Tidewater by Emmie Mears (Stonebreaker, Book 2)

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emmie mears THE AYALA STORME SERIES STORM IN A TEACUP ANY PORT IN A STORM TAKEN BY STORM EYE OF THE STORM

THE STONEBREAKER SERIES HEARTHFIRE Book One

STANDALONE NOVELS A HALL OF KEYS AND NO DOORS LOOK TO THE SUN

Editor: Jamie Rich

TIDEWATER Copyright Š 2019 Emmie Mears All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please write to the publisher.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published by BHC Press Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950989 ISBN: 978-1-948540-02-5 (Hardcover) ISBN: 978-1-948540-03-2 (Softcover) ISBN: 978-1-948540-04-9 (Ebook) For information, write: BHC Press 885 Penniman #5505 Plymouth, MI 48170

Visit the publisher: www.bhcpress.com

For Larz: Thank you for sharing a lifetime of friendship and the courage to show one’s true face in a world that prefers masks.

prologue

W

hat you have seen so far is only as far as my eyes could see then. Now I am able to show you wider, farther beyond the borders of what you have thought to be true. Now I know that I am the one guiding you.

Stories are like that sometimes. We don’t know what our own role in them is until we do.

That’s the thing about this world—just when you think you know the limits of it, it grows. You know your warmth, the floating peace of your womb, and then you find its edges and out you go. You know your parents, your life-givers and the blanket they put beneath you. You stare up at faces that you before could not imagine from your warm little womb.

You find the edges of your blanket and touch grasses or polished floor or dirt. You find then trees or river, village or waymake, city or glen.

Mountains. Seas.

Every time you touch an edge, it gives beneath your fingers, just as my edges gave beneath mine.

It can feel like falling, sometimes. Like the quick-coming of newness, shapes and places you don’t understand. Faces that don’t look like the ones you know. Beyond.

Let me take you there now.

1

A

surashk remembered the days where she only had to wake up once.

Those days were long gone, and she regretted the loss.

In her spacious cabin, swaying belowdecks of the Khardish frigate she would call home for the rest of her foreseeable future, she perched on the edge of her bed, wishing she were as bolted to the floor as it was.

She remembered the days when the first waking was enough. The soft feather touches of her lover’s lips upon her cheek or brow, fading into the heady warmth of opening her eyes to see him beside her. That was it.

Days and moons and entire cycles had begun that way.

Now she had the second waking.

Each morning when the ship’s drums began, Asurashk felt those feather touches again. And then she opened her eyes, and Tel was not beside her but gone forever, washed away on a death wave, and this was her life now.

Her fingers had found spots in the wood frame of her bed. Each morning she sat like this until the drums slowed into their softer rhythm.

It gave her time to push the old self into the skin of the new self so she could walk out of the door of her cabin instead of staying in bed with her face in a pillow for the rest of her life.

Even her name wasn’t hers anymore.

The drums still beat out their waking frenzy. Thankfully, they didn’t start out at that tempo. Soon they would slow again, and the ship’s day would begin.

A knock sounded at her door.

Asurashk had grown used to her two wakings, but only when she had the time to herself. The sound of knuckles on wood sent her heart

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into a beat as quick as the drums, heat flashing through her. Her routine cracked in half with the knock.

“Yes?” Asurashk found her voice, her new voice, distant and detached.

“Forgive me, Honored Asurashk,” someone said from the other side of the door. Basha, she thought. “The Ada’sarshk wishes to speak with the Asurashk, if they please.”

“I’ll be with them shortly,” Asurashk said.

Her Khardish had grown fluent, but she still struggled to remember the correct forms of address at times. In Triya, where she had been born, one depended on people to share the addresses that fit them. Khardish folk did the same for the most part, but they had more layers, more nuance, like comparing a single-color afghan with one of the patchwork quilts popular in the Triyan north. Where in the former there was predictability to some extent—a change in stitch does not alter the hue, after all—in the latter it was as if Asurashk got used to one pattern only for it to swirl into another. Where she thought the pattern would be a wheel in the next square as it had been in the first, it would instead be a series of waves. In Khardan, some professions elevated a person beyond the typical status of society.

Including her own.

The thought soured her already-stale morning tongue. She rose from her bed, the delicate gold chains at her ankles jingling. Another reminder.

It was hard to consider the chains an honor when she could never take them off.

There was a small basin—a sink, she reminded herself—in the corner of her cabin. The Khardish not only had found ways to cool the cabins of the ship in the tropical heat, but they piped fresh, sweet water somehow stripped of the sea’s salt into each room. In the opposite corner of her cabin was a toilet. On a ship.

