Rowan's hands wouldn't stop shaking.
The sea around the prince's cage still trembled from the whirlpool he'd called, steam thinning into threads that vanished as if ashamed. Midg flickered in his chest—brave, exhausted, a candle shoved into the wind. The corrupted captain was gone into the deep, burning and hateful, but gone. That left the work.
Cut the chains. Free the prince. Move.
He wedged his harpoon point under the first lock. The corroded iron fought him like it wanted to stay cruel forever. He braced a foot against the whale's rib and levered. The bar snapped with a pop he felt in his teeth. One shackle slackened; the prince slumped and then caught himself with a grimace that said: I am not broken where it counts.
A Thalriss ally slid into place on the other side, knife flashing. His hands were steady in a way Rowan envied. They worked without speaking, as soldiers do when time is a blade at their throats. Second lock. Third. Above, a muffled thud rolled through the ribs—impact, heavy and wrong. Rowan didn't look up. Looking up got people killed down here.
"Almost," he mouthed, bubbles snagging the word.
The prince's eyes found him through the bars. Up close, he was younger than Rowan had expected, the lines of command not etched by years so much as carved by hunger and hurt. He inclined his head a fraction—a nod to a stranger who had become necessity.
The last lock resisted hard. Rowan twisted, felt the wood of his harpoon creak close to splinter, and snarled. Midg gave him a thin ribbon of speed and strength, the kind you only feel when you've spent everything else. The bar gave. The door drifted open.
The prince tried to push free, but chains still webbed his ankles. Rowan sliced them, and together they shoved the door wide—just wide enough for a body starved to sinew to pass. The prince slid past Rowan, caught the harpoon shaft, and used it like a rail. When he cleared the frame, he almost drifted away—then a manta ray, freed minutes before, shouldered in beneath him and bore his weight like a patient table.
Rowan clapped the prince's shoulder with more force than he meant. It was that or hug him. "Breathe," he mouthed. It was nonsense down here but made sense anyway.
A shadow moved. Two corrupted guards nosed around the skull's hinge, blinking dumbly as if the current had changed its mind and they didn't like that. The nearest made a grabbing thrust with a spine-spear. Rowan met it with the haft, knocked it aside, and jabbed the harpoon up beneath its jaw. The body spasmed and folded. The second turned to flee. The Thalriss ally with Rowan didn't let it—he arced a knife into its gill and yanked it through the soft part. The water clouded; the manta flinched, then held.
Rowan blew out the breath he didn't need and waved the manta on. Up. The ray surged toward the light with the prince secured between its wings.
Only then did he let himself look beyond the cage.
There were still dozens. Thalriss hanging in narrow frames built to humble tails. Merfolk slumped in nets that had bitten their scales raw. A green turtle with a cracked scute beating one corner of her prison with stubborn rhythm because the world had only four directions and none of them led out. He couldn't do everything. He would do as much as the water would let him.
He set his shoulder and harpoon to three more locks in quick succession, bones of the whale thudding a slow counterpoint to each break. More shadows moved—not enemies this time. Dolphins. Thin, scarred, alive enough to help. One nuzzled Rowan's shoulder, chittered in his face as if to argue about the order in which he saved things. He couldn't understand the words. He understood the intent well enough.
Up. Up. Up.
He pointed. The dolphins understood that perfectly. They flowed into place like thoughts you'd been trying to have all afternoon, nosed freed bodies toward the warm bright place where air still mattered.
By the time Rowan shoved for the surface after the prince, his arms had become strangers, heavy and prone to argument. He gripped the harpoon anyway, because letting go would teach his muscles a habit he didn't want them to learn. Midg's glow dimmed to something like a pulse. "Almost," Rowan told himself again, and it moved his legs like a command.
He broke into air and gulped it like he hadn't been breathing all along.
The world above was noise and light and blood. Boats heaving against bone. Nets streaming like seaweed hair. The battle had paused for now. Men shouting, women yelling back, children crying, seals barking in indignation because someone had stepped on them by accident. Luna's glow had gone from balm to a tight, bright line that drew men's eyes where their hands needed to go. Darin's jade shimmer curved across two boats at once, rock-hard where tentacles had tried to pry hulls up and over.
And Lyra—
Lyra was gone.
"Where?" Rowan croaked. His voice came back torn. He didn't know who he'd asked.
Darin pointed with his chin because his hands were busy being a wall. "Taken. Tentacles. Callen too." The words were flat. Flat took less time than grief.
Rowan's stomach pitched. He had a harpoon. He had lungs that could cheat a little. He had a name to say into the water. He looked down.
