The Huntress: Storm

by Sarah Driver

  But I can’t summon enough life-spark of my own to answer him. Crow paces and the terror ent drained yet from his face. Sparrow stays crouched by me.

  ‘Wraithed, was I?’

  ‘Almost.’ Sparrow rocks back on his heels. His hands reach out and feel my face. ‘Salt-sticky, ent you, stinker?’

  They wrap me in dry furs, until I’m lying bundled by the fire like a seal. My brain ticks slowly and I remember. As Crow makes me eat, and Da holds me close, singing to me, I remember her.

  Grandma.

  I open my still-clenched fist.

  In the dip of my palm rests a heavy silver ring. A ring in the shape of a merwraith, with a catch. I flip it, revealing the tiny hiding place inside. Grandma’s poison ring.

  A great warrior of the sea waits there. Astraia wasn’t talking about Rattlebones. She was talking about Grandma.

  I stare around at my crew helplessly. ‘But – Stag shot her!’ I babble. ‘How can she be . . . ?’

  ‘Mouse, you need to rest,’ says Da.

  ‘No—’ I steal a glance at Sparrow, lowering my voice. ‘I think Grandma’s there!’

  Da pinches the bridge of his nose. ‘No, Mouse. You know that only folk who drowned become wraiths. Your grandma was shot.’

  I open my stiffened fingers to show him the silver ring. ‘This fell through the hull of our ship just now. It’s Grandma’s ring. Stag must’ve left it behind. And the whale said . . . and I saw a wraith—’

  ‘Sometimes, when folk are running out of air,’ he says slowly, and I know what he’s gonna say and I hate it, ‘they see things – things that ent there.’ He gifts me a gentle smile. ‘Don’t set your hopes alight. They will only be doused.’

  But later, when everyone’s asleep, I beg Sparrow for help. I watch as he coaxes out a little purple breath of flame from his fingertip. He pokes it into the ring’s poison cubby and I swiftly shut it tight.

  I sneak past the former merwraiths, who are lying pressed together for warmth, tails entwined. Slowly, Sparrow’s purple fire has been restoring them to life. The ones with intact tongues have started a clumsy kind of talking.  Some are so old that they don’t speak our tribe-tongue, or anything like the common trade-tongue, unless they’ve just forgotten.

  Normally, if a wraith is dredged, the sea-change reverses when they touch air – that means they dissolve, except for their scales. But Da reckons Sparrow’s life-spark has re-started their hearts, so their bodies will stay in one piece.

  So far, their tails ent reversed back into legs – Da’s been thinking on that, too. He reckons that’ll take longer, so he’s shared out bottles of purple fire between them and told them to keep drinking it to help stay alive.

  I pull the heavy merwraith ring out of my boot and stagger towards the half-healed hole in the ice, dodging huge craters made by skull-sized hailstones. I kiss the silver and drop it into the water.

  ‘Don’t you remember? ’ I whisper, staring into the murky depths.

  My net is cast. I can feel it weaving its shadow down, down, down, spelling towards the sea floor.

  Before everyone’s awake, I take another drop of Da’s wolffish blood and dive again. My fingers plunge into the seabed and I cast around desperately, searching for a cloud of silvery weed-hair, or a fierce, pale face.

  But there’s no sign of a wraith, here. Gods, I pray, as I twist in the water, eyes straining.  Please let her be here. Don’t let it be that I imagined her.

  Suddenly, iron-strong fingers grip mine. I squeeze my eyes shut, and pray to all the sea-gods. I pull, kicking hard, not daring to look back at who – or what – I’ve got clinging to me. Cos what if it ent her – and what if it is ?

  I reach the hole and haul myself through, then lie on my front and lean down to pull the wraith out. Her fingers dig deep into my palms with a grip like now-or-never, all-or-nothing.

  I stagger backwards, wrenching her free of the ice. Then I crouch, panting, in the stillness of the ships’ graveyard. Dead and dying ships look on, all broken masts and wounded hulls and torn sails. The place echoes with the snores of giants.

  An old woman sprawls across the ground. A relic of a former sea-captain. Straggling, ice-sparkled silver seaweed is slapped wet against grey-blue skin and thick globs of fish-egg gunge cover the body. The eye in her upturned face is a faintly glowing, filmy pearl, like a moon behind cloud. Where the other eye should be, there gapes an empty black cave; a withered socket. Her fleshy earlobes are fish-nibbled.

  I fall to my knees.

