He clenched his teeth as he saw how the trap had been laid: his mother’s careful touch, Tigris’s planted pearl, even Tigris having a dagger on him when he should have been searched by Lother before the race.

His own crew. His own mother.

They would all frostbitten suffer for it.

Zane slapped a hand over the needlepoint cut in his tattoo and kicked for the hole above that now seemed much too small and far to reach. His mind burned through every spell he knew, which he spit toward whatever creature hunted him below.

But he already had an idea of what sort of monster had awakened in the bowels of the snowseas. One that would smell his blood. And one that would never forget it once it did.

SECONDLY

The octosiren was half the size of the Kelidestone; its fangs longer than Zane’s own legs. It slid from the blackest cave of the snowseas, spilling bronze and brass treasures over the sea floor. The creature rushed to circle Zane like a serpent, its sharp scales tipping out to pierce his flesh as it closed in.

I smell you…

The octosiren’s cold whisper drove into Zane’s chest and turned the dull colours there to ash and cinders.

I smell you too. Zane jested back, though he wasn’t sure the creature could hear him, or if he had the same sort of speech as this thing in the water.

But a low, cruel chuckle told Zane the monster had heard him.

Zane slid his eyes closed. He would die here like this—in the pit of the snowseas. Perhaps it was where he was always meant to meet his fate; a fair payment for all his pillaging in his earliest seasons. Pillaging that had killed his spirit at first, made him ill and sent him into the corner of his cabin to tremble at night as visions of his evils haunted his dreams. He had learned to sing himself to sleep, and he had taught himself to read to pass the worst of times. But it had not been enough.

Under the water, Zane’s supply of air ran out. The pale colours began to swim in his chest, his heart writhing for life he did not have left to give. And so, a measly prayer for forgiveness of his misdeeds slipped into his mind, to an old being of legend he did not believe in, one that might spare him a pinch of mercy in the afterlife for his crisped soul. A being he had read about in a book or three stolen from a coastal village he had destroyed to please his mother.

But an idea struck him as he was nearly encompassed by the octosiren’s long, black tentacles.

Might we make a deal? Zane’s gaze slid over to seek out the octosiren’s dreadful face.