And would not claim it now, for the undertow protected its own. Nubrevnans respected the sea; the empires did not. Vivia respected the sea; these intruders did not.

Cannons fired, sopping and rusted yet propelled by iron that begged to be used, and somehow—though she didn’t understand it—propelled by fire too. Vivia heard their eruptions, a vibrant call that shivered through Vaness and laughed atop the sea. Yet the cannons didn’t aim for the Dalmotti ships, but rather sent their iron right past. Warnings of what might happen if the Dalmottis did not flee. Promises of violence and death the flaming iron would gleefully claim. That it wanted to claim, but that somehow Vaness kept leashed.

Or did she? As Vivia forced her own eyes to see, not as an undertow but as a human, she found Vaness before her on planks slick with algae and gray with time. Her nose gushed blood, her head slumped. How she still stood, how her arms still reached, Vivia had no idea.

And she discovered with a drooping wrench of horror that she was faring no better. Her own posture had crumpled, her own arms shook like the deck beneath her, and the longer her eyes clung to Vaness’s face, the more darkness swept across them. She couldn’t do this forever. If she did, then the water would take her completely. She would lose herself entirely to the undertow—and rather than allow the Dalmottis to leave, it would drag and drown and feed. It didn’t care that Baile’s Blessing would be caught too, that the Nubrevnans it respected would sink and die. What was one life compared to the civilizations it had lived beside?

No, Vivia thought. Then harder, a word to rip up from her stomach: “No.” She loved the tides, she loved the sea, and she loved this echo of Stix that seemed to live within them, but they could not have her. They could not have these people, Nubrevnan or Dalmotti.

Vivia released her magic. Like blocking a waterfall, one moment she was filled with rapids she could not swim against. The next, she was empty and still. A riverbed drained dry. Her heart boomed and rain still drizzled. The ghost galleon still thundered beneath her feet. And when Vivia twisted her focus left, right, her muscles protesting as if she were made of the same decayed wood as this galleon, she found the rest of the undertow’s navy. Already, those ships capsized anew, though their ancient cannons still fired—and kept on firing even as the waves swallowed them plank by plank.

But the Dalmottis were leaving. Not the Lioness, for the sea had eaten her, bones and all, yet the rest of the fleet now sped toward the horizon, where a rainbow did indeed split the misty sky.