Page 119 of Dark Water Daughter

The Stormsinger did not scream or beg as Hoten took the shard of the Mother Tree and prepared to strike. Her chest shuddered and her hands shook, but she faced him.

Hoten stabbed the shard into her chest, and Tane’s world changed. Blood, rushing. Heart, beating. Lungs, shuddering. Tears, streaming. Then, blackness.

Sleep. Tane slept and dreamed, within the woman’s body. She slipped between the Other and the human world, unable to root on either side. There were moments of clarity, but though Tane could remember she had a purpose, she could not recall what.

Time passed. Untold, unmarked time. Then, Tane noticed another presence. It was small and fragile, a tiny light in the Other and a new, fluttering heartbeat in the human world. But it was not strong. It was fading.

A child. Tane recognized the life for what it was, and instinct pulled her towards it. She wrapped around it, strengthened and sustained it. She bound herself to that new life and soothed her.

As the girl grew within her mother’s womb, Tane awoke a little more. There were moments of blazing power, of fear and fight and storms. In those moments Tane would stir, and she and the Stormsinger broke fleets upon the water.

When the child was born, Tane went with her. The child’s mind filled her own and she grew with her, living and breathing, feeling and thinking and learning. Part of Tane remained dormant, listless and absent, but she was near a Wold, and both she and the girl found solace there.

Tane belonged among the ghisten trees, and so the girl did too. They were the Girl from the Wold.

It was not until they left the Wold that Tane began to strain against her rest. The girl needed her then, and Tane felt her fear.

Then, on a night of fire and death, Tane fully awoke, for a time. She saw Hoten again, and she knew only to flee to the water, dark and familiar. To another ghisting, with wide eyes and a fan of spectral hair. Juliette.

Sister.

Together, they found the bonded soul of one of her daughters. Harpy. Then, with the girl safely in the hands of Harpy and her host, Juliette slipped away again, and Tane slumbered once more.

Other ghistings came and went, each tugging her along the path towards permanent awareness. Tane did not force thechange—sheknew Mary could not endure the shock. So she took her time, slipping to the forefront only when Mary slept or drifted, or would have greatly suffered without her intervention.

Now, with the arctic wind on her cheeks and her own Wold before her, Tane finally, fully awoke.

***

THIRTY-NINE

Captain Fisher

SAMUEL

Harpyemerged from the Stormwall into the twilight of a foreign sunset. I watched her limp across the water through Fisher’s spyglass, retrieved from her chest in the captain’s cabin. Mine had been lost in the storm, and Fisher herself still had not been found. Nor hadDefianceemerged from that wall of death.

I could not say which absence affected me moregreatly—Fisher,or Benedict. They and the hundreds of other lives we had lost were something I could not permit myself to feel, not when I was commanding officer aboard a nearly derelictHart.

As to the dozens of other wrecked ships, scattered across the ice and rock and slow-moving channels all around us? They were another weight entirely, eerie and foreboding as tombstones in the perpetualtwilight—awarning that unless we were able to rig a new mizzenmast, we were already one of them.

Harpyslid into the shelter of our peninsula. She was battered and low in the water but intact, her deck positively crowded with pirates in the light of two lanterns. Conversation and shouts drifted to my ears across the twilit, glassy water, interspersed with creaking lines and rustling canvas.

No, they were not all pirates. The Navy’s striped trousers among themand…Benedict,Ellas and Fisher clustered on the quarterdeck.

Relief hit me like a boulder, colliding with my exhaustion and leaving me weak in the legs. I braced against the rail, battling to stay composed as they climbed into a longboat and struck out forHartwith James Demery.

My twin lived. Fisher had not died.

I was not alone.

We met in the main cabin. I drew curtains over the windows and lit a lantern, bathing the company in warm, welcome illumination.

Demery sank into a chair beside two Usti, a woman in pale blue and a man with a thick beard. Captain Ellas sat while Benedict took up station at her shoulder, straight-backed and casting me glances I had no time to interpret. He looked well, though, aside from a bruise on his cheek.

Fisher sidled up to me as our guests found their chairs. I watched her come, overtaken with the irrational urge to snatch her up and crush her to my chest. Her captain’s hat was gone and her short salt-caked black hair was a mess around her narrow, windburned face. But she was not dead.

“I thought you’d gone down,” the woman murmured. I felt her hand on my arm, light and surreptitious. “I’m glad I was wrong.”