Child of a Hidden Sea Read online

  They must use it to conceal themselves. That’s why I don’t know where I am.

  It was a strangely reassuring thought, one that made her feel as though she might not be that far from home after all.

  A cry of triumph from the kids. One skinny four-year-old dashed up, holding one of the float pods for the ubiquitous seaweed. Inside the pod was a crimson eel, barely wider than a strand of spaghetti, and it was brooding over a clutch of red granules. Eggs?

  “Good!” Sophie set it up so the sun was shining through it, exploiting the natural light, and took a macro shot. She let the kids look at the resulting image for three seconds before shutting the camera down again.

  “So Sylvanna does … they research new magical spells?” Sophie asked Ralo.

  “Yes.”

  “This is bad because—”

  “They are crooks,” Ralo said. He pointed at the sea pod, struggling with either the concept or the translation. “This eel are ours. If they uses them in a new scrip, the scribing, they should pay.”

  If this was a delusion, it was getting complex. International politics and conflicts about resource use? And magic that seemed to operate under something like patent law. “Could any of this be tied to the attack on my aunt?”

  Ralo gave a peculiar little shrug, indicating, she figured, indifference.

  The morning passed. The kids found her a shell with an interior that was crimson-colored mother-of-pearl. She set it on a board next to the body of a seagoing bat, collecting specimens she could photograph in a group. They led her to a stand of delicate orange flowers that looked like miniaturized helliconia. Using signs, she asked them about the moths. They pointed at the cliff tops. Too far away.

  At midday, Ralo broke out bowls of seaweed and fish broth, carefully dividing the mushy lump of one cooked dumpling among the children. He and Sophie got the soup without dumplings. If anything, the broth made her hungrier.

  The woman, San, returned to nurse her baby. She looked half dead with exhaustion. She spoke to Ralo in the islanders’ dialect, pointedly excluding Sophie.

  Sophie gave them some space, sitting in the sun with one of the kids. If she could get home, she’d pick up some proper equipment—her diving rig, the video camera. She could give her little collection of shells to one of her bioscience buddies—maybe the USC guys, or the guys at the Scripps Institute.

  She wondered if the rest of these magic users were as backwards as the people on Stele Island.

  That wasn’t likely, was it? The scarf in Gale’s pouch was a fine silky fabric, and there were the gold coins. Wherever this subculture was hidden, it had its rich and poor, same as anywhere else. Sylvanna, Ralo had said. A great nation. Scientists. Crooks.

  She turned the shell over in her hands. The possibilities for exploration were mind-boggling even before you got to the existence of magic.

  Magic. Every scientist on the planet was going to freak out. Bram was going to lose his mind.

  Ralo broke into her thoughts: “Dega’s calling you.”

  Sophie scrambled to her feet and ran to Dega, saving the older woman the effort of crossing the distance between them.

  “Your aunt is awake, Kir Sophie.”

  “Just Sophie’s okay,” she said.

  “If you wish.” They crossed the wharf, where a crowd of villagers had gathered around four bodies, fishers who’d been recovered from the sea. They glared as Sophie passed.

  “Am I bad luck or something?”

  “The storm was unexpected.”

  “It’s weather.”

  “Kir Feliachild was nearly murdered,” Dega said. “You’re Fleet Couriers; the storm pursuing you was unnatural—”

  “The storm might have been magical? Seriously?”

  “The moths migrate on windless nights, always windless.” Dega ushered her into a shack that seemed to serve as their infirmary. “Kir Feliachild, your niece is here.”

  Gale looked about ready to expire—she was pale, her chest was bandaged, and her breathing was raspy. She opened her eyes, took in Sophie, and closed them with a pained expression.

  Nobody was glad to see her. Exploring the beach with the adorable moppets had cheered Sophie, but now rejection by her birth family struck again with the force of a slap.

  She perched by Gale’s bedside. It was little more than a pallet covered in shreds of grubby blanket. “They said they can … spellscribe you if you aren’t healing.”

  “No scrips!” Gale looked past her to Dega. “There must be ships coming to assist you.”

