Blood spurted past my lips. My mouth gaped open, and my throat burned raw with my screams. The vibration of my shrilling voice battled the explosion of anguish in my skull. But I couldn’t hear it. I couldn’t detect a single sound.

Swallowed whole by the agony, I wept in the startling silence. The deck was hard and sticky beneath my cheek, the constant punch of pain swarming from every direction, tearing through my ribs, chewing at my arm, and piercing my head like the tireless stabbing of a sword.

Sanguine droplets spluttered from my mouth and stained the deck. All I could do was stare at those red beads of blood, and in that moment of noiseless clarity, I mentally hummed.

Oh, poor fellow, your life will end

And I say so, and I know so

Oh, sad fellow, by the thrust of my blade

North to south, click, click

South to east, one tick

I’ll cut you thrice, east to west

I’ll spear you once, west to north

Say I, dead man, you met your end

I’ll drop you down to the depths of the sea

Where the sharks’ll have your body

And the devil’ll have your soul

The clicking, ticking, once, thrice verbiage hadn’t made sense before, so I’d ignored those parts. Perhaps that was where I’d gone wrong.

Determination took over.

Sprawled on my side with my weight on my uninjured shoulder, I exerted more energy than I thought capable as I dragged my hand—which still held the compass—toward my face.

A smear of something thick and dark blurred my right eye. Swollen skin? Broken vessels? I strained to see through the partial vision. Worse, I still couldn’t hear a single sound. Even my breaths had been silenced.

It didn’t matter. Listening wasn’t required as I dug down deep and gathered the last vestige of my strength. I just needed enough grit to stay awake and turn the dial.

The world narrowed to my father’s song and the rotation of the brass casing in my hand. North to south. I depressed the center pin on which the needle turned. Two clicks. Did I just feel a spring release inside? My pulse quickened.

Carefully, hurriedly, I followed the series of steps in the rhyme, gritting my teeth as pain swept up and down my body, wracking me from the inside out.

When I reached the end of the song, the needle felt unsteady as if it had been ejected from its housing. I slowly lifted it away, shaking with shock. It had never done that before. Whatever had held the dial onto the compass had been rotated away like a vise opening its toothy grip.

My fingers trembled as I untied the leather thong around my neck and inserted the stone in the hole in the center.

It fit.

Start and end north.

I turned the compass north.