The door to the Bone Pirate’s cabin was thick oak, stained and polished to a deep red sheen that was the color of blood at night. It might’ve been beautiful, Alira thought, but for the bones that had been set into its surface: the face of a human skull, its jaws open. Staring at it in horror, Alira wanted to imagine that it was meant to be coming from the wood, like a diver just breaking the surface of the sea, gasping a breath into aching lungs. But the more she stared, the more she thought it wasn’t a gasp. It was a scream. A final shout of terror before the face was pulled down forever.
Tai knocked on the heavy wood beside it. Then, after a few heartbeats, she opened the door. Alira, motioned forward, stepped inside.
The room was in the same place that the cabin of the shipmistress had been aboard the Black Crow—across the stern of the ship, just above the rudder—and it was roughly the same size. But nothing else seemed the same. It was ornate in a way that neither Seaborn cabins nor Stormborn homes ever were. The woods—of the bunk, of the massive bleached-oak desk, of the cabinetry—were all intricately carved. Even the wooden frames between the panes of glass in the great bank of windows across the rear of the cabin were made beautiful with twists and turns in the wood. Alira’s eye wanted to go to it all, but her gaze couldn’t be shaken from what stood at the center of the room, behind the broad desk, framed by those windows: the seat of bones and the skull-masked woman who sat upon it.
To stand before the Throne of Bones was to stand before death. Every Seaborn girl knew it. And every Seaborn woman upon the sea lived in fear of it.
The truth was more frightening than Alira had ever imagined: a jumbled mix of human remains, spliced together almost as if to mock the human form itself. The sides of the chair were the long bones of human arms, held together by the mortal grips of the thinner bones of hands and fingers. The fronts of its arms, leading down to the floor, were legs, ornamented with twists of human spines.
The Bone Pirate sat at ease on a seat of leather stretched over pelvis bones, her back against a pile of skulls stacked among splayed ribs. She wore a stormcoat the color of shrouds, and her long, dark hair was pulled back around the mask upon her face: the front half of yet one more skull, this one missing its lower jaw. In the shadows of the open sockets where another’s eyes had once been, the living eyes that stared out were big and brown.
Alira took a few hesitant steps into the room. The door shut behind her. Tai was gone. She was alone with the Bone Pirate. Her heart was pounding so hard in her chest that she felt it in her ears.
She took a deep breath, trying to calm herself, trying to focus, trying to figure out how to start talking to a woman who’d sent untold numbers of Seaborn women to their deaths. A woman who’d killed so many for so long that some thought her immortal. Some kind of magick, Alira had thought when she was younger. Though now, seeing the lack of wrinkles on the living fingers that rested on the throne’s bony arms, she wondered if maybe the only thing long-lived was the mask.
Alira opened her mouth to speak, then couldn’t decide whether to begin by kneeling or giving a respectful nod. Caught between both, she gave an awkward bow.
The Bone Pirate didn’t respond. She just stared. Her mouth, visible beneath the half-face of skull, was a tight line.
“Thank you for—”
The Bone Pirate cut her off by raising her right hand, a single finger lifted up. The head tilted a little, and Alira felt like a mouse in a trap, beneath the gaze of an owl that was curious to study its prey before eating it.
“Your name is Alira?” The Bone Pirate’s voice wasn’t as high as Tai’s had been, but it was no less surprising. It had a soft undertone. The sound of a young woman who, in another life, might have grown up to be a healer.
Alira nodded. “I was born on Myst Motri. I was shipwrecked here on the Rootless Isle.”
The skull-masked face tilted the other way now, examining her. “The ship?”
Alira’s face was tight. “The Black Crow.”
The Bone Pirate nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “If you’ve come to seek vengeance, you should know I did not sink it.”
Alira swallowed hard and nodded. So the Windborn airship had indeed sent it to the depths. And Bela hadn’t lived to be seized and murdered by the Bone Pirate. That night—that moment when they kissed, when the airship dropped its fires upon them—Alira had been thrown into the sea. Bela had met the Mother.
It was good to know. But she was too exhausted to hold her emotions in check. Her limbs shook. She wanted to sit down. If she had any tears left, she wanted to shed them.
There was a knock at the door. It opened, and someone else entered the cabin.
“Do you recognize her?” The Bone Pirate was looking over Alira’s shoulder, at the door.