  “Our light is signaling for help. Someone might arrive tomorrow, if winds are fair.”

  “You want to be rid of us; we want to go,” Gale said. “The girl’s to catch the first respectable ride to the Fleet.”

  “Yes, Kir. And you?”

  “Give my ship, Nightjar, until tomorrow evening. If she hasn’t arrived, send me to Erinth, whether I’m conscious, half dead, or a corpse.”

  “Understood, Kir Feliachild.”

  “Well, I don’t understand,” Sophie said. “How can you send me off on my own?”

  “I’ll leave you.” Dega bowed and let herself out.

  Gale struggled for breath. “I must get you back to your home world—”

  “World?” Sophie interrupted.

  She’d broken her aunt’s train of thought: She got a blank stare.

  “It’s not another world,” she said. “The moon’s the same.”

  “You must go home,” her aunt repeated.

  “Eventually, yeah. But you’re hurt—” Her mind was spinning. World? Another world?

  The older woman shook her head. “You can’t stay.”

  “Someone tried to kill you,” Sophie said. “These islanders think they’ll try again. You can’t sail off by yourself.”

  “You’re my bodyguard now? What do you do back on Erstwhile—are you a cop?”

  “Well, no. I’m…” She felt a rush of embarrassment. She’d spent the past four years bouncing between teaching diving classes, guiding mountain-climbing gigs, and going on short-term video shoots aboard scientific research vessels.

  Adventuring, her brother called it. Frittering, her father said.

  “I guess mostly I’m a marine videographer.”

  “I feel so much safer,” Gale wheezed.

  “You need help,” Sophie insisted.

  “If they come after me, what can you do, besides get hurt?”

  “I don’t know. Make some burly sailor guard your cabin door? Scream my head off?”

  A weak smile. “They’d have killed you, girl.”

  Don’t thank me or anything. Sophie bit her tongue. “Okay. Yes, those guys scared the crap out of me. I don’t want to be in another brawl. If something’s gotta try to try to kill me, I prefer it to be an avalanche or … I dunno, hantavirus.”

  “Something impersonal.”

  “You’re helpless. I’m responsible for you.”

  “Responsible…” Gale closed her eyes, long enough that Sophie wondered if she might have passed out. Then she spoke, voice cold. “You saw the bodies, the drowned fishers?”

  Sophie nodded.

  “We brought that on them, you and I. They lost villagers, and half of a critical harvest. Even with aid, they’re going to have a terrible year.”

  “That’s on the guys who tried to kill you.”

  “You prevented the assassination, child. You kept me afloat. You meant well, but had I died in San Francisco there would have been no storm here.”

  Hot tears burned their way down her face.

  “If you stay in Stormwrack, Sophie, you’ll bring trouble to your closest kin. Beatrice, me, your sister Verena—”

  “I have a sister?”

  Gale closed her eyes. “You are going back to your own world—to Zan Francisco—on the fastest ship I can hire. You cannot ever come back.”

  CHAPTER 4

  “Zophie,” Bastien said. “We’ve found a ship for you.”

  He was calling fr
om the base of a low escarpment, one of the ridges that bordered the bay and essentially formed the boundary of the village. The surface was pocked but solid, an easy freeclimb, and she’d scaled about thirty feet to peer into a series of deeper pits and notches that riddled the stone.

  It was a spectacularly beautiful morning. She had awakened from uneasy dreams to find the sun bursting over the horizon, edging a postcard-perfect backdrop of long wispy clouds with gold and orange. The tide was out, revealing a stretch of beach with sands the consistency and color of brown sugar. Ralo and the little kids were already out there, scavenging for crabs and other treasure: things they could eat, things they could make into tools.

  So much had happened since she’d been rejected by her birth mother; Sophie’s mind had been chattering even before she was fully awake. It circled her memories of the fight in the alley: the men with hunting knives, Gale getting stabbed. Remembering the shock of a man’s nose crunching under her camera case made her wince. A pocket watch flying out of Gale’s hand, bouncing behind a Dumpster and the blast of wind, lifting her into the air …

  Finally Sophie had made for the rock wall and begun hoisting herself up.

