Tin Swift (41 page)

They were no longer the rescuers. They were in sore need of being rescued.

“Mae?” Rose said softly.

Mae jerked. She didn’t know how long she’d been standing there, the sisters’ voices filling her thoughts, but Ansell was now sitting staring out the fore windows and Miss Wright was staring out the aft. Someone had pulled a blanket over Mr. Theobald and moved him to one side of the space.

Mae rubbed her hands down her dress and walked over to Rose, her boots strangely loud in the quietly rocking ship.

“I’m here,” Mae said.

Rose opened her eyes. “Maybe I could help,” she said. “Fix the boilers?”

Mae took her hand. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do. Any of us, right now.”

“Ship coming,” Joonie said. “Straight over from the compound.”

Ansell jumped up and jogged over to peer out the window. “What kind of thing is that?”

Joonie bit her lip and shook her head. “Nothing I’ve seen before. Wait. That’s glim light in glass. A single globe high. It’s okay, Mr. Ansell. That’s a friendly ship.”

“Lots of people can get their hand on glim,” Ansell said, pulling a gun down from the overhead storage.

Joonie put her hand on his arm. “It’s a signal among the people I work for. Miss Dupuis knows it.”

“You think she’s aboard?”

“She must be.”

The sound of fans grew louder as the ship neared.

“There!” Joonie said. “That’s Mr. Hunt.”

Mae’s heart lurched. She didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath, wondering if he was alive.

“We’re coming aboard!” he yelled, from where he hung half out of the craft.

Ansell strode over to the door. “Is the captain alive? We lost the boiler.”

“He’s alive,” Cedar yelled. “Stand back while we secure the ship.”

Ansell got out of the doorway. A cannon boomed, and ropes fell like rain around the ship. No, not rain, it was a net with weighted bolos on the edges catching at the ship.

Clever.

Ansell stepped up to the door and latched the net onto the hooks worked into the frame. Then he tied two extra lines from the netting to bars inside the ship. The net formed a sort of rope walkway between the two vessels.

Mae shifted so she could see out the door. Cedar Hunt strode into the room, bloody, burned, but whole, and Mae felt as if she’d just seen the sun rise.

Then Bryn Madder strode in behind him, his tool belt and pockets bulgy with metal and devices, his goggles strapped across his forehead. “Heard there’s a blown gasket or two?” he said. “Mind if I take a look?”

“Back that way,” Cedar said.

“You know him?” Ansell asked, eyeing the bull-shouldered short Madder.

“Yes. And he’ll treat the ship right, Mr. Ansell.” Cedar paced over to Mae.

“And the captain?” Ansell asked.

“He’s still breathing, but hurt badly,” Cedar said. “Mae, can you help him?”

“The captain?” she asked. “I can try. Of course. But I won’t leave Rose. Cedar, we can’t leave her behind.”

Cedar’s eyes went hard. “Who said we’re going to leave her behind?”

“I…” Mae looked around the room. Someone had said it. Surely they had. But she couldn’t remember. There were too many voices in her head, too many words screaming at her, pulling at her.

Cedar’s hand gently touched her face. “…need you to stay with us, Mae. Just a bit longer.”

She blinked hard, trying to focus on him. His touch, his words. “I’m fine,” she said. “What do I need to do?”

“I need you to tend to the captain.”

“Bring him here,” she said.

“Mae, the ship isn’t steady. It’d be better if you came over to the Madders’ craft. Better if we all boarded their ship.”

She heard him, his voice a low rumble beneath the sisters’ constant shriek. But he wasn’t listening to her.

“Captain Cage needs to be here,” Mae said, not sure that her voice was rising above the sisters’. “He needs to be on the
Swift
. He’s tied to her. Bound because I bound him, tied him. His ship’s dying. He’s dying.”

Ansell muttered something, but Cedar must have heard her and understood. “I’ll bring him. Stay here with Rose.”

Then Mr. Alun Madder was suddenly strolling across the ship toward her.

“How’s Miss Small?” he asked, looking genuinely concerned.

“Fine as wine,” Rose whispered.

Alun looked down at her and gave her a smile. “Just lying around when there’s a ship to be flown? That’s not like you, Rose.”

“I offered to fix it,” she said slowly, her words falling off at the end of each breath. “Mae said no.”

“And you listened?”

