Child of a Hidden Sea Read online

  “Um … I guess that’s technically true.”

  “A Verdanii princess, eh?”

  Sophie turned. The man who had just come up from below was dressed like the hero on the cover of a romance novel. Tanned, with flowing golden hair and a toothy grin, he wore an open-collared peasant shirt and tight tan breeches.

  “No princesses here,” Sophie said. And what are you, the ship’s gigolo?

  Dracy cleared her throat. “This is Lais Dariach of Tiladene … another passenger. Lais, Kir Sophie Hansa.”

  “You must be somebody, Kir,” he said. “We’re dropping everything to rush you to the Fleet—”

  “All that makes me is inconvenient,” she said. “To my aunt, to the islanders, and apparently to all of you. Believe me, if I’d known chasing my past was gonna drop me in a fantastic new ecosystem that I’m not allowed to explore, I’d have stayed home and rewatched Veronica Mars.”

  Lais rocked back on his heels, seeming baffled. “Beg your pardon, Kir.”

  “It’s okay: I’m joking, sorta.” Sophie upended the rag bag onto the deck, shaking its contents free so she could toss it down to the departing rowers. The Stele Islanders were so poor that even a woven bag was a sacrifice.

  Lais caught her conch before it could bounce across the deck. “Careful, Kir! You don’t want to break the intention.”

  “What? If it breaks, I won’t understand Fleetspeak anymore?”

  Dracy and Lais exchanged a look.

  “I’m not from around here, okay?”

  “Well … yes,” Lais said, bemused. “The purpose of the spell lays within the inscription.”

  She bundled it in her skirt. “I’ve been keeping samples in it.”

  “We’d better lock it in your cabin.” Dracy picked up Sophie’s collected bits and pieces, leaving her the camera case, and led her aft.

  Sophie followed, automatically falling into walking with, rather than against, the rhythm of the ship’s movement. “You came to help the islanders?”

  “As we’re able. We gave them some salted fish and a few barrels of preserved onions. I’m leaving my diver behind to see if they can raise one of the downed ships. We’ll pick up more food and swing back, after we’ve dropped you off.”

  Estrel had already caught a fresh breeze. Her sails filled, and she made for the open ocean beyond the bay.

  “Were you caught in the storm?”

  “Skirted it,” Dracy said. “We were headed out toward Zunbrit Passage with Lais. It was an evil clash of winds, Kir. My mate and cook saw towers of lightning, spun between the water and cloud. It blew up of a sudden and was gone just as fast.”

  “But you’re okay? No damage?”

  “Estrel saw us through,” Dracy said, laying a hand on the bulkhead with obvious affection. “And here we are.”

  “Home sweet home, huh?” The cabin was small, a triangular closet, well aft, with a peculiar, heavy portal. Its substance was glassy, but it was thick and its texture was rough. It was more translucent than transparent, with a dark tint.

  “Is this obsidian?”

  “Yes, from Erinth. Stow that scrip here,” Dracy said, opening a small locked cabinet and offering her a linen handkerchief to wrap the conch shell in.

  “It’s not that fragile.”

  “It names you, Kir.” Dracy explained. “A certain amount of discretion is … customary.”

  “Meaning what? Someone needs my name to do a spell on me?”

  “Exactly. Lais and two of my crew have seen it already, as have I. You should conceal it from now on.”

  Sophie ran a hand over the glowing copper script on the shell, fighting a momentary urge to dash the thing against the wall. It was hardly worth it to know Fleetspeak if she was being packed off home.

  That’s not true. The inner voice, the one that sounded as much like Bram as herself, argued. The language itself is an artifact. A good linguist might make links between Fleetspeak and the tongues of home.

  Not to mention that the shell could serve as a sample of the magical writing. Cheered, she locked the conch in the cupboard.

  “Perhaps, too, since you’re an outlander…”

  What else had she done? “Yes?”

  “Lais Dariach … he’s from Tiladene.”

  Tiladene. That word was on one of Gale’s coins. “You said that. So?”

  “They’re somewhat … promiscuous.”

