Chapter 24
Twenty-Four
“He’s not going to throw himself overboard,” Cali said, watching Gert loop a thick length of frayed hemp around Thrain’s middle. She wasn’t sure of this, but she felt she should lodge some sort of complaint to keep her friend from being tied up.
“I promised Marvella I’d help her scrub the pots,” Thrain protested, his arms pinned to his sides as rope unwound itself from a pole and encircled his chest. “She’ll wonder where I’ve run off to, you know.”
Cali blinked in surprise at the self-coiling rope, although she shouldn’t have been startled that Tris was eager to save Thrain from himself and the sirens. What was surprising was the fact that Thrain hadn’t noticed, although he was focused on arguing.
“Marvella will survive,” Gert said flatly. She gave the rope a firm tug and stepped back to examine her work. “So will you, which is the point.”
“I don’t need to be tied up like a—”
“Dwarf who can’t be trusted not to throw himself at the sirens?” Gert patted him once on the shoulder, not unkindly. “You do.”
A dark wave hurled itself over the bow while lightning shredded the sky in angry white gashes. The hull screamed in protest—not the usual creak and groan of wood, but something more desperate that made Cali’s damp fur stand on end.
“He was perfectly fine with the mermaids,” Cali called to Bonnie. “He didn’t throw himself overboard for Arabella.”
“Arabella isn’t a siren,” Bonnie said, swiping her wet hair from her face.
This gave Cali pause. It was true that she’d never encountered a siren, and neither had Thrain. The dwarf had a tendency to fall hard and fast, and she’d prefer if that wasn’t over the side of the ship. None of that made her feel better about seeing her friend bound to the mast of the pirate ship.
Rain pelted the deck as The Cruel Mistress was propelled from wave to wave, like a flat stone skipping roughly across the surface of a pond. The hull moaned with each bone-shuddering impact, and Cali sensed that Tris was as scared as she was, which was not comforting in the least.
The pantheri gripped the stair railing leading to the quarterdeck to keep from being tossed to her knees, her heart pounding and her eyes squeezed shut. If she went down with the ship, she didn’t want to know it.
Then, as violently as it had arrived, the storm blew itself out.
A final gust of wind slammed them down a wave, as the sea smoothed out beneath them, and Tris expelled a long, shuddering exhale through her sails.
The turgid sky unknotted itself from black to grey to sun-worn silver, the sheets of rain giving way to errant drops.
Cali was soaked through to her fur, which she suspected would take the better part of a day to dry, and she smelled powerfully of brine.
She pushed damp hair from her forehead and was just drawing breath to renew her arguments for Thrain’s release when she looked up and saw them.
Two ebony rocks jutted from the water ahead, as sharp as broken teeth against the pale sky, and between them lay a narrow channel of enticingly placid water.
For a beat, Cali wondered why they couldn’t go around it, until she spotted the equally sharp rocks just below the surface surrounding the two ebony ones.
It would be impossible to steer a ship around without being impaled on the graveyard of spikes.
“This is it.” Bonnie’s voice was pulled tight and flat. “The entrance to the Claw Island cove.” She squared her shoulders and swept her gaze over her crew. “You know what to do.”
Around her, the crew snapped into action.
Pinkie produced wads of cotton from her pockets, stuffing it into her ears as her cheeks puffed with concentration.
A sea fey with intricately braided hair produced two bundles of dried seaweed that were tucked in her sleeves, jamming them into each ear with the flat of her thumb.
One of the burlier halflings had a pair of thick rope plugs she wore on a cord around her neck, apparently kept ready for exactly this moment.
Then Seraphina appeared at her elbow. Despite having two legs, the nagine glided more than walked, which had never stopped being unsettling.
Without ceremony, she pressed two scratchy bundles of wool firmly into Cali’s ears, holding them in place with a strip of cloth she wound around the pantheri’s head and knotted at the back before she gave Cali a satisfied nod.
The world became muffled. Cali could still feel the sway of the ship and the burr of Tris’s groans beneath her feet.
Instead of calling orders, both Bonnie and Gert used intricate hand signals to each other and the pirates on deck, although the sailors clearly knew precisely what to do, as the ship drifted uneasily toward the gap between the rocks.
She watched the rocks sidle closer and let herself believe, for a handful of breaths, that they might simply pass through without incident.
Maybe the sirens were sleeping, or absent, or had found more interesting prey elsewhere.
The channel was narrow but navigable, and all traces of the storm had burned away.
Was it possible that they might pass without being stopped?
Then she saw a pair of eyes, pale and luminous, like two moonstones set into the rock itself, watching the ship without blinking.
Then another pair flashed above them, and two more beside those, and suddenly the rock was not a rock at all, but a surface made entirely of ravenous eyes.
She knew all too well what it was like to hunt a target, but it was unsettling to be on the other end of it.
Cali’s claws were out and her fur rippled along her spine as one siren rose. The creature came up slowly, over the jagged peak of the nearest rock, and the sunlight caught her golden hair, which was as fine as spun sugar and flowed around her shoulders as if it were still floating in water.
Cali could hear nothing. Whatever the creature was saying or singing, she couldn’t hear it.
She could only watch the siren’s lips part and feel the vibration of it through the soles of her feet, through the deck, through Tris herself, who let out a buzz of protest that vibrated up her legs and bristled her fur.
She turned to check on Thrain, who’d gone completely still. His eyes were glazed and unfocused, his beard slack, and his mouth opened and closed as he wriggled against the rope. Cali read his lips enough to know the word he was saying over and over. Angel.
Cali looked back at the creature on the rock. She was hardly an angel, but her smile was sultry and self-satisfied as she locked her gaze onto the dwarf and licked her lips, as if she were about to devour something particularly delicious.
The pantheri had no trouble admitting when she’d been mistaken about something. Bonnie had been right about the sirens and about Thrain’s inability to resist them—and she’d been very wrong.