“Just haven’t argued yet,” Rose managed. Then her face screwed up in pain and she bit her lip, her moan thin and high. Even the blood that trickled from her lip was tinged with gray.

“Mrs. Lindson,” Alun said, “if you have a way of making Mr. Hunt find that piece of Holder, then now’s the time for him to do so. She won’t last the hour.”

There was a ruckus of boots and grunting as Cedar, Wil, and Seldom carried Captain Cage into the ship and laid him down on the blankets near Rose’s hammock.

Someone had taken the time to wipe most of the blood from his face, but there was no hiding the hole where his right eye should be, nor the burned star in his forehead.

“I’ll need my satchel,” Mae said, walking over, then kneeling next to the captain. “Someone check his limbs and torso for wounds.” She ran her fingers over his neck, his head, and then looked at both his ears.

He had lost the eye. His face was burned, bruised. But he still had one eye, his tongue, both ears, and his nose.

Seldom split the buttons on the captain’s shirt and spread it open. His entire chest was bruised and knotted, with black, green, and sickly yellows spread out across his skin.

“Bullet hole in one leg,” Seldom said. “Broken arm. I don’t see blood except his face.”

“That’s good, thank you, Mr. Seldom.” She took her satchel from Cedar and soaked a cloth with the coca leaf tonic, then pressed that against his eye socket and did the same for the brand in his forehead. She quickly bandaged his head, and then wrapped his ribs, in hopes they weren’t so broken that they were cutting up his insides.

She put his arm in a sling and soaked another cloth with the coca leaf to tie down tight over both sides of the hole in his leg.

He didn’t wake. He didn’t stir. But he was breathing.

“That’s all,” she said, trying to think through the call of the sisters,
the incessant push for her to return to the coven, to walk, run, jump the ship if she had to. “That’s all I can do for him. If the ship can be patched, any at all, it might help him.”

“Bryn’s working on it,” Cedar said.

She looked up. Some time had passed. Miss Dupuis was sitting next to Mr. Theobald, holding his hand. She was very pale and silent, her eyes red as tears stained her face.

Mae knew that sorrow. Mr. Theobald had been more than a traveling companion to Miss Dupuis. He had been her love.

Wil and Cedar seemed oblivious to her pain, and stood squared off toward Alun Madder. From the set of their shoulders and grim expressions, it was clear they had been arguing.

“What?” Mae asked.

“You tell her, Mr. Hunt,” Alun said. “It’s your idea.”

Cedar turned to her, and helped her stand. “Rose needs the Holder. Mr. Madder still thinks if we can find the tin piece of it, we can use it to draw out the key that is killing her.”

“Yes,” Mae said. “I remember.”

“Mr. Shunt is down there. He was in the compound. I think he has the Holder with him,” Cedar said.

“So you’re going to go find him, right?” she asked. “You’ll hunt him, find him, take the Holder from him, and bring it back for Rose.”

“We don’t have time.”

His words were even, and without much emotion. But she could see the sorrow in his eyes.

Rose. It was Rose who didn’t have the time.

“What can we do then? We can’t just…Oh, Cedar, we can’t just let her die.”

“Can you save her?” he asked. “Your magic is vows and curses: bindings. Can you call to the Holder, Mae? Now that it is so near, can you cast a spell to bind the piece that’s in her to the whole of it? It used to be one whole thing. It might respond to being one thing again at
your urging. If you can bind it to itself, and to Rose, just like you bound the captain and his ship, you’d draw it here, right out of Shunt’s hands. Rose might have a chance then. We could try to remove the piece once we have the chunk it came from.”

“Bind it?” Mae’s heart raced. “I don’t…my magic. It’s so hard to focus. To make magic do what I want. If I bound it to…to Rose. Made her a part of it like Captain Hink and the
Swift
…” She searched his face. “I could kill her.”

Cedar nodded. “I can’t think of any other way to save her, Mae. No time. No Holder. She’d want you to try. You know she would.”

Mae looked away from him to his brother, Wil, who was watching her with the curious eyes of the wolf he once was. Then she looked at Alun. “You’re against it?” she asked.

“Not entirely,” he hedged. “If you think you can do it. Are you strong enough, Mrs. Lindson? Are you near enough the Holder to call it this far?”

Mae knew she was not. But she had to try. “I’ll need a flame, a bowl of water, a stone or dirt, and smoke. And I’ll need you all to give me and Rose space.”

