Across the Darkling Sea

  ACROSS THE DARKLING SEA

  A NOVEL BY

  K. FERRIN

  Across the Darkling Sea

  Copyright © 2016 K. Ferrin

  Published by Pixie9 Press

  All rights reserved. All logos owned by Pixie9 Press

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the copyright owner of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the copyright owner is illegal and punishable by law. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Note:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Design: Ravven Kitsune

  Editing Services: ExLibris Editing

  Interior Design: Tugboat Design

  www.kferrin.com

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Also by

  K. Ferrin

  Novel: Magicless

  To all those who dare to bring their dreams to life.

  CHAPTER ONE

  A velvety mist rose from the canals and waterways of Meuse as Evelyn hurried along. It drifted in thick ropes, painting the pre-dawn darkness with soft smears of gray. She could feel it against her skin like a damp breath, and she couldn’t stop herself from glancing around for the thousandth time since she’d left her house that morning, but the dark and fog kept her surroundings hidden. Everyone in the town could have been lurking there, watching her every move, and she would never have been able to tell.

  She pushed the worry out of her mind and pulled the hood of her cloak forward, burying her head more deeply in its folds. No one knew what she was up to. No one was watching. Her parents’ room had been dark and quiet when she’d snuck by on her way out.

  The agitated thoughts moved aside easily, but she couldn’t stop the cold sliver of fear that pushed through the pulsing heat of her excitement. She’d snuck magic into Meuse before, but nothing like this. Every time before it had been a tiny little trinket—things that barely qualified as magic. But this was very different. She doubted even her mother would be able to save her this time if she were caught. As chancellor, her mother would likely have to be even harsher in dealing out punishment. Every person in Meuse would demand it. If word got out, every person in the entire country would demand it.

  She moved faster, placing her feet carefully to avoid the drumming thump of her knee-high mud boots on the raised wooden walkways of Meuse. If even one person saw her out and about and realized what she was up to, it was over. She hadn’t even dared tell Rudy what she was doing, and he was her closest friend. They’d gotten into every sort of trouble together over the years, but even he drew the line at magic.

  Rudy said his resistance to her reckless fascination with magic was because magic was dangerous and inherently evil. But Evelyn thought it more likely that he feared magic only because he didn’t understand it and couldn’t use it.

  It wasn’t his fault. No one in Brielle could. Whether due to some trick of geography or breeding or something else, the reality was that while everywhere else in the world that Evelyn knew of had magic, Brielle had none. A tragedy in Evelyn’s opinion, a blessing to literally every other person alive in the country. Instead of trying to figure out how to gain magic, Brielle had outlawed all forms within its borders long before anyone living had even been born.

  The only things in Brielle were endless swamplands, groves of zildeschor trees, and in the few places where enough grains of sand had managed to bind together and rise a fraction above the brackish water, grass.

  Almost in the exact center of Brielle, the river port of Meuse huddled on a wide spit of land just above the point where the Lisse River dumped unceremoniously into the Arnhem River before continuing its bloated journey to the sea. Evelyn had lived here her entire life, and it was as featureless and boring as the rest of Brielle.

  Even her own home was boring. Thanks to the zildeschor trees and the schor cloth made from them, Brielle was a wealthy nation. Meuse was even more so, given that it was at the crux of the schor trade. This wealth allowed them to build their homes high and large despite the soggy landscape. Evelyn’s home was big even by Brielle standards, but boring. There was no paint, no color on it anywhere. She used to think the intricate carvings covering it were interesting. Images of zildeschor trees and scenes of people churning the soft bark into valuable schor cloth had been painstakingly etched across every inch of the building, but even that had lost its charm when she’d realized how common such carvings were. The house was a simple square, with simple square windows, sitting on a simple square pile of green-stained rocks. Boring.

  It didn’t matter how much trouble she got in for this. Magic was so much more interesting than anything else in Meuse, or even all of Brielle. She’d risk anything to get her hands on it, to play with it, to see what it could do. Rudy had tried his hardest to talk her out of it, telling her she was a fool to challenge her parents. His parents had died when he was young in a random accident that had nothing to do with magic at all, but it meant that he thought Evelyn should be grateful for her parents in every way, right down to obeying their every word. She hated that he made her feel guilty for her fascination with magic, so she’d just stopped telling him about it. She’d crossed a line with this one, though; even she knew that.

  On her last trip with her father down to Middelhaern on the Brielle sea coast, she’d managed to get her hands on a maish, one of the magical seeds enchanted by the Bremen of Noorland to grow incredibly fast and produce the tastiest fruits, biggest vegetables, or most beautiful flowers in the world. She’d heard about them, of course. Everyone in Meuse had, though most wouldn’t admit to it, the damn fools. But until the trip to Middelhaern, she’d never seen one before.