Dazed, Alira turned toward the open door. Tai was there, and another young woman stood beside her, almost as small. She had bright-green eyes, and they widened on seeing her. “Alira?”
Alira blinked. She knew her. The girl who’d spent so much time up in the gull’s nest of the Black Crow, watching the horizons. A face she’d thought dead, but now standing here—alive, breathing, a little older. “Hikora?”
Hikora ran forward to wrap arms around her. Alira gasped at both the firmness of the embrace and the shock of seeing her. “We’d thought you’d gone to the Mother’s Embrace!” Hikora exclaimed.
“I thought you all …” Alira choked on her own words.
Hikora pulled away, face beaming. Then she tugged at Alira, forced her to move so she could look out the windows on the starboard side of the Bone Pirate’s cabin.
The other ship she’d glimpsed. Alira saw it now. And she knew it too. Whole chunks of the ship were different—repairs after the Windborn attack, surely—but she still recognized railings and hull boards that she and Bela had scrubbed clean again and again. The Black Crow.
Alira staggered. The world was suddenly spinning. If Hikora was alive, if the Black Crow hadn’t sunk, then maybe—“Bela?”
“Not here,” Hikora said. “But she’s alive.”
It was too much. The floor suddenly seemed to be rising up, but Hikora had grabbed her elbow and was keeping her upright.
“She’s very weak,” Tai said, coming up to help.
The Bone Pirate stood. “Sit her down.”
One of them had pulled a chair to the other side of the massive desk in front of the throne.
Guided by Tai and Hikora, Alira fell into it. Her arms shook in relief.
Bela. Alive. All this time. Alive. Mother.
She couldn’t believe it. Her mind reeled with questions. What had happened to her, where she was, how she could—
No. Safety first. Kora, Amaru, all the rest—they were here now. They needed help. “There are others on the island,” she said.
Tai exchanged a look with the Bone Pirate, who sat down and stared across the bare wood of the table at her. “The Rootless. They’ve taken some of us.”
Alira shook her head. “No. They haven’t. All this time, I’ve been living with the Rootless—the Stormborn, they call themselves. I assure you that the same thing that hunts you hunts them. They hunted me too. They took me. I barely got away.”
Hikora set a hand on her arm reassuringly. “Is that what happened to you?”
Alira nodded, smiled with as much strength as she could manage. “I lived.”
The Bone Pirate abruptly stood and walked to the window at the side of the room. She stared out at the Black Crow. “Are these Stormborn, as you call them, the ones at our gates?”
“They are. What’s left of them. They’ve come—I’ve come—to ask for your help. Please, let them inside.”
Tai’s back straightened up as she turned toward the pirate leader. “We can’t do that, can we?”
Something about her tone made Alira blink up through her exhaustion. The Bone Pirate’s shoulders had fallen, as if a heavy weight had been placed upon them. “I … I don’t know,” she said.
“This is your ship,” Alira said. “Your bay. You’re the Bone Pirate.”
The Bone Pirate let out a long breath. “No, I am not.” She reached up and pulled the mask from her face before turning back around. She was, as Alira had thought, a young woman. A beautiful woman, though her eyes seemed tired early. “My name is Julara.”
“I don’t understand.”
Julara carefully slipped the mask into a bag at her side. “The Bone Pirate left here not long after you arrived on the island. She left with Belakané.”
“What?”
“I can read numbers. I’m the only one left who can. So the women put me in charge to help keep track of the stores.”
“Ti’nay’s broken toe,” Alira swore.
No one disagreed. It was, indeed, chaos.
“We all have questions,” Hikora said after a moment. “But to start—”
Julara chewed on her lip for a moment, then nodded. “Right. To start, we get your people inside the walls. Tai?”
The pirate stood, hesitated. “Some of the women will grumble.”
“Suggest to them that I might miscount their next meal allotment if they do.”
Tai smiled, gave the slightest bow of her head, and left.
“Thank you,” Alira said. “But you should know the Bloodborn will be coming.”
“The Bloodborn?” Hikora asked.
“The ones who took me.”
“Our walls are strong,” Julara said.
“Ours were too.”
Julara walked back and sat down on the throne with a heavy sigh. “Well, it’s a start. A step while we figure out what to do.”