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of a pirate. As if she could see the private hidden person. He found his hands were shaking, had the strangest feeling this girl, whoever she was, knew everything about him. Everything.
    Stranger still, he did not mind her knowing his secrets, felt almost relieved that at last he could share them with someone. Her presence was not intrusive but comforting – and suddenly a suppressed memory of the past flooded into his mind, a memory of experiencing something similar to this before!
    He had been on his knees spewing his guts into wet earth puddled with his own urine; was distraught, crying and gasping for breath. He was not yet fifteen years old and his brother was behind him carolling vicious and vindictive laughter. And through the shame and fear he had distinctly felt a hand resting between his shoulder blades: a sensation filled with love and protection. And a voice had entered his head, breaking through the utter, bereft and lonely despair.
    ~ Fight him! ~
    Words he was sure, later, he had imagined, for everything that dark night had been tainted with bewildering distress. Yet, squinting across the widening gap of the sea at this girl he questioned his assumption. Had he imagined it?
    He felt – how did he feel? Odd, as if someone was standing beside him, smiling. As if a smile was in his head – not words, not thoughts, just a loving, protective smile.
    He looked down at the splinter of wood stabbing into his arm, at the blood soaking his shirt. Was this nonsense because of blood loss? Making him light headed? Yet, beyond this stupid idea that someone was standing here with him, there was no disorientation, no confusion.
    He had a sudden urge to look at that child properly; spun on his heel and hurried up the companionway steps to the shattered chaos of the quarterdeck, claimed the telescope from beside the ship’s compass, mercifully both still intact. Extending the tube to its full length, was about to raise it to his eye when Malachias, his face covered in blood, called his name and distracted his attention. The spell was broken. Jesamiah turned to answer and when he looked again she was gone; no one stood at the stern of the Christina Giselle . There was no girl. He shrugged. Perhaps he had imagined her after all? Perhaps it was the smoke, the noise, the anguished cries of the wounded begging for help – his anger – playing tricks on his mind? He shook his head to clear his senses, set his attention to concentrating on more important things; getting this sliver of wood out of his arm, tending the wounded – there would be amputations to do. The dead to see to, a few words of respect to be spoken over them before the corpses were sent overboard. The Mermaid to be salvaged, somehow.
    Busy, his mind occupied, he forgot the girl.
    As Tiola, with her gift of Craft, had intended him to.

    Tethys rippled, annoyed at the fluctuations of sound thumping and echoing, intrusive, through her vast domain of the oceans. She stared upward at the faint glimmer that was the sparkle of the sun on the surface of the sea. Two ships. Men. Stupid, irreverent, irrelevant men. She had no time or patience with the world of humans. The thud of cannon oscillated the water. Was that all they thought about? Killing and maiming each other? She shifted position, her great amorphous mass disturbing the sand, stirring the bones of the dead, her collected trophies, and flushing the fishes into swarms of iridescent panic. Noticed as she went, turning away from the pathetic self-destruction going on high above her, a gleam of gold and a flutter of blue. She halted, intrigued. She liked pretty, shiny things, for there was only limited colour and light down here in the deep.
    Tethys looked again, closer, projecting her senses into the confined world of the pirate ship. She heard the moans of the wounded, the shouting, the confusion; smelt the pungent odour of cannon smoke and seared flesh; the sickly-sweet stench of spilt blood. Found the presence