  Now she had one—one that, according to the woman, would grow into a single enormous flower. The biggest she’d ever seen, and likely ever would see, if the woman could be believed.

  It had been a month since that trip, and from the moment they’d landed back in Meuse, she’d begun preparing for the seed. It required dry earth to grow—something common in Bremen but a rarity in Meuse. She’d snuck out regularly, first piling sopping wet dirt onto an old raft she’d built from wood scraps out in the swamps and then turning it over and over, waiting for it to dry out. She’d even built a small roof over the raft to keep heavy rains from soaking the dirt, or worse, from washing it all away. It’d taken an entire month, but last night, finally, she’d planted the seed.

  The seed itself had been disappointing to look at. Hard. Brown. Oddly curled into the shape of a mountain goat’s horn. There was nothing magical about it as far as she could tell. In fact, every time she looked at the dried curl, she wondered if she’d been scammed. But what did she know? She could count on one hand the number of times she’d seen a seed other than those meant for milling or cooking. The only things that grew in Brielle were the knobby zildeschor tree, a few random grasses, and mold; none of which involved
seeds as far as she knew, and all of which were useless, save the trees. Everything else was imported from Noorland or some other place. Even Rudy’s flowers were brought in aboard riverboats.

  She’d picked the seed up from a quiet woman who had been lurking in a corner of the Shadow Market in Middelhaern. Magic was forbidden there, too, but the wetsmyn never went into the Shadow Market to enforce the laws. It was the only place in Middelhaern that boasted more diverse offerings.

  The woman’s light hair had been tied in a messy braid that stretched down her back clear to her rear. A broad-brimmed hat rested low over her eyes, and her clothing had been covered with vibrantly colored birds in every shape and size. The birds had been embroidered on the fabric in amazing detail and had immediately drawn Evelyn’s eye. The people of Brielle had cloth running through their veins instead of blood, and as much as she hated it, she’d suckled at that same teat for all of her sixteen years.

  The base cloth of the woman’s clothing was schor, of course; everyone wanted the fabric Evelyn’s people made from the soft inner bark of the zildeschor tree. But the birds were sewn into the cloth in a manner Evelyn had never seen before. The detail was extraordinary, down to the texture of the feathers and the beady black dot of an eye. The thread was as fine as anything made in Brielle, and the color…Evelyn had rarely seen color like that anywhere. She’d wondered if the thread was somehow enchanted.

  The cloth is what had caught her eye, but the woman’s wares were what had held her enthralled. Magical seeds, in a dazzling array of shapes and sizes. She’d argued with herself endlessly about which one to buy, but there was never any question she would buy something. She’d debated with herself until she was so short on time she risked her father coming to look for her. Finally, she’d snatched up a single seed, tossed the woman exactly the price she’d asked for without even pretending to negotiate, and hightailed it back to the ship, the boring-looking seed stuffed deep into the pockets of her trousers.

  The woman had told her to push it deep into soil, give it just a drip of water, and the seed would do the rest. The problem was that Evelyn had no idea what “the rest” meant. She had been half convinced the plant would burst out of the dirt and grow to full size all in a matter of minutes once watered, but nothing had happened at all. She’d sat there for two hours, the small patch of dirt the only thing visible in the circle of light cast by her lantern, and in the end she’d left disappointed.

  But she was certain something would have happened by now.

  Soon she was wading through the deep muck of the swamplands around Meuse. It was drier than it should be, which was confusing considering how wet everything had been just yesterday. It was colder than it should be, too—the swamps were usually steaming even before the sun came up this early in the summer. She was thankful for the cloak she’d grabbed off the hook in her room on her way out the door. She’d grabbed it to hide her face; she hadn’t expected to need it for warmth, too.

  Evelyn pushed through the thick plant life and stopped in her tracks. Her little raft was there, but the roof was caved in and tilted sharply to the left, two of the support legs busted.

  She cried out and rushed forward to see if anything was salvageable. She had dried out plenty of dirt, and she held out hope that maybe there was still enough left for the seed to be able to root properly. But it was gone. All of it. Washed back into the soggy grasp of the endless bog that was Meuse.

  She leaned against the base of the little raft and crossed her arms over her chest. She stared at the mess, feeling horribly disappointed. All that work, all that time, all the risk of sneaking out and hiding from everyone she knew, all for nothing.

  It wasn’t just the roof, either, she realized. The entire raft looked as if the only thing keeping it above water was the mat of grasses growing below it. They were tall and tangled, as if they’d been growing for several seasons. An impossibility considering she’d only built this thing a month ago.

  She looked over the remains of her experiment and felt a wash of confusion. There is no way all of this happened last night. At first she’d thought the tightly woven reed roof had simply broken off when the supports fell, but on closer inspection it was clear it had rotted away to nothing. The boards looked soggy enough that she could put a foot through them without even trying. The entire structure looked as if it had been sitting out like this for years, not just a single night.

