“That’s good, thank you, Mr. Seldom.” She took her satchel from Cedar and soaked a cloth with the coca leaf tonic, then pressed that against his eye socket and did the same for the brand in his forehead. She quickly bandaged his head, and then wrapped his ribs, in hopes they weren’t so broken that they were cutting up his insides.
She put his arm in a sling and soaked another cloth with the coca leaf to tie down tight over both sides of the hole in his leg.
He didn’t wake. He didn’t stir. But he was breathing.
“That’s all,” she said, trying to think through the call of the sisters, the incessant push for her to return to the coven, to walk, run, jump the ship if she had to. “That’s all I can do for him. If the ship can be patched, any at all, it might help him.”
“Bryn’s working on it,” Cedar said.
She looked up. Some time had passed. Miss Dupuis was sitting next to Mr. Theobald, holding his hand. She was very pale and silent, her eyes red as tears stained her face.
Mae knew that sorrow. Mr. Theobald had been more than a traveling companion to Miss Dupuis. He had been her love.
Wil and Cedar seemed oblivious to her pain, and stood squared off toward Alun Madder. From the set of their shoulders and grim expressions, it was clear they had been arguing.
“What?” Mae asked.
“You tell her, Mr. Hunt,” Alun said. “It’s your idea.”
Cedar turned to her, and helped her stand. “Rose needs the Holder. Mr. Madder still thinks if we can find the tin piece of it, we can use it to draw out the key that is killing her.”
“Yes,” Mae said. “I remember.”
“Mr. Shunt is down there. He was in the compound. I think he has the Holder with him,” Cedar said.
“So you’re going to go find him, right?” she asked. “You’ll hunt him, find him, take the Holder from him, and bring it back for Rose.”
“We don’t have time.”
His words were even, and without much emotion. But she could see the sorrow in his eyes.
Rose. It was Rose who didn’t have the time.
“What can we do then? We can’t just…Oh, Cedar, we can’t just let her die.”
“Can you save her?” he asked. “Your magic is vows and curses: bindings. Can you call to the Holder, Mae? Now that it is so near, can you cast a spell to bind the piece that’s in her to the whole of it? It used to be one whole thing. It might respond to being one thing again at your urging. If you can bind it to itself, and to Rose, just like you bound the captain and his ship, you’d draw it here, right out of Shunt’s hands. Rose might have a chance then. We could try to remove the piece once we have the chunk it came from.”
“Bind it?” Mae’s heart raced. “I don’t…my magic. It’s so hard to focus. To make magic do what I want. If I bound it to…to Rose. Made her a part of it like Captain Hink and the
Cedar nodded. “I can’t think of any other way to save her, Mae. No time. No Holder. She’d want you to try. You know she would.”
Mae looked away from him to his brother, Wil, who was watching her with the curious eyes of the wolf he once was. Then she looked at Alun. “You’re against it?” she asked.
“Not entirely,” he hedged. “If you think you can do it. Are you strong enough, Mrs. Lindson? Are you near enough the Holder to call it this far?”
Mae knew she was not. But she had to try. “I’ll need a flame, a bowl of water, a stone or dirt, and smoke. And I’ll need you all to give me and Rose space.”
Alun lifted one eyebrow. “As you say.”
Everyone on the ship moved away. Someone found the items she had asked for, and Cedar handed them to her.
A lantern for flame, a cup of water, a smooth stone out of Seldom’s pocket, and a bundle of sage that would smoke once lit.
“Will these do?” Cedar asked.
“Yes.” Mae took them and placed one at each compass point on the floor around Rose. Then she stood next to Rose.
It was as if all the color had washed out of her friend. Her skin was gray, her lips blue, and the fire of her hair dulled down to ash.
Her eyes were open, glossy as dull nickels, staring at the ceiling. Each breath stopped too soon, and the next began too late.
Mae took a deep breath. The sisters’ chorus grew louder with her fear. She shouldn’t be using magic, shouldn’t whisper the spell, shouldn’t utter the blessing, cast the binding. Magic turned dark in her hands. Magic turned wicked on her words.
The sisters did not want her to use magic.
Mae refused to listen to the voices. This was the only thing that might save Rose.
She took Rose’s hand firmly in her own and closed her eyes.
She let the words of the spell reach out far and wide, singing it over the sound of the sisters’ voices, singing it over the sound of the ships, the wind, the night.
But it was too much, impossible to think, to hear her own words, to guide the spell. The sisters were strong. Stronger than her.
And they intended to tear her mind apart.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Cedar balled his hands into fists. It was everything he could do to stand and watch Mae as she whispered over Rose.
He could smell Mae’s fear, he could smell the sweat of her pain. Her entire body trembled with the effort of casting the spell to bind the Holder.
He didn’t know how long she could endure. Didn’t know how long before he grabbed her up in his arms, broke her spell, took her away from Rose. It’s what the beast in him wanted to do—protect Mae at any cost.
And it would seal Rose’s death.
Wil shifted and stood next to him, facing the opposite direction, watching the people in the ship and the door at Cedar’s back where Miss Wright stood.
Cedar could look nowhere else other than at Mae.
Suddenly Mae stopped whispering.
The air became soft and burred, as if lightning were just about to strike. But it was not lightning. No, what Cedar tasted on the back of his tongue was the scent of the Strange. Of the Holder.
And then, like a star tearing through the sky, a piece of metal broke through the floor and hurtled into the ship. A song, huge and tempered by an otherworldly chorus, filled Cedar’s ears.
The Holder ricocheted off the walls of the ship, scorching wood, bending metal.
The people in the ship each had their own reactions to it, but Cedar took scant note of Hink’s crew’s startled disbelief, the Madders’ wild laughter, or Miss Dupuis’s and Miss Wright’s wonderment.
He was watching Mae. And Mae said one word, her lips trembling around it, nearly unable to give the word breath enough to form.
“One,” she whispered.
And then the Holder shot toward Rose. Too fast for him to stop it. Too fast for Mae to block it. Too fast.
It struck her chest and spread out like liquid, bending to fit over her shoulder, flowing down to her collarbone,