Triya had ventured nowhere near these levels of comfort. Not on ships, anyway. Perhaps the very wealthy in their vast lodges in the hills had sinks and toilets. The rest of her homeland knew of no such things.

That Asurashk had them in her own cabin (which she did not share) was proof enough of her own station, or she assumed, anyway.

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She lifted the lever on the sink, and cool water spilled into the basin.

She caught it in her hands and drank, sweeping away some of the stickiness of sleep. She scrubbed her teeth, combed her hair, dressed herself.

Her feet stayed bare onboard, and their soles had finally become calloused enough that she seldom got a splinter. She wore baggy bronze silk trawses that belted at her waist and ended at her knees. Her hair she plaited and coiled like a black crown on the top of her head—another necessity of her status.

It had taken weeks to get used to the shirt, if she could call it that.

The Khardish word for it was tarke’e, which came from a root word meaning strength. It had a dual-pronged cape that spilled over each shoulder, long enough to meet the floor. The first time she’d seen it, she thought it was simply a giant X of fabric, because that’s what it looked like, the lower half tapering to thin points and the place where the crossbars met asymmetrically low. Where the crossbars met belonged over the center of Asurashk’s chest. The strips covered her breasts, looped under her arms, crossed her back, and finally, the thin points dipped through embroidered holes in the wider cape bit at her shoulders to secure it with a series of knots that had to be done just so. The result, Asurashk thought was rather splendid, especially because the Khardish script that detailed her station and place on the ship was done in gold thread against the deep red silks.

The one bit of her own past that she was permitted was the kohl that lined her eyes. Every Triyan used it. It was said that because the eyes hold the soul, kohl kept one’s essence bound to one’s body once one left their place of rest for the day.

Asurashk didn’t know if she believed all that, but it did remind her of Tel. This one small thing kept him close to her.

She stopped with one hand on the brass latch of her door, as she always did.

“This was my choice,” she murmured to herself.

Asurashk opened the door.

The belly of the ship was always abustle with movement. Khardish sailors were the best in the world, which Asurashk supposed made sense, since their empire began as an archipelago. Still, it unsettled her how smoothly they stopped their work upon her approach, watching her with

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eyes darker than her own brown, their skin ranging from lighter than the gold-brown of hers to deep brown-black. Their tarkesh cape tails reached only to their waists.

The moment she passed, they resumed, as always.

Asurashk made her way to the Ada’sarshk’s chamber at the heart of the ship.

When this was over, if it was ever over, Asurashk thought she would like to go a moon complete without smelling the brine of the sea.

She did not knock, for Asurashk and the Ada’sarshk were equals in rank and station under Khardish law, even though Asurashk was not even a Khardish citizen. Well, technically. She hadn’t paid taxes yet, because in spite of her elevated position, she hadn’t gotten paid. A technicality, according to Rela, who had found her.

The Ada’sarshk stood with shoulders hunched over a mapped table, her own tarke’e almost slumped to the floor with its deep green-blue silk and silver threading. The Ada’sarshk’s back was muscled and lithe, her skin the darkest brown-black. Her hair was not coiled atop her head like Asurashk’s, but twisted into a thousand tiny coils that were in turn twisted back from her face like waves. Silver clasps glinted in those waves, sparkling like sunlight on the sea of her hair.

“Asu,” she said, turning to see Asurashk.

Asurashk closed the door behind her. “Ada.” Between familiar folk, the shortening of names was commonplace even in Triya, but for those like Asu and Ada, whose names had been stripped to make way for their elevated titles and roles in Khardish society, it was a small rebellion.

Ada had begun as a sailor like those working in the halls and up on deck, but in her some twenty cycles of shipwork, she had risen to the rank of commander and now, with the murmurs and whispers that had begun in the far east of Khardan and spread steadily westward, Ada had been chosen. Just like Asurashk had.

“We will reach the village harbor at last light today, if the tides manage,” Ada said.

In spite of the room’s comfortable warmth, chills spread out through Asu’s body. She hadn’t realized they were that close to the island.

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“Today?”

Ada nodded.

“That means—” “I looked, but I could see no difference in the horizon.”

Asu swallowed. “Perhaps by midday today, then.”

There should be no shock in this; it was the sole purpose of Asurashk’s choice and the Ada’sarshk’s as well. Tomorrow, Asurashk would meet with the fisher in the village, a father called Usha, and she would do her duty to determine whether what he spoke was indeed true. It was a formality at this point, but since he was the first, the easternmost witness and one of the sole survivors of the death wave’s highest crest on his island, Asu had to speak to him.

