Work Text:
Many said that the true undine was Lizzy, not her ship. The river siren with the sharp teeth could only belong to the Wrenhaven, as it was as if her mudwater-brown eyes could see every stream and tributary from above. Sailors and aristocrats and drunken gossipers alike swore her toes were webbed, she had gills alongside her lungs, that she sunk ships with the storm magic that cracked in the joints of her bony fingers. Lizzy Stride rose in legend as a spirit of the Wrenhaven river that needed appeasing, an immortal installation that put a face and a name to every fear that accompanied those ugly, untamed waters.
But she alone knew that she was born into something else, as much as she was pleased to play the part they gave her.
Bastard daughter of Morley, Elizabeth’s childhood was comprised of grey skies and stifling hours trying to shake the damp and cold from her bones. Her mother never spoke of her father as anything but a cautionary tale, a warning to the girl that apparently carried so many of his features not to end up as he did. And Elizabeth believed her every story about what Gristol was like, the sins of Serkonos to the south - she watched Morley’s ports fill up and empty with the tides, bringing strange faces of gruff sailors and painted visitors alike, so different from the same faces she became used to in the tiny port town her mother deemed private enough to hide a daughter in.
Elizabeth had fled the island that was meant to shelter her by that year’s end.
***
All she could think of when her hands were tightened around the schoolteacher’s neck was that he deserved it.
The other girls kept quiet about month after month of his hands on their bare shoulders, of hair-pulling and ruler-slapping and his two hundred other offenses against them. But she had always been the first to talk back, the one that yelled when he so much as looked at her the wrong way, who was the only one willing to kick his shins and run away. And, of course, she became almost the sole object of his antagonization.
Every day for months she nursed bruises that her school uniform only just covered, wondering just what it was that she was supposed to be learning, and just how long she could keep defending the other girls with her body. She stood in front of the bathroom glass, examining herself - the ruddy face, the dark eyes, the tangles of hair, the bruises and scrapes and marks she didn’t want to think about more than she had to - and found that she didn’t entirely recognize the girl she saw.
The moment came when she could feel his breath hot on the back of her neck as he stood behind her, when he tugged on one of the braids that Elizabeth’s mother styled so meticulously every morning, when she finally decided that she could no longer stand another one of his heavy breaths that still stank of last night’s whiskey.
It was as if there really was lighting in the spaces between her bones when she lashed out, when she drove his back up against the wall and throttled him, her nails digging into his sallow neck enough to draw blood. It was power over him, for once, and it was like she watched every moment that he had power over her drain away with the fear in his eyes.
When she turned toward the other girls, Elizabeth found far too many eyes staring back at her, widened with shock.
She knew that she needed to leave.
***
Within the week, she was aboard a ship - the Temeraire - as a powder monkey, somehow taken from schoolgirl to Navy boy with little effort on her part. Enlisting was simple enough, now that she decided she was an orphan, and with her braids gone and gunpowder smeared across her cheek, she fit the part as well as any other 14-year-old boy.
It’s height they care about, she told herself, even as she bit at her nails in guilt at all of it. Every sailor’s tale about women upon ships bringing bad luck rang in her ears. Keep my head down, that’s all I gotta do.
Mortimer Stride, she penned in a childish hand at the bottom of her enlistment form. The other boys just called her Stride.
“Why would an orphan need a name as ridiculous as Mortimer?” The oldest and biggest of the boys, Greene, spoke up from his seat atop a mountain of supply crates in the storage-compartment-turned-living-quarters on the first day she boarded.
“It was my father’s name,” Stride asserted herself, matching his sneer with a steely gaze, effectively silencing him.
When he reached down and offered his hand, she took it and clambered up the crates after him.
“Really, m’ name’s Horace, like my pa’s,” he confided in her, to her grin. “But you’d do well to call me Greene.”
“You’d do well to call me Stride,” Elizabeth answered, and they were fast friends.
***
They liked her well, and she liked them.
Together with Greene, she became a part of a world that she didn’t entirely understand, but her and her companions made smart work of finding ways to pass the time between few and far-between sea battles. She played Nancy with Boone and his brother Benjen, listened to the crewmen’s stories in the mess, read books that Renshaw passed down from the ship’s physician. All of them were her world, out on the sea farther away from home than she had ever imagined she’d be, and as she grew to care for them they cared for her in return.
A pod of whales burst by alongside them as they moved down toward Gristol. Greene called her up from her endless rope-making to stand alongside the railing with him and watch them, to listen to their calls.
“M’ ma gave me a charm of whalebone to take with me,” he told her, matter-of-factly. “You should keep it. Would do you more good than me, I think.” He pressed it into her hand, and she shared a nod with him, for once wishing she had brought something from her old life if only to pass it on to him.
“Hope we’ll never need the good luck.”
***
They felt the storm rumbling on the horizon long before they saw it. Renshaw always complained of aching feet, Boone of twitching eyes and his brother of popping joints, Greene of his hair standing on end. Lizzy’s hands itched something awful, and as they stood there griping as they cleaned the deck, the lookout first spotted the low line of deeply grey thunderclouds east on the horizon.
