The Aubade Sings at Midnight

Captain Iset Rahal had promised her crew calm seas, a fat cargo, and a three-day run to Port Ellard. She had been wrong about all three by the second night out.

“Storm’s not on any chart I’ve got,” said Old Fenn, the navigator, squinting up through the rain at a sky that had gone the color of a bruise. “Not natural, if you ask me.”

“Nobody asked you,” Iset said, though she was watching the same sky with the same unease. The wind had shifted four times in an hour, which winds simply did not do, and the swells were coming from two directions at once, crossing each other in ways that made the *Second Chance* buck like something trying to throw a rider.

Her first mate, a broad-shouldered woman named Tarkeh, gripped the wheel with both hands and both boots braced hard against the deck. “Orders, Captain?”

“Reef the mainsail, get everyone below who isn’t needed topside, and somebody find out why the compass has spun three full circles in the last ten minutes.”

“Compass isn’t the only thing spinning,” Fenn muttered, and pointed off the starboard bow.

Through the sheeting rain, a shape resolved — another ship, listing hard, sails torn to ribbons, no lanterns lit despite the near-total dark. It shouldn’t have been visible at all in this weather, and yet it sat there steady as a rock while the *Second Chance* was thrown around it.

“That’s not possible,” Tarkeh said.

“A lot of things aren’t possible tonight,” Iset said. “Bring us alongside. Carefully.”

“Captain, with respect, that thing looks abandoned, and abandoned ships in storms that shouldn’t exist are exactly the kind of thing my grandmother told me to sail away from.”

“Your grandmother also told you sea foam was mermaid spit, and I notice you still eat oysters.” Iset was already moving toward the boarding ladder, pulling her coat tight. “If there’s a crew alive over there, we can’t just leave them. If there isn’t, we find out why, and we get gone before whatever did this decides we’re next.”

They crossed on a line rigged between the two hulls, five of them — Iset, Tarkeh, Fenn, and two deckhands with lanterns that guttered and struggled against wind that seemed to want them out specifically. The other ship’s deck was empty. Not battle-scarred, not signs of mutiny — simply empty, gear stowed, ropes coiled, as if the entire crew had walked below decks mid-task and never come back up.

“Ship’s called the *Aubade*,” Fenn said, reading the half-obscured lettering on a crate. “Never heard of her.”

“Because she’s not from around here,” Tarkeh said, crouching by a coil of rope unlike any rigging she recognized — a fiber too smooth, too uniform, machine-spun in a way no shipwright in this ocean produced. “Captain. Look at this.”

Iset knelt beside her. The rope was cold in a way that had nothing to do with rain. “Below decks,” she said. “Two of you stay topside, keep the line secured. If anything changes with that storm, you cut us loose and go, understood? Don’t wait.”

“Captain —”

“That’s an order, Tarkeh, not a suggestion I’m fishing for arguments about.”

The hold of the *Aubade* smelled of salt and something else, something sweetly wrong, like fruit gone soft. Lantern light caught on hammocks still swaying gently despite the ship’s violent pitching, on a galley table set for a meal nobody had eaten, on a logbook lying open on a captain’s desk with the ink still wet.

Fenn read aloud, voice unsteady. “*Third day becalmed at the coordinates. The others say the water sings at night. I told them water does not sing. I was wrong to tell them that. It sings, and worse, I am starting to understand the words —*” He stopped.

“That’s where it ends,” Tarkeh said, looking over his shoulder.

“That’s where the handwriting ends,” Iset corrected, and pointed to the bottom of the page, where a second hand — cramped, hurried, entirely different from the captain’s careful log entries — had written a single line: *We are not lost. We are being kept.*

The ship groaned around them, timbers flexing in a way wood should not flex, and from somewhere below, deeper in the hold, came a sound like singing — wordless, layered, dozens of voices or one voice pretending to be dozens, rising through the floorboards.

“Captain.” One of the deckhands, ashen. “The water. It’s doing that thing the log says.”

They went up together, fast, no pretense of composure left among any of them, and the sound followed — not loud, never loud, but close, closer than a voice below decks should carry, as if it were moving with them rather than staying where they’d left it.

On deck, the sea around the *Aubade* had gone still, glassy, impossibly calm in the center of a storm still raging fifty feet in every direction, and the water was, in fact, singing — a low, resonant hum that seemed to come from beneath the surface itself.

“Cut the line,” Iset said. “Now. Everyone off, now.”

“What about the *Aubade*’s crew?” one of the deckhands asked, already scrambling for the boarding rope.

“I don’t think we’re going to find them,” Iset said, watching the water hum and shimmer, “and I don’t think I want to find out what we’d find instead.”

They cut the line with an axe rather than untying it, no time for knots, and the *Second Chance* lurched back into the storm’s teeth the moment the connection broke, as if the calm patch had only ever existed to hold them still long enough to listen. Behind them, the *Aubade* sat in her pocket of unnatural quiet, growing smaller, the singing fading beneath the returning roar of wind and wave.

“Captain,” Tarkeh said, once they’d gotten the sails trimmed and the worst of the immediate danger past, her voice carefully level in the particular way of someone holding several louder reactions in check. “What in the depths was that?”

“I don’t know,” Iset admitted. “But I know what it wasn’t. It wasn’t a ship in distress. Ships in distress don’t set a table.”

“So what do we do?”

“We log the coordinates,” Iset said, “and we make sure every captain who’ll listen knows to sail around them, not through them. And Tarkeh?”

“Captain?”

“Next time you tell me your grandmother’s instincts about the sea are worth trusting, I’m going to believe you a little faster.”

Behind them, far astern now, the singing had not stopped. It had simply gone quiet enough that only the sea could hear it, waiting, patient as tide, for the next ship foolish enough to come alongside.