Chapter Ten Before #2
“Ryman, let me tend to you,” she called, grimacing as the words left her mouth. But it was the only way she knew to get him belowdecks and out of the way. “Come, you can take my bunk, if need be—”
“Nonsense, you are a lady of the Meridian, you should not stoop to cleaning,” Ryman shouted back over his shoulder. His nightshift was soiled at the collar, splattered with sick. “Captain Quine! I say, unhand me!”
Another sailor caught Ryman by the arm, bodily steering him around. But the lord slipped on the rain-slick deck, stumbling to his knees with a bray like a donkey. Cat felt her cheeks flush deeper, her embarrassment a roaring fire. She did not miss the look on Fell’s face either.
Pity.
I don’t pity the likes of you.
She did not know which she preferred. Fell’s pity, or the pirate’s disdain.
A few yards away, the officer wrestled Ryman to his feet. Somehow he had developed a nosebleed in the last thirty seconds.
She could hardly watch the shameful scene.
Ryman whining for a servant and falling over himself.
Another sailor of the Venerable running to escort the helpless lord below.
Captain Quine at the helm, shaking his head with a look of disgust. And the storm beyond it all, black and green, still churning its way across the furious sea.
Lightning veined once more, crackling through the clouds. Guttural thunder followed, the distant force of it reverberating in Cat’s chest.
Then another light flared, lower this time, somewhere between the waves and the cloud bank. Barely above the waterline, or where the waterline should be.
Cat squinted at it.
It was a flash in the clouds, but not like a lightning bolt.
Like a—
“CANNON FIRE!” Fell roared, just as the sound reached the Venerable.
Not the distant rumble of thunder, but the sharp, brutal blast of gunpowder.
A cannonball whistled across the distance between storm and ship, hot iron burning through the air.
She barely had time to flinch, let alone brace.
Lieutenant Fell was faster, throwing out an arm, forcing Cat to duck against the deck. He did the same, his body pressed beside hers, his arm around her shoulders, his wet clothes soaking through her shift.
The whistle became a howl.
Through the cage of Fell’s arms, Cat looked up in time to see the cannonball careen past the forecastle and slam into the figurehead of the Venerable.
The ornate prow, a gold carving of the Meridian lion with a lantern sun in its paws, exploded in a storm of shimmering splinters.
The legendary beast fell to ashes, the great symbol of the Empire destroyed in seconds.
The lantern in the lion’s paws went too, flame spitting and hissing as it spiraled into the sea.
The force of the blow rocked the ship, and Cat’s stomach rocked with it. Her ears rang with the force of cannon fire.
Across the deck, the crew of the Venerable leapt to battle stations, whipped into a frenzy. Quine barked orders, his officers scuttling, his helmsman rapidly spinning the wheel. Sailors flew up the rigging, climbing to free the sails.
Cat expected Fell to stand, to follow orders. But he did not move, hovering over her, his silver eyes sweeping back and forth over the ship, and into the clouds, reading the distance between the Venerable and whoever lay in wait.
Whatever he saw, he did not like.
“Lieutenant,” she murmured, trying to stand despite the arm holding her down.
Again, it was useless to fight him. He did not move, his face a blank stone.
“Is the hurricane shooting at us?” Ryman wailed out, already forgotten in a heap.
Before anyone could answer the stupidest question ever asked upon a ship, there was another flash in the clouds.
And another.
And another.
* * *
SHE WOKE TO the taste of blood.
I bit my lip, Cat thought, her mind pulling itself slowly from the black maw of sleep. Ryman was making such an ass of himself, I bit my lip to keep from screaming at him.
Then something nudged beneath her, gentle as a cat pawing its favorite toy. The rise and fall of whatever she lay on had a rhythm, as if the thing below was breathing. It was not so warm as the air, a few degrees cooler, but not unpleasant.
And wet.
Cat’s eyes flew open to a cloudy sky and gray water, the waves no longer a line of furious mountains but a parade of calm valleys. The thing nudging her was not a thing at all but the current of the Lyrian Sea.
She jerked up to sit, the wreckage beneath her bobbing with the sudden motion.
Cat yelped and froze, lest she tip her makeshift raft over entirely and plunge the rest of her body into the water.
Her arms were already doused, and one leg too, but her torso had dried, stiff with salt.
She could still claim modesty, even half soaked.
As if modesty mattered in the middle of the sea.
It was finally daylight, though the storm left behind a low blanket of misty clouds. A rare reprieve from the Lyrian sun. Cat squinted, trying to see through the haze. Trying to make sense of the destruction coming into focus all around her.
