Page 14 of Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear

“The harbormaster will explain it all, I promise.” Borya looked to Inna. “Sing us home.”

“Of course.” Inna leaned over the side again. This time, the song she started was faster and jauntier, filled with interior rhymes that set an almost-galloping rhythm. The other fishers joined in, and Nadya found herself wishing she knew the words, that she might do the same.

Oh! to be a fisher on and under this great river! To sail a ship on turtle-back and see the world from both sides of the water! It would be a glorious thing indeed! The things they had said were fragmented and strange, but still, they stuck with her, making her think that perhaps this could be her future—a turtle for a companion, like Inna, and a good ship beneath her, carrying her to whatever destinations she desired. She didn’t yet know this place or these people well enough to know whether she wanted to stay there forever, but she didn’t find the idea unattractive in the shape it had to offer her.

Yes. She could be happy here.

Vasyl changed the angle of his swimming, going from a straight line to a spiral, gently winding his way toward the nearest of those tall, lace-wrapped towers. It drew closer with daunting speed, until the lacy docks looked less like decoration and more like the functional structures they were, bustling with people carting baskets of fish and strange vegetables and piles of nets, lined with little stalls and individual docking posts. The expected boats were tied up there, with space beside them for their turtles, who ate out of vast troughs offish and greenery, occasionally lifting their massive heads to converse with the people passing by.

It looked very much like paradise to Nadya. She bounced in place, fighting the urge to jump off the boat and swim to the dock. Only the fact that water seemed to turn to air without warning here, and she didn’t really know how to swim, kept her where she was. Inna smiled indulgently.

“I felt the same way when I first saw Belyyreka,” she said. “Patience, child. You’re home now. The Drowned are never cast aside.”

Nadya tamped down her excitement as they pulled up to the dock, and Borya hopped out, tying up the boat before releasing Vasyl from his bonds, murmuring thanks to the great turtle as he swam up from beneath them and moved into position at his trough. Nadya swallowed. He was sobig,bigger than any turtle she’d ever imagined could exist in the entire world. And he was beautiful, dark green with yellow streaks down the sides of his head, and big orange eyes that made her think fall must be the sweetest season.

“H-hello,” she said, as politely as she could manage.

Those big orange eyes fixed on her. “Hello, Drowned Girl,” said the turtle Vasyl. “Have you had a grand adventure?”

“I don’t think so,” said Nadya. “I had a journey, but I didn’t have an adventure, not really. I didn’t save anything important or find anything that had been lost.”

“You saved yourself,” said Vasyl. “I would think that is the most important adventure of all.”

Nadya, who had never thought of it that way, said nothing, only sat in weighted silence as the turtle continued, “And you found Belyyreka, the Land Beneath the Lake, which many say has been lost forever.”

“There’s no lake,” protested Nadya. “I didn’t see any lake at all. I fell into a pond and washed up in a river. Those aren’t the same as lakes.”

“But youdidsee the lake, if you looked up at all,” said Vasyl. “The surface of it stretches above the clouds, and the bravest of us can swim that high if they are quick, if they are clever and strong, if they desire to know what dry air tastes like in their throats. This whole land is a Drowned Land, and you are a Drowned Girl, for nothing breathes the air in Belyyreka, only different weights of water.”

Nadya blinked at the turtle, and when Borya came to help her out of the boat, she went without question or complaint, letting him lead her along the dock, away from the boat. Only as they were approaching a long, low building with lights burning in the windows—and how could anything burn there, at the bottom of a river? How could any of this be possible?—did she look at him and ask, “Are we really all drowned here?”

“Of course,” he said, voice soft. “What else would we be?”

Straightening, he yelled, “Harbormaster! A door-swept daughter for your custodianship!”

The door opened. A broad, smiling man with a beard like a bush appeared, blocking most of the light.

He gestured, and Nadya went inside.

8THE LAND BENEATH THE LAKE

THE HARBORMASTER’S NAMEwas Ivan, which seemed like the best and most serviceable of names to Nadya, who allowed herself to be led into his small, cozy study, with its chairs upholstered in buttery leather and candles burning all around the edges of the room. He saw her frowning at the fire like it was entirely incomprehensible, and he smiled.

“Let me guess; you don’t understand how fire can burn beneath the surface of a river?”

“I don’t understand how a river can run under a lake, or how we can breathe and not die. We don’t have gills like fish do; we shouldn’t be able to survive here, unless someone has been lying to me.” Nadya fixed him with a hard gaze. “If I’ve been underwater since I fell into the pond, I should be as dead as any victim of the rusalki by now. How is this happening?”

“At least you aren’t trying to claim it’s not,” said the harbormaster, and took a seat in one of the chairs, gesturing for her to do the same. “Some of the door-swept begin by denying everything that’s happening around them, claiming that because it doesn’t fit the world as they understand it to work, it can’t be true. That gets tiresome fairly quickly.”

“A giant frog came out of the river and ate my arm,” said Nadya. “I don’t think pretending it didn’t happen would do me any good, and if that happened, then everything else is happening, too.” Talking foxes and lakes in the sky and giant turtles and all.

And admittedly, she reallywantedthe giant turtles to be happening. She wanted it more than she’d ever wanted almost anything.

The harbormaster nodded. “Do all children have detachable arms where you come from?”

“No. It was a prosthetic—a tool made to look like an arm, to fill the gap where people thought an arm was meant to be.” Nadya waved the stump of her right arm in his direction, making sure he saw it. “I was born without one.”

“You seem to be doing quite well for all of that.”

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