Noa crept toward the staircase leading belowdecks, keeping to the shadows as much as possible. She guessed that Gabriela would have brought along only a skeleton crew to keep the ship light and speedy, and she hoped that meant she wouldn’t run into any mages.
Noa paused and drew a shaky breath. She wasn’t going to run into Gabriela. Her mission was all about speed. She would find Beauty’s daughter, free her, and then leap through the nearest shadow.
A sailor stomped up the stairs toward her. Rather than running in the other direction, Noa swallowed her panic and drew her hood farther forward as she continued down the stairs. As they passed, she said gruffly, “What a night, eh?”
The sailor snorted. His face was lowered against the weather, and he barely glanced at her. “This mission can’t end soon enough. That thing’s still screeching.”
Noa snorted back and kept going, her heart a wild thing in her chest. She waited for the sailor to turn, to call for her to stop, but he didn’t.
People were good at explaining away inexplicable things, Noa had often noticed. The man wouldn’t have thought it possible for an intruder, let alone Julian Marchena’s sister, to appear out of nowhere on their ship in the middle of a storm, so he just told himself she was one of the crew. She was almost the height of a grown woman, after all, and in the darkness her hooded face was impossible to make out.
Noa found a narrow corridor at the bottom of the stairs. To the left was an open hatch with a ladder leading down into the hold. The ladder disappeared into shadow, and from the shadow rose a horrible wailing.
Noa’s hands flew instinctively to her ears. The sound was like a child’s cry mixed up with a kitten’s mewl and a snake’s hiss, baleful and uncanny. The last thing Noa wanted to do was go down into that hold.
She set her jaw and stepped onto the ladder.
“Hey!”
Noa looked up, and found herself facing another sailor who had stepped out of one of the rooms off the corridor. The woman’s eyes were wide as she stared at Noa, who realized belatedly that her hood had fallen back.
Noa scrambled down the ladder, reaching up to swing the hatch shut. The sailor thundered toward her, but Noa was quick: she fumbled for a lock, found one, and slid it into place. She heard the woman cursing as she wrenched at the handle on the other side.
Filled with nervous panic, Noa half fell the rest of the way down the ladder. The hold was completely dark. The wailing was horribly loud and echoing, and Noa couldn’t pinpoint where it was coming from.
She ran her shaking hands along the wall, and hit a lantern suspended from a hook. Her pulse racing, she switched it on. She knew she had only moments, possibly seconds, before the sailor told Gabriela she was there.
The light revealed a low-ceilinged space, narrow and long. And at the far end, in a dirty corner that smelled of old blubber, was Beauty’s daughter.
The serpent hissed at Noa, but the sound died in an odd sort of gasp. She was perhaps as long as Noa was tall, and several times as thick as an ordinary snake. Her head and tail were cruelly bound with metal rings that dug into her skin. Her eyes were as black as Beauty’s, but she was toothless: when she hissed, Noa saw only pink gums like a human baby’s.
Noa ran forward. The serpent was shaking—someone had wrapped her in wet towels to keep her skin moist, but most of them had fallen away.
Noa had no love for Beauty, and she suspected that her daughter would grow into a similarly terrifying monster, but she nevertheless felt a surge of fury at Gabriela for treating the infant serpent like this. It hadn’t harmed anybody. Not yet, anyway.
Noa pulled on the chains, and the serpent let out another wail. Fortunately, the chains weren’t locked with a key—they just needed to be unlatched, which the serpent wouldn’t have been able to do, lacking hands. Noa supposed that Gabriela wasn’t particularly worried about anyone on the crew trying to unchain a sea serpent, toothless or not.
Unfortunately, once the chains fell away, the baby serpent sprang at Noa, knocking her over. The creature slithered across the floor, wailing and throwing herself against the walls.
Noa drew herself up onto her knees, holding her head, which had struck the floor hard. Gritting her teeth against the pain, she forced herself to stand and throw open the only window, a high porthole that was just barely above the water. A wave sloshed through, splashing Noa in the face and startling her so much she breathed in a gasp of it.
“Here—hurry—” she managed between coughs. The serpent, though, had already seen the sloshing water, smelled the salt. She lunged for the porthole, ramming into Noa and sending her sprawling again. This time Noa’s cheek scraped against the wall as she fell, and her elbow jarred against a table, sending a shock of pain up her arm. The serpent couldn’t quite reach the porthole, though, so Noa, head spinning and blood trickling down her face, was forced to hoist her up to it. Of course, the baby serpent didn’t understand that she was being set free, and she struck Noa with her tail over and over again, wailing so loudly that Noa thought her eardrums would burst. A part of her noted that she hadn’t thoroughly thought through this part of the