She was splayed across a curved piece of wood, one side pocked with barnacles, the other black and burned. Revulsion crawled up Cat’s body.
This was part of the hull, from deep below the waterline.
Terror descended and Cat raised her gaze.
The Venerable lay in pieces.
Small ones.
The edge of a gilded rail. A window frame from the captain’s quarters, its glass shattered.
A few barrels floated past, sinking slowly.
Rope trailed along like the tentacles of some horrible sea creature, tangled and frayed.
One of the masts bobbed nearby, a felled tree, its white sail rippling across the surface as it had once rippled in the wind.
A longboat stubbornly remained afloat, albeit flipped over and broken in half.
Cat sucked in a desperate, terrified breath. She tasted ash instead of salt air and nearly retched.
It was not mist moving over the surface but smoke. Indeed, pockets of flame still burned along the wreckage, feeding on what remained of the Venerable, clinging to dry wood and skims of oil on the surface.
More dark shapes took form through the thick air, arcs of wood like the ribs of a skeleton. The deepest parts of the hull had risen to the surface, too wet to burn through. It looked like a watery hell all around her, with nothing but death to keep her company.
A wet, rasping sob rose up in Cat’s throat. She clapped a hand to her mouth, blinking furiously, trying to stem her tears before they even began. The smoky air seemed to sear her lungs, but Cat gasped it down, breath after breath, trying to steady herself against a world turned upside down.
“Hello?” she finally called out over the water, her voice trembling. “Sara! Captain Quine! Lieutenant Fell!” She was desperate enough to even call for him. “Ryman!”
No one answered.
“Hello?!” she shouted again, into the emptiness, with no one to reply but the hissing embers.
Her eyes stung, her face crumbling despite her best efforts. Cat told herself it was the smoke, but the hot tears running down her face said otherwise.
What now?
It was the only question that mattered, with the Venerable sunk, the sea stretching in every direction, and Cat at the center of it all.
Alive, but still very much doomed.
There is no point in crying.
Cat shivered as the thought crossed her mind, the voice her own. But colder, harder. And correct. There was no one to hear her weep. No one to come to her rescue.
She glanced through the wreckage again.
No one but me.
Slowly, she forced herself to her knees, rising up a little for a better view of the debris. The water sloshed over the wreckage, but she kept her balance, hands outstretched.
Now she glimpsed the bodies amongst the debris, felled like their great ship. Men of the Meridian to the last. A tricorne hat floated by, the edge of it decorated in gold filigree. Cat recognized the pattern.
Quine.
Worse was the shock of dark hair, blacker than the waves, never to be woven into a severe braid ever again. Sara already looked like a ghost, the nightgown her shroud. In the smallest of mercies, she floated face down, and Cat did not have to look into her lifeless eyes.
Cat expected another wave of tears, if not sickness. She touched her arm, feeling the still-blooming bruises of Sara’s terrified grip.
Sorrow washed over her. But the tears did not return.
What good will it do? There is no point, Cat told herself again, turning her gaze away.
She searched, not for the uniform of a navy officer, but a stained nightshift. A head of dirty blond hair. Bare feet and soft hands.
Let him be dead at least. Show me this mercy, she begged.
Then someone groaned, and her body whirled so fast she nearly plunged into the water.
Cat tracked the sound like a hunter, finding the overturned longboat again. One side of the broken hull dipped into the water, with an odd shape clinging to the wood.
It was moving.
Cat bent to the water’s edge. Her hands clawed through the waves, working furiously to paddle herself towards the longboat.
“Hello!” she screamed once more, her arms already burning with exertion.
The shape groaned again in reply. It sounded more like a growl this time, bitter and annoyed. One arm bent, pushing up through the haze, bringing his face into sharper focus.
Foolish though it might have been, Cat plunged into the sea. Her nightshift like a cloud around her, she swam the last few yards to the longboat.
And Second Lieutenant Jasper Fell.
He stared down at her with a strange look, in a daze.
Black hair clung to one side of his face, and a vicious cut sliced across one dark eyebrow.
His arms, bare to the elbow, were striped in angry, pink burns.
They almost obscured a tattoo on his left forearm, a navyman’s mark—the Meridian lion with an anchor in its paws.
“Lady Rose?” Fell said softly. The cut through his brow dripped red, a bead of blood working down his cheek.
“Under the circumstances, I suppose you can call me Cat,” she sputtered, fighting to float.