  There’s an opening below the bony ridge of nose, a thing like a blue-lipped mouth. It opens and closes, sagging and squeezing, like a gill. But the shape it keeps making is an M.

  ‘Sparrow,’ I whisper stupidly. Then my voice rips painfully from my mouth. ‘Sparrow !’ I howl. ‘Help us!’

  Someone yells. There are footsteps, running.

  Da crouches next to me. He stares at the wraith in disbelief. ‘Wren? ’

  ‘I need Sparrow, now.’ I look around desperately.

  ‘I’m here,’ my brother says, stepping forwards.

  ‘Can you wake her?’ I beg. My blood jumps in my veins. I can hear my heart beating like a drum.

  ‘I’ll try my best,’ he whispers.

  ‘Her sea-heart won’t wake for always,’ says Da, face sorrowful. ‘You will have to say goodbye again.’

  ‘I never said goodbye in the first place!’ squeaks Sparrow, outraged.

  ‘Truth be told,’ I tell him, gritting my teeth, ‘nor did I.’

  Sparrow bends over the wraith, brow puckered, and in this beat I feel like he’s so far away from me, so full-grown, that he’s leaving me behind. He rubs his fingertips together until his purple sparks are rolled into a glittering, sticky thread. Then he pulses it – fast – into the middle of her chest. There’s a smell of burning. Thunder grumbles and I ent even sure if it’s storms in the sky or in the heart of our grandma.

  I shake my head, thunderstruck. I’m half aware of the rest of the crew grouped around me, hands pressed against mouths.

  ‘Is that—’ whispers Crow.

  ‘Aye,’ whispers Da, squeezing my shoulders.

  I nod, trying to smile. But I can’t breathe and I’m at risk of being swept away by the crashing shock beating down over my head.

  Then the wraith’s lungs wheeze open. Everyone flinches. Sparrow scrabbles away.

  A voice squelches out of her wet lungs. ‘Mouse.’

  I breathe a lungful of sour air, but as I start to speak, it comes again.

  ‘Mouse? ’ the earthy throat booms. Close by, snow murmurs.

  Fright wraps around my throat and limbs, sticking me to the spot.

  Everyone watches me.

  The cavernous yelp scratches my insides again. ‘Mouse! ’ cracks the voice, like a sea-mountain if it could talk – ragged, rocky, caked-blood-raw. She claws the ice with blue fingertips, nails edged with ice, hands cluttered with limpets and fish eggs.

  Sparrow sits in the snow, sucking his fingers and weeping quietly.

  I step forwards. The wraith spits a slimy length of seaweed onto the ice, thickened with blood and oyster-pearls and chips of broken shell.

  The eye swivels onto me as I crouch next to her. She grabs my hands with startling strength and cries out for me again. The voice carries scorched thunder. The breath is worse than fierce. The wave of knowing and loving her stronger than an oar over the head.

  Her grip is like a lifeline to another world, a great sinewy cord. I know in my bones that’s why she’s saying my name and not Sparrow’s. I was there in the beat that Stag wrenched her into the Other realm. Our spirits leapt for each other. Sobs judder through my ribs, cleave my body in two, hunch, aching, in my throat.

  She lifts her barnacled hands to my face like she’s checking me for hurts. Then she grabs my shoulders and pulls herself up to sitting. She is heavier than I can believe. Iron-tipped. Axe-skinned. She grunts like a landed thing of the sea.

  The wrai
th glares blindly at us. ‘Mouse,’ she brittles out again. ‘Get your blade, girl. Ye’re to cut me, and do it quick.’

  ‘By the gods,’ mutters Crow. Lightning flickers in the north. ‘She can’t mean—’

  ‘And what would you know about it, sproglet?’ clack the damp lungs of my grandmother.

  ‘Aye, she means it alright.’ I fish my blade from inside my goatskin cloak and kneel by Grandma’s almost-tail. My hands shake. Snowflakes settle in my lashes.

  ‘I know ye’ve the belly for the work, child,’ scritches the voice, a beat closer to one of Grandma’s stern old kindnesses.

  I nod. When I press the tip of the blade gently to the tail, she spits onto the ice, waking beat-by-beat into a thing more like my grandma. ‘For the sea-gods’ sakes, do it, Mouse. I want to be a walker again, not some flail-by-blubber stuck on this sorry scrap of frozen land.’ She spits land like a curse.