  The significant look on Dracy’s face made her want to giggle. “You mean sexually promiscuous?”

  “They don’t believe in marriage—in faithfulness.”

  “Okay, got it. Your other passenger—”

  “Lais.”

  “Lais is from Friends with Benefits Island.” Planet of the Polyamorous Sluts, she thought, lightheaded. Didn’t the Star Trek guys used to go somewhere like that for shore leave?

  And then: A little shore leave wouldn’t be the worst idea I ever had. And he is cute.

  Not as cute as that guy in the rowboat.

  “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  Artifacts. Samples. Lots of opportunity to learn. “I’d love to see some charts. I don’t know this area.”

  “Of course, Kir. This way.”

  Still carrying the camera case—she figured her battery might be good for another fifteen shots—she followed Dracy up to the pilot house, where she unrolled a map of currents and islands.

  “This is our position and bearing. Stele is here…” She indicated a small hump to the north-northeast.

  “We’re making for the open ocean?”

  “The Fleet is on its spring tour to the islands of Greatwater; we’ll rendezvous around here.” Dracy tapped the map.

  Spring. It’s spring at home, too. “How many days until the equinox?”

  “Seventeen.”

  She bent over the chart. Since recognizing the moon, Sophie had been convinced that seeing a good map would orient to the geography of the area her aunt had called Stormwrack. This was some little unheard-of archipelago of islands, had to be. Yes, she’d been flung across the planet in the blink of an eye, and yes, there were some animal species she didn’t recognize. But another world? Come on.

  Same moon, same gravity, same pelicans, same Earth. Gale’s wrong.

  She knew magic existed: It made sense that the Stormwrackers kept themselves hidden.

  None of the landmarks on this map matched anything she knew, though.

  “Do you have anything with a smaller scale?”

  “A world chart?”

  “Exactly.”

  Dracy’s brow knitted. Rummaging in the cupboard, she found a page the size of a placemat, colored with a crude enthusiasm that hinted it was a kid’s school project. “Does this help?”

  “Yes, thank you,” Sophie said, but she was lying. There were continents at the north and south poles, all right, but the oceans between them were massive, laced with fairy-rings of islands, small and large. The biggest of the land masses wasn’t quite as as big as Australia. And Europe, North and South America, Africa … where the hell are they?

  “Kir Sophie?”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just—I’ve seen projections of land losses to global warming. In one, the water rose two hundred meters, and I could still make out the continents. Where’s Asia? Where are the Rocky Mountains?”

  “I don’t understand ‘Asia,’ I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t understand?” She fumbled out the camera and photographed the map. The battery light blinked at her, dying, dying. Shutting off the camera, she gaped at the map again. “Okay, maybe we’re not in Kansas, Toto.”

  “I don’t know Kansas. This is the Northwater.” Dracy stubbed her finger down on the northwest quadrant of the page. “Our position.”

  Sophie took a moment to put her camera away, fumbling the case open, shoving Gale’s courier pouch aside—she’d forgotten to return it.

  Ask for some food, Sofe. Bram’s voice again. Your mood’s swinging like this because you’re being an idi
ot.

  She didn’t deserve food. She’d drowned those islanders.

  “Northwater. So … north?” She tapped the top of the map. “South, down here? East, west?”

  “Yes, of course. But that little chart’s no use for day-to-day navigation,” Dracy said gently. “If you want it…”

  “It’s almost all water,” she murmured. The child’s rendering of the map showed chains of islands, hundreds of them, and no real continental masses at all. Even the biggest landmasses were mere lumps at this scale; if this was even somewhat accurate, there wasn’t an island on this world that had even the area of Australia.

  “Thanks,” she said. And then, just to change the subject: “Where were you taking Lais?”

  “It was a speculative venture, Kir—we’re a salvage ship. He hired us to help recover some stolen goods.”

  “Transporting me’s messed that up?”

  “It’s not just you. His goods are sunk, and I loaned my diver to Stele.”

  “Sunk at what depth?”

  “Forty, fifty feet down.”

