CHAPTER 25

Before the Inevitable Comes

Aboard the Current of Faith, life wasn’t the same without Jules. She’d been the heartbeat of the larboard watch, whose voice kept them together as they hoisted the sails or hauled up the anchors. When Jules called, you answered.

When Jules sang, you listened.

Now the sounds of the ship seemed thin, like a piece of music missing its harmony, its rhythm, its lead—stripped down and skeletal.

Jules would have said this was the right thing to do—getting outlaws together to establish a safe harbor from the war between the kingdoms. But Reed had not forgotten Dimarion’s words—We’re bound to lose more, before this is over. What would doing the right thing cost him? he wondered, rubbing the unmarked skin of his wrist. What would it cost the people who looked to him, the people he loved?

From a distance Haven appeared perfectly circular, its steep sides providing no mooring for ships that made it through the savage currents, the fog, the swells and stone monoliths. But Captain Reed, who understood the ocean the way Sefia understood writing—the way Jules had understood music—knew there was more to the island than that.

The tides buffeted the Current this way and that, tipping it precariously close to the cliffs as Jaunty maneuvered them toward the island’s secret entrance—a narrow channel to the heart of Haven.

After a few nail-biting close calls, the waterway opened up. The mist rolled back. And the center of Haven was laid bare before them: white beaches, teal waters, jungles teeming with birds and bright flowers. An isolated paradise perfect for harboring outlaws.

Reed just hoped Adeline and Isabella would be willing to help them.

By the time they anchored the Current in the center of the lagoon, two figures had appeared on the beach. The first, lean as a whip, with hands resting easily by her gun holsters—Adeline. The second, tall and soft, with full skirts and a double-barreled shotgun on her shoulder—Isabella, the gunsmith who’d crafted Reed’s silver-and-ivory revolver.

“Is that them?” Marmalade asked in a hushed voice. “Is that the Lady?”

Reed smiled down at her. Sometimes she still cried at night, curled up in her hammock with Jules’s old mandolin. Sometimes she’d pluck a string, and the sound would reverberate all through the Current like a ripple in water.

“That’s them, kid,” he said.

Adeline and Isabella were as close as you got to royalty out here. In her prime, Adeline had earned the nickname the Lady of Mercy—the only authority in the whole Central Sea to which every outlaw answered—and the title Lady had become a sign of respect.

Hoisting a longboat over the side of the ship, Captain Reed and a dozen of his crew struck off for the beach.

He’d met Adeline and Isabella when he was seventeen, not long after he’d joined the crew of the Current. Five years, numerous adventures, and the death of a captain later, he’d brought them to Haven to retire, spry sixty-year-olds eager to settle down in peace.

Now Adeline’s short blond hair had gone white as snow, and as they neared the beach, Reed thought he saw a tremor in one of her liver-spotted hands. Isabella had aged too—her thundercloud of hair was more gray than black now, and her sagging skin had made a few more folds in her smile.

As they splashed into the shallows, hauling the boat onto the sand, Adeline nodded at him. “Cannek Reed,” she drawled. “I’ve never known you to go visitin’ when there’s adventure to be had.”

“Visitin’ you’s always an adventure.” Reed tipped his hat to them. “Good to see you both alive and kickin’.”

Isabella laughed. At least that was the same—clear and resonant as a bell. “We’re alive. I wouldn’t say we’ve done much kicking lately.”

Adeline watched Reed thoughtfully with her rheumy eyes. “I suspect there’s time for that yet.”

Isabella scanned the crew, her expression brightening as she recognized sailors she knew. But then she frowned and turned to Reed. “Say, this is a nice landing party and all, lots of old faces and some new,” she said, winking at Marmalade, who blushed. “But where’s Jules? You didn’t make her stay on the ship, did you, Cannek?”

The others shifted uncomfortably. Marmalade’s already pale face went even whiter. Always steadfast, Horse hugged her to his side.

“Well,” Reed said softly, “that’s part of why we’re here.”

•   •   •

Striking off for Adeline and Isabella’s home in the jungle, Captain Reed told them what had been happening in Kelanna the past twenty years: the war against Oxscini, the Everican-Liccarine Alliance, the way outlaws were being exterminated like rats, how Jules had lost her life. By the time they reached the compound, Reed had related the whole plan.

