by Tiana Warner
Eyrin went limp. I loaded my crossbow with a violently shaking hand. The mermaid gripped Eyrin’s head with a webbed hand and brought the other back, and met Eyrin’s skull with another blow. I fired. The bolt sliced through the mermaid’s tail as she continued to bludgeon Eyrin’s limp body.
The mermaid fell off but still held onto Eyrin’s hair. She struggled to pull herself upright.
“Eyrin!”
I sprinted towards them. She wasn’t moving. She couldn’t be . . . she was just unconscious. I had to take her away from the demon.
The mermaid looked at me, still clenching the bloodied rock in one hand and Eyrin’s hair in the other. Her red eyes gleamed. For a moment they faded into white—into human eyes—but then she smiled and her jagged teeth grew back, and she lunged at Eyrin like a striking cobra.
I froze, as though the air had turned to ice. My brain and my eyes disconnected—what I saw couldn’t be real. Nature couldn’t function this way. The monster I stared at, this half-formed human, couldn’t be ripping flesh off Eyrin’s body like a mountain lion on a deer. The chunks she swallowed whole couldn’t be pieces of flesh. The blood—she was covered. It stained her sallow flesh red.
This wasn’t happening.
I reloaded and aimed at the feasting demon, but before I could fire, a change beneath my feet threw me sideways. I landed hard on my hip, the crossbow flying out of my hands.
The deck tilted, sending loose items sliding towards the water; I lunged for the bow, desperate not to lose my weapon. It crashed into the railing and leaned dangerously against it, threatening to fall through.
Above, the great fore mast tilted towards the water as the ship careened. I should have been panicking but I still felt numb, the vision of Eyrin’s bloody corpse burned into my eyes, blinding me to everything else.
As the ship continued to lean, I lost control of my limbs and was suddenly face down on the deck, head smacking hard into a post. Still, I kept an eye on my crossbow. The tip of the black handle rested feebly against a railing, the ocean thrashing beneath it. I brought my knees up and pushed myself closer.
Whatever had been making the ship tilt, it released. I swiped for my crossbow and my fingers closed around it as we rocked back the other way. The deck levelled. I scrambled to get my feet under me.
Blacktail appeared beside me, her bloodstained hands void of a weapon. She crouched, bracing herself. The entire ship shuddered. It lifted on its side again, this time tilting the other way. Something other than the waves was at play.
The ship lurched and I nearly went down again, but I leapt forwards and grabbed the railing. Blacktail did the same.
Below our slipping feet, the mainsail drew dangerously close to the water. The deck was nearly vertical.
“They’ve cornered a whale,” said Blacktail.
Her eyes were enormous, her breathing fast and panicky. She had a white-knuckled grip on the railing.
Between fits of swinging my legs to get a hold on something, I managed to choke out, “What d’you mean?”
“I saw a few of them. They’re using harpoons. They cornered a whale against the keel. They jab at it, so it has nowhere to go but further into the ship.”
Below us, the masts drew almost parallel with the water. A swarm of demons clung to them like leeches, trying to weigh them down.
“They’ll capsize us!”
The saw-whet owl flag was half-submerged. The mermaids hung off it, tearing at it with their teeth and webbed fingers. The rope holding it to the mast seemed as feeble as a thread. Then, like a shrivelled maple leaf in autumn, it plucked loose and fell into the water, taking several cackling mermaids with it.
“Meela,” said Blacktail. She was staring up at her hands. “I’m slipping.”
Her voice was so calm, she might as well have been commenting on the direction of the wind.
I looked down, trying to find something for us to rest our feet on.
“Let go,” I said. “Try and land on those crates.” I nodded to the other side of the deck.
“I’ll break my legs!”
But she didn’t need to worry, because the whale must have escaped, and the Bloodhound crashed back down to the sea. My stomach lurched at the free-fall.