The next few hours were a flurry of activity, of tying things down, of falling into the routines that Stride and her boys had become as accustomed to as the backs of their hands. Every precaution was made, everything done that could have been, and yet they could not have prepared for what that summer storm brought along with it.
Before they knew it, it was upon them, around them, within them. It was driving rain and hail and thunder louder than the blood pounding in her ears as the deck pitched and rolled beneath her bare feet, a hurricane without an eye raging around her.
“Get below!” someone bellowed, but too late - something, she never knew what, was loose from the deck and barreling toward her. The impact seemed to send her flying into the wind, for one moment a part of the storm itself, before she felt the deck slam back beneath her, and the world go dark.
***
“Mortimer Stride, indeed,” a voice said, and Elizabeth nearly jumped out of her skin.
The ship’s doctor sat at her bedside in the medical bay, seeming to have little shame and perhaps some satisfaction about the fact that Elizabeth was suddenly Elizabeth again, with only a bandage covering the large wound in her shoulder to hide her chest.
She knew she was faster than him - knew it by all the times she had wrestled with the other boys and won, of all the times she caught a crewman’s attention with the way she took to scaling ropes and poles and anything taller than her. She knew it in the storm born confidence that cracked in her joints, and in the way the tips of her fingers began to itch.
The scalpel was in her hand and in the doctor’s neck before she could notice Greene gaping in the doorway.
“Stride?” he questioned, not bothering to hide his stare.
“Lizzy,” she corrected, pulling her shirt back over her head with hands sticky and hot with blood. “But, t’ be fair, my pa was named Mortimer.”
The discovery didn’t stop him from bringing together the boys, all ten of them crouched in the med bay around the doctor’s corpse.
“We’re talking about mutiny,” Benjen claimed, with a shaky voice, but Lizzy only laughed.
“Better now than never, Ben. You know how they treat us - how they'll treat us once they find out about Doc. Help me carry him.”
And, without argument, they did. Lizzy Stride led the powder monkeys, her first crew and her first friends, out onto the deck with a corpse strewn between them, with a pistol on each belt and blood smeared across their faces. Greene was the first to draw, and when his threat stayed the hands of the seamen that gathered tight around him, Lizzy helped heave the doctor back, then over into the water below.
It was as if she turned to face the schoolhouse again. She faced rows of wide eyes, angered, some afraid, but she faced them all the same. Rain fell on her face, pushing blood into her eyes. None of them knew who she was - none of them had to know the secret that she killed for before the bloodshed began.
But she wanted them to.
“Tell them that it was Lizzy Stride,” she declared, before she fired the first shot into the navigator’s chest.
The rest was mayhem. It was Boone’s screams being silenced and Benjen’s accompanying wail. It was Greene beside her, one shoulder against hers with the promise of a kept secret and a fight to the end. It was a pistol hot in her hand, then another from the belt of someone she assumed was important. It was the strange song that filled her ears. emulating and pulsing out from Greene’s good luck charm, a welcome ache.
But finally, as they slipped around a deck turned red with blood, when she and Green, Benjen and Renshaw, all of Wright but his left hand left behind the dead and dropped into a skiff to escape, it was a blissful and blessed silence.
Greene piloted, silent and sullen, pushing ever farther away from the grey mass of the Temeraire. They couldn’t quite escape the sound of gunshots and pleas, of cries of innocence drifting on the wind until the sun began to set, the rain chased away with the heat of the day.
“One hell of a show, Stride,” Renshaw muttered, shaking his head. “One hell of a mutiny.”
‘“It’s Lizzy now, remember?” She looked up from where she worked, bandaging Wright’s stump best she could, offering Renshaw a smirk. “Nothin’, really. All this for a dead doctor and a bare chest.”
“What now?” Benign seemed smaller now without his brother, crouched out of the reach of the boom. “What are we supposed to do now?”
Lizzy’s eyes met Greene’s watchful stare, and as she tied off the final knot in the gauze she turned her gaze from an unconscious Wright to the horizon stretched before her.
“Tyvia,” she offered, glancing between each of the five as she spoke. “Then Gristol. Serkonos, for the warm winters. Pandyssia, maybe.” The bone charm in her pocket pulsed into her a power she wasn’t sure she wanted to acknowledge. “We’re a crew now, deserters we may be. We’ll keep each other safe.”
Elizabeth was somewhere else now, far away, drowned in the blood of the men that stood between Morley and the skiff where she put up her feet, casual with the dying of the light, content with it. She was Lizzy, just Lizzy, and for now, that was enough.
“We’ll make them remember our crew.”
When they remembered, they knew that she belonged to the water, and so did her crew. There was power in her hands and in her body, in her unwebbed toes and her hundred of scars and her meticulously sharpened teeth. She was a beast to be respected, feared, appeased.
But that power within her came only from the woman that she used to be, long before she was Lizzy, and the blood that it took to take her to where she began.