Her black-booted feet on a sheet of endless white, Bela watched her ship die.
It wasn’t what she was supposed to do. She knew that. A mistress was meant to go down with her ship.
Helm to the end.
She’d been an unsalted girl when she’d first heard that phrase. It was one of the earliest memories she had. She was a mere stick of a thing back then; that she’d become Belakané, the Hero of the Harbor, wasn’t something she could’ve imagined. The Windborn were nothing anyone could’ve imagined. She’d been just Bela, just a girl who desired the sea. Other girls dreamed of children or magick, and prayed to the Nine in hope. Her friend Alira had been like that; all she’d ever wanted was to weave the Char dust. But not Bela. She’d dreamed of wind and sail. When the evoker came to judge their womb and their will, Alira had taken the test and nearly died. Bela walked herself to the ashmarker that very day. He’d cut the first tick of a wave under her right eye, filled it with the heated dust of crushed bark. Many of the older girls who’d done it had bitten their cheeks or fought the restraints as the darkness seared into their flesh, black on black. Some of the weaker ones had even screamed, and they’d been ashamed.
Bela hadn’t moved. She hadn’t screamed out. Not for that first tick, and not for the swirl and all the waves that had come after.
Ashmarked or not, she’d been too young to be salted back then. So she’d tended the supplies in a warehouse near the Merchanter’s Maze. That early memory was there. She’d been counting off stores of dried pork against white marks on the stocking sheet when one of Domina Bibsbé’s crews returned from the sea. A hull at harbor could be a time for raucous laughter and delightfully foul speech—every palm-shaded girl and boy learned it early—but the crew that filed into the great storeroom that day did so in silence.
They’d lost someone. Even then, Bela knew the signs.
Their shipmistress had taken her position before them, uncovering her head in respect as the old domina limped out from her office to hear their report and let them pay their respects to her. Bela could see a glimmer of tears tracing through the knots of tattooed sea that swept up from the woman’s cheek to break above her eye. Domina Bibsbé saw them, too, and her shoulders hunched as if they already felt the weight of the news that was being delivered.
Stocking sheet forgotten, Bela had slipped between barrels to get close enough to listen.
It was the Bone Pirate, of course. They’d all known the skull-masked woman had been haunting the southern isles. In shaking words, the shipmistress told how the domina’s eldest daughter had been at the helm of one of the half-dozen rumrunners in convoy when the Bone Pirate’s damnable hull had crossed their wake. The domina’s eldest daughter was a brave woman—Bela had met her once before, and even as a child she’d recognized the qualities that would make her a fine mistress—and she’d ordered the other runners to full-sail ahead. Even as they bolted, though, the young woman had flipped her own rudder, cutting a frothing line through the waves in order to broadside the Bone Pirate and give the others time to escape.
A gamble. A good chance well taken.
A loss, though. The Bone Pirate had been ready, and she’d struck first. When the killing was done, the pirate had captured her prize.
Domina Bibsbé had listened, staring at the ground. Her eyes had glinted wet in the lanterned dark. She’d looked so much older in that moment. “And what of my girl?” she’d asked, her voice quiet.
The shipmistress had tried to speak but failed. So it was her maiden who did. The rumrunner’s second in command took two steps forward, bowed to the pained old woman, and whispered the bitter truth.
“With the ship,” she’d said. “Helm to the end.”
The domina had nodded then. And when she’d at last looked up at them, there was pride mixed with the loss on her face. “A strong girl. A good girl,” she’d said. “Helm to the end.”
A mistress goes down with the ship. Old Domina Bibsbé had known it, and her young daughter had known it—Mother hold her soul. The rumrunners in that room had known it. Even the Bone Pirate would have known it.
Helm to the end.
And yet now, a black dot on a white expanse, Bela stood and watched her Sandcrow die. No mistress at her helm. No one in her belly but the dead.
Of the half-hundred crew who’d crowded her decks when they left Myst Wera, only seven of them were left. They stood in a ragged and silent line, close beside the jumbled crates and bags that they’d salvaged while they could.
Like the others, Bela rubbed at cold, numbed arms. The blue sky—a welcome break from the weeks of blizzard—teased a warmth it didn’t provide.
A horrible, discordant song marked the ceaseless pressures that grappled her ship in its death throes. The low moan of twisting timbers. The higher scream of her keel catching and scraping on the bone-hard ice. A mid-range of snapping wood amid the wretched groans. A few of the crew shuddered visibly when the mainstay finally snapped with a boom.