But once he got a look at their little patch of land, he began to doubt.

Their compound had fallen into disrepair. The wide porch that wrapped around their house had caved in at one end. The roof was rotting, and the garden was quickly losing ground to the jungle. The barn, the splintering gazebos, the weedy walkways, everything had the look of decay.

“It all started coming apart a few years ago,” Isabella said as she escorted them into the yard. Though she didn’t seem troubled by the shotgun resting on her shoulder, her bad leg seemed to have finally gotten the best of her, and each step was like a hiccup of pain. “But honestly we thought we’d be gone by now, so we figured why bother fixing something that no one would use when we were dead?”

Adeline picked up a broken piece of fence. “If we do this, we’ll have to build. Docks, barracks, land to till, barns for livestock.”

Build? How could they build when they couldn’t even maintain what they had?

Reed must have looked as worried as he felt because she chucked the rotten board at him. It hit him square in the ribs and crumbled into dust. Her aim was still true, at least.

“Don’t look at me like that, Cannek,” she said.

He brushed at his shirt. “Just wonderin’ how you’ll get pirates to tend a field.”

“Same way I ever did anything.” She patted the revolver holstered at her side. “They do what I tell them, or they’ll see just how much mercy I have left.”

Reed tried to grin, but he couldn’t help wondering how long it would take for some conniving pirate captain to kill Adeline and seize Haven for himself. In the past, the Lady had held her own against dozens of bandits. Somehow, he doubted she’d be up to it now.

For a moment, he imagined both old women in their deteriorating garden, their bodies riddled with bullet holes, their blood soaking the earth. Even if they lived through the war, they’d be giving their last years to a cause that wasn’t their own.

How could he ask that of them, knowing where they’d be going? How could he live with himself, knowing he’d be sending them there quicker?

•   •   •

Sun baked the compound that afternoon as the entire crew of the Current turned out to offer their services to Adeline and Isabella. Horse and his carpenters set to work on the house, sawing and hammering, repairing rotten beams and holes in the roof, while the rest of the sailors mucked out the pigpen and patched up the barn, weeded the garden and hacked at the jungle encroaching on the fences.

“The world’s changed,” Adeline said as she sat on the porch, supervising the repairs.

Reed nodded.

“You’ve changed.” The Lady scratched at the paint peeling from the arm of her rocking chair. In their silence, they could hear Isabella chatting with Doc, who was inspecting her bad leg. “For the better, I reckon.”

“Hope so,” Reed said. He’d lived close to danger his entire life, demanding his crew do the same, and spit in death’s eye if they ever got the chance. But it’d always been with the promise that the things they did would be recounted so many times they’d never be lost.

Collecting outlaws fleeing from the Alliance would be dangerous, yes, but it’d be forgettable. If they died, they’d be a drop in the ocean, utterly unremarkable in the grand scheme of the war. They’d have nothing—no legacy, perhaps not even anyone to remember the way they went down.

Nothing but red lights and black water.

“Cannek?” Adeline’s voice startled him from his thoughts. “What’s eatin’ you?”

“Is this a good idea?” he asked. “Am I doin’ the right thing?”

“Right?” Adeline flicked a paint chip into a broken flower pot on the porch rail. “The hard questions ain’t got a right. They only got what you think you can live with, at the time.”

Just then, Isabella came limping out of the house.

“How’s the leg, my love?” the Lady asked.

“Painful,” Isabella said, kissing Adeline gently on the lips. “But I’ll live.”

“You’d better.” As Isabella settled in her own rocking chair, the Lady touched her sleeve, fingering the cotton as if it were made precious simply by being on Isabella’s person. “I plan on you outlivin’ me for a good few years, at least.”

With a smile, Isabella clasped her hand, squeezed it once.

Around them, the work continued.

•   •   •

By nightfall, Adeline and Isabella were set up in their rocking chairs again: Adeline nursing a glass of some potent gold liquid Cooky had dug out of his pantry; Isabella fanning herself with a wide leaf. Below in the yard, Cooky and Aly dished out crispy cuts of pork and curried lentils while the rest of the crew regaled the two old women with tales of what they’d done since they’d parted ways: chasing dragons with the Black Beauty, finding the Lady Delune in her garden, braving the maelstrom for the Thunder Gong, Captain Cat and her cannibal crew, the floating island, Sefia and Archer and the hunt for the Trove.

