Except it was barely moving. As the bullet reached her, as it came close enough for her to grab from the air, the iron spliced into countless smaller shots that sprayed sideways. Then Vaness coalesced in the fog, her nose bloody and gown shredded. Behind her, more shots fired and orange light seared Vivia’s way.
Vaness reached Vivia first, arms flinging wide as she tackled Vivia overboard. They fell toward the sea. Fire ripped out above them, singeing the edges of Vaness’s hair and gown and blasting Vivia with heat. But it was too slow, and now Vivia and Vaness were beneath the fog. Beneath the Lioness’s decks.
They hit the waves. Vivia’s breath burst from her as the sea enveloped them. Vaness still held on, though, and when Vivia opened her eyes, she found blood trailing behind them, a stringing silhouette upon a sea gone mad.
She yanked water to her, though she didn’t carry them to the surface. Instead, Vivia let them sink, let the water cradle her and feed her power.
It foamed and roiled as the Lioness sank, displacing the water—angering the water. Use us, it told Vivia. Use us and attack.
How? Vivia wanted to ask it. How can I use you to protect my crew? To protect Noden’s Gift? She could try to sink more ships, but those hulls would simply become more skeletons upon the seafloor while the sailors would live on. They would swim ashore, Kadossi at the lead, and they would destroy the Gift anew. How can I use you? Tell me what to do.
As Vivia and Vaness sank, the Empress’s fingers clutched at Vivia’s biceps and bubbles roared from her mouth. The Lioness bore down, a massive shadow from above. They were deep enough now that the waves had calmed. No more currents to spin and dunk. They would hit coral soon or one of the many skeletal ships filling the sea.
Here, Vivia sensed a deep bass thrum within the water. One she’d never sensed before. An undertow that quavered in her belly and trickled up from beyond the farthest shelf. Perhaps all the way from Noden’s court. Become us, it urged. Become us and attack.
The Empress clawed at Vivia, a vague, distant sensation compared to the water’s command. Become us, the water said. Join us and attack. There was no malice in the undertow. Only welcome. Only an element accustomed to being ignored until someone entered its realm.
The Empress shouted, a water-filled burble that hit Vivia’s skin. Blood still streamed from her nose as she shook her head, eyes bulging. Then a hundred tiny pricks pierced Vivia’s biceps. Painful, sudden, and jolting. Vivia blinked, and this time, she focused fully on Vaness.
The Empress was drowning. She didn’t have the lung capacity Vivia did. She hadn’t spent half her life surrounded by waves or riding rivers to their falls.
Vivia glanced up, at the wild silhouette of the Lioness descending. Even if they could make it to the surface, only pistols and flames would await. Never had she wished for Stix more, to help her, to lift her, to guide her because Stix always knew what to do. How to make everything better. But Stix wasn’t here, and Vivia had only herself to do what needed doing.
So she did the one thing she could think of that would keep the Empress alive in this tiny cocoon of safety: she pulled Vaness to her and kissed her.
* * *
As the Queen of Hawks and the Queen of Foxes vanished beneath the roiling sea, Stix, Ryber, and Kahina watched in silence from a stretch of gravel beside the Origin Well.
“Are you ready?” Kahina asked. Smoke curled from her pipe, mingling with the acrid stench the battle. She had shed her admiral’s coat and boots.
“Yes,” Stix answered, and she turned to Ryber. “Safe harbors. We’ll return soon.”
“Safe harbors,” the Sightwitch replied, and her lips twitched with a rare grin. Then she held out the Giant card for Stix to see. Its gold back winked in the morning’s coral light. “Do not take too much magic from Her.”
“No.” Stix wagged her head. “We’ll only take what we need.” She walked to Kahina’s side, her own bare feet rolling over tide-worn gravel, and together, the Paladin of Hawks and the Paladin of Foxes walked into the sea to help their queens as the Sleeping Giant—the goddess at the heart of everything—wished for them to do.
* * *
It wasn’t a true kiss. Or Vivia didn’t think it was. Later, she would agonize over that distinction, but during the panicked moments while it happened, while she pressed her lips to Vaness’s and shared every remnant of breath in her lungs, while the Empress crushed her lips back and drew in air like the drowning woman she was, Vivia saw it only as a way to save the Empress and buy them more time beneath the waves.
Because the undertow’s song wasn’t finished with Vivia yet—Become us, become us and attack. It sounded like Stix. Vivia didn’t know how, she didn’t know why, but it was as if her Threadsister were right beside her, pumping her fists and urging her on.
Vivia had wished Stix were near to save her only moments ago, and now it felt as if she really were. Become us, become us and attack. Go, Vivia, go.
The iron needles on Vivia’s arm pulled back, leaving only the Empress’s fingers, stronger by the heartbeat. Then the Empress herself pulled back, nothing more than a shadowy shape swept in gold. Vivia’s sinking feet brushed a long-forgotten hull. Kelp reached for her ankles. Become us, become us and attack.
Yes, she replied, and in that moment, she sensed Vaness do the same. Like a scale glinting in a tide pool, something flashed in the Empress’s eyes. Something that Vivia spotted despite the shadows, despite the crude light of a rising dawn. Iron had summoned Vaness, and she too was answering the call.
It was like the Origin Well all over again, but a hundred times stronger. As if the very Threads between Vivia and the Empress had thickened into roots that could not be broken. They no longer belonged to themselves, but to the elements they commanded.
Vivia lifted her arms; Vaness raised hers. The sea obeyed, the iron obeyed, and the sunken ship obeyed.
Whirlpools formed around Vivia and Vaness as water was displaced. As sand that hadn’t moved in decades sloughed off a keel long dead. Iron creaked, a higher-pitched descant to the groan of wooden ribs—just as Vaness’s magic seemed to sing atop Vivia’s undertow. Water lifted and moved, hands to raise a ghost ship while iron reassembled into the ghost cannons it had once been.
A galleon, Vivia recognized. Perhaps even Dalmotti all those years ago.
Now it was Nubrevnan. Now it belonged to the seas that had always lived here, to the undertow that had outlived nations. It remembered more than Vivia’s human mind could conceive, though her tiny brain tried to stretch and warp and absorb as the water flushed into her, flooded through. It had seen continents grow and shorelines fall. It had tended corals large as cities and fed every life that had ever flickered. It had caressed and nurtured and killed and destroyed.
As the galleon lifted, it carried Vivia and Vaness higher and higher, eventually angling to avoid the Lioness as that ship sank lower and lower.
She lost all sense of her body. Like her brain, she became a vessel for the water. She became the water, exactly as it desired. And she would swear, again, that Stix was somehow right beside her. Go, Vivia, go.
The galleon rose, lifting Vivia’s head above the water’s surface, then her neck, her chest, her legs. Water sluiced off of her, dawn air crashed in. Distantly she sensed other ships rising, carried by the water. Two, three, fourteen, the undertow lifted fallen galleys and half-galleys, sunken carracks and longships shed here by different empires over decades of a war that had never claimed Nubrevna.