  Freeclimbing quieted the interior gabble, forcing her attention back to the present. She checked her holds and balance points one after another, remembering that every foot she hoisted herself upward was another foot she’d fall if she screwed up.

  A vertical climb didn’t leave space in the mind for OMG I could’ve been killed! or How could a different world have the same moon as Earth? or Why don’t these women want to know me?

  She’d gone up the rock wall, come down again, and then tried meditating—she’d never been great at it, but she knew the signs of trauma, and it was the only treatment she could think of. When the edge of anxiety faded, she went asking for jobs. Nobody wanted her help.

  She’d finally rejoined Ralo on child care duty, despite a clear “don’t need you” vibe from him.

  But watching children left plenty of energy for chasing the question of magical loads and the possible side effects of having the brain rewired by third world mystics. Within an hour, she was obsessing again: How could a different world have the same moon? Maybe Gale misspoke. Maybe she doesn’t understand how we got here. Wherever here is. Another world? No, can’t be—

  Okay, Sofe, you’re freaking out. Back to the cliff.

  She’d been halfway up, that second time, when Bastien had spotted a lizard above her and gone into a frenzy. He was excited, not freaked out—he clearly coveted the thing.

  Specimen collection was a definite step up from babysitting. Sophie had climbed down and asked about fifty questions: Does it bite? Is it poisonous? How do you usually catch it?

  It wouldn’t make up for the drowned fishers or lost harvest, but the thing was obviously valuable.

  She was beginning to feel more centered as she started up the rock face for a third time.

  Now she peered into one of the holes and was rewarded with a shock of eye contact.

  Taking a slow breath, she checked her footholds again before plunging her right hand into the hole. She caught the lizard behind the head. Cool scaly flesh writhed under her palm. For an instant it seemed as though it might wiggle free, but no—she had it.

  “Zophie, you must come down.”

  Moving gently, so as not to scrape the still struggling creature on the edges of its bolthole, she drew it out into the light.

  It was eighteen or so inches long and had many of the characteristics of an iguana: the same stocky trunk and pit bull proportions, the dewlap, the long toes, which even now were digging into her fingers, working to break her grip. But its coloration was entirely different, its skin a mottled pattern in two browns, one the same mahogany shade as the stone escarpment, the other the lighter, sugary shade of the beach.

  It opened and shut its mouth, glaring at Sophie with yellow eyes as she took it in, a marvel, an alien, a fistful of life. The breeze ruffled her hair and she caught a whiff of flowers from somewhere.

  Gently, she lowered the lizard into a nylon bag from her camera kit. Its weight pulled the drawstring shut, trapping it.

  Shaking out her wrists, one after another, she worked her way down the escarpment.

  “It is a male,” Bastien said, when she had descended to ten feet or so. “Big.”

  “He looks healthy to me.” It was squirming at her hip, not enough to throw her balance off, but with enough zeal that she couldn’t entirely tune out its presence. “Is it for magic?”

  “I use the shed skins to scrip fishers and sailors with better vision.”

  “For trade?”

  He nodded. “It’s been some time since we had a village lizard. People will come to me, for the scribings. They will pay. Thank you.”

  “Think of it as a going away present.” She stepped down to solid ground again and handed him the sack. It felt good to have made herself useful.

  “Your boat is here,” he said.

  Sophie nodded. Every time she had awoken, Gale made it clear that her conviction that Sophie had to leave—and leave immediately—was unshakeable. When it was obvious there was no changing her mind, Sophie had changed tacks, insisting that Gale come visit her at home. “You obviously come to San Francisco to see Beatrice,” she’d argued, just the night before. “You can see me, too.”

  Maybe it wasn’t fair to badger an injured woman, but Gale had agreed. They would meet.

  She’ll see I’m not dangerous, and I’ll get her to introduce me to my sister—half sister, she said—and I can get her to explain in detail about this whole “you must go!” issue. It’ll take time, but I’ll change her mind.

