The Crew

Prologue

The girl and her mother lived a humble life, spending their lives by the sea. The port of the north brought with it its trades and its raids. On the good days it brought fish and stories. On the bad days it brought smoke. But those days had not reached their little boat in many months, and it was easy to believe they never would again. After the girl's mother finished her shift at the "moonpool" serving all the passing sailors in whatever manner they were willing to pay, she arrived home smelling of muscles and stale beer. She knocked one time fast and three times slow their code for each other. Their code. The girl could never remember learning it, only that she had always known it.

The long day she was left to her senses. She was only seven, yet she spent her long afternoons as children of the harbor often did—left to the quiet company of gulls, waves, and whatever work small hands could manage. That evening she had mended another careful stitch in the blanket that had wrapped her as an infant. Though uneven and crooked, it held. She placed it proudly into her mother's hands. They both prepared for bed, and together they closed the blackout curtains until the little boat forgot the sun still lingered beyond them. The girl sat obediently as her mother braided her ginger curls into a crown of twists, humming the same lullaby she always had. They settled into the bed that they shared. Sleep found them quietly. The lullaby dissolved into dreams, and for a little while there was only the gentle rocking of the tide.

Years later, the girl could never remember whether the screaming had found her first, or if it had been the splintering of wood that tore her awake. There hadn't been a raid in months, but living this far on the coast, it seemed inevitable. The girl and her mother were luckier than most, in that former dangers hadn't crept as far as their door, but it just seemed that their luck had run out. Glass echoed in their ears as the sound of a bottle with a liquor-covered cloth engulfed in a flame flew through their bedroom window. Her mother jumped out of bed, shielding the girl with her body, the girl jumping out of her sleep in frantic panic at the chaos before her. An Oger-shaped giant enters their home, seizing her mother by the hair and dragging her out to the docks. The girl runs helplessly behind them as the smell of burning metal and wood fills her nose. She is snatched by the arm of a man half the size of the giant with markings along his arms. Cuts and pictures. He grabs her by either side, picking her up by her arms as she tries to wiggle free from his grasp. The man seizes her little body, and she nearly escapes his grasp, but he simply changes his hold, this time hugging her chest with one arm and grabbing her face with the other. His hand, now placed under her chin, forces her gaze to her mother, who is now being held by her neck by his friend. She begins to scream for her mother, tears streaming down her face, before the ogre-like man with golden teeth squeezes the breath from her mother's body and tosses her now lifeless body into the sea.

Everything after that became strangely quiet. Later she would know the harbor had been filled with screams and fire and crashing wood, but memory had stolen all of it away. There was only the image of her mother disappearing beneath rough hands, and her own scream echoing somewhere she could no longer hear. Moments later, they are hauling her onto a boat. She hears the muffled cries of other children from the village, 4 of them total. One of them, a classmate from the school she attended in the spring. A girl, a girl with hair the color of corn and pale skin. She sits beside the others, watching as the boat starts moving away from the land, until she can only see the cloud of smoke in the distance. Across from them sits a bony boy drowning in faded rags and torn shorts; he, like the others, does not cry but observes them quietly. The shoreline drifted farther away until the burning harbor became only a smear of smoke upon the horizon. By sunrise, even that had disappeared.