Page 58 of Dark Water Daughter

I could not breathe. All I knew was icy water, Fisher’s grasp and the rough ropes. I braced, willing my body to stone as the water raged, the ship trembled and the Other tugged.

Then the wall of water vanished. Horizontal sailors dropped back against the shrouds, drenched and choking. Some quarter of my consciousness not occupied with coughing countedthem—one,two, three, and Fisher, still locked in my grasp. Not one had been lost, even the injured man, protected by his fellows.

Suddenly the deck rocked in the opposite direction, lifting Fisher from the sea. I hauled, shouting, blood hammering behind my eyes with the strain. Her free hand seized a line, her boot found the rail, and she toppled into me.

We hit the deck, all elbows and obscenities. Sailors dropped around us, frigid water splattering around their boots and shoes and knees.

I forced myself upright. Fisher started to follow, but sagged back to the deck. A sailor rushed to help her and she fended him off.

“Hold up!” she croaked, windburned face caked with freezing hair. She clutched an arm to her chest. “Gently, you fool! Myarm—Ilanded on my arm.”

The hammering of my heart slowed another degree. Just an arm. Just an injured arm. She was alive.

“Here.” I offered her a hand, hoping the seawater excused the hoarseness of my voice. “Let me.”

She glanced at the proffered fingers, then pressed her good hand into them. I helped her carefully to her feet and gathered my wits to say something, to try to express my relief that my vision had not come to pass.

“The wind’s gone,” Fisher said.

I looked up, startled. Yes, the sea roiled and the ship moaned and cold made every inch of my flesh ache, but the wind had vanished.

Stormsinger.

I grabbed the nearest sailor, Penn, who had lost his customary hat. “Help Lieutenant Fisher below, quickly now.”

“As you say, Mr. Rosser.”

Fisher shook her head at Penn’s offered shoulder and something in her eyes struck me. Hurt? No. Terror. A haunted, empty fear that I recognized well. The Winter Sea had nearly taken her, and she had just realized how close to death she had come.

The vision passed through my mind a thirdtime—silence,distant waves, drifting hair. A fresh ache lodged in my chest. I had stopped the vision from happening. The danger was over. Why, then, did it still feel so potent? Was there more to be seen, another threat in the near future?

Of course there was, I chided myself. We sailed the Winter Sea. The feeling was just another symptom of my brokenness, and perhaps an overattachment to Fisher. One she would not welcome. We were not, after all, friends.

“I’m quite all right, Mr. Penn,” Fisher said to the sailor in question, straightened and pointed to the injured crewman. “Help him. I’ll manage.”

I gave her a short smile, hoping she could not see the lingering anxiety behind it. She gave me an exhausted nod, her gaze glancing off my face, then turned away and started issuing orders.

Pushing the last of the vision aside, I made my way to the very fore of the ship.Hartbecame steadier with each step and Slader joined me, emerging from the quarterdeck with sleeplesseyes—hehad taken charge for the first watch of the storm, Fisher and I the second. But there was no sleeping through something like this.

“The Stormsinger can’t be far,” Slader observed without greeting me or mentioning Fisher, though I knew he had seen her heading below. “Where is she?”

I grasped the rail to hide the shaking of my hands and let my senses slip. The transition was too easy, and I saw Mary’s grey-edged light just over the border.

“Nor-nor-west,” I said, blinking away the starless sky and black-bellied sea. But it lingered at the edges of my vision, quiet and waiting. “She is closer than before.”

Slader nodded. “Then go take your rest, Mr. Rosser.”

***

A hasty knock on my cabin door jarred me from a fitful sleep.

“A shroud on all you hack-faced shitlings,” Fisher growled from the other side of the curtain, proceeding to mutter further obscenities which may have included my name.

I dropped from my hammock and answered the knock quickly, stepping out into the hall and closing the door to keep the heat of the woodstove in.

“Hush, Ms. Fisher is sleeping,” I chided the boy on the other side. My shoulder ached from striking the rail, and I rolled it carefully.

He nodded, eyes wide and voice low. “Aye, sir. Sorry, sir. Those Navymen we sighted the other day, they’ve come upon us an’ you’ve been asked for.”

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