The boats lay in the lee of a jagged reef, their hulls seesawing in the long, patient swell. Sun pressed down like a hand. Salt dried white on rope and sleeve and brow. Men shifted on the thwarts and pretended they weren't counting heartbeats.
Three days at sea had a way of stripping talk down to the bone. They had followed dead current and rumor, checked the empty bellies of reefs that should have hummed with life, and found only silence. No dolphins keeping pace. No glitter of fish. Just the long breath in and out of water that seemed to be waiting for something neither wind nor tide could name.
Mira was gone. At first light she'd slid over the side with a merfolk runner and cut for the islands, two dark commas on the water. The sea had swallowed their wake as if embarrassed to have shown it. Since then, every eye that found the horizon stayed there a little too long, like staring might coax sailcloth out of haze.
Rowan kept his gaze on the thing that made staring at anything else feel dishonest: the whale skeleton. It broke the world like a wrecked cathedral—ribs stabbed up from sea to sky, pale and wrong; the skull a pale cliff; the spine a serrated road vanishing into green-black. Bones should lie quiet, he thought. These looked as if someone had taught them to listen.
"We should strike now," a Thalriss warrior said, not for the first time. His trident's barbs winked wetly. He spoke in a voice clipped short by training, but anger fanned the fins at his jaw. "Every moment wasted is a moment my prince spends in chains."
"Strike with what?" an Islander shot back. He was broad across the shoulders, sun-scoured, his hands as comfortable on an oar as some men were on a sword. "Two boats and a fistful of knives? You'll feed that thing meat and call it honor."
"Better to die fighting than rot while you plan," another Thalriss hissed, tipping his chin toward the skeleton as if the bones could hear him and mark his name.
Steel and salt made quick friends of tempers. Oarlocks creaked. Someone's net slid with an ugly whisper. A young Islander spat and said something about fish-thieves and gratitude that would have been braver if his voice hadn't wobbled on the last word. A Thalriss took a half-step, trident lifting.
"Enough," Rowan said, and put his voice through the middle of the argument like a beam through a wall. He stayed at the prow, one hand on the mast, because if you moved to stand between two lines of angry men you risked giving both sides a target. "We wait for Mira. She'll bring boats and nets and hands enough to make the cut clean. If we hit that now, we free a handful and drown the rest in panic. Patience isn't cowardice. It's the only chance we've got."
Grudging noise rolled down the boats like a low surf. The Thalriss with the trident stared too long, then dipped his chin the width of a fingernail. Not agreement, exactly. The kind of assent warriors gave when they chose to obey rather than when they were convinced.
Darin sat with his back to the rail, axe across his knees like a promise. Waiting didn't fit him. He had that restless, penned-in look of a draft horse in a stable while wolves howled outside. The wood under his boots clicked as he flexed and stilled the same foot, again and again.
"You'll have your fight," Rowan said under his breath, close enough that only Darin heard.
"Not the kind I want," Darin muttered, not taking his eyes off the white bones. He opened his mouth as if to say more, shut it, and ground his jaw until the muscles jumped.
Lyra sat on a coil of rope by the mast, knees drawn up, fingers knotted in her tunic hem hard enough to whiten the knuckles. Her eyes had the distant, not-quite-here look Rowan had come to recognize as her listening to something no one else could hear. Every so often her mouth formed a word without sound. A ripple ran over her arms like a shadow had cooled the air just where she sat.
"They're crying," she said suddenly, and her voice was small in a way that made older men look away. "So many. Like… like cloth over a mouth. Some close. Some deeper. Some so far down it hurts to know they're still making noise."
Luna slid beside her and laid a hand on her shoulder. Calm wasn't just in Luna's tone; it seemed to bleed from her skin, a soft, pearly light that spread in a sheet across the water. The air eased where it touched, as if heat bowed to it. "Then we'll be ready when Mira returns," she murmured. "You don't have to carry it alone."
Luna's glow peeled darkness off the surface. Under the boats, shadows that had been a suggestion became shapes that had names. A long form patrolled—shark, but wrong: its roll juddering, tailbeat uneven, eyes pale as old glass. A knot of squids turned under the light, their tentacles trailing like weeds. Farther out, something thicker slid and did not care that anyone watched.
"Storm take me," an Islander breathed, so softly it couldn't find its own echo. "They're waiting."
