The hags looked almost the same as when she left—dark, lank hair framed pale, gaunt faces. The room hadn’t changed much either—it was still covered in skulls and bones, although Elisabeth was sure the pieces were rearranged. Maybe that rib cage was a new addition, and maybe the femurs weren’t quite so prominent on the far wall in the past. A few more mushrooms grew in the corners, and two stalactites were forming on the ceiling. A layer of crumbling bone sat on the floors, piling up where they slid off the wall as time went by, their structure no longer holding them in place. Looking around with eyes that had traveled the world, Elisabeth saw how small the space was, and how drab, how shabby. But despite the neglect and decay, it was clearly the lair of necromancers.

  “Sisters,” Elisabeth walked into the room, hands tucked into her pockets, eyes hidden beneath the brim of her hat. She kept her posture straight, with just her head tilted to shield her gaze, and did her best to appear confident.

  “Here she is, come home, slinking in the door like nothing’s happened for a decade.” Esther’s voice held a harsh rasp that hadn’t been there. Sickness? Elisabeth wondered, or just age? Not important at the moment, but she noted it as a possible weakness to exploit later.

  “I wouldn’t call this ‘slinking,’ more like ‘walking in the door.’ With an entourage. And bearing gifts.” Captain Wolf gestured behind her. The vanguard ushered the six male captives closer to the stone table and the three witches that sat behind it. “I ask for your hospitality, sisters, and offer these lovely specimens as tribute for your generosity.”

  Eve stood up, the bone fragments sown into the rags that made up her clothing rattling, as she moved towards the docile men. Elisabeth remembered pilfering corpses to cobble together items that allowed her to feel like a pirate, and not just the fourth sister, born out of sequence, and excluded due to her youth.

  “They look…delectable,” Eve crooned, running a pale hand over the chest of the tall trouble-maker who still stood at the front of the group. “But only six? For all our years of sorrows?”

  “Aye, we wept for you. Our lost lamb,” Emilia agreed. The three hags cackled.

  “For days, then weeks, months, and finally years, the tide came and went, again and again, but not our Elisabeth,” Esther added, dark eyes sizing up the tributes. Tongue darting out to lick her chapped lips. Magic probed at her shields as the sisters bantered. Elisabeth brushed the tendrils aside. She knew that these attempts were only a prelude. They were sizing her up, checking to see what tricks she remembered, and what new ones she might have learned in the intervening years.

  “And now you’re here. Just like we thought—needing something,” Eve concluded, gaze hardening as it turned to Elisabeth. “We’ll take your gifts, and the ones in the boxes, too.” She nodded at the two women who carried chests brimming with magical trinkets and talismans—a variety of powerful items meant to entice the three necromancers stored inside them. “You can send the guards away. We have a lot to talk about, sister, and much of it not meant for the ears of common sailors.” The insult wasn’t lost on the pirate captain, but she let it pass without comment. Showing her temper wouldn’t help her here—a lesson it took her most of her life to learn, but she was finally able to heed it.

  “Cressia will remain, the rest will go.”

  “Aye, aye, the little knife-bitch can stay,” Esther agreed.

  Elisabeth gestured at the pirates, and the women wasted no time. They shoved the captives to the center of the room, deposited the chests on the slick rock floor, and then left without a word or backwards glance. The She-Wolf knew they were glad to put the three hags, the skeletal remains affixed to the walls, and whatever bargain behind them. The vanguard always followed orders. And with Cressia staying, they knew their captain was as safe as she was likely to be.

  “They better make it back to the ship in one piece,” Elisabeth added when the last of them was out of the cavern and earshot.

  “Your women won’t come to any harm. The lads bought you that much hospitality, sister.”

  “Thank you, Esther.” The hag waved off her gratitude like it was a fly buzzing around her head. “You will dine with us.”

  “My thanks, but we will fast.” All three sisters cackled at her response. Elisabeth’s disdain for their habits was a source of amusement to them, and always had been.

  “Suit yourself.”