Alun lifted one eyebrow. “As you say.”

Everyone on the ship moved away. Someone found the items she had asked for, and Cedar handed them to her.

A lantern for flame, a cup of water, a smooth stone out of Seldom’s pocket, and a bundle of sage that would smoke once lit.

“Will these do?” Cedar asked.

“Yes.” Mae took them and placed one at each compass point on the floor around Rose. Then she stood next to Rose.

It was as if all the color had washed out of her friend. Her skin was gray, her lips blue, and the fire of her hair dulled down to ash.

Her eyes were open, glossy as dull nickels, staring at the ceiling. Each breath stopped too soon, and the next began too late.

Mae took a deep breath. The sisters’ chorus grew louder with her
fear. She shouldn’t be using magic, shouldn’t whisper the spell, shouldn’t utter the blessing, cast the binding. Magic turned dark in her hands. Magic turned wicked on her words.

The sisters did not want her to use magic.

Mae refused to listen to the voices. This was the only thing that might save Rose.

She took Rose’s hand firmly in her own and closed her eyes.

The fragment to the whole, the Holder to the key. Two as one, joined, bound, forever. Come on the wind, come on the earth, come on the stars, come on the mist. Be bound, be whole, be healed once again.

She let the words of the spell reach out far and wide, singing it over the sound of the sisters’ voices, singing it over the sound of the ships, the wind, the night.

But it was too much, impossible to think, to hear her own words, to guide the spell. The sisters were strong. Stronger than her.

And they intended to tear her mind apart.

C
edar balled his hands into fists. It was everything he could do to stand and watch Mae as she whispered over Rose.

He could smell Mae’s fear, he could smell the sweat of her pain. Her entire body trembled with the effort of casting the spell to bind the Holder.

He didn’t know how long she could endure. Didn’t know how long before he grabbed her up in his arms, broke her spell, took her away from Rose. It’s what the beast in him wanted to do—protect Mae at any cost.

And it would seal Rose’s death.

Wil shifted and stood next to him, facing the opposite direction, watching the people in the ship and the door at Cedar’s back where Miss Wright stood.

Cedar could look nowhere else other than at Mae.

Suddenly Mae stopped whispering.

The air became soft and burred, as if lightning were just about to strike. But it was not lightning. No, what Cedar tasted on the back of his tongue was the scent of the Strange. Of the Holder.

And then, like a star tearing through the sky, a piece of metal broke through the floor and hurtled into the ship. A song, huge and tempered by an otherworldly chorus, filled Cedar’s ears.

The Holder ricocheted off the walls of the ship, scorching wood, bending metal.

The people in the ship each had their own reactions to it, but Cedar took scant note of Hink’s crew’s startled disbelief, the Madders’ wild laughter, or Miss Dupuis’s and Miss Wright’s wonderment.

He was watching Mae. And Mae said one word, her lips trembling around it, nearly unable to give the word breath enough to form.

“One,” she whispered.

And then the Holder shot toward Rose. Too fast for him to stop it. Too fast for Mae to block it. Too fast.

It struck her chest and spread out like liquid, bending to fit over her shoulder, flowing down to her collarbone, and up to her ear, like some kind of medieval armor.

Rose gasped, a huge, labored breath, her entire body arching.

And then she lay still in the hammock.

Cedar had run toward Rose as soon as the Holder entered the ship and only now reached the hammock. Everything had happened in a split second.

He caught Mae as she fainted.

Wil rushed up, half a step behind, and Alun and Miss Dupuis were on his heels.

“I’ll be damned,” Alun Madder said. “She did it! She called the Holder.”

“Are they well?” Miss Wright asked from where she stood near the door. “Are they both well?”

Rose was still breathing, easier than she had been. Her color was better too, at least in her face, some of the natural pink and freckles appearing on her forehead, nose, cheeks.

The Holder looked like someone had melted it down to pour a liquid sheet of tin across Rose’s shoulder and chest. He wondered if the key had gone liquid inside her body, if that was why her skin and eyes had been turning gray.

“Don’t touch it,” Alun Madder said. “It might take some time for the Holder to draw all of the key out of her blood and bones.”

Cedar didn’t wait around to watch. He carefully unclasped Mae’s hand from Rose’s and carried Mae over to one of the crew’s cots toward the front of the ship, where he eased her down gently. He tucked a blanket up around her shoulders and brushed her hair away from her face.