Page 67 of The Sea Witch (Salt & Sorcery #1)

A sharp searing pain filled Alys as she reviewed a chart in her quarters. She clutched her chest, gasping.

“Are you ill?” Stasia demanded.

“I’ll fetch Fatima.” Luna ran for the door.

“Not illness,” Alys ground out.

Luna paused, one hand on the doorknob.

“If not illness, what?” Stasia asked urgently.

“It’s...” Alys rubbed at her heart. The pain began to recede, leaving emptiness in its place. Her soul rattled within the

cage of her body. “Ben.”

She dragged her gaze up to Stasia and Luna’s alarmed faces.

“The link we shared.” Alys drew in a sharp breath. “It’s gone.”

“He is...” Stasia cleared her throat.

“I don’t know.” Alys pushed herself upright, fighting the urge to curl in on herself. “He could be too far away for the connection

between us to hold. Maybe it shattered. Or the spell that created it simply dissolved. Spells do that. They have a lifespan.”

The navigator and quartermaster shared a skeptical look.

“He isn’t dead.” Alys’s voice rang off bulkheads. “I would know it. I’d feel it.”

“With the link between you vanished,” Stasia said carefully, “how could you know or feel?”

“Because I would,” Alys snapped. She dug her knuckles into her chest. “Forgive me, Stasia. But he can’t be dead. He just can’t.”

Stasia’s lips pressed into a slash. “It is, as you say, likely that the physical distance between you two is too great to

support the magic that connected you. Only that.”

“Yes.” Alys squeezed her eyes shut, fighting to keep steady on her feet. “Yes, that’s what it must be.”

The following morning, Alys stood on the forecastle deck, her spyglass trained on the island ahead of the Sea Witch . It was a small strip of land, only a mile across, with a thick green forest that lay just beyond the beach that ringed the

island. It seemed vaguely familiar, but then, there were countless beaches across the Caribbean that looked alike. There were

no columns of smoke from fires cooking breakfast.

“Is this what we seek?” Stasia asked beside her.

“The tides protect us if it isn’t.”

“Not especially noteworthy,” her friend said flatly, “this island.”

“But it’s where the carving knife led us.” Lowering her spyglass, Alys said, “Its insignificance gives me hope that this is

the place we’ve been pursuing. Cunning as he’s been throughout this hunt, Little George wouldn’t pick anywhere obvious to

hide his fail-safe.”

“Hua says we should be able to drop anchor within minutes.”

“We’ll gather our landing party.” Alys made her way back toward the main deck, trying to keep her thoughts on what lay ahead,

how to prepare for what awaited them on the island, and not things beyond her control. Or the possibility that Ben was no

longer alive.

If she let herself truly consider this, if she allowed herself to believe it...

She climbed down the companionway to the main deck and tried to ignore Stasia’s look of sympathy, or as close to a sympathetic

look as her friend could manage.

“He could be well,” Stasia said. “The distance, I am sure.”

Even as her friend spoke, Alys grasped for something that was surely hopeless.

She had to see Ben. She would see him. And when she did, she’d tell him... she didn’t know what, exactly, she wanted to tell him. Only that her days

had been endless and her nights lonely and that the ship was far too empty when he wasn’t aboard it. She’d stopped herself

several times from asking him to review a chart, or she poured two mugs of rum when she was alone in her quarters. But he

wasn’t there. And when she hoped to see him last night in her dreams, and he wasn’t there, either... disappointment was

a stone anchor heavy in her heart.

“Distance,” Alys echoed.

“Surely that must be it,” Stasia added.

Her friend’s willingness to humor her made slivers of icy alarm dance across her skin.

She and Stasia reached the main deck, where the crew gathered.

“I want Stasia, Susannah, Inés, Dayanna, and Thérèse in the landing party,” she announced. “Each one of you must take a brace

of pistols, a cutlass, and a dagger, minimum. We don’t know what’s waiting for us, and if anyone gets themselves killed, I’ll

personally drag them back from the afterlife, and then make them pick oakum for a fortnight. Understood?”

“Aye, Cap’n,” the crew assigned to the landing party answered.

“The rest will stay on the ship with Polly as acting captain.”

Polly nodded and stood straighter, ready to assume the mantle of responsibility.

“We’ll reconvene in five minutes,” Alys added. “Dismissed.”

As the group broke apart, Alys sped down to her quarters to arm herself. She tucked three primed pistols into her baldric,

buckled on her cutlass, sheathed a dagger, and tucked several more knives into her boots. She grabbed the carving knife retrieved

from Lambert’s enclave, and placed it in a pouch tied to her belt.