  Her stomach grumbled, trying to quash the little sprout of optimism. All they had for food here was fish broth and pickled moths. Sophie didn’t ask for more. The islanders had to live on this, year in, year out. Because of the storm, because of her and Gale, they’d missed their big annual fish harvest.

  She followed Bastien to his place, where he put the reptile in a wicker cage, murmuring reverent words over it. Then they trooped to the healer’s hut, where Gale was resting. By day it seemed even more ramshackle: The seaweed bundles that made up its roof had patches of rot here and there, and the mud seals between the pieces of driftwood were flaking. That much was true of many of the structures, especially those on the southern edge of the village, which had less shelter from the wind. But the doorframe of Dega’s shack had a bent, cracked look to it that made the whole thing look dispirited, ready to fall.

  She’d hoped to find Gale awake, but she was fast asleep. Her breathing was steadier than it had been a few days before, her face less pale.

  “There’s great strength in her,” Dega whispered. “She will live.”

  Sophie nodded. She’ll make it, and she’ll come to San Francisco, and I’ll talk her ’round …

  Bastien shifted behind her, not so subtly hinting that they should go. Sophie kissed her unconscious aunt’s forehead, then followed the spellscribe.

  “Your things.” She already had the camera bag with her, but Bastien handed her a rag-woven bag containing the handful of biological samples she’d collected. The conch shell he’d used to teach her Fleetspeak was nestled inside.

  “Thank you.”

  “Take care, Kir.” He escorted her to a rowboat and gave her a whisper-frail hug before telling the sailor: “She’s to go to Convenor Gracechild.”

  The little harbor was busy: A number of sailing ships had arrived to give aid to the islanders. The seascape looked like a painting from the Napoleonic Wars. Horatio Hornblower, she thought, as they rowed out to meet them. Her head was throbbing. Now that she was sitting, fatigue from the climb was combining with hunger to leave her a little dizzy.

  At least she’d caught up on her sleep.

  An incoming boat passed on their starboard side.

  The boat bore, as its passenger, one of the most attractive men Sophie had ever seen. He was perhaps thirty, with skin the c
olor of a walnut shell, glossy black curls and a full mouth that made her think, in her hunger-addled state, of ripe plums. His expression was sober and intensely focused.

  Her hand drifted to her camera.

  One of the rowers saw her looking. “Captain Parrish, of Nightjar. Pretty, no?”

  “Nightjar … Gale’s ship?”

  “The cutter.” He pointed it out, a gray, somehow frumpy-looking ship.

  “Is that where we’re going?” Maybe she’d misunderstood; maybe Gale would take her with her after all.

  “No, Kir, we’re for Estrel.”

  Sophie had spent considerable time at sea on various dives, but had only been aboard a proper tall ship once. Now, as she climbed to the main deck under the watchful eye of her sailor escort, she saw this ship wasn’t quite the Age of Sail relic it seemed. The same letters that glowed on her Fleetspeak shell had been carved into the ship’s wheel. It and the masts had a sinewy, organic sheath; the spokes of the wheel reminded her of a bird’s talons. Estrel’s sails were embroidered with gray thread, long gray stitches that gave them the appearance of feathers.

  The figurehead itself was a bird of prey, one Sophie didn’t recognize.

  “More magic?” Excitement pipped, like a newborn chick, over the physical distress. She ran a hand over the rail. It was polished to a high shine and, at first glance, also seemed to have a feathery pattern to it, but under her fingers it felt like varnished wood.

  “Scribed for speed.” A woman—the captain, presumably—answered her unvoiced question. “Estrel’s uncanny good at finding the breeze. We’ll get you to the Fleet in a week.”

  Sophie made herself smile. There were still things to see here, observations she could make.

  Lots of opportunity if you take it. It was what Bram would have said.

  “Are you all right, Kir? Seasick?”

  Starving. “Just … missing my brother.”

  “I’m Captain Dracy,” said the woman.

  “Sophie Hansa.”

  “Of the Verdanii Feliachilds, I understand?”