She blinked and was surprised to find she was not underwater but in a room. Her eyes refused to focus on the broad dark outline of the person holding her hand.

“Try to relax,” he said.

Her eyelids felt heavy. She let them fall closed, and the fiery ocean folded over her once more. Exhaustion urged her to stay there. Yet a quiet voice inside her insisted she open her eyes again. She’d left something undone. She’d left people unprotected. She’d left before she meant to, and on the other side of those flames were people she loved.

Pisces.

Amina.

Redtooth.

Hime.

Donnally.

Now she was burning. The room was hot. So hot. Her skin was burning, and she could barely draw a full breath. She tried a second time, and for a second time felt her lungs constrict. So she tried harder and harder still, but it was as if she were trapped, by water and by fire.

“Oh, hell. Someone get Triple!” the boy holding her hand called.

“She’ll kill herself if she keeps this up.” This was a new voice. And not a kind one. “Good riddance.”

“You’re not helping, Pine.” A third voice. This time a girl. “Move over. I’m going to put her under.”

The cool glass of the sea returned. Caledonia drifted. Her lungs heavy and shallow, but she didn’t mind. The sea had her. And she always trusted the sea.

When she woke next it was dark. The air smelled like damp cloth, and the only light came from a small pile of dying embers cradled in a ceramic bowl. It cast its ruddy glow over the wall nearest Caledonia’s feet. Fabric, not steel. Her eyes struggled to focus, and her mouth felt like it had been filled with tar. A soft pain throbbed in her back.

A breeze pressed against one wall of the tent. The fabric rippled, and just on the other side of that thin layer pine needles whispered. This is not the Mors Navis.

Her mind was suddenly very alert, her memories returning in a flash. Her crew had sailed into these cold northern waters for a chance to save her and Pisces’s brothers. They’d fought Electra and won; they’d found Ares. But not Donnally. And when Lir’s ship appeared on the horizon, she’d left the Mors Navis for the chance to take revenge on the boy who’d killed her family and stolen her brother. She’d faced him on the deck of his own ship, and for a second time Lir had left her to die.

That explained the pain shooting from her lower back to her stomach, but not the tent in which she now found herself. Not the loose-fitting shirt and pants in which she was dressed.