Read Chapter 24: The Turn of the Tide

The deck lurched beneath them, and Elinor felt Nathaniel’s weight sag against her shoulder. Above, the night sky bled orange—the schooner’s lanterns had found the spilled oil, and fire was crawling up the rigging like a living thing. Men screamed. Somewhere behind the wall of smoke, steel rang against steel.

“The rail,” Nathaniel rasped. “Our cutter—it’s still tethered astern.”

She dragged him forward, boots slipping on scorched planking. The smoke was a second sea, thick and blinding. She could not see Thomas anywhere. The last she’d heard of him was a shout—Hale’s name, spat like poison—then the crack of a pistol.

“Elinor!”

Thomas’s voice, close. She turned. He emerged from the smoke, one hand clamped over his side, blood black between his fingers. His eyes found hers and something in them eased, as if he had been searching for her and only now remembered to breathe.

“Go,” he said. “The boat—take it and go.”

“Not without you.” She grabbed his arm. His skin was hot and slick.

“I’m done for. You know that.”

“I know nothing of the sort.” She pulled harder, and he staggered with her, three steps, four. The fire had jumped to the mainmast now, and the whole world shook with the roar of it. Men were throwing themselves overboard. The schooner groaned like a dying beast.

They reached the rail. The cutter bobbed below, tethered by a single rope. Nathaniel was already fumbling at the knot, his hands clumsy with fever. Elinor shoved Thomas toward the rail.

“You first. You can still—“

The shot came from behind them. Thomas jerked, a grunt punched from his chest, and his grip on her arm went tight, then slack. He toppled backward over the rail, a slow, awful fall, arms thrown wide, and hit the water with a sound she felt in her teeth.

“Thomas!”

She did not think. She vaulted the rail and hit the cold black water, and the sea swallowed her whole. Darkness. Salt. The hammering of her own heart in her ears. She kicked, broke the surface, gasped.

“Thomas!”

The fire lit the water in patches of hellish orange. Bodies floated—men, some moving, some not. She spun, searching the chaos, and saw him. Twenty feet off. His head above the water, one arm barely moving, the other pressed to his side.

She swam. The cold was a knife in her lungs, but she swam, closing the distance with desperate strokes. She reached him, grabbed his collar, and pulled his face toward hers.

“I have you. I have you.”

His eyes were glassy, but they found her. He tried to smile. Blood ribboned from his mouth and unraveled in the current.

“You shouldn’t have come in,” he said.

“Shut up and swim.”

“Elinor.” His hand came up, found her wrist. His grip was shockingly strong for a dying man. “Listen to me. The last page. The torn name—“

“We can figure it out later. Swim.”

“It’s—” He coughed, and the water around him went dark. “It’s Mercer. It was always—“

Another cough. His hand tightened on her wrist, then pushed. Pushed her away with the last of his strength.

“Save yourself.”

“No. Thomas, no—“

But he was already sinking. She lunged, caught his coat, tried to haul him up, but his weight and the current and the cold were all against her. She went under with him, pulled down into the black, and for a moment there was only silence and pressure and the frantic beating of her heart.

She broke the surface alone.

The cutter was beside her. Nathaniel had managed to bring it alongside, his face white as bone as he leaned over the gunwale, reaching for her.

“Elinor! Take my hand!”

She looked back at the water. The firelight danced on the swells, and there was nothing. No shape. No arm. No Thomas.

“He’s gone,” she heard herself say.

“Take my hand.”

She reached for him. Her fingers closed around his, and he hauled her over the side. She collapsed onto the floorboards, choking seawater, shivering so hard her teeth chattered. The schooner burned behind them, a funeral pyre riding at anchor.

Nathaniel was saying something. She could hear his voice but not the words. Above, flames climbed the sky. Men called out in the water, but she did not see them. She saw only the place where Thomas had gone under, the water smooth and empty now, as if the sea had swallowed him whole and was already forgetting.

She pressed her palms to her face. The cold had taken all feeling from her hands. She did not know how long she lay there, only that eventually the burning ship slipped behind them, a shrinking ember in the dark, and then it was gone.