“A few hundred years ago, Usti settlers used ghisten wood from their ships to build homes.” Demery nodded back to the jumbled roofs and rising hearth smoke of the town. “A dangerous decision, true, one that went ill for many others in the past. But here, the humans and the ghistings found an accord. The ghistings vowed to protect the island in exchange for not being sent back to sea—and a ghisting’s vow can never be broken, not unless the other party breaks it first. The humans kept their end of their bargain, and eventually new ghisten trees started to grow. Here, ghistings and humans live in harmony.”
I looked up at the sweep of the ghisten ash’s branches over my head.
“Ghistwolds like this sprout where many ghistings converge,” Demery continued, looking at the tree instead of me. “If there’s a Mother Tree’s seed among them, anyway. So now, all who’d visit Tithe must pay their respects to the island’s rulers: the port mistress, and the ghistings.”
“All who visit? Will your entire crew come here?”
“If they intend to stay a night on shore,” Demery said with a nod. He turned, indicating the other trees in the graveyard, and the glint of coins told me they’d undergone the same tradition. “I told you, Tithe needs no forts, no castles. The ghistings guard this place. It is The Tithe to the Sea—both our Winter Sea, and the Dark Water.”
The Dark Water. That was what sailors called the Other, the realm where ghistings, morgories, implings and even lantern dragonflies originated. It was also where Stormsingers, like me, sourced their power.
I ran my fingers across the coin-mottled bark of the ash. Branches clacked and the sound of the sea rushed past my ears, but as I began to sing under my breath, the wind, for once, subsided.
Demery watched me keenly, noting the change in the wind as I began to circle the ash, trailing my hand as I went.
The bite of the cold faded. I found a narrow spot of unbroken bark between a Mereish dette and an unrecognizable tin piece, then tapped my offering into place.
When I finished, I passed the hammer back to the pirate and he hung it on an iron hook. Then, desperate to recapture the feeling of the Wold, I pressed both palms into the bark of the tree.
I closed my eyes and instinctively reached. The impulse might have unnerved me, but before I could acknowledge it, I saw something with my mind’s eye—a trumpeting angel with bladed wings, his face forever frozen in a pious, heavenward gaze. The tree’s ghisting. A guardian. A herald. A warrior.
My hands pressed harder into the bark and ridges of coins, palms and fingers spread. The pull that had drawn me to the tree now dragged me deeper, reaching out with ethereal lines of communication—a mixture of emotion, thought and memory.
The angel’s eyes abruptly clapped onto my face.
Sister.
All the breath left my lungs.
With impossible grace, the angel reached through the wood to place a palm against mine.
Images slammed into my mind, so rapid and vivid that I gasped. In one moment, I saw centuries of memories. I saw dragon-headed longboats, junks and great hundred-gun Capesh warships. I saw gun smoke and blood. I saw a younger, sparser Tithe growing along the shore. I saw saplings with roots that went not into soil, but through the fabric of one world and into the Other. The Dark Water.
Sister.
My knees wavered, but my fingers dug into the coin-laden bark. More images came, but I sensed that they did not originate from the tree. They came from me, images of fire and Lirr’s fingers upon my chin.
“Ms. Firth.” A hand closed on my upper arm and I squinted into Demery’s face. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Just… dizzy,” I said, though in truth I couldn’t describe what had happened. I’d sensed ghistings before, but this had felt like a conversation of images and feelings, along with that single word, Sister.
“Do ghistings speak?” I asked suddenly. “Everyone in the Wold… my Wold… says they don’t. My mother said so too.”
I expected the captain to laugh, or worse look at me with pity over my ignorance of the world. But instead, he inquired in a voice that suggested he already knew the answer, “The ash spoke to you?”
I shook the snow from my skirts. There was no hiding it, given my reaction to touching the tree. “Yes.”
Demery did smile then, a nearly invisible crinkle in the corner of his mouth. His hand, still on my arm, released. “It’s more common than one might think, if one knows how to listen. You’re a child of the Wold, a Stormsinger tied to the Dark Water.”
That wasn’t far off my own reasoning. I still didn’t trust the pirate, but I saw little reason for him to lie about this. Relieved, my breath came a little easier. “Do you hear your ship’s ghisting?”
“Harpy?” Demery shoved his hand back into his pocket. “Sometimes.”
That was enough to satisfy me for the time being. Despite my claim to dizziness, my thoughts came quicker now. “You promised I could stay at an inn, Captain…”
The wind I’d ensorcelled tugged stray hair into his grey eyes as he waited for me to go on, backed by the windswept graveyard and the snow-laden roofs of the town, with its piping chimneys and bustling inhabitants. I noticed for the first time that the grey of Demery’s irises was not solid—rather a rim of grey with a warm green heart. They reminded me of my mother’s eyes, and of my own. It was an odd similarity, but I’d only just stepped out into the world beyond my Wold. There was much that struck me as strange.
“Then take me there now,” I said, blinking my observations away, “and I’ll consider your proposal.”
MAGNI, MAGNUS—A mage with an unnatural ability to incur loyalty and desire from those around them. It is considered one of the most subtle of the human giftings, and, debatably, the most dangerous. A notable Magni was Sir William Caston of Merrifolk, who, in a fit of madness, ordered five thousand soldiers to their doom in the White Desert of Ambia during the Second Mereish War. Every soldier, it is said, perished without complaint.
—FROM THE WORDBOOK ALPHABETICA: A NEW
WORDBOOK OF THE AEADINES
TEN
The Edge of the Other
SAMUEL
Exhausted from another day on watch, I languished in my hammock, eyes closed, hands resting on my stomach. Gradually, my consciousness drifted out from the arc of my ribs, beyond the tips of my fingers towards the Other.
I twitched, realizing I had left the worn coin in the pocket of my coat, on my trunk. I ought to retrieve it before the Dark Water swelled, or visions started in full. But my tired body refused to move.
A vision flickered across my eyes—a glimpse of Mary Firth on the deck of a ship, singing under her breath.
“Slow is the knell of summer’s end…”
Then I was a child. I sat next to my brother Benedict on a bench in a wood-paneled study, his bloodied hand—my aunt’s work—hidden under his opposite arm. The scents of coffee, aged wood, wax and wig powder filled my nose, sigils of my uncle, Admiral John Rosser.
I heard the admiral’s voice: You are his elder brother, even if that be only by a few moments. He is your responsibility. He and his darkness. My name can only protect you two for so long.
I heard my father next, older, fainter. One hand on my cheek, one hand on Ben’s as he looked down at us with pride. Take care of one another, my boys.