Sea. Sarah Driver

neck and pierces a thick blood vessel. Black blood hails down on us, hissing as it strikes the wood. A droplet fizzles on my arm and makes an angry red pit in my flesh.

      Bear grabs my waist and throws me from the crow’s nest into the rigging. Rope burns my palms as I hurtle downwards. The Huntress shudders as the terrodyl crashes onto the crow’s nest with a great crunch of splintering wood. I jump the rest of the way and roll when I hit the deck. Bear lands beside me. Most of the nest falls away, showering splinters down around us, until all that remains is part of the mast and the bleeding body of the terrodyl. It twitches and finally stills.

      The two living terrodyls scream in fury as I lie curled on the deck. All the wind is knocked from my lungs. Inky blood rains down from the broken mast and devours the wood with a smoky crackle.

      ‘Mouse, get below decks, now!’ Grandma booms. ‘And someone send for Pipistrelle – we need his cauldrons to catch that filthy slime, so it don’t eat the Huntress whole!’

      Bear helps me up and starts to lead me away. ‘Oarsmen, to your positions,’ he calls down to the rowing benches. ‘Someone take up the drum until my return!’ I pummel Bear with my fists but he tugs me until my boots slide across the soaked wood.

      The captain’s hatch has fallen closed again. When Bear opens it, Sparrow’s voice reaches us through the gloom. A clump of song knocks against my cheek, whale-skin cold. With it comes a low, sad groan from far across the water.

      I twist to look over my shoulder and in the distance, lit by the yellow moon, the dark shapes of whales swim towards us in great numbers. They’re a mass of giant tails and fins, blowholing jets of water into the air. A veil of blue whale-song throbs over them, and Sparrow’s song rushes to join it. Together, they push against the terrodyls.

      Bear stops dragging me and watches the horizon. Terrodyl screeches rip at the air as they reel away from our ship, recoiling from the whale-song. Tears of heart-gladness stream down my cheeks, but I swipe them away with the back of my hand – it’s nearly my thirteenth Hunter’s Moon and I ent some child.

      The drum, the Huntress ’s life-pulse, begins to beat steadily as we pull away, heading west. As the black-cloaks gather up their arrows, an icy blanket of mist settles. Frog swings from the ropes, coaxing the lanterns to life. When he reaches the main-mast, he wiggles and weaves around the skewered terrodyl. I glance down; my breeches are torn at the knees and the wound on my arm is crusted with terrodyl blood. When I wipe my nose, my hand comes away bloody.

      Grandma stalks towards me and Bear as the terrodyls throb out of sight. She’s wearing her danger-face. Without a word she grabs my sodden cloak and bundles me along the deck, past the hidden Hoodwink where the sea-hawks live, and down the steps to our cabin.

      Sparrow’s stopped singing; now he’s just sobbing amongst the bed-furs. My brother’s sickly as a merwraith and full of heart-sadness, especially when he sings with the whales. Even more now that Da’s been away trading since the last full moon.

      Thunderbolt, Sparrow’s pet moonsprite, sits on a pillow and chatters softly. Grandma plucks her from the pillow and drops her into a glass bottle, making a silvery moon-lamp that she hangs from a hook. It spills pale light across Grandma’s oak table, where the big crinkled map is nailed down, spotted with puddles of blood-red sealing wax. Furs, silks and velvets are heaped in one corner and chests are stuffed with golden eggs, onyx, jade and boxes of pearls. My diving sealskin hangs from a nail, still dripping wet from my morning dive.

      That’s one of the things I’m best at – diving for pearls. When I collect more than three in a day Grandma tells us her best stories as we huddle amongst our blankets and furs.

      Now I ent expecting stories, though. Just a flaming earful.

      Grandma catches my jaw in her hand, checking my face for hurts. ‘You won’t be in need of stitching – I’ve a mind some of my crew will, though. Ent no place for a child on deck when terrodyls come near, girl. Half a hundred times I must have told you!’

      ‘But I ent no child. I just shot one of the terrodyls!’ I wave her hands away and fling myself down on the bunk I share with Sparrow. ‘And I’m the only one with the beast-chatter, so only I can understand—’

      She scoffs. ‘You think we need beast-chatter to hear the hate in them terro-wails? You brought the creature down to crush us! Count yourself heart-glad we’re striking distance from land, with the damage you’ve done to that mast. By dawn we should be docked. But we’ll have to battle to make it through the night.’ Her voice is weary and her brow is furrowed with crags.

      ‘What am I to do with my arrows ’n my poison then? Save them for the merwraiths, when we’re good and scuttled?’

      Grandma sits at her table and mixes sea-mud, kelp and herbs to make an ointment for my arm. ‘That’s enough o’ your flaming lip. If your da returned to find you dead and buried at the bottom of the sea, what would I tell him?’

      ‘That I died like any good captain; saving her crew.’ I scowl and pick a nib of hardened skin from around my fingernail. Bright blood wells and I suck it clean.

      ‘Twelve moons old and captain already, is she? I think not. I’m hopeful the gods will gift me a few more moons yet, my girl. And any captain knows better than to put the lives of all on board in danger, for the sake of showing off.’ Grandma seizes my arm and rubs ointment into my scorched skin. Her silver rings scrape me and I try to push her away but her hand’s clamped tight as a limpet.

      My cheeks begin to burn. ‘I didn’t do it for showing off – I done it to avenge Grandpa, and to keep us safe! And it’s barely sundown. I’ll be thirteen tomorrow night! Sparrow’s eight and he ent even asleep yet!’ I splutter and almost choke on my words.

      A small smile tugs at Grandma’s mouth. ‘Never mind what your brother’s doing, though he should be snoring by now. We might have need of his voice again afore the sun wakes. Off to the privy, now, Sparrow.’

      ‘Yep, off you go,’ I say, smirking at my brother. ‘Just be watchful that bigtooth shark don’t leap up and bite your behind while you’re peeing.’

      Sparrow yelps and burrows deeper among the blankets. Grandma fixes me with her glass eye. Story goes, her eye went blind when she half turned to merwraith, when the ship of her childhood sank at the hands of wreckers and she nearly drowned. I stare back into its sea-green depths, hard and unblinking.

      All of a sudden the fierceness drops out of her face and she starts to chuckle. ‘Gods have mercy,’ she gasps after a moment, clutching her sides. ‘Sparrow, off t’ the privy ’n I’ll hear no more about it. Mouse, get yourself into your nightclothes. You’re to get to bed, and stay put whilst I tend to my injured.’

      She turns and clomps up the stairs, herding Sparrow before her. ‘My hide’s much too ancient for all this child-rearing caper,’ she exclaims. ‘Not enough that I’m captain and medsin-maker and—’ her grumblings fade as she disappears through the hatch.

      I strip to my smallclothes, dry myself with a scrap of linen and wriggle into my nightshirt. One of my fingers is grazed raw from my bowstring, so I lick it clean and dab it with Grandma’s ointment. When I scoot onto our bunk and prop open the porthole the night rings with the siiigh and shhhhh of whales breathing.

      In the sky, the great green fire spirits dance and ripple, stretching far away into the distance. Grandma says their pictures are gifts, to show us what will come and what has been. She says they showed our Tribe that I’d be a captain, before I was even born. At Sparrow’s birth the spirits said he’d be a whale-singer – and sure enough, he was singing before he could talk. I search for some sign of Da among the fire spirits as they flicker with life. But there’s naught of him there and my heart aches with it. ‘Da?’ I whisper.

      Sparrow