Her skin beaded with perspiration in spite of the coolness of the room. Ada saw it.

“What is it like?” The other woman’s voice was quiet, not prying, but curious.

Asu hesitated. “At first I could not control it. I fell out of my life and into someone else’s, sometimes one after another, and finding my way back was—” Tel. Finding her way back had been finding Tel. Until the wave. Until the sea smashed their ship and took her love with it. Asu stopped, took a breath. She found her new voice again. “Now it is still like falling, but it is more like the sailors who dive from the highest mast into the sea. They feel the drop, and they know the risk, but they have done it enough that they know they will surface again. They can choose when to leap.”

She left out the urge she now sometimes felt, the desire to climb that mast and jump. To see the stories of others through their own eyes. Ada didn’t need to know that.

Ada’sarshk stood, thoughtfully chewing on her bottom lip. Her eyes were big and round, always making her look younger than she was. Her lashes were thick enough that it looked as though she too had lined her eyes with kohl. She had high cheekbones at odds with those young eyes, a chin just a little too sharp. Right then, she raised her chin until she and Asu were standing eye to eye.

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“I do not envy you that,” she said finally. “I saw the storms myself, many times, but that day I was in Sahesh.”

Sahesh’s sea walls had kept the city mostly safe from the death wave.

The islands to the east did not fare so well. Asurashk’s Triyan ship to the west had not fared so well either. Tel. Asu nodded, then turned to leave.

“Asu,” Ada said, stopping her.

Asurashk turned back. “Yes?” “What was—” the woman broke off, her voice rasping like it had begun to take on water and she needed time to bail it out. She cleared her throat. “What was your name? Before, I mean.”

It wasn’t really taboo to share such things, only to continue to use them. Asu thought of Tel, the way he used to kiss the warm spot between her ear and her temple, the way they had crossed all of Triya and half a sea together to find a better life and instead found only death and waves.

She wasn’t sure why she answered. She had told no one else since she had been chosen by the Khardish mage. Found, rather. Sought out, since Rela had tasted the strands of threadbare magic trailing after her when she washed up on an island south of Sahesh itself.

“Arin,” Asurashk said. “My name was Arin. I came from Triya.”

That could have been obvious, but plenty of native Khardish folk were of Triyan descent.

“I was Hoyu, named for the tribe of tree singers who vanished into the east,” said Ada’sarshk. Then she added softly, “I came from the eastern islets.”

A shock rippled through Asu at those words. Where they were going was nearly home for this woman. Both of them would have to bear whatever came next. Neither for the same reason.

Asu looked at the older woman, feeling herself to be older now too.

“It is an honor to go into this work with you,” Asu said.

“And with you,” said Ada.

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2

S

art watched as the newcomers stumbled to the river.

River.

One woman cried out, her eyes wide and full of tears Sart could see from where she stood.

It had started as the spring itself had, as a trickle of folk winding their way through hills and plains, from Salters and Crevasses, then Sands and Boggers, then even Taigers far to the north.

“There’s one in Crevasses now, too,” Ryd said, walking up to stand quietly at Sart’s side.

He pointed to the southwest, toward the mountains. He looked thinner, except for the bulb in his gut that would one day kill him. That was clearly getting larger, because the way he was standing, its outline changed the fold of his tunic just enough for someone to notice if they knew it was there.

“I heard.” Sart glanced involuntarily toward the east, where she knew yet another new river was stretching itself out from the ground. By now Carin would be almost there.

The newcomers had fallen to their knees in the mud at the edge of the river—river—and were drinking from it. Sart heard their disbelieving sobs over the sound of their simultaneous laughter.

“We may have to adjust again,” said Ryd. Sart followed his gaze to the north bank of the river, where the water had eroded a small hillock, exposing the gnarled roots of a scraggly tree that would likely never get the opportunity to enjoy the newfound abundance of water.

“We ought to perhaps stop building these roundhomes until we know where the water wants to settle,” Sart said. “If they are indeed meant to be permanent dwellings, we can’t risk wasting more of them.”

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Three had already been lost to the rapidly expanding spring in the turns after Carin had broken the stone nearly three moons before. The water washed away even the gravel used to secure the roundhomes’ poles in the ground, but first it had flooded the homes themselves, and the cellars that had begun to hold early stores of food from the gardens. It had happened almost overnight. They had lasted through a turn of rains, but three days after the rains passed, the spring broke through harder, and within half a day, the flood had come. Only by working late into the night had they managed to salvage building materials from the roundhomes, and a few bundles of foodstuffs that had gotten wet could be dried. They had worked through the night to secure the precious food. Most had been saved.

