I methodically divested myself of my outer clothing. I unbuttoned my frock coat and waistcoat with fingers that trembled with anxiety. I pulled off my cap and unwound my scarf—it felt too much like a noose, anyway—and sat on the deck on my side of the canvas divide.
I toyed with the worn coin, trying to sap some last thread of comfort from the talisman. The peace of it, the way my senses settled, reminded me of Mary’s song. My concern for the Stormsinger redoubled.
I slipped the coin back into my pocket, closed my eyes, and opened my mind.
The Other’s dark waters rushed into my head as if through a fractured hull. It came with a roar and a hiss and a deeper, more profound cold—the cold of midwinter nights and forgotten tombs.
The human world dissipated until all but the walls of the ship vanished. The ghisting-saturated wood retained some of its solidity, but allowed me to see through it to the endless, black sea and twisted, upside-down forests of the Other. The dragonflies in their lantern remained too, dozing and pulsing with the same soft glow as they had in the waking world.
Anyone entering my cabin right now would see nothing amiss. I would still be sitting there on the floor, fully clothed and breathing steadily. But my mind, my self, was in the Other.
I was visible on the Other side too, though my clothing was not. I was left naked, clad only by a Sooth’s earthy green light; I was stripped bare in a world where I did not belong. A world of monsters and visions, where past and future had little meaning.
A world where, without the coin in my pocket, I could easily become trapped.
Lights began to appear, visible through the transparent wood of the ship. Some were in the water, dark and gently shifting. Some were in the murk of a starless night sky. Some clung to the huge, twisted trunks and branches of a distant forest, a forest with no leaves or boughs, just knotted roots where they ought to have been. I was too far away to see the details of that Wold, but I had visited ones like it before. I knew how the Dark Water perpetually washed around their roots, and how they sheltered an endless array of monsters.
One of the lights in that flat, endless sea was myself—my deep, woodland green. Another was the Hart himself, our ship’s ghisting. He was at rest, ensconced within the stag figurehead and radiating soft blue. Many of the other lights were a similar color: the gentle indigo of ships’ ghistings, trapped in the human world, and the sapphire blue of free ghistings roaming the Dark Water.
Other lights were amber, teal, burnt orange, white or grey. Most of them were distant, in or beyond the forest.
I forced my breath out in a long, settling gust. A clock began to tick in the back of my mind, and I went to work.
Lirr. I pictured him as I imagined him to be: middle-aged and plain, with the sunbaked, weathered skin of every Aeadine sailor and the coiled muscles of the violent and bloodthirsty. I conjured his victims in my mind’s eye too—burned ships, bloated bodies shredded by torture as much as sharks and morgories. Seaside towns in flames. Mutilated prisoners set adrift as warnings to the rest of the world.
My internal clock chimed and I scanned the lights on the horizon to make sure none were closing in. They danced impassively, the waves of the Other slapped against the hull, and I was undisturbed.
Good. I changed my imagining of Lirr, trying to find the combination of vision and feeling that would connect the pirate and I. But as I had told Slader, it was impossible. In theory, I could locate any mage with connection to the Other—and Lirr was a mage, we knew—but not without touching them first.
Prove your worth or get the hell off my ship.
Panic and cold prickled into my flesh. I ran my mind over my limbs back in the waking world, reassuring myself of my connection to them, and sunk deeper into the Other.
The lights grew brighter. My limbs grew lighter. I made a soft sound of dread—half groan, half grunt—and refocused. Lirr. Fire. Blood.
Snaking, orange light.
I spun, coming halfway to my feet and bracing myself on the insubstantial deck. Inside the lantern, the dragonflies awoke with a start. Their light tripled and their wings made a hushed, rattling drone.
Something surged through the dark water towards me, quick as a snake in the grass, though far bulkier and many-limbed. It was the fodder of my every childhood nightmare, reflections of days spent trapped in this realm as a sick, frightened young boy. Only the coin in my pocket had saved me then, and only it could save me now.
I shoved my hand into my pocket. But there was no pocket here, just cold, ethereal flesh. I was too far into the Other, my connection to my true body too thin.
I forced myself back into the real world one breath at a time, ears roaring, heart thundering. Finally, the Other faded. In my last glimpse of that world I saw the orange light slow, disoriented, and drift east.
I slipped into my own bones, only to immediately lose grip again. I clung to the divide between worlds, the edge where time had no meaning and Sooths like myself could see the future, the past and present. I tried to lurch past it, tried to get free before the visions came, but I was not fast enough.
Images assaulted me, fragmented and stark: Mary Firth holding a pistol to a man’s head on a dusky road; Charles Grant with a bloodied face; and myself in a summer Wold of lording ghisten trees.
I fumbled the coin out of my pocket and locked it into my palm. The visions cleared, the world righted, and my back hit the deck with a thud. I lay as still as I could, panting up at the ceiling.
I blinked the visions away, sending the one of Mary and the pistol last. That was odd, to be sure. But I saw dozens like them every day, about anyone and anything around me, and interpreting them was routinely futile.
I cannot find Lirr. The words rang through my head, as true as they had ever been. Maybe a better Sooth could have done it, even without having met the pirate. Maybe a better Sooth could slip to and from the Other with ease, without fear of being trapped. A better Sooth could make peace with their premonitions, living a step ahead of the rest of the world, unstoppable and immeasurably valuable. But I was only myself, fractured, and imperfect.
And stuck. If I came back to Slader without results, by tomorrow I would be abandoned on Whallum’s docks, alone and freshly disgraced. I would lose my best chance to redeem myself in the eyes of the world, my family, and myself.
Anger burned away some of my anxiety and cold, replacing it with smoldering indignation. I pressed my fist into my aching chest and closed my eyes.
Well, then. If Slader threatened me and asked for impossible results, I would give him the next best thing—even if my conscience roiled at the idea.
A lie.
*
“You’re sure he was bound for Tithe?” the captain asked, watching me from his seat at the table in his cabin. A view of the snowy coastline stretched beyond him, partially blocked by a half-drawn curtain.
“I cannot speak with absolute certainty,” I cautioned, “but there is nothing else like him in this region of the sea.”
“Good enough,” the older man said with a nod, and I could tell that he was pleased—not necessarily with me, but with this change in fortune. “See the ship readied for departure, then get some rest, Mr. Rosser.”
The Girl from the Wold
The Girl from the Wold is drowning. She flails and panics, naked beneath her shift in the black water of the midnight millpond.