  She’s still got legs, I tell myself, haggling for time.  They’re there, only partly sealed together. I can see the seam. I breathe. Shut my eyes. When I open them again, my hand’s already moving, cos Grandma’s sat forwards and she’s helping me press the tip of the blade deep into her and then I’m pulling it, arrow-straight for all the stretch down her legs, to where the sea-change has flattened her feet and splayed them into a V shape. The scream she utters makes the snow groan.

  But when it’s done, she flexes each foot and sticks out her furred tongue and bends her knees. She’s still got merwraith scales. Dark old blood oozes between them.

  Crow wraps one arm around his belly and bends forwards, shuddering with dry tears, dry heavings and strange, panicked laughter. But Grandma dazzles. She digs her tattered feet into the ice and wrenches herself upright. ‘Lend me your arms,’ she commands, in a voice to make the mountains cower.

  Da bows to her as she passes. Sparrow capers in her wake.

  We hobble together, back to the fireside on the edge of the sea, in the shadow of the mountains.

  Our crew has swelled by one.

  ‘You left them like that ?’ Grandma eyes the other once-were-wraiths, hands on hips. They’re huddled together for warmth, and their tails clank restlessly against the ground. When they move, it’s like they’re still below-worlds.

  But it’s Grandma I can’t keep my shield-wide eyes off, so I just gape at her stupidly.

  ‘What a flaming state,’ she mutters, breaking the spell on me.

  ‘Well—’ I growl. ‘I didn’t know I had to cut them!’

  She scoffs. ‘Don’t cut them, Mouse, and what then? How’re they meant to walk ?’ She tuts.

  ‘Da reckoned they’d change back eventually!’ I whine. ‘We ent stupid!’

  ‘Eventually is no good to man nor beast,’ she scolds. ‘You could at least have sped things up for the poor blighters.’

  ‘We only just woke them!’ I shoot her a stormy look.

  She shoots one back.

  Then we’re both laughing, painful hard. We cough up the seawater in our lungs. We check the other wraiths over, and then the proper grimness begins. She shows us how to slice the tails back into legs, then how to stitch the wounds. Then she gets tired and grows distant, like a turning tide.

  Her hands can’t hold a cup, so Da brings broth to her lips. The wind lifts locks of her hair and carries it about. I prod the sagging skin of her arm to prove she’s real. Her roots are still in the seabed, so she barely looks at me, and I refuse to let it hurt.

  ‘I have been dwelling in the kelp forest, among sea-spiders and stars, my memories circling like sharks, with teeth just as sharp,’ she murmurs, eyes filled with fire. ‘But some stitch of me always knew I had to endure such a fate as this.’

  I watch her, even as my eyes cross with exhaustion.

  Sleep sneaks like a thief in the dark, to knock us all over the head. I sink dreamlessly into the deep.

  *

  When we wake, there are so many unasked questions crowding the air.

  Grandma must’ve summoned strength again – she’s squatting at the tent mouth, frying fish caught by my hawk. Thaw perches by her side, devouring a raw fish. The wind pushes her feathers into frozen spikes.

  ‘What happened after . . .’ says Da.

  ‘How did you become a wraith . . .’ I ask.

  Grandma cranes round to look at us all and snorts. Then she points at the underside of her chin with fish-gut-smeared fingers. There’s a small clean hole through the tip of her chin. ‘Threw myself backwards as the wretch fired at me.’

  ‘You jumped?’ I croak.

  ‘Aye. Still managed to hit me in the undercurrents, he did, and it gouged a chunk from the bone of my chin. But if I hadn’t jumped, I would never have turned to wraith. And salt water is the best for all wounds, eh, Bones?’ She grins, showing ragged sockets in place of teeth.

  I’m remembering the same heartbeat that she is. When I crouched in the shadow of sails raised by a mutineer. ‘You’ve got to let my grandma go! ’ I yelled, stupid-bold enough to believe my word had power on that ship, not knowing how scrap-young I must’ve sounded.

  ‘No.’ Stag said the word like such cheap talk could be enough to trade for a whole life. He jerked his gun towards Grandma.  Fired. And she disappeared into the sea.

  Grandma squeezes me tight. ‘We don’t go quiet, do we, Bones?’

  I smirk. ‘No way!’

  ‘When someone threaten us, we drum up a hellish hullaballoo, don’t we?’

  ‘Aye!’ A proper howl steams from my jaws.

  Grandma slaps her thigh.

  I eat tucked neatly under her arm, same as when I was a bab, gratefully tearing fish-flesh in my trembling fingers.