Every so often, Theo, the chanty leader of the starboard watch, would pick up his violin and play a tune. Sometimes Harison’s red lory, perched on Theo’s shoulder, would even whistle along.

They tried not to think of Jules, but she was everywhere—in the stories they told, in the songs they sung.

Those that had been to the place of the fleshless didn’t mention what they’d found at the edge of the world.

They didn’t want to think of her out there, robbed of her voice.

But Reed couldn’t help thinking of it, couldn’t help thinking of Adeline or Isabella out there too, of Meeks or Doc or Marmalade or any of his crew out there, one day soon.

They had to know. They had to know what would happen to them, what they were running toward, since they’d given up on immortality. They deserved to live however they wanted before the inevitable came for them.

He stood, rubbing his wrist. “I got a story,” he said. “‘The Red Waters.’”

The others fell silent. Adeline raised an eyebrow. Isabella’s fanning slowed.

Meeks swallowed. “But that’s a story we never tell.”

“It ain’t right keepin’ it to ourselves anymore,” he said. “C’mon, we’ll tell it together.”

Marmalade and some of the new crew members looked around uneasily. To them, the Red Waters was only a name they’d heard in passing, meant as a warning. The sailors who’d been there drew in, like they could already feel the cold closing in on them.

Meeks inhaled deeply—the breath before the plunge. “There’s a story no one tells, for those who know it don’t want to remember it,” he began. “But it’s a story we’ll never forget. The story of what we found at the edge of the world, when we passed through the sun into the black place beyond. The place of the fleshless.”

Reed shivered as the second mate’s words pulled him back there, into the dark.

“It was cold, so cold frost crept up the hull of the ship, spiking the running lines and silvering the decks. So cold our throats seized up, and our breath was brittle in our mouths. Deep in the water, the red lights blinked, innumerable, goin’ back as far as anyone could see. And that sound . . .” Shuddering, Meeks covered his ears with his hands.

Adjusting his spectacles, Theo took up the story in Meeks’s stead: “It was like whisperin’ and chitterin’ and mad laughter. Voices, or the tollin’ of funeral bells, or glaciers cleavin’ in two. It was like cliffs crumblin’ to dust. Like the last rattlin’ gasp of the dyin’.” On his shoulder, the red bird let out a low whistle. “The most terrible sound in a world of terrible sounds. The kind of sound that haunts you in the late hours of the night when the darkness closes in and the cold creeps into you through the cracks. ’Cause we knew, didn’t we? We knew where we were. We didn’t know how we knew it. But we recognized those red lights in the water.”

“The red eyes of the dead,” Reed said.

Adeline glanced at him sharply. In Kelanna, they didn’t believe in an afterlife. Didn’t believe you were anything more than a story once you were gone.

But Captain Reed knew the truth.

And now, so would Adeline and Isabella and all of his crew.

The sun had been a gateway, a portal from the living world to the place of the dead. They’d managed to blunder through it at dusk, when the sun touched the water. But the sun had left them, sinking through the waves, and it wouldn’t return until the following day.

“The dead rose from the water,” Meeks continued, “more monsters than men, with two red lights where their eyes should have been. They looked like the people we knew, more or less. Sometimes their faces were clear as day. Sometimes they were hazy, like we were seein’ ’em through frosted glass.

“They wanted us to join ’em, see. They used the voices of people who’d died. We wanted to go to ’em. I would’ve given anything to . . . But when they touched us . . .”

Goro made a sound like he’d been punched. “But every time they touched us, their fingers went right through us, takin’ a little of our warmth, a little of our life.”

“Some of the crew started pitchin’ themselves over the rails,” Meeks said, “like they’d be united with loved ones they never thought they’d see again. But when they hit the water, the red lights swarmed ’em. The waves seemed to form faces and hands. I’ll never forget the shriekin’. Over and over they screamed as the shadows ripped into them, stealing away their life.”

“I saw my brother out there,” Jaunty said hollowly, rubbing his tattooed knuckles. “My brother. Hadn’t seen him for twenty years. Was sure I’d never see him again. But there he was, lookin’ almost as scruffy as I remembered. Can you imagine? I thought I could hold him again. I thought I could tell him I was sorry. For not bein’ a better brother. For not payin’ enough attention. For not knowin’ he was gonna climb onto the bowsprit one night and eat his gun. My brother.”