A few folks had left, then, deeming the risk too high to stay in one place, even if there was clean water so freely flowing.

Ryd nodded. “In this, I have just as little experience as you. I’ve never watched the birth of a river before.” He gestured to the water, which they’d named Lahivar after Sart in spite of her protestations. “The Bemin, in Haveranth? It is nearly three times as wide.”

“We’ll lose all the muck-raked gardens if that happens. No one will stay here.”

“I don’t think that’ll happen,” said Ryd. “Care to bet on it?” Sart smiled, but her heart wasn’t in it.

“I’m the type to learn from the mistakes of others in cases like this,” Ryd said. He reached out and gave Sart’s shoulder a pat.

His hands were strong from his halm-working. Among the seeds he had brought with him from the southland beyond the mountains were a few perfect black ones, shaped like a kazytya’s eyes when the pupils were at their thinnest. Halm seeds, rarer than a talking ihstal here. Apparently abundant in this Haveranth Ryd came from, along with all the other luxuries Sart’s people spent their lives scraping for.

More things had changed than just the water. Or perhaps it was that water changed everything. Where once there had been scrubby weeds and sparse blue-grey grasses, now there were lush meadows, deep blue, the color the sky turned as the sunset’s light faded. Some were beginning to go to seed, and a few bavel stalks already held pale white puffs that soon would be harvested to spin into thread and yarn.

tidewater | 19

Movement above her head made Sart look upward. A hawk, its wings spread wide as it climbed a warm updraft, circling above the waymake.

Ryd followed her gaze, and to Sart’s surprise, his breath hissed inward.

His eyes tracked the bird, every muscle in his shoulders gone rigid.

“Do you have some fear of hawks, my friend?” Sart’s tone was light, and she smiled. “You are not so small that a hawk could carry you off; worry not.”

He didn’t answer for a moment. Sart was not certain he even recorded her words in that span of breaths, for he did not even blink. Then he seemed to shake himself.

“I know that hawk,” he said simply.

Sart squinted up at the bird. One hawk looked much the same as another, she thought, though they were a rare sight outside Crevasses at all. Or had been. But… Now that she watched, Sart felt a murmur of something, a whisper of power that made the hawk’s defined circles tighten her own body. She found her fingers itching for her bow.

“You say you know this hawk,” she said, still looking up at the bird.

“How?” Sart wasn’t sure if he knew he was doing it, but Ryd leaned closer to her until his shoulder touched hers. Or perhaps he did it on purpose, because when he spoke, his words were almost too quiet for her to hear.

“On our Journeying, when Carin and I traveled to…find our names,” he trailed off there, the mingled loss and bitterness and anger and aching clear between his words. “That hawk marked our steps, and if you are looking for a bet, my friend, I will make you a halm bow if that hawk did not report to Merin.”

“Merin.” Both Carin and Ryd had mentioned this name, this soothsayer of their village who had sent hunters after them to murder them as they fled their former lives. “This is her beast, somehow, that does her bidding?”

Culy knew of this magic, which sy said had been lost in the last age, along with much else. Sart did not like the flavor of it. Magic used to control minds was a nasty thing. Culy knew that in ages past, it had been used to control people. Sart didn’t like the thought of it being used on animals

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any more. She wanted to ask Culy of this, but sy was with Carin to the east, searching after yet more water.

Ryd was nodding. “I cannot tell you how I am certain, but I am sure of it.”

“Rot.” Sart didn’t like that, either.

The hawk still circled. With the grasses to seed and plentiful water, the fields had grown full of quickly reproducing rodents—squirrels and mice and a long-eared, long-tailed critter Sart’d never seen before that was about the size of a rabbit but had a face like a mouse and a pink nose like a far smaller tiger. Cuter than any rotted rodent had a right to be— the children of Lahivar had been begging incessantly for their parents to catch one to domesticate.

If the hawk were hunting its supper, surely it would have swooped down upon some hapless animal by now.

“Why would it be watching you here?”

“I could not say.” With that, Ryd tore his eyes away from the sky and scrubbed his fingers through his hair. It was getting long, past his shoulders. “There are not so many hunters in the Hearthland that she could risk sending any across the mountains. Especially after…”

He didn’t need to finish; Sart already knew. After he and Carin had killed several. There were so few people south of the mountains, it seemed. Few children born and fewer each cycle that passed, if Ryd was correct, which he probably was.

