Page 112 of Dark Water Daughter

I heard my voice say, “I see a peninsula up ahead with calmer waters on herlee—getus there before this mast sinks us. Mr. Keo, get below and bring me a report. Bring me Ms. Skarrow too, if you can. Ms. Fitz! That longboat is still intact? Find and pull whoever you can from the water. If Captain Fisher is alive, we will recover her.”

The Spirit in Her Bones

The Girl from the Wold can no longer stay awake. The ship rocks and the wind howls, but she slips away. Her mother’s songs play at the edges of hermind—boldand demanding, assured in her control of the Stormwall’s ceaseless rage.

Aman—aghisting—appears.She does not need light to see him, softly glowing as he is. Nor need she open her eyes. He passes through the wood of the wall and watches her sleep, wisps of him still licking at the wood at his back.

Tane?he asks.He is not listening. He does not know I am here.

I will not do it, Hoten. The voice is not the girl’s, but it comes from her.

Hoten’s voice hardens.You must see it now! You see what we can be, what we can do.

Her response is calloused, imperious.What I see is a weak, wayward son.

Hoten’s form flickers and billows larger.I did this for our kind. What have you done? You left them to sleep until their roots turn to dust. Trapped forever.

Better they sleep than to become like you.

Hoten approaches the hammock, putting out one hand to stop its swaying. The girl feels the hand distantly through canvas, blankets, and the fog of slumber.

I will awaken them, Hoten vows, his voice low and deadly.Whether or not you’re willing to help. I’ll burn your vessel and water your tree with her blood until you wake.

I would wake and destroy you, she that is not the girl responds.

Hoten leans in, so close that his breath would pass across the girl’s lips, if he had lungs.

Then do it, Mother.

***

THIRTY-SEVEN

The Crossing

MARY

Iawoke to the muffled roar of the Stormwall. Threads of dreams chased me and I’d no will to get up, so I lay in my swinging hammock for a long while, battling stray emotions and reliving my conversation with Lirr and my mother.

Ghistings, within human beings? That was unheard of. This wasn’t even the realm of folklore or raving old men. Everyone knew ghistings were bound to wood or nothing at all.

But Hoten had appeared from Lirr, not the wood of the ship. Harpy had called me Tane. Ghistings spoke to me and I felt drawn to them.

My mind produced a dozen memories of strange, inexplicable experiences I’d had since leaving the Wold. They unsettled me, making me doubt myself all over again. I’d leapt off Lirr’s ship, but hadn’t drowned. I’d found Demery instead, rescued by a ghisting. The way visions that had passed between me and the tree in Tithe, my incident in the bath, and how Demery’s conversation with Harpy had refused to root in my mind, as if someone covered my ears.

“Tane?” I whispered to the raging, roiling dark, dreading that I might receive an answer.

There was no response.

Hours passed. The weather worsened again, the lull that had allowed me to sleep long past. I’d no light to see by as I sat braced in a corner of my little cabin, my hammock swinging wildly and the contents of my stomach long strewn across the floor. But it was too cold to smell the bile.

Suddenly, the door opened. My mother barreled inside and clicked the barrier shut behind her, a swinging lantern in hand. Her gaze was as grim and haunted as ever, but so full of determination that my heart slammed in hope.

“We’re getting off this fucking ship,” my mother said. My eyes dropped to her side, where she shifted an enormous woodsman’s axe into two, shaking hands. “Back away from the gunport.”

I fumbled around to the other side of the room. My blanket-laden hammock smacked me in the head but I hardly cared.

“Youwerepretending,” I breathed, trying not to cry, trying to be dignified. I was a grown woman, not a red-eyed child, crying for her mother to come home.