Vivia had wished Stix were near to save her only moments ago, and now it felt as if she really were. Become us, become us and attack. Go, Vivia, go.

The iron needles on Vivia’s arm pulled back, leaving only the Empress’s fingers, stronger by the heartbeat. Then the Empress herself pulled back, nothing more than a shadowy shape swept in gold. Vivia’s sinking feet brushed a long-forgotten hull. Kelp reached for her ankles. Become us, become us and attack.

Yes, she replied, and in that moment, she sensed Vaness do the same. Like a scale glinting in a tide pool, something flashed in the Empress’s eyes. Something that Vivia spotted despite the shadows, despite the crude light of a rising dawn. Iron had summoned Vaness, and she too was answering the call.

It was like the Origin Well all over again, but a hundred times stronger. As if the very Threads between Vivia and the Empress had thickened into roots that could not be broken. They no longer belonged to themselves, but to the elements they commanded.

Vivia lifted her arms; Vaness raised hers. The sea obeyed, the iron obeyed, and the sunken ship obeyed.

Whirlpools formed around Vivia and Vaness as water was displaced. As sand that hadn’t moved in decades sloughed off a keel long dead. Iron creaked, a higher-pitched descant to the groan of wooden ribs—just as Vaness’s magic seemed to sing atop Vivia’s undertow. Water lifted and moved, hands to raise a ghost ship while iron reassembled into the ghost cannons it had once been.

A galleon, Vivia recognized. Perhaps even Dalmotti all those years ago.

Now it was Nubrevnan. Now it belonged to the seas that had always lived here, to the undertow that had outlived nations. It remembered more than Vivia’s human mind could conceive, though her tiny brain tried to stretch and warp and absorb as the water flushed into her, flooded through. It had seen continents grow and shorelines fall. It had tended corals large as cities and fed every life that had ever flickered. It had caressed and nurtured and killed and destroyed.

As the galleon lifted, it carried Vivia and Vaness higher and higher, eventually angling to avoid the Lioness as that ship sank lower and lower.

She lost all sense of her body. Like her brain, she became a vessel for the water. She became the water, exactly as it desired. And she would swear, again, that Stix was somehow right beside her. Go, Vivia, go.

The galleon rose, lifting Vivia’s head above the water’s surface, then her neck, her chest, her legs. Water sluiced off of her, dawn air crashed in. Distantly she sensed other ships rising, carried by the water. Two, three, fourteen, the undertow lifted fallen galleys and half-galleys, sunken carracks and longships shed here by different empires over decades of a war that had never claimed Nubrevna.