We slammed into the water and a solid wave pounded down on us. I held onto the railing with all my strength to keep from getting washed away. My crossbow pushed painfully into my arms as the deluge swirled around us. My ears knew nothing but the hollow, rushing sound of a current.
The water swirled endlessly over us. My lungs begged for air, the muscles in my hands and arms trembled, and I wondered if the demons had capsized us after all. But then the hollow underwater sound shifted, deafening me with a noise like a rushing river.
I welcomed an enormous gulp of air into my lungs.
The ship rocked violently, threatening to overturn with each tilt.
Beside me, the railing was vacant. Blacktail was gone.
I cried out, searching across the way for her body. But I couldn’t see her. So many corpses littered the water it was as though we’d taken a wrong turn at the River Styx. I scanned the bodies frantically.
A head emerged from the red water, staring at the rocking ship. The demon’s eyes had faded to normal, her skin ivory white. Her gaze found mine, but when I reached for my crossbow, she submerged once more.
The screams and firing crossbows had been silenced.
Panting with fear, I glanced around. My legs shook too badly for me to stand up. My hands still clamped the railing. I couldn’t pry them away.
I tried to yell for Annith but my voice stuck in my throat.
“Meela,” said a voice close to my ear.
I started. Blacktail hung on the other side of the railing, clinging to the same one I was.
“Help me over,” she said, her arms visibly trembling. “My feet touch the water when the boat rocks.”
I scrambled to my knees and pulled myself to my feet, using the railing as support. I leaned over it and grabbed her under the arms.
“Have you got a foothold on something?” I said. My voice was weak and quiet.
“A bit.”
“Next time it rocks up, push with your legs.”
She grunted. The Bloodhound swayed, and her legs touched the water, and as it rocked back up I pulled as hard as I could. I heard her legs scrambling to push on anything they could find, and then I wrapped my arms around her waist and hauled her aboard.
We collapsed onto the deck, gasping. Both of us shook worse than ever—probably from the cold, as well.
I hugged her tightly when she landed, feeling a surge of gratitude that she was alive.
“What happened?” she said breathlessly. “Where’d they go?”
I glanced around the empty ship. “I think they retreated for now. We were slaughtering them.”
My eyes fell onto Blondie and Kade, who showed bloodied signs of having been in a struggle on the far end of the deck.
“There’s Annith,” said Blacktail, and I whirled around to see her and Linoya coming from the helm. I struggled to my feet to meet her.
“You’re okay!” I said, though she appeared miserable and shaken.
Her eyes raked my scalp. “You’re not.”
I lifted my hand, suddenly remembering a demon had sliced it open. It felt like it was on fire. Blood covered my clothes, probably most of my face. I didn’t know how much of that blood was my own.
“Annith,” said Kade, her voice high. “We need stitches here.”
We all turned to see Zarra stumbling forwards with a hand over the entire right side of her face. Blood cascaded down her cheek and between her fingers, and I had to drop my gaze because my head suddenly felt like it drained of fluid.
“I’ll get the first aid kit,” said Annith, dashing to the cabin.
I took a mental inventory of the girls standing before me.
Sixteen. Only sixteen of us remained, including me.
“Where’s Shaani?” said
Fern.
A dark silence fell over us. I couldn’t look at Fern.
After a moment I said, “Eyrin’s gone.”
Every eye fell on me. I stared down at my bloody clothes.
“I saw it,” I said, my voice barely audible.
After a few seconds, Holly said, “Nati, too.”
“Mannoh. Mannoh got pulled in.”
Nora said it, but after a shocked silence, the entire crew turned towards Shaena.
Shaena stepped back, her eyes huge and white behind her blood-covered face. The training master had chosen an order of captaining for us, should anything happen to Mannoh. After Mannoh was Shaena. After Shaena, Linoya. After Linoya, me. After me, Dani. And so on. I’d taken dark reassurance in the thought that as long as I was still alive, Dani could never be my captain.