Sart still felt that murmur, the power that emanated from the circling predator. She felt its eyes on her.

Just then, a gaggle of children came running from the waymake, giggling as they skirted one of the gardens and racing each other. She thought Ryd took a small step back, but she wasn’t certain.

“Sart! Sart! Myan says that you cannot juggle four stones at once, and sy doesn’t believe me that you can juggle five, and sy said if I am right, sy will give me a piece of purple sea glass.” Ina, the child, rattled off hys words with breathless excitement.

“Speaking of bets. They’re starting young,” Ryd said, his amusement cut with what seemed like some small bit of relief.

“Please?” Ina tugged at Sart’s tunic.

tidewater | 21

Sart pretended to look put-upon, and the entire gaggle of children—including Myan, who stood to lose a precious bauble—let out a crestfallen breath.

With a flourish, Sart produced several round stones from her pockets, which she kept handy for use of her sling. To the children, she may well have created the stones from the air itself. They clapped and whooped as Sart held six stones in her hands, out for them to see, and then launched them into the air in a whirling circle, her hands moving deftly to shift to a sinuous twist shape, then back to a circle.

The children cried out with absolute glee, and Myan (ever so gracefully, Sart thought) presented Ina with a rounded ball of purple glass, sanded smooth by the sea, as promised.

After a few moments more, Sart made a show of tossing each stone higher and higher, catching them as they fell with a click into her palm, then making them vanish much as she had made them appear.

She heard a few disappointed groans and one shy child in the back looked as if sy would very much like to ask Sart to keep on. Ina beamed at Sart and pressed the small bit of purple sea glass into her hand as if in payment.

Sart was about to refuse it—Ina had won it from Myan fair and square—but the murmur of the hawk suddenly changed, and Sart looked up, so fast it made a sharp twinge in her neck.

Sart heard neither the children’s begging or giddy excitement, only the sudden rushing blood in her veins.

The hawk had broken its circles and now winged its way east.

Toward Carin.

3

I

t must have been larger than all of Haveranth together.

Carin had never seen anything so—

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Enormous wasn’t right, as she’d seen mountains, obviously, and they were bigger. But this was made by hands. Seeing it in person and not just in the dreams that now came to her every night—she almost couldn’t believe it. It was real. And she was walking through it.

Hillocks of carved stone surrounded her on all sides, reaching higher than trees in spite of their walls having crumbled. Buildings. Huge ones, as big as every roundhome in Haveranth stacked atop one another. Everywhere she looked, there were more of them. One still had its top, a curved dome broken in half, reaching toward the sky. When the sun touched it, something bright and yellow shone back with enough force to make Carin blink and turn away. Surely no one would have enough gold for such a thing.

She and Culy had walked for nearly an hour through these ruins, perhaps more than that. Only now had they reached the center. Up until now, Carin’s mind had been tumbling full of thoughts of returning to Lahivar, back to Ryd and Sart and the gardens, back to where she could ride to the ocean that filled her with need she could not explain. The ruins in front of her chased those thoughts to the recesses of her mind, leaving only a hum so pressing it was almost a buzz and a sight that made her feel as if she’d spun too many times around in a circle and was one half step from falling over.

Spreading out on both sides of the spring’s rivulet was a wide…hearthhome…of what had once been smooth white stone. Calling it a square seemed too simple. Hearth-home wasn’t much better. Scraggy plants had claimed it long ago, bulging some of the stones up to lay crooked, others chipped and cracked away into dust. She did not know what it could be compared to other than what in Haveranth had been the village hearthhome, if that hearth-home was as big as the entire village. Bigger. On either side of it were what looked like huge stone bowls, wind-weathered with spires of the same rock in their centers. One had toppled over into the bowl, but the other still stood. Carin had no idea what such a thing could be used for. She supposed a hundred people could stand in each bowl if they wanted to, shoulder to shoulder without being cramped.

More stone blocks stood at intervals around the place, rubble between them as if they had once been archways, and perhaps they had.

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But what drew her eye was the spring itself. It flowed down a stone channel far wider than it needed, and the water itself emerged from what looked like a tiger’s face, carved of the same white stone but almost too eroded by time to identify. She knew what they were first because she had seen them in her sleep, impossible as it felt. There were—she counted— fifteen such faces of tigers in a semicircle around a wide trough of stone that became the stone channel. Where the semicircle met the mouth of the channel, there was a stone bridge, or had been. The center of it was crumbled away, though its ends remained intact. Someone, sometime in the ages of the world, had designed carvings around a spring itself. Carin could almost picture all fifteen tigers’ mouths spilling water into the pool to flow down the channel, under the bridge and through the ruins as they once had been.