The sea answered for him.
A silver streak ripped through the murk beneath the boats, arrowing up. It hit something Rowan's eyes couldn't make out—a pale coil around a smaller body—and the water shuddered with the impact. The coil loosened. The streak hit again, and this time Rowan saw it clean when it rolled and dove, arrowhead grin and ink-drop eye: a dolphin, lean and scarred where nets had burned through skin.
Lyra burst out of the water on the dolphin's back like a fish-made miracle. She coughed once, twice, and then laughed, the sound wild and sharp. Luna caught her under the arms and hauled her across the gunwale as the dolphin hovered, slick back gleaming silver in Luna's light. Lyra gulped air like a child who's forgotten what to do with it, then went very, very still.
Silver seeped from the dolphin's skin—no, not from it. Through it. Light poured from the creature's ribs and into Lyra's hands where they touched. It ran up her forearms in thin seams, spidered across her shoulders and down her spine. For a heartbeat Rowan thought she'd scream. She didn't. She made a small, broken sound and smiled—astonished, grateful, a little afraid.
Her eyes unfocused and then focused beyond anything anyone around her could see.
A thought that wasn't sound touched the air around the boats. Everyone felt it. It landed on Lyra like coming home and it landed on Rowan like being forgiven for a thing he hadn't known he'd done.
I was waiting for you to come into the water… The "voice" was clear in Lyra's mind, and somehow—through the way Luna's hand held hers, through the spray touching Darin's face, through the curve of Midg shivering in Rowan's chest—they all felt the shape of the words without hearing them. The dolphin nosed Lyra's cheek, breath bursting in a wet cough against her jaw. …but not like this.
Lyra laughed again, the sound bright and shaky. Tears made clean tracks through the salt scummed on her face. "I hear you," she whispered, and then startled at the undertow of noise that rolled up under the words. She clapped her hands to her ears like the sky had opened. "They're all—gods, they're all so loud—"
"What?" Luna asked, catching her shoulders.
"Everything," Lyra breathed. "The manta is humming—she's counting breaths. The orca is angry—no, not at us, at the taste in the water. The gulls are arguing about a fish head. The—" She blinked hard, swayed. "Too much."
Luna cupped the back of her neck and eased her down. "Then listen to just one," she said gently, as if coaxing a fevered child into a cooler room. "Start there."
Lyra shut her eyes. The dolphin pressed its brow to her heartbeat. Silver flared, then steadied to a pale, familiar sheen. Lyra's breath evened. Her hands, which had been shaking as if with cold, went quiet. When she opened her eyes again, they were Lyra's eyes, but with something clear and deep layered in them. "Thank you," she told the dolphin aloud and in the place with no words at all.
The dolphin clicked once, satisfaction more than sound, then wheeled and arrowed under the nearest boat, where a tangle of line was about to drown a man without anyone noticing. It surfaced with the rope in its teeth and a look that said, very plainly, don't do that again.
"Callen?" Rowan asked, still as if the water might answer for him.
No answer rose. Something bumped the hull; a moment later an axe washed out from under the rib and knocked gently against the boat as if it had been placed there with care. Darin caught it on instinct. The handle had four fresh gouges where a hand had tried to hold on against a pull that didn't understand the word enough.
Darin's jaw tightened. He handed the axe to no one. He slid it into the empty bracket on the inside of the gunwale, where Callen's had always hung between uses, and pulled the leather strap over it and buckled it down. The motion had the gravity of a prayer you can do with your hands.
For the space of three breaths, all the sound around them got very small. You could hear the drip from the manta's wing. A boy's hiccup before a sob. The wet whisper of Luna's palms against Lyra's hair.
Then work shoved itself back into the world like a tide.
"Move them inboard," Darin said, voice steady again. His eyes were red but his hands didn't know how to hesitate. "We make room down the middle and keep the edges clean. We cut anything that looks like it wants to pull. We feed who can swallow." He looked at Rowan finally, not asking for permission, not offering a plan for approval—just making sure the man with the harpoon was still part of the same picture. Rowan nodded. That was enough.
The prince's manta surfaced in the lee of a broken rib and rolled him carefully into waiting hands. Thalriss voices, frayed to threads and then tied back together, rose and fell with something between prayer and curse. One of them had the presence to lay two fingers on the prince's throat and nod when he felt the thin flutter there. Another took the prince's wrist and lashed it to a stanchion because even heroes drown when boats buck.
The prince's eyes found Rowan's again. Up here, the blue was deeper, the gold at the edge of his irises brighter with the light. He parted salt-bloated lips. "Name?" he rasped.