"They're guarding," Rowan said. He reached for the leather sling at his hip and lifted the glass globe that lay there. Midg—a sliver of silver, a minnow Soulkin—dashed frantic circles in the little world, slamming his face against the glass, turning and turning. Panic poured off him like a smell. It wasn't fear for himself. The minnow had only ever gone like that when danger was close and had noticed.
"Five with me," Rowan said, scanning the Thalriss. "Swiftest. Quietest. We look. Only look."
"You can't—" Darin started, halfway up, the plea naked because he hated it.
"Not you," Rowan said, hand up without looking. "You can't breathe it, and I won't fish you up with a rope." He softened the line with a glance. "Soon."
Darin swallowed his answer like a hot coal. His fingers tightened reflex on the axe haft.
Rowan tipped the globe. Midg blurred silver, darted to his palm, and then—like a thought slipping through a door—slid into his chest. Cold poured into Rowan's lungs. It should have been suffocation; it was relief. He drew in water and it moved through him clean as air, left him clear and bright-eyed. Sound folded to a hush; edges sharpened.
He dove.
The world above the skin of the sea shattered into coins of light. The world below opened cool and green and patient. Pressure set a hand on his ribcage and then decided he belonged. He kicked and he was himself but more—his limbs cutting cleaner lines, his body finding the angle water wanted.
The four Thalriss and Luna slid around him, soldiers underwater, their strokes a language: one to mark a hazard, two for current cross, three for stop. Rowan matched their economy, nodded where nods would do.
As the skeleton swam up at them, details fastened to the mind like burrs. Ropes of kelp, blackened like rot had burned them, bandaged ribs that should have fallen. Iron spikes bit bone to bone, ugly sutures pinning a carcass upright. Nets drooped from the spine, heavy with weed and—Rowan's stomach tightened—hair, both human and animal, woven into the mess. Barnacles clustered as big as fists, and some wept a thin, oily black that dribbled in threads through the water. When one of those threads touched his tongue, the taste was like old blood on old iron.
Guards drifted where watch would stand. One lounged in the whale's hollow eye socket, a body that had once been a man then a fish then neither; gills at his neck were thick and blackened, his eyes filmed over to a soft, dead color. Another circled near the hinge of the jaw, tail sweeping with a rhythm that never quite found itself. Their spears were made from what was at hand—barbed spines, sharpened coral, metal lashed to wood.
"Curse them," the Thalriss to Rowan's left mouthed, bubbles small as pearl from his teeth. Rage kindled bright in his eyes; training kept his hands still.
Rowan raised two fingers—caution—and pointed inward. They slid through the whale's jaw, between teeth taller than men, and into the cavern made of ribs. The inside was a nave. Chains webbed the air. Cages hung at different heights, a forest of iron and bone and coral-framed nets. In them: faces.
Not just faces. Lives crushed into small squares.
A dolphin thumped its tail against netting that cut into skin. A green turtle bumped a corner again and again as if the world had only four directions now and none of them led out. Three merfolk were shackled tail-to-tail, their gills shuddering. A mountain man with a nose broken badly more than once clutched bars scarred with notches that counted something. Days. Beatings. Names. An Islander boy held a girl's jaw shut with gentle fingers so she wouldn't cry bubbles and choke on them. Eyes tracked Rowan as if the shape of him might be an answer.
At the center, lashed to the spine where the whale's heart would have been, a larger cage hung in a web of chain. A figure lay within, shackled at wrists and ankles, scaling sea-blue, jawline too proud to belong to anyone but a boy raised to command. The Thalriss prince.
The warrior beside Rowan jerked, rage breaking its leash. Rowan caught his wrist hard, shook his head once. The man glared murder. Not yet, Rowan signed clumsily—two fingers, palm, a point to the surface, a sweep taking in all the cages. Not without boats. Not without more hands. We save a dozen. We drown the rest.
For three beats the warrior fought himself. Then he swallowed fury like a man swallows bile and nodded, eyes reddened with the effort.
Rowan forced himself to look more. If he let his gaze stick to the prince, he'd be useless. He mapped chain hubs and lever points; he counted guards and marked how current slid around platforms and under nets. He saw two empty perches—a shift had changed not long ago. Fewer guards than there should have been, and that prickled worse than plenty. Either the jailers trusted the flock of corrupted circling outside more than watchmen, or they had other places to be. Neither thought comforted him.