Fifteen tigers, fifteen moons in the cycle. Was that why? The tigers all looked the same from here.

A shiver thrummed through her from her toes to the crown of her head. The humming buzz in her mind nudged at her, insistent, hungry.

For what, she did not know.

Her skin tingled, prickled at each of her pores with dots of heat that were almost uncomfortable.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” Culy ran one long-fingered hand along the nearest wall of the broken archway, tracing a stone block that would have taken a team of ihstal to move so much as a handspan.

The sound of flowing water whispered in the back of Carin’s mind, and she nodded at Culy, speechless.

Culy had overheard her talking about her recurring dreams to Ryd, of seeing this place in ruin and water beginning to flow through it. The hyrsin had taken her aside later, asked a series of questions Carin had been shocked to be able to answer, looked at her with eyes sharper than one of Ryd’s halm knives, and then asked her if she would like to see this place with her own eyes. At first she hadn’t believed hyr that it was real—how could something in her dreams be true?—but Culy had insisted, and now here they were.

Everything felt different now. Everything was different now, including Culy. Sy’d never asked Carin to go anywhere farther than a few paces

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away before. Culy now looked at Carin differently, too, as if trying to puzzle her out. Sometimes perplexed, other times curious.

She found her voice after a moment, walking over to the wall to touch it herself, as if that could make it more real.

“The spring that is flowing here now,” she said. “It would have been a water source great enough to support this…”

Waymake didn’t seem like the right word, nor did village.

“City,” Culy supplied.

Carin tested out the word. “City.”

The forest had had time to reclaim parts of this city before the river had run dry and the spring had stopped flowing, but as with most of the Northlands, most of the vegetation had long since faded to dust and scrubby grass, except for the halm grove that spread out around the spring in a large crescent.

Her first view of the ruin had stopped her in her tracks. There were more halms together here than she had seen in the rest of her travels combined, some of them ancient, reaching higher even than the now-crumbled pile of stones that lay some way to her left. Fifteen of them, too.

Carin couldn’t imagine what the city had looked like, once. When it was new and alive. Most of the buildings had fallen away over time, leaving piles of enormous rocks and shells of some that looked like a tree struck by lightning, hollowed out at its center. The spring was in a cleft of a hill, surrounded on three sides by the halm grove that fanned out around it. Water must have remained, somehow, at least enough to sustain the trees for this much time, if never to breach the surface of the land until now.

Until now.

Culy and Carin stood about a hundred paces from the bank of the newly re-formed river—still not quite more than a creek but already it had grown by at least a pace since they’d arrived the night before. This water would reshape the land here, and everyone in it.

“Who built this? Who could build this?”

“A people long lost to us,” Culy said. “I believe they were the first to settle this land, long ago. They knew magics we have lost and had knowl-

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edge I think we threw away. If you hear the word Tuanye from the mouths of people in the waymakes, it is these people they refer to.”

“I thought they were referring to gods.”

“Those with the kind of power and knowledge the Tuanye had would seem like gods to you or me.” There was some small note of amusement or wryness in Culy’s voice to Carin’s ears, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask the hyrsin to follow that line of thought farther.

“Are there more of these places?” Carin asked quietly instead.

She had not seen as much of the Northlands as Ras had, but surely he would have mentioned something like this. Awe filled her, but through it was a vein of something else. Uncertainty, maybe. Or dread. She wanted to ask how she had seen it in her dreams, but Culy was already answering her other question.

“Not many that I have seen,” Culy said. “And of those only fragments remain. In my studies I have searched, and there are other cities mentioned, but I believe they were destroyed far more thoroughly than this one.”

“By what?” Even time had not succeeded in destroying this one.

“Have you ever felt the ground move?”

“What?” The words themselves made a chill run its fingernails over Carin’s skin. The ground didn’t move. It was the ground.

But she remembered her Journeying, what she had seen in that cave.

She’d thought it simply part of the vision, not literal truth.

“It’s called an earthquake,” Culy said, wryness obvious now. “Is this another thing you don’t have in Haveranth?”

“I suppose not.” An uncomfortable suspicion took root in Carin’s belly. “You are someone who knows the history of this land and the people who…came before us.”

It wasn’t a question, but Culy inclined hys head.

