Tress of the Emerald Sea (The Cosmere)(19)

They were over halfway to the other ship.

Please, Emerald Moon, she prayed. Please. Just a little more time.

She could see sailors gathering on the foredeck of the other ship. They’d stopped firing. They didn’t need weapons any longer. The smuggler ship cracked and popped in the distance as an overwhelming number of vines grew up on the side where the bleeding sailor had fallen.

Tress felt the eyes of the enemy sailors on her. One figure in particular—standing right at the prow of the ship, wearing a hat with a tall black feather—looked ominous. The shadowed figure raised a long musket and aimed straight at Tress.

Then the figure turned slightly. The musket shook, and the crack sounded a fraction of a second later. The sailor who had been striding toward the ship in front of Tress dropped, his blood starting another eldritch spire of twisting vines.

Tress stopped, then braced herself for a second shot. When it didn’t come, she started forward again. It was too late to turn back, and certain death lay that direction anyway.

So she pressed forward, feeling an awful tension, like a bowstring being drawn farther, and farther, and even farther. She kept waiting for that crack, or for the ground to start trembling beneath her feet. Or for a spore to slip into her nose or to touch one of her eyes.

When she at last reached the shadow of the grounded enemy ship, it felt like she’d been walking for an eternity with a knife right at her throat.

Sailors gathered at the ship’s rail and stared down at her. She spotted no uniforms, except maybe on that figure in the center. With the black-plumed hat, their face was lost in shadow as the sun shone from near the horizon, silhouetting them.

No one said anything. The sailors didn’t offer Tress a place on their ship, but they didn’t shoot her either. So, lacking any other options, Tress tied her sack of cups to her belt and tried to find a way to climb up. Unfortunately, the keel and hull of the ship were of smooth brown wood, and after a few attempts Tress knew that scaling it would be impossible.

“I’m sorry,” Huck said. “I think I must have been wrong. Those don’t look like the king’s people up above, Tress. I wish…I wish that I…”

Tress gave their situation a moment of thought. Then she wiped her finger to remove any spores before putting it to her mouth. She got some spittle on her fingernail, took a deep breath, and flicked it toward the spores a few feet away.

A midsized vine “tree” grew from the spores, curling around itself and reaching into the sky. Tress grabbed it, feeling the rough coils beneath her fingers, like rope.

Then she climbed.

“That’s it!” Huck said, scrambling off her shoulder and up higher along the vine. “Come on, Tress. Hurry!”

She did her best, pulling herself up some ten feet until she could barely reach a porthole on the side of the ship. Huck leaped onto her shoulder again as she grabbed ahold and clung to the hull. She could see the ship’s name there, painted in golden letters. The Crow’s Song.

Up above, some of the sailors were laughing, chatting with a jovial nonchalance about her struggle. Spores streamed from her boots as she hung there, scrabbling for a foothold on a small ledge running along the outside of the ship below the portholes.

“There it is,” Huck said. “Listen.”

It started as a low humming that vibrated the ship. Moments later the spores began churning, air rising up through them. The ship lurched—nearly shaking Tress free. Orders above led to unfurled sails.

Tress’s vine ladder slipped away, sinking into the suddenly fluid ocean. She glanced at the Oot’s Dream as it listed to one side, dragged down by the many vines that wrapped it. The entire thing bobbed, then capsized, before finally sinking entirely.

Vines mushroomed up around the vanishing wreck as men screamed, giving their water to the ocean, and the flock of gulls scattered. Tress’s current ship sailed past the wreck, but the Oot’s Dream was gone before they arrived. Just three lonely crewmembers remained. Two on pieces of wreckage, one in a small lifeboat. All three wore scarves over their mouths, their eyes squeezed shut.

Two shots sounded from the deck, killing the two on the wreckage. For some reason, the Crow’s Song left the man in the lifeboat alive. The sole remnant of the smuggler crew. An…ignoble end to Tress’s first voyage.

She clung to the hull of the Crow’s Song. Her fingers began to burn, her arms to ache. But there were no handholds above—plus, the side of the deck and gunwale extended out there. She doubted she had the strength or skill to get up over that, if she could even reach it.

So she hung on. Tight as she could, as the ship rocked and swayed. Faces periodically appeared above, glancing down to see if she was still there. Then they’d call out to their fellows to relay her status.

Still there.

Still there.

“Go,” she whispered to Huck. “You’re a rat. You can climb that.”

“Doubt it,” he said.

“You could try.”

“That’s a fact. I could.”

Together they clung there. For what seemed like an eternity. Finally she started to slip. Her aching muscles screamed, and—

A rope slapped the wood next to her. She stared at it, numb, wondering if she had the strength to climb it. Instead she snatched it, hung on, and tucked her head against her arm.

Blessedly, the rope began to move, pulled up by several of the sailors above. When she was high enough, an enormous man with his black hair in dreadlocks reached down and grabbed her under her arms, then dumped her onto the deck. The last spores on her clothing died as the silver in this ship’s deck killed them.