Chapter 22: The Hatch

Ronan's POV

The deck tilted under my boots, and I kept my hands on the bar.

I had it half turned already.

I threw my weight on it.

It gave with a scream of rust.

The hatch cover swung up and hit the rail, and cold green water came up through the opening to meet me.

Below it, in the dark, faces.

Women, mostly. A few old men.

Children on shelves of wet wood, with their hands up.

"Up!" I shouted. "One at a time! Climb!"

My men were at the rail behind me, and they dropped a rope ladder past my shoulder.

The first one up was a boy.

He was thirteen, and thin, and he had his mother's gray eyes.

I did not need to ask.

"Is she safe?" he said.

"She is at the Kearney house, and she has not stopped asking for you," I said. "Go."

My man pulled him across the rail.

The water was at my knees.

I went down the ladder into the hold.

It smelled of rust and rot and fear, and the water ran into it through two broken seams at the stern.

I took the nearest child under the arms and passed her up to the rope.

I took the next.

I had thought about this moment for nineteen years, and I had never thought it would be wet and loud and fast.

I had imagined my father's hands on this bar.

I had never imagined my own.

An old woman came to me out of the dark, and she was holding a baby.

"Take the baby first," she said.

"Up the ladder, ma'am," I said. "I have the baby."

I passed the baby up first, then I boosted her.

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