“Do you know when this…earthquake…happened?”

“It would have been back some two thousand cycles, perhaps more.”

The suspicion became a certainty. Carin reached out one hand and held herself against the crumbling wall beside them. The stone was weather-pocked and worn, somewhat warm from the sun that dappled the ruin.

It felt as if the ground had tilted beneath her feet.

26 | emmie mears

She had seen nothing of cities in the visions the cavern gave her, high in the mountains above Haveranth. But perhaps that would have been too much for the elders to share, whoever those first were who decided how their secrets would be kept and how they would be passed on. An existence of eking out a living was one thing. The destruction—Carin lacked a better word for the level of this—of cities was somehow worse. Entire cities. Shaken to the ground like this one. Would the people have had time to run? How many people would it have been? Hundreds? Thousands? More?

She didn’t realize she had spoken aloud until Culy lifted her chin with hys hand.

“Earthquakes come without notice,” sy said softly. “A city such as this could have held some thirty thousand people.”

Carin took a ragged breath into lungs that burned like they had been stretched over the embers of a fire. How was one person to bear this?

Not one, really. Ryd too, and Ras—though Ras seemed to feel it little enough—but the weight of what her people had done staggered her.

Culy’s fingers fell away. Sy offered no words of comfort or solace, and Carin wanted none.

She found her voice after a long moment of simply breathing and forcing herself to feel the stone beneath her fingers and the ground beneath her feet until it leveled off again.

“Did you know what caused this?” Her eyes met Culy’s gray ones, and again the sheer depth of hys gaze sent a shock through her.

“I believed it had to be something of magical origin,” sy said. “Earthquakes are localized things, spreading out from one spot like ripples when you toss a stone in a pond. The other cities mentioned were far too spread out to all fall to the devastation of a single earthquake, yet they did. Whoever caused that magic in the first place would have been channeling tremendous power. It is likely this city escaped some of the destruction because of its proximity to the mountains.”

At Carin’s uncomprehending look, Culy went on, patiently.

“Mountains are formed on what is called faults. A fault is a crack in the earth itself, and far below our soil and clay and stone there is melted rock. An earthquake too close to that could trigger a volcano—a moun-

tidewater | 27

tain that vomits molten rock and ash and poison clouds into the air, changing everything for hundreds of leagues around it.”

Carin looked at the stone under her hand and tried to imagine the ground shaking hard enough to cause such damage. The shudder that shook her shoulders was an uncomfortable parallel. She had seen heated and molten metal often enough in her mother’s smithy, but rock? She didn’t know rock could melt.

“Mostly, there is nothing to fear from earthquakes,” Culy said.

“Those we see usually are only enough to rattle a hut. At worst to jostle my ink pot and leave me a mess.”

It was clear sy was trying to make Carin feel at ease now, and she noticed hys reassurances were only in response to natural phenomena and not the acts of people.

As if sy could read her thoughts, Culy went on. “I know that you have been unaware of what your ancestors did until recently. We none of us are without those things in our pasts. If I offer no comfort it’s because I can’t. It is your choice, your responsibility—whether you take it up or not—to engage with those who came before you and did wrong, and I cannot make your heart sit right in your chest. Only you can do that.”

Carin nodded, slowly.

“What do they teach you, in your villages to the south?” It was the first time Culy had outright asked.

“We learn runes and writing, the planting of seeds and the tending of crops and animals. The mooncycle. Numbers, some. The histories they share with us when we are children are only stories and legends, or at least they are painted with that brush.” Carin fought the bitter laugh that wanted to pry its way out of her lips. “I am finding that even the secrets they reveal are not the whole truth.”

“When one has eaten only fish for one’s life and then is given a haunch of saiga, it does not mean that fish and saiga are the only things to eat.”

Carin wasn’t much for proverbs, but that one was particularly appropriate. “It also doesn’t mean that whoever gave you the saiga doesn’t also have mutton and yams tucked away to deliberately keep you from having them.”

28 | emmie mears

The cry of a hawk yanked Carin’s attention to the sky so quickly that she missed what Culy said in reply.

That sound.

She knew that sound.

It couldn’t be the same hawk, Merin’s hawk.

Carin had watched the bird for turns upon turns upon moons upon moons of walking. Heard its voice in her dreams as she slept. Her breath caught and stuck, like a wall had grown between her lungs and her throat.

It couldn’t be the same hawk…but it was.

