He kept hearing Bronach’s laughter. Kept seeing Ewan’s empty, scorched black eyes.
“Welcome aboard the good ship Wailing,” said one of Bronach’s daughters or granddaughters.
It didn’t matter.
Tables filled the gallery and women filled those tables and he went from table to table dropping off food for them to eat while his companions remained caged. Most ignored him but some spanked him or pinched him as he moved past, hooting and hollering anytime he flinched. Bronach sat among her children and grandchildren. No central or high table to distinguish her position as ruler of the ship.
Paintings and tapestries hung from the walls. He knew they were stolen. Everything in the Wailing was stolen. Or so he told himself.
His lungs felt shallow, like he couldn’t fill them back up. Like they hung limp in his chest. Like they had tiny holes in them that would keep them from ever fully inflating again without some kind of engine like the airships had.
If he could only take a full, complete breath, he’d be able to fly away from this nightmare.
He left the gallery’s laughter and chatter and made his way back to the kitchen where he loaded up more trays with food while the cook ignored him, reading something in Eirish. The little girl with the fox ears watched him with her huge eyes. Unnervingly large, rarely blinking.
Emrys had not spent much time around children. To many, he himself was still a child. There had always been children scampering about the Matauc clan but he paid them little attention and never bothered to spend time with them or come to know them.
And so he didn’t know what to do or say around the child.
The cook said, “Quit staring at him, Sionnach.” Didn’t even look up from her book.
The girl blinked and turned to the cook. “He’s sad.”
“Oh, aye.” She turned the page of her book and Emrys took the new trays of food back to the gallery.
When he looked up into Ewan’s scorched, blackened eyesockets where no eyes rested, he had nearly collapsed. Was only the terror of flying and the roaring wind that kept him standing. He screamed though. Screamed for all he was worth. Screamed out every last mouthful of air in his lungs.
Ever since, he couldn’t catch his breath.
Clinging to the giant, his flesh burned. Not only where Home had bitten deep into him, poisoning his very soul, but every inch of his skin caught fire. Rather than recoil and leap away, he held tighter to the giant. Could do nothing else but hold on or else plunge to his death far below.
Bronach only cackled, knowing the effect this was having on Emrys. Watching him burn and suffer. Brought him there just for this. For Ewan to entrap him, to suck the soul right from his body.
And Ewan opened his blackened mouth full of blackened teeth and released sounds that Emrys should not have heard over the wind for Ewan did not shout them but sang them.
And the singing came to Emrys quietly.
Gently.
Softly.
Like lapping waves.
Emrys didn’t understand how he heard but he knew it wasn’t with his ears. The song slid into him, filled him, overcrowded him, kept his lungs from filling.
A joyful song. A dancing song. But the words were unlike any he’d heard before. The language foreign and strange and they scorched him too. Visions bloomed within him, burning the inside of his skull with their strange vivid flashes.
Transported.
Emrys stood at a sea of blood. The sand blackened by dragon’s breath. Great swathes of it turned to glass from the battle that raged there. A hot wind blew ash and soot into the air, swirling round him and he raised his face to the sky where distant creatures flew through the air. Their great batlike wings outstretched, gliding. So high up they cast no shadow down upon the earth yet they remained visible.
He took a step into the sea of blood and saw the upraised arms like antennae reaching towards the heavens but they bobbed, severed from their bodies. Ankle deep, he trudged through the blackblood of his friends, his family, his clan. Bodies broken and ruined and savaged.
He swallowed and tried to catch his breath again as he entered the gallery, the visions from that morning still brewing within him, still terrorizing him. Walking in a daze, as if through a nightmare he couldn’t wake from, he focused on the paintings. They had been blurred and indistinct when he first entered the gallery, the shrieking buzz of his terror swallowing all thought and attention. Calmer now, he chose to look at them rather than the crew of marauders laughing and celebrating the capture and death of his friends.