“But it wasn’t his brother.” Meeks shook his head. “’Cause when you die, you become a shadow of who you were. Empty. Starvin’. A monster.

“We couldn’t fight ’em. Couldn’t shoot ’em. Our bullets passed through ’em like they were made of smoke. We kept losin’ folks who jumped over the side, or who got touched one too many times and just curled up and died. It’s a miracle we lasted the night.”

“That was Doc’s doin’,” Horse said, putting his arm around the surgeon. “She thought to stop our ears with wax so we couldn’t hear ’em callin’ us.”

“And the light,” Theo added, fixated on the flaming coals, “the light kept ’em away.”

“We passed that fearful darkness together, while the shades of our friends and kin hovered just beyond the reach of the light. We couldn’t hear their words anymore, but we felt their chill in our hearts and our bones. And when the sun returned, descending out of the starless sky, Cap roused us. It woulda been easier to stay out there and let the fleshless take us, but Cap made us get up. He got us out of there, and the warmth returned to our bones. We unstoppered our ears. Never in my life have I been so grateful for the sounds of water and sails.

“But some of us never returned to normal, like the fleshless had stolen too much of them, and they just sort of faded away on the journey home. Sometimes we’d find their bodies still and cold in their bunks. Sometimes they’d simply be gone. Lost overboard during the night watches.

“We held the funerals. We said the words. But we knew. Death ain’t the end.” Meeks glanced around at the others, who avoided his gaze. “It’s worse.”

In the silence, Marmalade began to cry. “So she’s out there, then? That’s what happened to her?”

Reed gripped her shoulder. “That’s what happens to all of us.”

On the porch, Adeline and Isabella had clasped hands. “This a warning, Cannek?” the Lady asked.

He shook his head. “We ain’t gettin’ any glory for this one, folks. Might be all we get is grief and nothingness. I thought everyone oughta know the truth before they chose to throw in their lot.”

Isabella smiled ruefully. “We knew the second you showed up in our lagoon you’d ask us to do something that’d probably get us killed. We let you come ashore anyway.”

“And now?” Reed asked. “Even knowing . . .”

Adeline turned to Isabella, and as if to some unspoken question, some secret language they’d developed over the years between the two of them, she nodded. “If we all become monsters in the end, best we do something that makes us better humans while we’re still here,” she said.

“I’ll still do it,” Marmalade added in a quavering voice. “Just like Jules would’ve.”

Meeks raised his glass.

Everyone drank.

Later, long after the others had turned in for the night, Reed joined the two women on the porch and slid the silver revolver into Adeline’s hands.

She trailed her fingers across the engravings of cottonwood leaves, the mother-of-pearl inlay. “When I gave this to you, I never thought I’d see it again,” she said. Her hand closed over the grip, and it was as if a part of her had been missing all this time, and only now, with the gun in her hand, was she made whole again.

Isabella nodded. “That’s good work, that,” she said. “Some of my best.”

“You only do the best work,” the Lady chided her.

She preened, touching the crackling waves of her hair.

“Much obliged, Cannek.” Adeline tucked the revolver into her waistband. “Sounds like I’ll need this.”

“Don’t you think I’m letting you go without a replacement.” Isabella glanced at the black grip of the Executioner with distaste. “You need a gun, not a monstrosity.” She limped off into the house and came back with a cloth-wrapped bundle.

Gingerly, he folded back the fabric, revealing the most beautiful revolver he’d ever laid eyes on. It was longer in the barrel than the Lady of Mercy, but while the silver gun was a moonbeam on the dunes, this weapon was the great dark ocean itself—crafted of deep blue steel with silver crests and an ebony grip as black as the depths of the sea.

“This is too fine.” Reed tried to hand it back.

“Nonsense.” Isabella swatted him in the shoulder. “I made it with you in mind, Cannek. It was always meant to be yours.”

He spun the cylinder, studying the light through the chambers. The revolver fit as perfectly in his hand as the Lady of Mercy fit Adeline. Isabella had been right, as she always was when it came to firearms—there was no weapon more perfect for him.

“Any idea what you’ll call it?” Adeline asked.

With a turn of his wrist, Reed flicked the cylinder closed. “How about the Singer?”

A

SAVIOR

OR