"Rowan."
"Rowan." He tasted it as if it were a difficult fruit. He seemed satisfied with the effort, or just done. He let his head rest back against the deck and closed his eyes with a sigh that might have been relief if it hadn't sounded so much like I will kill something later.
Rowan's own breath didn't know whether to hurry or slow. He set his palm on the nearest rib, felt the whale's dead bones shudder under the living weight they carried. Midg breathed thin and steady in his chest. The minnow had done everything anyone could ask of a small, brave thing. Rowan's hands stopped shaking. He was allowed that much.
"Where is Mira?" someone asked close to his ear.
"Coming," Rowan said, because believing it would make it easier for her to be true. He turned to the business of keeping everyone between now and that arrival.
They moved with the practiced clumsiness of men who had learned too fast. Luna assigned tasks without seeming to, the same way water gives you your own reflection without making a fuss. Lyra, eyes bright and far, staggered only once when a chorus of seals on a rib ten paces away broke into the kind of song they use to scold the tide. "Hush," she told them, and they did, because they were surprised anyone had answered in their language.
The dolphin—her dolphin, because anything that had said I was waiting for you belonged to the person who'd heard it—kept circling the ring, shouldering weak swimmers toward ladders and flicking lines off ankles with irritated good humor. When a gull swooped to steal a strip of drying fish off a belt, Lyra glanced up and said, almost absently, "Drop it," and the gull did, then looked bewildered at its own obedience and went to bother someone more gull-appropriate.
Rowan set men to prying up cages more firmly stuck, and the freed sea-creatures hauled under the lip and pushed. There is no leverage in water without friends; he had friends now. He kept one eye on the ribs where the tentacles had risen and fell. The surface there boiled in a way that meant not finished.
He took the space between one order and the next to find Darin's eyes. "I'm sorry," he said, the words raw and simple and necessary.
"Later," Darin replied. He didn't chide. He didn't soften it. He had a shell drawn across half a dozen men who were shaking so hard their teeth chattered; he could not carry grief and them both at once. "We put it where it can't fall off the work."
Rowan nodded. The placement would hold. He scanned the ring again, counted heads and found that counting would not change the number that mattered. Callen's absence had a shape you could walk around and swallow salt over and still not fill.
A hush fell that wasn't silence. Sound kept happening—ropes, water, breath—but something else had arrived and sat down and everyone could feel its weight.
"Look," someone whispered.
At first Rowan's eyes took the dark line on the water's edge for a cloud. Then the cloud grew masts. And then the masts grew the suggestion of sails. Not two, not ten—many. Dozens. Hundreds. The line of them ran to either horizon like someone had drawn a stitch across the world and pulled it tight. No pennants flew that he could make out, no colors he could call friend, no horns spoke to tell him whether to lay his harpoon down or lift it.
Luna's hand found Lyra's. The girl squeezed it, hard. "I can hear them," Lyra said, voice small and huge at once. "The gulls over there. They're laughing. The fish in the shadows—they're quiet. The things that shine under the keels—they aren't… they aren't like the ones here." She swallowed. "I don't know what that means."
Darin set his feet a little wider. Tharos's light thinned and broadened until it traced the whole outer curve of the nearest boat, a promise instead of a wall. "We won't assume," he said. "We'll choose when we know."
The freed murmured. A man from the mainland made a sign on his chest he hadn't put his hands through since he was a boy. A Thalriss muttered a name like Thalorin under his breath and then flinched at his own superstition and stared hard at the bones to punish himself for it.
The prince, who had been slack with the kind of tired that lives behind the eyes, lifted his head and looked. He smiled without humor. "Always more," he said, and if he had been stronger he would have made it a joke you could laugh at. He let his head down gently and closed his eyes to save the strength for the next thing.
Rowan raised his harpoon and set the butt on the plank to steady his legs. Steam still seemed to hide under his skin, waiting for his anger to tear the lid off the pot again. He didn't let it. Likely there would be a better time to boil the sea than at the sight of shadows you hadn't measured.
All eyes were on him because that's how men align their own spines when they've seen you stand upright in a place that wanted you to bend. He didn't give them a speech. He didn't have one. He gave them the thing he always had: a line to stand on.
"Then we face them," he said, and the words slipped into the water and sank into the boats and laid themselves along the ribs like a brace you could lean on when the next wave came.
No one cheered. Their throats were too tired. But the line around the whale settled, and the noise of frightened men turned, very slightly, in the direction of patience.
Out on the horizon, the silhouettes kept coming.