Page 2 of A Scot in the Storm
The starboard longboat was gone, staved in by the falling mast. The port boat was jammed in its davits. Men hacked at thefouled lines with axes while the sea poured over the listing deck. Rory grabbed an axe from a man whose hands were shaking too badly to swing it and cut the last line himself. The boat dropped into the black water and held.
“Wounded first! Then the rest, orderly, damn ye, orderly!”
They were good men. Even in the dark, even with the ship coming apart beneath them, they loaded the boat the way they’d been trained. Rory counted them in. Fourteen. Eighteen. Twenty-two. TheArdentcarried thirty-six.
The deck tilted further. Twenty-eight in the boat. Six still aboard. Lachlan. Henderson. The cook’s boy. Two marines.
Murtagh.
“Where’s my brother?” Rory seized Lachlan’s shoulder. “Where is he?”
The man’s face was grey. “Below. He went below before?—”
Rory was already moving.
The companionway was halfway underwater. He plunged in. The cold was a fist around his chest, squeezing. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t hear anything but the water and the terrible creaking of the ship as she broke apart around him. He felt his way along the passage, hands on the bulkhead.
“Murtagh!”
A sound. Faint, muffled—a banging from the surgeon’s stores. Rory surged forward. The door was jammed, the frame warped from the impact. He threw his shoulder against it. Once. Twice. Something gave, and the door burst inward.
Murtagh was chest-deep in the flood, one hand braced against the bulkhead, the other gripping a fallen timber. A gash above his left eye bled freely.
“Rory.” His brother’s voice was steady, which was how Rory knew he was terrified. The Sinclairs went quiet when they were afraid. “Beam came down. I couldna get the door open.”
“I’ve got ye.” Rory grabbed his arm. “The boat’s launched. We need to go. Now.”
They made it to the companionway. The water was higher now, chest-deep and rising, the current pulling at them with a strength that had nothing to do with the tide. Rory went first, hauling himself up the ladder, and reached back for Murtagh’s hand.
Their fingers met.
Rory’s grip closed on his brother’s wrist. For one held breath, he had him.
The ship shuddered. A surge came through the hatch like a thrown punch. Rory’s grip—wet, slipping on wet—slid the length of his brother’s forearm and caught on the cuff of his shirt. Old linen, already rotted by the saltwater.
It tore, the strip coming away in Rory’s fist.
Murtagh was still there. Still standing. His eyes met Rory’s, dark and steady, as he lifted his hand again, and Rory threw himself back down the ladder to meet him.
Their fingers touched.
The ship rolled.
It was a slow, massive thing, theArdenttilting past the point of return, her keel lifting free of the reef as the sea claimed her. The deck went vertical. Rory’s grip on the ladder held.
Murtagh’s didn’t.
He fell. Not far. Maybe ten feet. But the water was there, black and churning, and it swallowed him.
“Murtagh!”
Rory dropped from the ladder and dove, eyes open in the blind dark. His hands found rope. Timber. He surfaced, gasped, dove again. The cold was in his bones now. The ship was groaning, going down, and he couldn’t find him.
Arms locked around his chest from behind. Someone was dragging him backward. He fought, twisting, clawing. He brokefree, doubled back, dove again, deeper this time, fingers scraping the bulkhead, feeling for cloth, for hair, for any part of his brother the sea hadn’t yet taken.
Nothing. Only water. Only cold.
The arms came around him a second time. Two sets now. Lachlan on one side. Henderson on the other.