Nobody said anything for a long time. We’d lost four warriors that day, including our captain. The first battle, and already our numbers were cut by one fifth.
“Clean up the ship,” said Shaena, her voice dull and tired. “See Annith if you’re hurt.”
Annith returned and sat down with the first aid kit. I looked away when she pulled out a needle and silk thread.
“Who else is hurt?” she said. Her voice was high and shaky, and I could tell she was trying to keep busy so she wouldn’t break down.
I wished I felt confident enough to reassure her. My mind was still trying to process the fatalities.
Annith spent at least a couple of hours patching everyone up. We took turns changing clothes and cleaning the deck—though the surge of water had washed off most of the blood and bodies.
“We did well, though,” said Annith once she’d finished with my scalp.
I raised my eyebrows.
“I mean, we killed a lot of demons,” she said. “If we keep going at this rate, I think we might be able to cut the population down enough—”
“If we keep going at this rate,” I said, “we’re all going to be dead by the fifth battle. We have to do a better job looking out for each other.”
Annith frowned. “You know what Anyo said. It’s survival of the fittest. The ones who aren’t cut out for this get picked off in the first battle.”
I stood. “Eyrin wasn’t weak. None of these girls are weak.”
“I never said they were.”
I ran my fingers over the stitches on my scalp. The feel of them made me queasy. “I’m going to reload.”
I descended into the hull. We kept the ammo safely behind iron bars, which I fought to unlock with shaking hands. My eyes brimmed with tears, but I forced them back, afraid I wouldn’t be able to stop once I started.
What kind of hellish mission were we on? Was this really what the Massacres had been like for more than a quarter century? Did Eriana Kwai knowingly send their eighteen-year-old boys out to face this, year after year?
This wasn’t like shooting a target, or a rabbit, or even a full-grown buck. This wasn’t the simple task of harnessing an invasive species, like we were a team of biologists on an expedition. This was the most gruesome combination imaginable: an attack by the most nightmarish demons the devil could summon . . . yet shooting them was like shooting humans, normal teenage girls. Those mermaids looked like any one of us when their appearances faded back to normal.
I couldn’t let their human facade faze me. That was what the demons wanted. The human image was just that: an image. Inside, they were as hideous as their rotten-looking skin, and they deserved to die.
They’re the reason your people are starving, I thought. They’re the reason you don’t have a brother. They came all the way to your homeland to make your people suffer. They kill children and lure sailors and . . .
My quiver was full. I realised I was still trying to jam bolts into it.
They eat humans.
I put everything down and breathed deeply, closing my eyes and willing myself to stop trembling.
I needed to get outside again. Standing in the darkening hull did nothing to calm me. I tried to call the training master’s voice to mind, telling me to turn off my emotions. But I couldn’t. My emotions rampaged around my insides like they’d been shot from a cannon.
How many demons were there? After we killed five hundred and four like my father had, would we find our victory?
I stared numbly around as I emerged from the hull. The deck was already stained red, and deep crevices in the wood aged the Bloodhound by years. This was our brand new ship. The men and women of Eriana Kwai had spent an entire year building it for us, sawing and hammering a dream of peace and prosperity.
As I took in the battered girls around me, pushing past their exhaustion to clean and repair this dream, pride surged through me. Twenty—now sixteen—girls on a brigantine ship had become Eriana Kwai’s only hope.
Annith stepped up beside me and put an arm around my shoulders.
She was right. We did well. We must have killed a hundred demons already.
“For Eriana Kwai,” I said, slinging my crossbow across my chest.
Annith patted her own crossbow and took a deep breath. “For Eriana Kwai.”
Thinking of my people made it easier to force that black tar to melt over my heart. I could almost feel it dripping, coating my insides with thick vengeance on behalf of my fallen comrades.
Five hundred and four demons weren’t enough. For them, and for all the people who depended on me back home, I would slay every single one.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Pirate Democracy
By the time we cleaned off the deck and jammed the holes with tar, the sun had long dipped beyond the horizon.
