Waves ripple outward from the Northlands...
Where once water was scarce, it now springs from the ground, traversing over land to the sea in the west.
Several moons after the breaking of the stone, life is finding new balance in the Northlands. Carin has made her home in Lahivar with Ryd and Sart, and there they watch in awe as the new river reshapes the very surface of the land around them.
But far to the west, the wave of magic wrought by Carin snapping the first stone traveled fast and crashed into a whole new world-a bigger world, and one full of many kinds of power. A woman bereft of name and love. Another carrying the grief of an island on her shoulders. A herald. A seeker. A forgotten history.
There is a moment at the exact instant the receding waters along the shores of the earth meet the force of the moons above and change direction. The sound races around the globe with the rush of a new kind of wave.
The tide is turning, and it brings change to every land and people.
Waves ripple outward from the Northlands...
Where once water was scarce, it now springs from the ground, traversing over land to the sea in the west.
Several moons after the breaking of the stone, life is finding new balance in the Northlands. Carin has made her home in Lahivar with Ryd and Sart, and there they watch in awe as the new river reshapes the very surface of the land around them.
But far to the west, the wave of magic wrought by Carin snapping the first stone traveled fast and crashed into a whole new world-a bigger world, and one full of many kinds of power. A woman bereft of name and love. Another carrying the grief of an island on her shoulders. A herald. A seeker. A forgotten history.
There is a moment at the exact instant the receding waters along the shores of the earth meet the force of the moons above and change direction. The sound races around the globe with the rush of a new kind of wave.
The tide is turning, and it brings change to every land and people.
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Overview
Waves ripple outward from the Northlands...
Where once water was scarce, it now springs from the ground, traversing over land to the sea in the west.
Several moons after the breaking of the stone, life is finding new balance in the Northlands. Carin has made her home in Lahivar with Ryd and Sart, and there they watch in awe as the new river reshapes the very surface of the land around them.
But far to the west, the wave of magic wrought by Carin snapping the first stone traveled fast and crashed into a whole new world-a bigger world, and one full of many kinds of power. A woman bereft of name and love. Another carrying the grief of an island on her shoulders. A herald. A seeker. A forgotten history.
There is a moment at the exact instant the receding waters along the shores of the earth meet the force of the moons above and change direction. The sound races around the globe with the rush of a new kind of wave.
The tide is turning, and it brings change to every land and people.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781948540025 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | BHC Press |
| Publication date: | 12/05/2019 |
| Series: | Stonebreaker , #2 |
| Pages: | 448 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.13(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
ASURASHK 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 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.
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 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.
"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.
"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.
CHAPTER 2SART 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."
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.
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.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Tidewater"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Emmie Mears.
Excerpted by permission of BHC Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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