The flash of pain that jolted through her made Carin stifle the urge to cry out. In her mind she caught the barest glimpse of how she and Culy must look from above, two people standing facing one another but with faces upturned, two brown faces housing worried blue eyes and grey, somehow with posture and gesture both mirrored in their bodies without realizing.

Then it was gone, and Culy followed where she looked. Carin didn’t have to look to see that sy had noticed her reaction.

“What is it?” Culy asked. Sy didn’t mean the hawk.

“The soothsayer of my village, the one who sent hunters to murder us—she is a powerful magic-worker. On our Journeying, she sent the hawk to watch our every step. I had not thought she was so desperate to see us dead that she would risk sending the bird over the mountains.”

Carin’s words crumbled on the air, brittle as the harvest leaves that had only just begun to fall.

She looked to Culy. The hyrsin actually spat, a sharp sound Carin had never heard spilling from hys lips.

“Vile magic,” Culy said. “Forcing your will upon another creature’s mind is a heinous sin.”

Carin had very seldom heard the word sin, but she didn’t need it defined. If Merin could do such a thing…

“I’m so sorry,” she told hyr. “I don’t know what I have brought down upon you, but I promise I will do what I can to help you, whatever happens.”

They both watched the circling bird together in silence for a long moment, the sound of the growing new river behind them.

A cloud passed over the sun.

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“One thing I know,” Carin said, dragging her gaze away from the sky.

“There are not enough hunters in the whole of the Hearthland to challenge your people here. And they are weak and spoiled compared to the people here. They have never needed to survive, except for three or four moons together on their Journeying. They only reach for food or drink and find it in their hands. They whisper to the land and it gives them sweet yams and plump goats and spices and fish. If they come, if they threaten you, the easiest way to beat them soundly would be to simply flee and let the land take its blood price from them itself.”

“You have survived here,” Culy said blandly.

“We would have died in Suonlys if the people there had not saved us by mixing our waters and keeping watch over us. Four days, maybe a turn. We may not have starved, but it’s not possible to live without water.”

Culy seemed to consider that, and a small bit of tension faded from hys shoulders. Sy listened then, turning hys head and sighing.

At first, Carin thought sy sighed at what she had said, but Culy laid one strong hand on Carin’s shoulder. Carin jumped. Culy had never touched her before. The strength in hys grip sent another shock through her, a heady heat that unsettled rather than comforted, and for the barest blink of an instant, Carin wanted to place her own hand over top of hys.

“It seems we are due another complication,” sy said. “A band of rovers approaches from the south.”

Carin looked, but she saw nothing. How did sy— “Wyt’s people, if I am not in error. Rot. I’d hoped to put her off a bit longer.”

“Culy—” Culy met Carin’s eyes, gaze dropping to hys hand where it still rested firmly against Carin’s tunic. Surprise was there and gone before Carin could blink, and then Culy’s hand was gone from her shoulder as if it had never been there at all. Had sy not meant to do that?

Alarm made her unsling her halm bow from where it hung. Without thinking, she placed one curved end against her foot and pulled the string into place.

“You won’t need that, I think.”

30 | emmie mears

Carin heard them, then. The sound of ihstal feet and whistles, and the voices of people who either didn’t care if they were heard or meant to be.

“Listen to me closely,” Culy said. “When they get here, I will agree to go with them. I think if you stay here, they will insist on you accompanying me—” hys lips gave a sardonic quirk at that “—and I think you are needed in Lahivar. Go directly to our camp, take your things, and go. Tell Sart what happened, and about the hawk.”

“But what about you? Culy, you are needed in Lahivar.”

“I think if I do not go with them, it won’t matter.”

Cold cut through Carin’s chest. “Are you sure you’ll be safe alone?”

A thin smile appeared on Culy’s face. “I won’t be alone, my friend.

But you need to be. Go. Now.” Carin ran.

Her feet took her through the ruins without trouble, and behind her she heard the party of rovers call out Culy’s name.

“You’ve kept Wyt waiting long enough,” one said loudly enough for Carin to hear, and then her legs took her out of earshot.

She hoped Culy was right.

Her eyes sought out the hawk as she ran. The exertion of running wasn’t enough to make her sweat, not yet, but the sight of the hawk drew cold perspiration from her skin.

It was following her.

What could Merin do to them here?

What would she?

about the author Emmie Mears writes the books they always needed to read about characters they wish they could be. Emmie is multilingual, autistic, agender, and a bad pescetarian.

Emmie makes their home on planet Earth, and more specifically in Glasgow, Scotland. They live with their partner and two rescued kitties who call Emmie a forever home.