She hesitated, then went to her desk. Unlocking the top drawer, she pulled out a shiny brass button.

It had fallen off Ben’s coat some weeks ago, and she’d snatched it up off the floor.

At the time, she’d told herself she had taken it to keep her quarters tidy.

She ran her thumb back and forth across the embossed design.

Closing her eyes, she pressed the button to her lips.

Before he had climbed aboard her ship, dripping wet and bristling with righteous anger, her life had followed its own rhythms.

The Sea Witch found ships laden with gold and precious things, and raided those ships. When her ship would dock for shore leave and reprovisioning,

she would find herself a lover, sate her body’s needs, and then take to the sea again, unbound by the connections that could

sour or lead to miserable heartache.

She cared for him.

Her eyes flew open. Hell. She’d done everything she could to keep this disaster from happening.

He wasn’t Samuel, binding her to him with mouthed platitudes of love. What Samuel had professed wasn’t love. It was the mask worn by

a different demon: control.

Ben offered so much more than that. The treasure he’d given her... his true heart... She’d never had a prize like that

from any ship she’d taken. To him, her freedom was celebrated, not held back.

Hellfire. She’d been mute when he’d left her. Never giving him what he needed. What she needed to say to him, not even the

last time they’d dreamwalked. Regret was a shroud around her, weighted with stones, sinking her beneath the waves.

They might never see each other again. But if they did, what would she say? The only way to know would be to have him standing

in front of her. And then...

She didn’t know. But she’d make damned sure she and Ben had their and then . Whatever it brought.

She slipped the button into her pocket before striding from her quarters.

Back on the main deck, she watched as the ship dropped anchor a short distance away from the island’s beach. Strange that

so much relied upon a tiny strip of land, and yet everything to this point had led them here.

This was the end of their long search. It had to be.

The jolly boat was lowered to the water. A moment later, Eris swooped down, shrieking a loud alarm before landing on Stasia’s

shoulder. Her feathers were ruffled and she danced from foot to foot in agitation.

“The navy,” Stasia exclaimed.

“Enemy approaching,” Dorothea shouted from the crow’s nest.

Everyone ran to the gunwale, and a collective gasp rose up.

The Jupiter raced toward them. Three massive sea creatures towed the flagship: the leviathan, the kraken, and a gigantic shark the size of a sloop. Hooks were

embedded in the beasts’ skin, and ropes were lashed from them to the man-o’-war. With three creatures towing the ship, it

cut through the water at an impossible speed, foam flying into the air and waves parting as if cleaved by a gargantuan blade.

“How the hell did they find us?” Jane cried.

Stasia turned to Alys. “Did he...?”

“He’s no ally to the navy,” Alys said at once. “It must mean—”

Her heart sank to the seafloor. She hadn’t felt anything from Ben. Distance wasn’t to blame.

He was dead.

At that moment, the crack of dozens of muskets rang out. Glowing bullets shot from the upper deck of the Jupiter . They sped across the water, propelled by mage-derived magic.

“Hit the deck!” Stasia roared.

The crew flattened against the wooden planks as bullets slammed into the masts and tore holes in the sails. Wooden splinters rained down onto the company and Alys threw up a protective spell, sheltering the crew from the fragments.

Crouching, Alys and the company rose up just enough to look over the gunwale.

The Jupiter had untethered itself from the sea creatures and aimed its heavy guns directly at the Sea Witch .

Unlike Alys’s ship, the naval vessel had two gundecks, along with several swivel guns mounted to the top deck.

The Jupiter also boasted hundreds more crew members, including marines all armed with weapons charged with the mage’s magic.

And the sea creatures were swimming straight for the Sea Witch .

Fear congealed in Alys’s stomach. This would be a bloodbath. It would take the intervention of every goddess in the firmament

for any of her crew to make it out alive.

“Raise the anchor,” Alys bellowed.

The crew obeyed quickly to haul up the anchor.

“You and you,” Alys said, pointing to two of her crew. “Keep the kraken at bay. Use whatever magic you can to push them back.

And you two,” she added to another pair of witches, “the same for the leviathan, and both of you,” she continued to a third

duo of witches, “on the shark.”

“Aye, aye, Cap’n,” the witches yelled.

They raced to the gunwale. Brows furrowed in concentration, they held up their hands as they threw spells toward the sea creatures.

A whirlpool swirled around the kraken, sending it spinning. The sea surrounding the leviathan began to boil, and the beast

roared as it swam backward, out of the heated water. The shark struggled to move closer as the witches churned the sea around

it, creating massive waves.