She stood in the foreground of the painting looking away, staring back into the depths of the painting. Surrounded by blackness, she existed in the deepest possible nights. The perspective gave a sense of space and distance from the foreground to the background, with the paint itself spread thickly on the canvas. Layer after layer of paint, and though it all seemed black at first, it wasn’t. The more he stared, the more it revealed itself to him. Starless and strangely empty but with a swirling kind of brushed technique that made the sky and its depths feel alive, swirling away and around the figure looking deeper into the night, into the sky, where a moon hung, singular and alone. A moon covered in green and blue. A tactile feel even to that, like the green bushed out from the moon and the blue swirled upon the surface. Violets and reds so deep and dark they were almost black eddied and swirled and danced between the person and the moon and Emrys tried to understand what exactly this image revealed, what kind of scene this was. For the woman was not wearing clothes but armor. Black metal touched by red and yellow, as if reflecting a nearby fire. Her armor was scuffed and scarred by war, with a deep ravine cleaving the back of her breastplate. From her neck, a short black cape blew and billowed away, like a sail. In one hand, she held her helmet, letting her red hair dance in the wind. In her other hand, she held the hilt of a sword stabbed down into the earth at her feet.
A sword he knew.
Home.
Had he any breath in his lungs, he would have coughed it out and gasped but instead he simply swallowed and turned away, handing food to the woman at their tables. Hearing nothing and barely aware of what he saw or did. He kept glancing back at the painting to that dull sword reflecting no light. Unadorned yet arresting, it pulsed even there, in mockery, in replication.
“Fool,” called someone.
He turned to Bronach, the witch. He knew it then, atop Wailing, when he touched Ewan.
Magic seethed on the good ship Wailing and it all emanated from her.
“Another piece for her collection,” the cook had said when Bronach left him in the kitchen. At the time, it meant nothing to him. He didn’t care. Couldn’t possibly understand what that may have meant.
The giant.
The girl with fox ears.
“Sing for us,” Bronach called out and her children and grandchildren banged their tables, hooting, hollering.
His voice came out as a croak. “I cannot.” So soft and weak, it barely seemed to leave his lips.
But Bronach heard it. Sighed. Cocked her head, shook it. “He met Ewan this morning and still ain’t recovered.”
Laughter burst forth and his skin roiled. His chest full of bees buzzing through his blood.
Someone called out, “What’s wrong with dear old dad, mum?”
“Oh, he’s not been the same since he first looked upon me,” said Bronach. And everyone laughed and Emrys felt on edge. Like a bowstring pulled too tight. He’d seen it happen before. A string snapping.
He couldn’t catch his breath. Couldn’t take a full breath. He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came. His lips cracked and dry. His mouth a desert. His shriveled lungs useless in his chest, limp and papery, crinkling within him.
Bronach said, “Never mind, Fool. Catch your breath and try again tomorrow.” She looked away from him but the rest of the eyes fell upon him until he backed away, only then understanding the dismissal. When he left the gallery, they began speaking once more but in Eirish.
He turned back one more time to see the painting of the armored woman wielding Home staring at the strange moon in that dark and swirling night.
Swallowing, he backed away, his wound burning, a thousand questions flushing through him, but only one pulsing, shrieking within him.
Back to the kitchen, gasping, his vision tunneling. The hall seemed too long and too narrow. The wall seemed to rise to meet him and he fell into it and held himself up while he breathed. Sucking in deep breaths through his nose, or trying too. He couldn’t fill his lungs. Couldn’t breathe deep. Could barely breathe at all.
Staggered on to the kitchen and collapsed into a stool at the large table scarred with knife cuts from thousands upon thousands of chopped vegetables.
The little girl spoke. “What’s wrong with him?”
Sionnach was her name. He held onto that and clenched his eyes shut but saw only the sea of blood and the blackened sand and the dragons above and the ruined bodies scattered across the landscape, the reek of death seeping into his lungs, his pores.
“Hey. Hey, boy.” The cook snapped her fingers at him. “Look at me.”
He sucked in breath but it seemed to leak out before it got to his lungs but he raised his eyes to look at her. At this old woman who had not given him her name. Her face lined by age. She couldn’t be Bronach’s daughter. She seemed still older than Bronach herself.
“That’s good. Eyes on me,” she said.
Sionnach said, “Will you save him, granny?”