That smell still hung in the air—the stench of freshly slaughtered mermaids. Or maybe the wind and sea had already taken the smell away from us as swiftly as it had the bloody evidence. Maybe it was stuck in my nose, a reminder of all I’d just witnessed.
In the galley, we had rice and carrots for dinner¸ and Dani had managed to catch two fish in the net that we split between all of us.
Before we started eating, I stood and raised my mug.
“To Eyrin,” I said, “inventor of Morbles and one of the nicest girls I knew.”
My toast was met with a dim chorus of “Eyrin,” and then silence as everyone took a sip.
I was about to toast the other girls, but then Blondie stood.
“To Shaani and Nati,” she said, “my lacrosse buddies. Both of them were kind, thoughtful, and always made time for family. Inspirations to us all.”
“And our captain,” said Zarra, her speech thick through her fat lip.
My eyes watered as I looked at her face, which bore a gruesome line of stitches from temple to chin.
“Mannoh saved my rabbit once when we were kids,” she said. “We weren’t even friends, but she did it anyway. Got herself all scratched up in the bush chasing it down for me.”
We toasted to each of them. A lump formed in my throat that seemed to block it entirely, because I couldn’t eat. I knew I had to keep my strength, but I barely managed to get the few bites of fish down.
“I’ll make sure to have a big breakfast,” I said to Annith when she tried to force-feed me a spoonful of rice.
She dropped it and hugged me tightly, whispering, “I’m sorry you had to see it.”
Only a few of us choked down our food. Most girls couldn’t eat, seasickness lingering from the rocking boat earlier, so they abandoned the table and went to take some herbs instead. Other girls looked equally sick, but for an entirely different reason. A few—Fern, Linoya, Sage, and Dani—ate as much as they could. Dani seemed determined to gorge to keep up her strength, but the foggy, distant look in Linoya’s eyes suggested she was just experiencing the hungry side-effects of seasickness herbs.
I scraped my rice back into the pot—we never wasted food, even if it had been on our plates already—then climbed the stairs to the main deck. The sky had become pitch black in that time, the clouds not offering even a tiny star to light the way. A single lantern cast i
ts weak glow near the cabin door.
As much as I wanted to sit on the edge of the ship with my legs dangling over the side, that wasn’t an option. Instead, I sat in the middle of the deck and leaned against the main mast, gazing into the darkness. I ran my fingers over the wound on my scalp, willing it to heal.
Footsteps stopped beside me and I looked up to see the shadow of a narrow figure, ears poking out from a high ponytail.
Blacktail considered me silently for a minute, then sat down.
“They didn’t tell us anything about them using whales.”
I nodded. I’d been thinking about that too. After all our training, we were still unprepared for what the battles were really like.
“It must be a pretty new strategy,” I said. “We just didn’t know about it because there haven’t been any returning warriors.”
She picked at a splinter in the deck by her leg. “The way they fight. It’s so . . .”
“Predatory?”
“Yeah. They warned us the mermaids moved fast. Didn’t imagine it’d be like this.”
“We’d be dead in seconds if we were out here without weapons. If we were an ordinary fishing boat.”
“Think they knew we’re a battleship?”
“If they didn’t before, they do now,” I said, watching her push a long splinter back into the deck as though trying to put it back together.
“We need a way to keep us aboard. Next time, if they use the whale.”
I’d been thinking about it a little. We couldn’t tie ourselves to the boat though. I suggested the only answer I’d come up with. “We need to stop them from using a whale in the first place.”
She stared at me.
“Kill the whale.” Even as I said it I felt guilty, because the whale was no more than an innocent bystander.
Blacktail thought for a moment. “We don’t have the weapons to kill a whale. We’re only equipped for mermaids.”
“What if we aimed for the mermaids cornering it?”
“Won’t work if they’re underwater. They’re too small and fast.” She paused. “Bet we won’t even be able to see them.”