  She paused, toying with the map that made no sense and looking at a shell someone had nailed to the wall of the pilot house. It had the reptilian pattern and texture of tortoise shell, and the shape of a clam.

  What the hell. I can’t go yet, not if— “Forty feet … a person could free-dive that, if she knew what she were doing.”

  “We’re to take you straight to the Fleet,” Dracy said.

  “The dive site’s not even remotely on the way?”

  “Perhaps a day or two out of it.” Her eye fell on something in Sophie’s camera bag—the courier pouch. “Could you override our orders, Kir?”

  “Why not? I didn’t mean to screw up your plans.”

  Dracy brightened. “We’ll discuss it with Lais over dinner.”

  “Dinner?”

  So much for playing it cool: The captain looked as though a flashbulb had gone off in her face. “Oh, Kir Sophie. I should have thought.”

  She went on another rummage through the cupboards, this time coming up with an oilcloth packet that smelled faintly of bacon.

  Sophie’s stomach growled audibly as Dracy handed it over. Inside was a pressed cake that looked like it was made of unidentifiable fish, seeds, and bread—a salted ball of oil, protein and crunchy flour.

  “Slowly,” Dracy said. “I’ll have the cook get onto a meal right away. Milk, soup.”

  Sophie nodded, forcing herself to chew. The seeds tasted like sesame; after days with little but broth, the flavors seemed amplified, so intense they all but burned her mouth.

  “Come,” Dracy said. “We’ll dine early and the Tiladene can tell you his troubles.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The story on Lais—besides his apparently being some kind of bisexual Lothario—was that he worked for a cooperative of horse breeders whose prize stallion had recently retired from an inter-island racing circuit.

  “We mean to put him out to stud, of course. I’d set up his first pairing with a very exalted mare. But he’s suddenly grown…” His eye wandered to Captain Dracy. “Docile.”

  “Like a gelding?”

  “Like a lamb.”

  “I don’t suppose maybe he’s having trouble adjusting to retirement?”

  “We got a ransom note two weeks ago,” Lais said. “Silesian has been scripped infertile.”

  “Scripped. Someone learned the horse’s name, then wrote up a magical … intention, was it?”

  “Intention, yes,” Lais said.

  “And now Silesian can’t get it up?”

  “Better him than me,” Lais said.

  Dracy clattered a salt shaker and cleared her throat. The message was clear: No flirting.

  They were finishing off the remains of a cod and mussel stew and a dish of roasted, buttery fava beans, wiping up their plates with the remains of a hearty rye bread. Every bite had lifted Sophie’s spirits. She felt like her best self again: calm, optimistic, able to deal with whatever came her way. “The bad guys are holed up in this Zunbrit Passage?”

  “No, they’re long gone. We paid the ransom and they gave me the scrip’s location. It’s sunk near one of the Zunbrit sea mounts.”

  “You paid, just like that?”

  “Silesian’s appointment with Balletic is soon.”

  “Balletic’s the mare?”

  He nodded. “We didn’t want to lose face by breaking contract, so paying the ransom seemed expedient. The more so because I wanted the issue resolved quickly. Horses are the family business, but I have a side project.”

  “Problem is, I loaned my diver to Stele,” Dracy said.

  “Dracy says you can countermand the diversion,” Lais said. “And if you can, as you say, free-dive…”

  “I do have to go home,” Sophie said, trying to deploy her nonexistent poker face. “My brother’ll notice I’m gone eventually. But…”

  “Yes?” Lais slid a tray of what looked like cream puffs across the table at her.

  “Not to be rude, but you’re rich, right?”

  They both seemed taken aback, but she pressed on. “You paid this ransom, you’ve commissioned Dracy, and you’re in a hurry. This is kind of a big deal for you.”

  “True.”

  “If I get this scrip back for your horse,” Sophie said, “could you buy some food for those islanders, once I’ve gone home? I’m not asking you to beggar yourself, just to do whatever you can. The storm … Someone was after my aunt; their harvest is lost and it’s our fault.”

  Whatever breach of etiquette she’d committed, the request seemed to amend it: Both Lais and Dracy relaxed.

