipped back to me, adding as if his words were a gift, “Let him suffer as she did.”

As much as I hated Randalf, I trembled with the violence of it all. But my question to him remained unanswered.