Page 42 of Dark Water Daughter

“Lads, please,” Demery persisted.

Jack drained his cup and pushed his chair back. “Right.”

Demery nodded towards the side door again and we started off slowly, Athe stalking beside us and blocking me from view.

A shout rang out, followed by the crash of a table and a howl of pain. A few patrons screamed in shock, others in outrage, then madness took the room.

Demery opened the side door. I stole one last glance at Rosser’s handsome, brooding face, barely visible through the chaos of men and women standing to their feet. I couldn’t say what made me look, but the knot in my stomach felt a whole lot like shame.

My resolve, however, was harder than ever. It had to be.

***

A few hours later, I watched Tithe vanish into a veil of snow. My gaze drifted from ship to ship, the turmoil of my thoughts as muffled as the lights of the port.

I leaned against the windows in Demery’s cabin and slipped a hand into the pocket of Rosser’s coat. Cool metal touched my fingers. I withdrew a single coin, long and thin and oval, worn smooth on one side. I didn’t recognize the stamp on the other, which depicted three knotted serpents, each biting one another’s tails. The text around its circumference looked Mereish,though—allswirls and slashes.

Toying with it, I watched the anchored ships as we passed. Spars and yards, decks and lines were coated with sticky snow, and stovepipes trailed smoke into the night. One of those vessels wasHart, I knew. Would Rosser be back aboard, or was he still searching the town? How long would it take for him to realize I’d vanished at the same time as James Demery’s ship?

I turned the coin over in mypalm—once,twice—thenslipped it back into my pocket.

PART TWO

BLACK TIDE, THE—A variant of the original cultus of the Aeadine Mainland, which worshiped pagan deities and revered mages. With sympathies towards heretical Mereish magics, cultists are most widely known for their claims to amplify the magic of mages who undergo their rituals. Magni and Stormsingers are frequently subjected to various forms of physical torture, meant to expand the sorcerous mind through suffering or loss of senses. Sooths are often drugged until their connection with the Other is irreparably broadened, and they can no longer reside fully in the human world. All these rituals, according to their beliefs, must take place during the moonless nights and high tides of spring, hence the title of THE BLACK TIDE. The efficacy of their rituals is highly debated, and their practices formally outlawed under King Edmund in 1655. See alsoMOON WORSHIPERS, AEADINE CULTS.

—FROMTHE WORDBOOK ALPHABETICA: A NEW

WORDBOOK OF THE AEADINES

SIXTEEN

Defiance

SAMUEL

Isat on the deck in my cabin, eyes closed, skin prickling through my shirt. The woodstove had long burned down. Cold wrapped its fingers across my arms and made the fine hairs inside my nose tickle, but it kept me rooted in my flesh as the Other welled.

I needed the cold as an anchor, now more than ever. The Mereish coin was no longer in my pocket, ready to soothe my nerves, dispel my curse and keep me in the human world. It was gone. So was Mary Firth, and with her our only lead to Lirr.

What I told her had been the truth. Lirr was a Sooth, and he would be able to track her in the Other now that he had touched her.

So could I. One brush of our hands when she reached for her wine, and we were irreparably bound.

I stretched my neck one way, then the other, pushing out my frustration in a long, misting breath. My thoughts of the Stormsinger were insidious, and not in the way I needed them to be. I had to find her, not dwell on whether she’d gone to Demery willingly, or the way the firelight played down the curve of her cheek. She was a task, a goal, and a thief.

Anger stirred, along with an irrational feeling of betrayal. I had been kind to her, genuinely tried to do the right thing, and she had stolen from me. I had failed Slader again, and my position onHartwas more tenuous than ever.

Off in the town, a church bell began to ring. With each peal I barreled my emotions away, narrowing my focus to my breath, the cold and the Other.

That second world rushed in, preceded by a vanguard of thin, fragmentary visions and the sensation of fallingasleep—myconsciousness waxing and waning with every heartbeat. Then, between one breath and the next, an invisible tether snapped and the Other swallowed me like a whale from the deep.

I opened my eyes. Just like last time,Hart’s bulwarks and deck thinned to transparency, and I was alone save for the lantern with its sleeping dragonflies. The Dark Water surrounded me, its surface occasionally punctuated by swaths of moving, shifting light. But this time, I could see the land surrounding theharbor—ifanything in the Other could be called land.

Smooth sandbanks and stretches of flooded forest reached as far as the eye could see. There was no ocean at my back anymore, just more shoulders of opalescent sand and tufts of copper-black grasses, pulsating with the light of the free dragonflies that converged there. In the otherdirection—whatwould have been the mainland, in the humanworld—theghisten trees of Tithe reached into the Other’s bruised sky. Three muted suns cast light and shadow across the Wold. But those shadows were gnarled, twisted things, dancing across the surface of the water, and the trees here had no leafy canopies or rustling boughs.

This was the Dark Water, the Other, where ghisten trees’ true roots spread, ancient, tangled, and full of sapphire ghisting spirits. The creatures lingered and swirled, separated and entwined, weaving the patterns of a daily life I could not fathom, while dragonflies skimmed across the water around them in streams of gold and purple.

The dragonflies in my own lantern stirred and fluttered, perhaps sensing their free cousins through the barrier between worlds. I considered releasingthem—thesight of the creatures behind glass had always saddenedme—butSlader would just buy more.

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