Page 55 of Dark Water Daughter

We continued our lessons when the seas were calmer. My muscles ached less and began to recall the stances and movements Grant had taught me. I learned to manage a pistol and took to it well. We began to properly spar too, and in the brief spaces when I managed to stop laughing or mocking myself, I found a new confidence in that skill. I was by no means proficient, and I knew I’d be trounced by a trainedopponent—butit was the confidence I needed most.

I was no longer defenseless.

On the eleventh day, another tempest wrapped around us. Grant and I tried to play cards, but staying in our chairs was impossible. Eventually Grant staggered back to the gun deck and I retired to my cabin, taking one last look at the eerie stormlit windows and clinging snow before I closed the door.

Darkness stifled me. The quiet was loud, riddled with creaking and moaning, howling and roaring. It blended in my skull as I braced myself in a corner, choking down familiar anxiety and praying that this wouldn’t be the nightHarpyjoined the graveyard of ships on the bottom of the Winter Sea. But that night, the silence and fear felt different.

Perhaps it was the closeness of death. Perhaps it was the keen, piercing sense of my own fragile life, of each misting breath and every beleaguered heartbeat. Perhaps it was my recent successes with Grant’s lessons.

Whatever it was, I felt a shift within myself. Apprehension retreated, and a blind, dire courage took its place.

I was a Stormsinger, after my mother. I might have been silenced for sixteen long years, but I had my voice and the power to calm this storm, somewhere inside me. I simply had to doit—beforeit killed me,Harpyand her crew.

I opened the door and staggered across the cabin, climbing uphill as the ship lurched forward. By the time it tilted back, I braced my hands on the frigid windows. The wind seeped in, finding the barest cracks and edges, and through the frosted glass I saw the ice-caked balcony and menacing, dark waves.

I pulled those threads of wind into my nose and searched for the right notes, the right words. Instead of commanding the storm like an unruly hound, I thought to appeal toit—onepower to another.

My song was a lullaby, simple and sweet. My emotion went withit—thesame desire for freedom, peace and security that had fueled my voice as a child under the yew, at the gallows, and Kaspin’s auction. There was no questioning in that longing, only honesty.

“Oh, hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us,

And black are the waters that sparkled so green.

The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark overtake thee,

Asleep in the arms of the slow-swinging seas.”

The tendrils of wind whistling through the window eased. I held my breath for an instant, senses straining, hardly daring to believe I’d succeeded. The ship still rolled and complained, but the wind had lessened.

I sang again, and again. On the third round, I became aware of a new presence in the cabin but didn’t tear my focus off the window. It was likely just Grant.

The last of the wind retreated in a slow exhale.

“I can do nothing for thewaves—atleast, not yet.” I glanced over my shoulder.“But—”

It was not Grant who looked back at me, but a ghisting. She was small, translucent and smooth, hovering just beyond the wood of the bulkhead. Unlike Randalf’s Juliette, thisghisting—Harpy—hadno face, simply a blank space between falls of straight, ghostly hair. She wore smooth skirts that I immediately feared might be tentacles, but as she swayed with the movement of the ship, I saw legs press against the fabric.

She was beautiful, I realized, in an abstract way, her only distinct features being the fall of her hair and the belt at her waist, from which hung an array of closed fans.

As I watched, awestruck, she picked up one fan and unfurled it with a deft twist of her fingers. She raised it to her face and watched me for a moment, even though she had no eyes. But the fan did. It had a full painted face with a secretive smile, a sharp nose and eyes the color of a spring sunrise.

She lifted the fan fully in front of her. It vanished but the face remained, now imprinted on the ghisting’s own head. She smiled at me, gave a graceful, liquid bow, and murmured. No sound came from her bowed lips, but a single word thrummed in my chest.

Sister?

I held my breath.

Harpy spoke again, and this time there was no question to it.Tane.

“Tane?” I repeated, confused.

Her smile slipped into a passive, blank expression. I couldn’t tell if my lack of understanding had caused it, or the ghisting simply couldn’t maintain any expression for long.

“What does Tane mean? Is it a name?” I asked. The ship still rocked, and I braced myself against the window frame. “Or a word? Do ghistings have their own words?I…”I trailed off, realizing how ignorant I must be of the creatures I’d grown up beside.

We do, Harpy said. She slipped forward, beginning to circle me with no regard for the tilting of the deck. She passed through the wood of the table and chairs, smoky wisps of her flesh clinging to their surfaces in her wake.We have our own words, our own thoughts, our own desires. Do you not know that?

I shook my head.

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