They saw the steam-like mist of the bay, rising above the jungle, long before they heard the roar of the great waterfall that caused it.
Alira had never seen the Bay of Bones, though she knew that the most experienced Stormborn huntresses, like Whéuri, had long kept tabs on the Skull, as they called the feared pirate. But Alira was the most experienced of them left now. And all she knew about what awaited her were the tales she’d heard of the strange place: a river sinking to the sea, moving mountains, pirates who floated up a waterfall. Fantastical but fascinating images.
So while she was fairly certain that going to the Bay of Bones meant she’d die at the hands of the Bone Pirate—perhaps within the next hours—she was grateful, at least, that she’d see the truth behind the stories before the end.
Assuming the pirates didn’t fill her with arrows at the gate, of course.
As the noise of the waterfall grew louder, and its mist drew nearer, she directed the Stormborn to bring their boats closer to the bank of the ever-widening river, where they’d be able to beach before the current carried them over the edge and down to their deaths.
When the river turned and at last they saw that dreadful plunge, Alira’s breath was taken away by the enormity of it. The noise was so loud that she felt it like a rumble in her chest and bones.
There was a tall palisade of upright logs built right up to the river’s edge on either side, close to the falls themselves, and a bridge spanning the gap of the river beyond it, so Alira motioned for them to beach the boats well before that.
Then she told them to wait, to make no moves of any kind while she went ahead alone. Anyone keeping watch from the walls would know they were there, but a single emissary would surely be less likely to provoke an immediate fight than the dozens of them who’d made it out of Anjel. Kora wanted to stay with her, of course, in case there was trouble. But the truth was that neither of them was in a condition to fight. They could hardly walk. And it would be weeks, if she was lucky, before Kora’s shoulder was well enough to once more draw a bow. So Alira asked her to stay and protect Amaru specifically. That seemed enough to satisfy her.
And then Alira walked on, crossing a wide zone where the jungle had been cleared, approaching a large, double-doored gate in the wall.
Wearily limping up to it, Alira could see that the wall, and even the gate itself, wasn’t greatly different from what had enclosed Anjel. It was both a comfort and a fright to know that the pirates weren’t as secure as they might’ve thought.
“That’s far enough!” a woman said from somewhere inside the gate—a high-pitched voice trying to sound deep and imposing. A younger woman, Alira suspected. That could help.
Alira stopped and held up her hands, though she doubted that anyone seeing the condition she was in could imagine she was a threat. “I am unarmed,” she said. “I’ve come to talk.”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Alira, from Myst Motri.” She let her arms down, knowing she didn’t have the strength to keep them up long. “I was stranded here by the sinking of my ship, the Black Crow.” It felt wrong to Alira to say that she was Motrian—she was Stormborn now—but in discussions with Amaru and some of the others, they’d decided to begin with this. The truth was that none of them had any idea what the pirates knew of the Stormborn. They clearly knew that someone was with them on the supposedly deserted island—they protected themselves with a wall, after all—but it could be that the Bloodborn had been attacking them, too, and that they’d think that the Stormborn were that enemy. Far better, they decided, that she first present herself as something familiar. As Seaborn. As prey.
There was a long pause. Longer than Alira expected. Her mind began to imagine bows being drawn behind unseen arrow slits, the points aimed for her chest. Or a knife being sharpened as they prepared to use her to replace one of the Bone Pirate’s fabled skin drums. Or perhaps it was true they were cannibals, and they were—
“What ship?” the voice was so high it was almost a squeak.
The voice wasn’t angry. It sounded, if anything, confused. Alira’s brow furrowed. Hadn’t she been clear? “The Black Crow,” she repeated, speaking more loudly. “It sank.”
Again there was a long pause. But this time, Alira could hear the whisper of hushed voices in disagreement. That was good. And bad.
Feeling that something was teetering on the other side of the wall, Alira decided to push her luck. “The Bone Pirate is in danger,” she called out. “I need to speak to her.”
The disagreement hushed. Only a few seconds later, Alira heard the sound of a bar being pulled away from the gate. Then hidden hinges creaked, and one door of the gate was pulled open. There was a small, young, brown-haired woman standing behind it, and for a moment Alira was stunned by how normal she looked. Alira hadn’t given much thought to what a pirate ought to look like, but it still surprised her that this one could’ve passed for a young hand aboard a Seaborn vessel—no different from how Alira and Bela had been when they’d come here aboard the Black Crow.
“You are being watched,” the young woman said.
Alira nodded in understanding. It was a warning not to make sudden moves, and even if she wanted to do so, she certainly couldn’t. “I mean no harm to you or your shipmistress,” she said. Then, for an instant, Alira wondered if she’d made a mistake in assuming the Bone Pirate was referred to in this way among her crew.
The woman, though, didn’t even blink at the reference. “She may mean you harm,” she said. “No one enters here and leaves.”
“I’m willing to take that chance.”
The girl nodded at that and signaled for her to approach.
Alira hobbled forward, unable to hide her exhaustion. There were other pirates inside the gate, she saw. All of them women—most of them older—and all of them looking at her with obvious curiosity. “Thank you,” Alira said as she stepped inside.
“My name is Tai,” the small woman said.
“I’m Alira.”
“So you said. Alira of the Black Crow.”
Alira nodded.
Tai frowned. “Follow me.”
Alira heard the gate shut and barred behind her, but she didn’t turn to look. Even if she knew someone planned to stab her in the back, she wouldn’t be able to stop them. So better to keep her eyes ahead, to see the truth about the Bay of Bones.
And what a truth it was.
Tai led her down a path between wooden buildings. Storage, Alira suspected, though she couldn’t be bothered to look at them closely. Her every sense was fixed on what lay ahead. The cliff that the river fell off curved ahead to the left and right, reaching so far around that the walls nearly touched each other far ahead on the other side of what seemed a great hole in the ground.