“She’s going,” Malaika said. The grizzled woman had been predicting the vessel’s demise since they’d first been locked in ice. But if she felt any satisfaction in seeing it come true, she showed nothing of it. Her long braids of black hair shook as if she wanted to reject the very notion of what they were seeing.
Three more crashes drummed like thunder.
“Bulkheads,” Neka said. The tall woman had a reddish tinge to the curls of her hair. Its contrast with her paler skin marked her as one of the Kubwa people, stronger and hardier than a shorebreak. But even her voice was hardly audible, like the whisper of a loved one’s disease. “Not long now.”
The Sandcrow shifted as she drank deep of the icy water below. The new weight rotated her backward against the white plain. A shower of splinters vaulted up from her foredeck to crash down into the frozen landscape.
“Mother,” Malaika croaked. “She’s breaking up sure now. She’ll go down by halves.”
There were a few nods and hushed whispers of agreement from some of the others, but the crew members quickly fell back into their mutual silence as they watched their only hope of returning home be shredded piece by fracturing piece in the unforgiving floes.
Another shower of splinters from the deck, and the Sandcrow rolled even farther back into the waiting white, exposing more and more of her hull to the sky.
The sight of her underbelly was obscene, and Bela looked away across the stretch of endless white that just weeks earlier had been a deep and driving sea. For a moment, she thought she could see movement out there, a white rise shifting upon a white sea, but then it was gone.
Alone.
Bela’s eyes turned to the sky, where the fires of heaven were rippling to life. The twisting sheets of eerie light pulsed green and blue across the first of the evening stars.
Another thunderous boom from the ship behind her. On instinct, Bela took a deep breath to gather herself. The cold air stung like sharp knives. She coughed for a few seconds, then forced herself to take her breath in smaller doses, more directly through the scarf she’d bunched around her neck. She wanted to close her eyes against the cold and the despair and the exhaustion, but instead she turned back to what was left of her crew.
“We’ll need a fire,” she said. “We’re soaked through, and it’ll be a cold night. Oni?”
Her shipmaiden blinked, then shook her head as if waking herself from a dream. She’d shared Bela’s helm and her bed; a steady, strong anchor. Before they’d left, Bela had offered her a chance to take the vows and the wave above her gray eyes, a chance to become a shipmistress herself. She’d chosen instead to come along on this one final mission. Bela feared she’d chosen her own death, but the maiden’s eyes still had hope in them. “Yes, mistress?”
“See to the gear. Let’s move everything up to the cover of the outboats, clear of the fissures. We don’t want to go down with her in the middle of the night. I’ll want a full account of what we’ve managed to save.”
“Aye.”
Oni took one more look out at the disappearing ship, then hurried over to the piles of boxes and bags. When the others turned to Bela, she could see nothing in their faces but despair.
It wasn’t becoming of the women, but it was hard to blame them. Bela felt it too: the sense that they had no path forward that didn’t end in death. Her only hope was that their duties would move their minds from what faced them—herself included.
It was something she learned on the night that the Windborn came, the night she’d saved the ships and gone from Bela to Belakané, Hero of the Harbor. Despair never saved a woman. Duty and hope and trust could.
“Neka, Eshe—give her a hand,” she said. “Mal and Sanyu—I want you readying those boats for good cover. Give us a secure camp for the night. It’s calm enough now, but we can’t doubt that the wind’ll come up again. Be quick about it, while we’ve still got some light. Moon’s rising already. Mal, soon as you can, give us a fire and a small bite to eat.”
The four of them nodded and, to Bela’s relief, shuffled off to their tasks. There was still enough of a sense of duty to move them, even through the despair, and Bela thanked the Mother for it.
That left only the young scriptkey. He looked up with expectation. Not for the first time in recent weeks, Bela wondered how much warmer Tewrick would be if he had hair upon his head and cheeks.
“And me, shipmistress? What is this man to do?”
Her gaze returned to the frozen sea and the exposed belly of the boat. The Sandcrow had rolled over completely in the pack now, and Bela saw the terrible gashes across the underside of her hull and the broken remnants of her tattered keel. A terrible sight, but it also meant they could reach the parts of the hold that were sealed off when the first of the floes had broken through the ship’s flanks.
“You’re with me, Tew.” Bela smiled grimly. “You can swim.”
His eyes were wider than usual. His bald head swiveled from her to the ship and back again. “Swim, mistress? Those waters are just shy of freezing.”
“Then let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, reader.” Bela smiled down at the young scholar. He was more out of place than ever among the hard salters and the harsh elements. “But all the same, there’s at least one more thing we should try to retrieve before she goes all the way under.”
“What’s that?”
“Your books, Tew. What’s a reader without his books?”