The cook said, “That’s right, boy. Eyes on me.” She lifted a knife and displayed it for him, turning it this way and that. Then she grabbed an apple and rolled it across the table to him.
He caught it reflexively and she handed the knife to him, handle first.
For a moment, he imagined using it to kill his way to freedom. His fingers wrapped round the handle, feeling its weight.
She said, “Cut the apple.”
If he could have laughed, he would have. It caught him so by surprise.
“Do it,” said the cook. “Go on. Slice the apple.”
He did. He cut the flesh from the core.
“Go on, into slices.”
He did that too. The four cuts he made to reveal the core left four larger chunks of apple. He took each one and sliced it into thin halfmoon pieces.
She rolled him another. “That one too.”
With the knife, he brushed the slices to one side, the core to the other, clearing his work space. He cut the next apple. Then another. And another.
Stopped thinking. Just cutting. Sionnach sat to his right eating the apple slices and the cook watched him, rolling him a new apple whenever he finished.
After five apples, his hand no longer shook and he stopped grinding his teeth.
“That’s enough,” she said.
Only then did he look up. He took a breath and felt no strain. He took another and another, almost crying from how good it felt to breathe once more. He said, “What did you do?”
“Nothin.”
He supposed that was true enough. “What did she do to me?”
“That,” said the cook, “is a dangerous question to speak aloud.”
“Granny said she collects people,” said Sionnach.
The cook sighed. “You’re too eager, girl.”
Sionnach smiled but tried to suppress it. She took another bite of apple.
There was no obvious resemblance between the cook and the girl with fox ears, nor was there a strong resemblance between them and Bronach. The questions returned to him but he didn’t know how to begin. Didn’t know if these people were outsiders like him and therefore safe or if they were lures.
“Who are you?”
The cook wiped her hands on a towel hanging from her belt. She dressed differently than the rest of the crew. A long faded blue robe hung open from her shoulders and beneath that an orange apron stained with food and grease. She pulled her sleeves up to the elbow on each arm but the wide sleeve quickly fell back down. “I’m the cook.”
Sionnach said, “She’s my granny. The captain’s cousin.”
The cook ignored that. “She name you yet?”
“What?”
Her gaze hardened on Emrys. “She give you a name?”
“No.”
The cook nodded. “Name yourself to her before she does.”
“What?”
“He’s slow,” said Sionnach.
“No,” Emrys took a breath. “I don’t understand.”
“She names you, you will.” The cook went back to her seat and lifted her book.
The kitchen was small with the table filling most of it. A cast iron stove sat at the far end, beneath the window revealing the open sky. They cooked over an open flame as well. A big pot sat there with the lid only half on, steam drifting up from its mouth. Emrys stood there, unsure what to do with himself or where to go.
Didn’t want to go back to the cage and accept his entrapment but he also wanted to see how they were doing and if Yana’s body had been cleared away. He turned back to the cook and swallowed, prepared to speak, but then looked to the child. So small and so like any other child, except for the ears.
He was lost. Alone. All sense and reason gone. His nerves and senses frayed, his soul burning from a wound he could not heal. He said, “I don’t know what to do.”
Sionnach studied him. Hopping down from her stool at the table, she circled him and he let her. She lifted his left hand and turned it palm up. Tracing the lines of his palm with her tiny index finger, she made a noise, nodded, and let his hand drop. She climbed onto the stool beside him and grabbed his face.
He let her.
Didn’t know why. Couldn’t find the strength or interest to deny her. It felt almost like a game. Something stupid and absurd. This strange magical child examining him.
She pushed on his cheeks, pulled at his skin. Grabbing his chin, she pulled it down and he let his mouth open. She brought her face close and looked into his mouth, her forehead knit. Closing his mouth, she turned his face to the side and tugged at his ear, his hair. Next, she examined his eyes and tugged and played again with the elasticity of his skin.
“All good?”
She nodded in a very serious way. “You’ll live.”
He didn’t laugh, though he found it very funny.
The cook said, “Leave him alone, girl.”
“He needs help,” said Sionnach. “He’s a wound deep inside.”