As they got closer to the edge, Alira could see that those high walls embraced a circle of deep ocean waters. “Ta’koa’s bones,” she whispered. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The path led to a wooden structure along the cliff’s edge, directly beside the waterfall. The bridge over the river leapt across close beside it. Smiling at Alira’s amazement, Tai led her there and stepped out onto a platform of sorts—a kind of open-faced box, sized for multiple people—that was hanging from ropes over the terrifying drop.
Alira looked up before she stepped on, saw pulleys and lines of ropes thick and thin that ran from the structure into the waterfall itself. “What is this?”
“A lift.” Tai fiddled with two smaller ropes that hung down into the interior of the box. “Get in.”
Not knowing what else to do, Alira got in. The pirate pulled a lever, and the floor sank a few inches—Alira gasped in shock—before the ropes caught and held. Then the lift began slowly creeping down along the face of the cliff. Tai pulled at another of the ropes for a moment, and the lift picked up a small amount of speed.
Wooden landings steadily passed by, and Alira, looking out, saw that the landings led to wooden paths bound to the cliff walls around the bay. Other pirates were moving along them, walking to and from cave-like holes carved into the stony earth. They were like the paths and homes of the Stormborn, Alira thought, only instead of weaving around and upon Furywood branches, these were clinging to the rock walls. Turning to look out the other way, out onto the bay through a window on that side of the box, Alira could see that where the ocean squeezed through the gap between the arms of the high cliff wall, the pirates had built a massive gate, painted and formed to look like the rocks themselves. Moving mountains, Whéuri had said. Alira smiled at the description.
And this lift, of course, would explain the floating pirates.
But where was the Pale Dawn? The Bone Pirate’s legendary feared ship was nowhere to be seen.
“You’ve had a rough time of it,” Tai said.
“What’s that?”
“Looks like you can barely stand.”
Alira smiled. Befriending Tai surely couldn’t be the worst idea if her meeting with the Bone Pirate didn’t go well. “That obvious?”
Tai grinned. “You don’t look like you could jump a rat.”
“Probably not,” Alira admitted.
The smooth surface of the bay was getting close. Alira’s nose was suddenly filled with the thick, briny scent of it, and it occurred to her that she hadn’t smelled the sea since the days after Bela’s death. Sensing it now, she felt an ache of loss and wondered if a part of her hadn’t wanted to come back. No elder had told her that she couldn’t go to the island’s shore, after all. She just hadn’t.
Tai pulled on one of the lines, and their descent slowed to a crawl. Just a few feet above the water, a wooden landing rose into view, and the pirate pulled the lines to stop the lift when the floor of the platform met it. Then she moved the lever-locking mechanism back into place and stepped out.
Alira followed, her head swimming with thoughts. Wonder at the strange lift and how it might work. Fear at the feelings in her heart. Fear at what the Bone Pirate might do to her.
The wide walkway—hard against the base of the cliff, roofed against the wet of the waterfall close beside—bent back into an enormous cavern behind the streaming wall of water.
There were dockworks there, and two ships at anchor in the half-light. She couldn’t see anything of the second ship beyond its masts and rigging, but it probably didn’t matter: Alira couldn’t imagine anything that would’ve taken her eyes away from the ship in front.
Brig-built, with two masts rigged for square sails, she was a large but sleek ship with wide Furywood cladding running over the darker oak planking of her sides. Her bow was bleached white, and beneath it a fierce Furywood ram, pointed with iron teeth, sat at the waterline. Everything about her screamed speed and maneuverability, strength and power. Alira didn’t need to see the bone-pale flag atop her mainmast to know what she was.
The Pale Dawn. The most feared ship on the seas.
There were pirate women on her decks and in her rigging doing the familiar work of maintenance. As Tai led Alira closer—deeper into the cave and farther from the noisy waterfall that had become a glimmering sheet of sunlight over its mouth—she heard that they were singing as they labored. It was a song she knew:
Come all you young ladies who follow the sea,
Step up, pay attention, and listen to me:
On a dark as black midnight, came fire from on high,
Sails all turned to cinder, ash choking the sky.
Then an unsalted lass, brave Bela did cry:
Come quickly, cut anchor, to the waves we must fly!
They followed that maiden, the ships she did save,
And she helped them along with the point of her blade!
Oh she helped them along with the point of her blade!
Hearing them sing, Alira, for a moment, set aside her fear at the sight of the Pale Dawn and at the thought of that nightmare who lived within it. Instead, she smiled. Bela hated that song. She well and truly despised it—which was one reason that their shipmistress aboard the Black Crow had encouraged the crew to sing it whenever she or Bela had been slack at their duties. The embarrassment inevitably made them work harder.
There was a wide plank from the dock to the ship’s deck. As the pirate women began another song around them, Tai led her across the plank and onto the dark-wood main deck of the Pale Dawn.
So much was familiar to Alira—the lines of knotted rigging, the brass cleats, the rails, and even the buckets and mops—that her eyes went immediately to what she’d never seen before. There were three strange contraptions like horizontal bows mounted to the foredeck where they had come aboard. As tall as a woman, with metal arms and gears and what looked like mighty harpoons in the place of arrows. Piles of rope were carefully coiled up at their feet.
Alira didn’t have time to look at them long. Tai turned her onto the main deck, toward the rear of the ship, and she saw what could only be the drums. One on each side of the deck, mounted facing forward, they were covered with waxed canvas sheets. But their shape was clear. And so was their size: large enough to take the skin of a woman.
Tai, looking back before she opened the door to the lower deck and cabins, saw how Alira stared. “We were dead in the beginning,” she said, as if it were all the explanation needed. “We are dead even now.”