  “We’ll prepare a feast, and there will be a couple of birds for you and yours to eat,” Eve declared, silencing the others with a look.

  “Your cell’s still where you left it. All your things rotting inside it.” Emilia spoke after a long moment of silence, and nodded toward a tunnel. “Go see. You can tell us why you’re here while we dine. You remember the way to the hall?”

  Elisabeth nodded, done with their banter for the moment, and walked away from the table, tributes, and her thrice-cursed sisters. Cressia followed as always, more consistent than her own shadow. They made their way down another narrow passage, lit with the same blue witch-orbs as the rest of the stone dwelling. Memory led Elisabeth deeper into the maze of caves, taking her back to the young woman she had been when she lived inside the Hag's Rock. She trailed a hand along the cool, wet wall, unaware of the movement.

  At twenty, she ran from the place, her sisters, and the path set for her by family obligation. Choosing to make her own destiny, choosing the mercurial call of the sea over a life chained to just necromancy. Her sisters saw it as a betrayal—that she chose their father’s legacy over their mother’s. In truth, she was the only one of the five siblings who blended both sides. She took her mother’s death-magic, and her father’s piracy, and blended them into becoming not just fearsome, but powerful. The strength it took to walk away from this place propelled her forward into adventure and infamy.

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  At a seeming dead-end, Elisabeth slid sideways into a slot-tunnel. Her cutlass scraped against rock as she shimmied through. Every sense, both physical and magical, strained for a possible ambush, jaw clenched in apprehension. After twenty sideways steps, the passage opened up again, and spilled her into an antechamber, Cressia almost bumping into her, when she suddenly stopped in her tracks. No assault materialized, other than the cornucopia of repressed memories that her former alcove represented.

  She stood in the doorway, unsure about crossing the threshold. Elisabeth took a deep breath, and spent a small charm in checking for spell-traps—paranoia had saved her many times in this place. The quick sweep brought back no signs of danger, so she stepped into the room, eyes roaming over the items of her youth with the dispassion of experience. A neglected altar sat in the right corner, its three skulls showing signs of decay, mushrooms sprouting from their eyes. She knew if she pulled them up, a whole colony of fungi would be inside the empty brain cavity. Her cot took up the left side of the room, and was rotting to pieces. The wooden legs were broken, the abandoned blankets rank and molding, a patchwork of frayed fabric. It had never been welcoming, but now it was simply a hole full of atrophy.

  All of Hag’s Rock was a keystone to memories she didn’t want to acknowledge, and she fought against another wave, as she stared at the place that held her life for too many years. They rose regardless, a swell breaching her barriers and dowsing her in vaguely remembered dreams of grandeur and the sea, the heartbreak of being chained to this place, the unyielding desire to resist, to escape. All of it dead weight she needed to shed.

  Action always lifted the anchors that threatened to weigh her down, and so Elisabeth crossed to the altar, pulled the rusty offering needle from its place, and pricked her thumb. She rubbed drops of blood on the three skulls and muttered an incantation under her breath—an apology for abandoning them, and atonement in blood, the only thing that all ghosts understood as payment. The spirits flickered at the periphery of her vision, faint outlines of what they used to be—their tether to the world weak and frayed after a decade of neglect.

  “You lived…here?” Cressia’s breath fogged in the cold room. Elisabeth shot her a quick look, and then surveyed the space again.

  “Aye. After my father went five fathoms deep. And whenever he grew tired of having me underfoot on his ship before.” She thought she caught pity in the bodyguard’s eyes. “Necromancers don’t feel the cold, so it wasn’t so bad. Mundane. Boring. Stifling. But not uncomfortable.”

  Cressia only snorted in response, and rubbed her hands on her arms, attempting to chafe warmth into her flesh. Elisabeth pulled a bracelet from her pocket, whispered a few words to it, and then looped it around her companion’s wrist. Relief was immediate on her face—the trinket would warm her for hours. Hopefully long enough to conclude their business on Hag’s Rock.

  “Thank you, captain.”

