His bones had made a resounding crack, a sound that had followed Silverfish into dark and suffocating dreams for weeks afterward. Mantis had been the nimblest of them all, but when he’d lost his footing and tumbled down, there’d been nothing graceful about it. A dark stain lingered at the foot of the mizzenmast where Mantis had fallen only a few months before. He had gone up there plenty of times, but Silverfish still felt a swoop in her belly and the instinct to pray to her father’s gods. She finally spotted Roach up in the mainmast, his long, lanky body perched precariously above the riggings. The younger Bugs were good for climbing and getting into small spaces, while the older ones like her were used for manual labor: stitching up sails, scrubbing the hull, hauling cannon fodder on the gun deck. The Water Bugs-the other children-scurried about on the lower deck or climbed into the netting to fix loose ropes and retie knots.

Out of habit, she scanned the deck for Roach. The Brackish creaked around her, as if in resentment. In a few days’ time, she would never have to scrape fish guts again. Although she had once again been assigned to the foulest corner of the ship, she couldn’t help but smile. Now as Silverfish worked, the wailing of seagulls above her as familiar as a lullaby, she ignored how the slime of a sturgeon stung her withered hands. She had been forced to get used to these lessons over the last seven years, embittering and eroding her like salt on stone. How the odor clung to her hands for days after she’d worked the gutting deck, where offal and grime stubbornly adhered to the ship’s lacquered wood. The second thing Silverfish had learned was just how much a fish’s innards could stink. Not the useful kind that could gut a man, but something smaller, duller, and better suited for a child’s grip. The first thing Silverfish had learned on board the Brackish was how to hold a knife. THE VIEW FROM SOUTHERLY: A MARITIME HISTORY The most basic rule of water: Better to be above than below.

For information address Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. Copyright © 2020 by Glasstown EntertainmentĪll rights reserved.

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