  “My word on it, Kir,” he said. “Whether you succeed or not.”

  “I’ll pull it off.” She accepted the cream puff at last, raising it in a mock toast. “Let’s divert the ship.”

  That night, she lay in the confines of her small cabin, swinging in the hammock—which was vastly more comfortable than the pallet she’d borrowed on Stele Island—and trying to will her camera battery back to life. She’d used the last of her juice shooting a dusky gray-purple seabird, and a spidery crab the crew had hauled up from the depths. Now she’d been reduced to taking bad pictures with Gale’s phone, queuing them up to send to her e-mail account at home. She was still firing off the occasional text to Bram, too, just to jolly herself up:

  Bad news, Bro: UR gonna have to maybe rethink some physics.

  Message will be sent when we return to service area, the phone replied.

  OTOH, Good news: I’m not as crazy as initially reported.

  Bram might disagree with that one. He had had enough therapy over the years to come away with the idea that everyone was fundamentally neurotic.

  Her brother was a bona fide kid genius. He’d finished high school when he was twelve and had been working on his second undergraduate degree, two years later, when he came out to their parents. Dad had decided a teen whiz kid who was also gay was someone with too much to cope with, and packed him off to a doctor to talk it all through.

  If she could only have one week on Stormwrack, Sophie wished Bram could have been around to share it. The magic would offend his sense of an ordered universe—at heart, her brother was an engineer. But he might have some idea why Stormwrack’s moon was the same, so indisputably, Earthily familiar, when its land masses were jumbled beyond recognition.

  I’ll get back. Gale’s already promised she’ll get to know me. We’ll talk her into letting us have a proper look around, him and me. So little land mass, and it sounds like it’s mostly one country to an island … She dozed off contemplating the map, falling into thick, dreamless and restful sleep.

  A tap at the cabin’s hatch woke her. “Zunbrit Passage, Kir.”

  She made her way up to the main deck and found that Estrel had dropped anchor. To the stern, the water was pewter and foam, the waves breaking over a series of jagged rocks that extended eastward in a winding, dangerous-looking line. Most of the rocks were scoured bare by
the water. One was just big enough to host a few dozen petrels.

  Her pulse raced as she looked at the birds. They resembled Leach’s storm petrel, a species she’d filmed in New Zealand. There was another bird, almost identical to the Leach’s, that had recently become extinct.

  Which species was this? Any number of organisms that had died out at home might survive here, wherever here was. The thought was so exciting it very nearly hurt.

  One of the birds dropped off the sea mount and started dabbling in a stretch of shallow water at its base, almost dancing on the water’s surface as it fished.

  “Sophie?”

  She shook herself back on task. “Just thinking.”

  The crags and islets were the tip of a great mountain range. They were mostly too small to sustain larger animals; they wouldn’t be good for much besides wrecking ships. Sophie thought: I can see why they used it as a ransom drop. Lots of cracks and crannies.

  “Captain, do you have a dive locker? Equipment?”

  “After a fashion.” Dracy led Sophie amidships and down. The room was all but empty. “I left the best of our salvage equipment on Stele with Boris, my diver,” she explained, apologizing.

  “You must have something—a snorkel?”

  “Don’t usually need ’em,” Captain Dracy said. “Boris is a merman.”

  “He breathes water? Are you serious?”

  Dracy nodded.

  “Wouldn’t that have been something to catch on video?”

  “I don’t know video, Kir.”

  Hell with whether Gale wants me, I will get back here, Sophie thought.

  She quashed the urge to ask five thousand questions about mermen and magic, instead looking over what was left in the locker. Tanks and a regulator would have been too much to ask, but there was a decent mask—it appeared to be made of a dried sea jelly—and a pair of flippers that might have been carved from the cartilage of some massive creature. Plus plenty of rope, floats, and flags.

  The fins were short—not quite right for a free dive, but they’d do. She scooped them up and headed topside.

  “My heroine,” Lais said, as she emerged. “Savior of my honor.”

  “Your horse’s honor, anyway,” she said, leaning against the rail so she could put the flippers on.