  ‘Wren,’ says Da sorrowfully. ‘I am heart-sad I was not there to defend our home at your bleakest hour.’

  She reaches over and squeezes his arm fondly. Then she looks around the tent and down at me, frowning.

  I lift my brows. ‘What?’

  ‘Where’s the seal-pup? Young what’s-his-name?’ She snaps her brittle fingers, questing for the name she wants with growing annoyance. ‘The child!’ Her face crumples in concentration.

  ‘Sparrow?’ say me and Da together.

  Her face relaxes. ‘Aye.  Sparrow.’ She shakes her head, calls herself rude names.

  ’S’alright, Grandma! Some things must take longer to come back, I reckon.’

  She gifts my forehead a cold, rough kiss. I can smell the salt and damp rolling off her.

  ‘He’s safe, um – Captain?’ says Crow, proper awkward.

  ‘He’s asleep over there,’ I tell her, stepping over to my brother and peeling back his cloak to show her his crazed stacks of hair. He moans in his sleep.

  She smiles tenderly. ‘My little chick.’ She gasps suddenly. ‘I swallowed a spark, a purple worm of fire. Was it – oh gods, was it from this one?’

  I nod.

  ‘Aye, well,’ she says, shrugging. ‘We always knew his powers would be quite the thing to behold.’

  Next she turns to Crow. ‘Lad! Lanky ne’er-do-well, over there!’

  ‘Aye, he knows you’re talking to him, Grandma.’ I cast my eyes skywards.

  She sniffs. ‘Where’s he from? He ent just any land-lurker.’

  ‘Nowhere! Never you mind that now. He—’ I feel myself reddening, for no reason. ‘He treats us well.’

  She laughs. ‘Alright, lad from Nowhere. You must not call me by my former title. That one is to befall another.’

  ‘Captain?’ asks Crow.

  ‘Aye,’ she smiles down at me, pearl-eye shining. ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘Others are waking,’ whispers Sparrow, wriggling upright. He hiccups, and a purple flame pops into life on the tip of his thumb. ‘Mouse, you’re gonna have a proper old sea-army soon, if they keep waking up.’

  His words make me shiver. The little fire Grandma kindled crackles. One of Sparrow’s songs floats into my head.  Stare into the fire, see battles of yore . . .

  Grandma scuttles out into
the open like a crab. Her cackling slices wounds in the dark.

  We follow her, gathering more wraiths and helping them out of the ice. Grandma’s hands are feeling stronger so she performs the cutting and stitching.

  We keep going until Sparrow’s fire sputters, weak and smoky at the ends of his fingers. He looks proper drained.

  I stare at the wraiths. None of them is Rattlebones, and I can’t sense her anywhere near.

  ‘I don’t know where Rattlebones is,’ I tell the crew. ‘I can’t feel her any more.’

  ‘Captain Rattlebones, dredged,’ says one of the wraiths, her nostrils fish-nibbled into odd lumps of flesh.

  Cold fingers twist inside my hollow gut. Da beseeches the heavens, muttering a prayer. But Grandma sweeps me into a salty embrace. ‘We were lucky to have her watch over us as long as she did,’ she tells me.

  While Thaw hunts more food for the wraiths, I ask her more about Stag. ‘Was he there at my birth?’ I glance at Da and he looks away.

  ‘Aye.’ She clears her throat and spits out more sea-muck. ‘But – ack, you might as well know – he didn’t take well to you not being a boy.’

  ‘Another boy.’

  She looks surprised. ‘You found that out, too, did you? Aye. My first grandson lived but seven sunrises.’

  ‘Did you know about that, Da?’

  ‘Aye. Hare told me all about it.’

  ‘Why did Ma ever gather a wretch like that one?’ I jab the asking like a spear.

  Da turns away to start collecting the fish Thaw has dropped from the sky.

  Grandma sticks out her lip. ‘Folk make many bold-step, unwise choices when they’re young, and Hare was awed by Stag the moment she met him. He had charm, back then. Good looks, too.’ I wrinkle my nose and Grandma laughs. ‘He had proper passion for new ways of thinking and he sparked up a dull room just by walking in. But none of us knew how broken he was, child. Stag suffered greatly at the hands of his own ma and pa – and when I say suffered, I mean they tortured the boy half out of his wits. He locked away his heart and forgot where he left the key – and Hare was the one to help him find it. But he chose not to unlock it. And the death of their firstborn made him throw the key away forever.’