  Elisabeth shrugged off the gratitude. “Need you sharp. They’ve offered us hospitality, but that doesn’t mean they won’t test us. It’s not normally this cold in Hag’s Rock.”

  “I see.” Cressia changed positions immediately, no longer studying the room, but facing the entryway, blades in her hands in a motion so smooth that Elisabeth barely even noticed. The ghosts flickered in her peripheral vision, giving one strong pulse of light before fading away completely. Something was coming. The stagnant water froze, and mushrooms withered with the sudden drop in temperature. A scraping sound reached them from the narrow passage that led to the chamber—the noise of bone against rock distinguishable to the necromancer. A wave of putrescence came next, the smell so strong it made her eyes sting, and she saw Cressia blinking away tears.

  “What is it?” The bodyguard hissed, falling into a crouch, gaze never straying from the cleft in the rock.

  “An abomination,” Elisabeth replied, keeping her voice level. She allowed her magic to unfold around them, reaching careful tendrils towards the thing creeping towards them. With a final scrape and a loud slurp, it finally emerged. The shape of the monster didn’t make sense; bones stuck out at odd angles from flesh that was gelatinous, shifting as it moved. It didn’t have legs, or arms, it was just a mass of dead material forced together through magic. It was grotesque. Beside her, Cressia shuddered and began to retch, body rebelling against years of training in the face of the horror that shambled through the antechamber, in a heap of glistening flesh.

  Elisabeth stepped past her bodyguard and into the room with the creature, dropping a shield across the doorway behind her to keep Cressia in and the thing out. The former assassin’s skills were of no use against this opponent. The She-Wolf studied the magic that wove through the abomination, looking for ways to pick it apart at its seams. Without a head, or heart, or any distinguishable feature, it was difficult to locate the node that held it all together—but all constructs needed a piece to serve as a fulcrum. The stench grew stronger as it moved, shambling toward Elisabeth, bones moving through the gelatinous bulk to point at her—its only weapons, aside from the horror of it, and its weight. It lurched forward, attempting to crush her against the wall. Elisabeth dodged out of its way. It collided with the rock with a slap of meat and a snap of bone, the shards absorbed back into itself as they broke off.

  As she stepped around it, a femur shot out of its body and caught her in the ribs, the impact knocking her back and leaving her gasping. A sharp pain in her side let her know that she’d definitely broken something. She cradled her arm against her side to protect the injury, and moved as far away from the abomination as she could in the small space.

  “Fuck,” she wheezed, magic reaching for a healing charm sown into her shirt. Activating it brought a rush of heat to her side, a scalding agony, and then relief.

  “Captain, let me out!” Cressia stood on the other side of the shield, looking annoyed now that she’d recovered from the initial shock of seeing and smelling the creature. Elisabeth ignored her pleas. Her focus was on the abomination that was following her every step around the room.

  “I can at least distract it so you can take it apart!” The bodyguard sounded desperate, but there wasn’t enough space for the three of them to maneuver—not without someone getting hurt. She just kept moving, with her back to the wall and the thing always in front, as it lurched along, attempting to crush her again and again. All the while, she was searching for its weakpoint, magic pushing through the mass, brushing against the bones, seeking for the part that held it together. After going around the room three times, without any success in finding its node, she realized it didn’t have one. All of it was the fulcrum. It was so simple, she hadn’t even considered it. Of course, now that she saw the way it was constructed, it seemed obvious. She cursed herself for a fool and side-stepped another lunge. As she moved, she drew on an enhancement charm, and pushed necromancy into the abomination.

  And then with one savage push of magic, she tore the thing apart. She ducked behind the shield and back into her chamber a moment before shattered bones and hunks of rotting flesh filled the room in a putrid explosion. Elisabeth gagged at the renewed onslaught of stench, and Cressia vomited again. Should have brought a windcharm, she thought ruefully, while taking shallow breaths, hoping the smell would dissipate on its own, now that the abomination was destroyed.

  A ghost flickered into the room. Its arm rose. It pointed to the passageway that led back into Hag’s Rock. They had passed the test and were summoned to the feast.