But his head turns before she can finish, and his mouth brushes her jaw. Instinct, as unplanned as a breath, guides her lips to his. His cheeks and jaw are slick with ocean spray. Salt stings her tongue. The kiss is hungry and hard and over before she can understand it.
She grasps for him, but he slips out of her hands. Another sailor is there, trying to move past them, shoving them forward and apart. “Quick like!” he barks, and Isbe finds herself banging her elbows and legs as she’s thrown to the side and then down into a wooden basin, which is being rapidly lowered.
It’s one of the dinghies at the side of the ship, she realizes quickly, and there are several other men on board who are passing around weapons and oars.
“Gil! Gilbert!” she cries out, flailing her arms.
But she has lost him, and it feels like she has lost herself. The tiny lifeboat tosses in the rough waves, and she falls again. And again. Metal slashes the air just beside her face. Saltwater stings and burns like ice. She kneels and clutches at the air but can’t get steady. She can’t think, between the howling of the sea and the shouts of the sailors and the thrumming of blood in her ears and the conviction that she is going to die out here in the water’s vast, roiling, unknowable passion.
A spear is thrust into her open, shaking palms. Most of the crew knows she is blind. Why would one of them give her a weapon? How could they not realize . . .
But ah—it is night, and dark, and sighted men do not do well where they cannot clearly see.
More barked orders—formations and directions in words she doesn’t comprehend. Something about smallest men to the bow. She is shoved to the front of the tiny craft. Fear clenches down inside her, becomes an iron nail hammered tight to her heart. As she grips the rusted handle of the spear in one hand and hangs on to the side of the dinghy with the other, she at last grasps what’s happening. She is part of the hunt.
The drums are beating. The sailors shout their commands. “Lean into it, lad!” a man commands from just behind her. He’s talking to her, but she doesn’t have an oar, doesn’t understand the command. Does he mean lean into the motion of the boat? Perhaps it’s like riding a horse, where one must allow one’s body to move with and not counter to it.
Though she cannot see, there are things Isbe knows. She knows, for instance, that the man who just gave her orders has a thick beard. Even amid all this madness, she can smell how it traps the rancid odor of his last several meals. She knows his muscles are likely bulging from the effort of rowing the dinghy—she can tell this from the arrhythmic thrashing of wood against wave, the pauses, the creaks, the panting of effort, the warble of worry in all the men’s voices.
And she knows something else too, knows it deep in her bones like an echo in a long corridor: the beast is nigh.
Nearly as soon as she experiences the buzz of that thought, the dinghy lurches, the bow flying upward into the crashing waves. She’s thrown onto her back and swallows a huge gulp of seawater. Sputtering, she tries to sit up again, conscious that the spear is still in her hand, and that she could have stabbed herself—or someone else—with it.
“Gil!” she cries again fruitlessly. Her ankle throbs—it’s twisted at an unnatural angle.
“Encirclé!” she hears. The command has come from a different boat. They are surrounding one of the whales. She tries to picture the giant narwhal, with its long, majestic, glimmering horn. Tiny boats on all sides, getting closer. Men poised with their weapons. The great fish diving and surfacing, trying to get away. Faster, she thinks. Hurry. Escape.
Of course she knows where and how Deluce gets its oil—from the fat of these animals. And Isbe has witnessed many a hunt during her lifetime. Yet somehow this is different. She is flooded with awe, wonder, and repulsion.
Then she hears it: the zing of the harpoon’s spear flying through the air, followed by a noise Isbe can only describe as murderous. The creature has been hit.
It’s as though the whale’s cry contains the varied cries of whole families, of past and future beings: a strange and tragic symphony of mangled horns and snapped strings.
And then the world goes mute. Even the sea waits, eerily still.
Now a high, songlike wail breaks the silence. There’s a loud, angry splash. All the men begin shouting over one another again, and she hears weapons rapidly drawn.
“Round ’bout, Adeline! She’s diving! Sophia, Sophia! Losin’ line! All hands! ’At’s the pull! We’re losin’ ’er!” It’s the captain’s voice. He’s calling directions to the smaller boats, each of them given female names: Maria, Sophia, Adeline, Clementine, Clarabelle . . .
Then a frenzy of spattering and screaming as they try to stab the beast, many losing their spears if not their footing. A few have gone overboard, from the sound of it. She doubts they’ll be saved. Her breath clatters in her chest. Is Gilbert among them?
She tastes rust—and blood—in the salty air.
“The rope! Clarabelle!” the captain shouts.
“Close now! ’At’s you, lad!” Isbe is shoved, hard, in the shoulder.
She tries to breathe, but her lungs burn. The spear is slippery in her hand. The hunt has somehow, unthinkably, come down to her. The whale leaps, and her boat is jerked forward. It feels as though her heart has leapt up too, to clog her throat. Their oars are tangled in the harpoon’s line.
She chokes on saltwater. At any moment, they’ll all be tossed into the sea and likely battered to death by the giant, writhing fish.
The rope whines as it’s pulled tauter and tauter. The whale is yanking hard. It will drag them down with it, into the depths of the sea.
She realizes, with terror, what she must do, if she wants to live. The boat tilts and heaves again, and she’s nearly thrown over, but someone grabs and steadies her.
“Now! Now! We canna hold ’er much longer!”
She doesn’t know who made the command. The words surround her, coming from the wind itself. Now. Now.
The waves roar. The whale bellows. The rope hisses.
She only has one spear, one thrust, one chance to get this right. It’s impossible.
She clenches her eyes, listening hard, leaning into the movement of the dinghy even as she tries to feel for the movement of the agonized creature beside and below and before them. Now, now, now.
The waves lash. The whale moans. The rope sings.
Her heart stops.
The spear flies.
13
Claudine,
a Faerie of Considerable Stature
(in More Ways Than One)
Claudine would not have believed the rumors had it not been for a lack of jam. She finds herself this morning quite short of the sweet preserves that normally provide her only pleasure in waking up. Her maid trembles at her bedside, holding out a wobbling silver tray with a large hunk of rye bread on it, bare as a baby’s head. Claudine backhands the tray, which flies from her maid’s grip and clatters to the floor.