  For a moment she considered that maybe she’d gotten turned around and this wasn’t her raft at all, but she pushed the thought aside immediately. She knew the marshes better than anyone, and there was no way someone else had built a raft like this out in the middle of nowhere.

  The magic must have backfired somehow. The woman from the Shadow Market must have sold her a fake. Although, she supposed, clearly it had some sort of magic in it, to age everything so dramatically. That was interesting in its own way, but not nearly as interesting as growing a magic plant in the middle of Brielle, where such things were strictly forbidden.

  She picked through the wreckage, the remains of the raft falling into rotten splinters at even the lightest touch. She sifted through the muck looking for the seed, but it was gone; drowning beneath the thick mud and endless water, just like she was.

  She turned to go and ran smack into a broad and muscular chest. Arms closed around her so tightly she couldn’t breathe.

  Fear exploded through her. She’d been caught. Someone had followed her after all. She’d thought the fog would help keep her hidden, but it had hidden someone else all along.

  But the boat was ruined. The seed was gone. There was no proof she’d done anything more than sneak out in the early morning.

  She looked up, expecting to see her father, but instead the square jaw of Hanner met her gaze. He stared back at her, his eyes cold and expressionless.

  “Hanner! What are you doing out here?” she asked, smiling up at him.

  He was good at what he did, which is why her mother had appointed him wetsmyn, but he was also the one person in Meuse Evelyn didn’t like. Square even by Brielle standards, the man was implacable both physically and in his interpretation of the law. She’d snuck hundreds of trifles into Meuse over the years, picking them up in Middelhaern when her father allowed her to travel with him. Harmless magical baubles like rings that changed color with your mood, but Hanner took his role in law enforcement seriously and had taken them all.

  She’d begged, pleaded, cried, screamed. “The law is the law, little miss,” he’d say, voice as flat as the hard planes of his chest.

  When she’d complained to her father, he’d only laughed, ruffled her hair, and told her to stop sneaking into Ruggers to go to the Shadow Market when they were in Middelhaern or he’d stop bringing her with him. She’d stopped going to him for help then—she feared being left behind more than having her toys taken away. She loved her trips to the capital with her father, loved the exotic scents, smells, and people of Middelhaern. But she’d never stopped finding her way to Ruggers and trying to sneak her little treasures past Hanner.

  She’d never gotten one past Hanner until she’d managed to sneak in that seed, and it was clear she wasn’t getting past him now. He said nothing, but shifted his grip, twisting her arms behind her back, his hands clamped around her wrists like cuffs.

  “Ow. Ouch! You’re hurting me! Let me go!” she yelled up at him, struggling in his grasp. She craned her neck back at him as he shoved her along in front of him, but he was so much taller she could only see the bottom of his hairy chin. He ignored her and began walking back toward town, shoving her along a step ahead of him.

  “Let me go, damn you! When my mother hears about this—”

  “Your mother sent me. Why else would I be traipsing out here in this damned mud?”

  That gave Evelyn pause. There are only two things she could think of that would result in her mother sending Hanner to find her. Either something terrible had happened to her father, or she somehow knew what Evelyn had been up to fo
r all these weeks. Both options filled her with dread.

  “Is…is my father okay?”

  There was no way her mother could know what she’d been doing out here. No way, she repeated to herself.

  “Who knows? Man’s a waste of skin, far as I can tell.”

  A waste of skin? Her father? No one would ever say such a thing about her father. He captained the largest fleet of riverboats in all of Brielle. He shipped more schor on his boats than any other single shipper in the country. They’d be one of the richest families in Meuse even without her mother being chancellor.

  Hanner’s comment was confusing, but at least it meant her father wasn’t hurt or dead. She was caught, then. Had to be. She couldn’t think of any other reason her mother would send Hanner.

  She clamped her mouth shut tight and concentrated on the uneven ground beneath her. They couldn’t know about the seed itself, or they would have searched her days ago. They suspect, but they don’t know. If she was smart, she could still find a way out of this.

  She stumbled along, barely able to keep her feet under her. Only Hanner’s tight grip on her wrists still twisted behind her back kept her from falling into the slop. She thought frantically, searching for a story. All she needed was a likely story.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Evelyn remained silent as Hanner dragged her through the swamplands and back into Meuse. His boots clumped loudly as he walked, and Evelyn was certain he made such a clamor on purpose. Nobody naturally walked so loudly.

  The haze had lifted as the first rays of the morning sun stretched across the wide, flat bottomlands of Brielle and lit up the boardwalks of Meuse. The day-shift boatsmyn were at their work, and the boatsmyn they’d just relieved from duty were sipping stew as they lounged at their leisure before seeking their beds. The shopkeeps were out as well, setting out goods and sweeping the night’s debris from the walkways in front of their stores.