“He’s a prisoner,” said the cook. “Likely the captain gave him those wounds.”
Sionnach shook her head. “Don’t think so.”
Emrys said, “Do you know of the lord of bone?” He asked the child rather than the cook. If she could see the wound inside him, perhaps she knew something else. He saw her more as some magical anomaly than a real, normal child. Her fox ears reminded him of the lord of bone and the procession of foxes that nearly led to all of their deaths on the night he meant to abandon home and family.
Now he flew through the air in a pirate ship piloted by a dead giant.
Sionnach said, “Who’s the lord of bone?”
“He’s a fox god. A god of the northern forest.”
The cook set down her book and scowled at him. “You be careful.”
Sionnach turned to her. “What’s the lord of bone?”
“You mock her and I’ll feed you your entrails.” She raised her fist over the table and revealed a large cleaver.
Sionnach’s ears lowered and she touched them, her expression falling.
Emrys shook his head, “No. I—” he shook his head again, let his hands hang limp at his sides. He was lost. Didn’t matter if they despised him. “The wound. Was given to me by the lord of bone.”
Sionnach looked to the cook and the cook looked at him, cleaver still clenched tight.
The cook said, “Why don’t you tell us what you mean.”
“Not sure I can,” said Emrys before he recounted the long night he spent in nightmarish Chalon Forest with the daughters Lyr and his cousin, and the wound he received in the labyrinth leading from Black Goda’s home to the rest of the world.
Time disappeared for Emrys as he fell into his story, racing to get it all out, the words spilling over one another and sometimes requiring him to double back and restate something more clearly or fill in detail that he initially forgot. Though it came rushed and disorganized, it did come.
In the telling, he remembered the giant beneath the earth. Perhaps sleeping or alive. “It was larger than Ewan. Perhaps twice his height or even more. It looked and felt more human though.”
The cook leaned back and turned to the dark sky beyond the window.
Emrys said, “It’s night.”
Sionnach yawned and stretched her arms wide.
“Go on to bed,” said the cook.
Sionnach’s expression twisted into disbelief and anger. “I’m not tired!”
“Go on, girl.”
Sionnach looked from Emrys to the cook and then back to Emrys. “Will you be back tomorrow?”
“He will,” said the cook. “Go on, get.”
And she obeyed but took her time leaving.
The cook waited a while and just watched Emrys. He shifted and itched. Exhausted and his back hurt and his feet too. He stretched his back, twisting from side to side to loosen himself up. He wondered, then, where Fionnuala had gone but put it out of his mind, uncertain if some magic aboard could peel away his thoughts from him.
After a time, the cook said, “Did you lie to me?”
Only then did he remember that he should not be giving these pirates any information. The cook was Bronach’s cousin and anything he told her would end up with the captain. Wasn’t clear that his story would do her any good or do him any harm, but Mari was right: the less they know, the better. “When?”
“Don’t be cute, fool. This story of the forest and all that. That true?”
“I was instructed not to tell you pirates anything.”
She watched him with her one eye. It darted back and forth over his face and chest as if she could pick something up that way. “Do you fear her, the captain?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Know this, then: she will flay what she wants from you and you will not be able to resist her unless you keep your name. That is your guard against her.”
“What name has she given you?”
“Ah,” the cook smiled. “Perhaps you’re not a fool. She has taken me and she has taken many others. Some throw themselves from the ship rather than continue being confined by the good captain Bronach, but more follow her out of loyalty. They may not even know that they are bound. I sometimes think Bronach didn’t know, at first, what she did to ensure such loyalty among her crew.” She tapped the table with her fist. “How many of your crew remain?”
“Just me, the captain, and one other.”
“Tell them to give the captain their names too.”
“She plans to ransom the others.”
“Not you, though.”
“I’m a bastard.”
The cook nodded. “Be wary. Be careful. She may have smelled the wound on you. Might be why she’s collecting you. Or she may just like the look of you. You have soft features, like a girl. She has a taste for men like you.”
Emrys swallowed.
The cook spoke on. “She’ll want the gallery cleared and cleaned. Go on.”
“By myself?”
“Welcome aboard, Emrys.”