A low push of pressure moved through the water. Not noise. A thud he felt in teeth and skull and the fine hairs of his ears. The skeleton took it and hummed a little, like a drum whispered to. The guards twitched and steadied, bored with their own monstrous heartbeat. Rowan felt the itch of Midg's worry flutter against his sternum. Too close.
He tore himself away.
They slid out through the jaw. The guard in the eye socket tipped his head, nostrils flaring. Oily barnacle threads drifted their way. The guard's mouth opened too wide. A small sound—a hiccup, a laugh?—spilled and died. He drifted on.
Rowan broke the surface and air slammed his face with heat and noise. He hauled over the gunwale in a wet hiss of rope and plank. Darin was there first, hand out, eyes searching.
"Well?" Callen asked, but his gaze was reading Rowan's answer before the word landed.
"They're all there," Rowan said, and the words scraped his throat dry. "Islanders. Thalriss. Mountain-folk. Mer. Beasts penned like tools. Hundreds. Maybe more. And the prince—alive." He swallowed. "For now."
The Thalriss hissed together, a drawn-blade sound. One drove his trident point-first to the deck; the thunk was oath and threat both. An Islander crossed himself in the old way and looked guilty for it.
"How many guards?" Callen asked again, because numbers make fear something you can carry.
"Not enough," Rowan said, and saw the way faces lifted a fraction before he added, "which is the worst thing I could have told you. Fewer here means more somewhere. Or it means they trust what circles those bones to do the killing for them."
Lyra's head snapped up. Her pupils were small as pinpricks. "Something old is under it," she said softly. "Not old like a tree. Old like an oath someone swore with both hands and then bled on."
The sea gave that slow, sullen thud again. It came up through wood into knees and spine.
"We wait for Mira," Rowan said, putting the words down like stakes in sand that wind and tide were already testing. "We gather boats and nets and knives on cords. We cut as one, or we don't cut at all."
"You'd leave him there?" the trident-bearing Thalriss demanded, pain chewing the edges off his precise voice at last. "You'd leave my prince in a cage while you make lists?"
Rowan's temper bared its teeth. "I'd leave ten in cages to save a thousand," he snapped, and heard the cruelty in it and didn't take it back. "You want me to say something else? I won't. You want truth or comfort? Pick."
The warrior stared at him, chest heaving, and then he looked at Luna's hand steady on Lyra's shoulder, at Darin's white-knuckled grip on an axe he couldn't use where he wanted, at Callen's careful readiness, and the fight in him changed shape. It didn't leave. It leashed itself.
Silence walked the boats. Someone passed Rowan a strip of salted fruit and a crust; Callen's doing, by the way it arrived without asking. Rowan chewed and tasted only iron. He fixed the prison in his mind with all its wicked angles and then refused to look at it for ten breaths, because men needed to see his eyes on them, not on horror.
Luna's light widened by a handspan, and the ring of shadows around the boats eased outward the same distance, as if brightness cost them something. Lyra blinked hard and wiped her cheeks with the heel of her hand, and though the far-listening didn't leave her face, something like steadiness returned to the set of her shoulders. Darin blew out a breath and rolled his neck until it popped, then planted his feet wide, as if the sea might try to buck him off the world and he was having none of it.
"Ready the ropes," Rowan said to Callen, voice even again. "Tie knives to wrists. Stack nets where you can find them blind. If they come for the hulls, we cut them off the wood instead of prying fingers."
"Aye," Callen said, and moved, and the Islanders moved with him because there was work now and men were built for work even when they feared the shape of it.
Rowan let himself look at the ribs again. The sun slid and threw new shadows through them; for a heartbeat it seemed they breathed. He threw the thought away like a fishbone before it could stick.
"Hold," he said, to the boats, to the men on them, to his own heart that had started to try to race ahead of the day.
The whale answered with its slow drum. The water took the beat and sent it along chain and bone.
Rowan put his palm flat on the mast and stood that pulse. He would not spend men on anger. He would not save ten to lose a thousand. He would hold until he had enough rope to bind the sea and enough knives to teach iron new tricks.
Mira would come. He decided that like a stone dropped into the center of himself. Decisions could be wrong. They were still better than fear.
"Hold," he said again. And they did.