Mermaidia
A Limited Edition Anthology
Contents
Seize the Storm
Racing the Clock: A Bonds of Madness Novella
The Sea King’s Daughter
Touched by a Mermaid
Fury: Crescent Moon Bay, Book Two
Of Moon and Sea
Sea Witch
The Sea of Time and Stars
Queen of the Island
Paranormal Maritime War: Magical Hunters Academy Expanded Book One
Salt and Stone
Sinking Hearts: A Royal Tail series, book 1
Siren’s Curse
The Mermaid
The Reef of Souls
Thank You for Reading!
Mermaidia: A Limited Edition Anthology © 2020
Cover by YOCLA Designs - Clarissa Yeo
All rights reserved by the individual authors.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Titles and Authors in this Anthology
Seize the Storm
By Kristi Lea
Racing the Clock
By Catherine Banks
The Sea King’s Daughter
By Anthea Sharp
Touched by a Mermaid
By Raine English
Fury
By Merrie Destefano
Of Moon and Sea
By Sara Elizabeth
Sea Witch
By Pauline Creeden
The Sea of Time and Stars
By Mara Amberly
Queen of the Island
By Bokerah Brumley
Paranormal Maritime War
By Nicole Zoltack
Salt and Stone
By Rachel A. Marks
Sinking Hearts
By LA Fox
Siren’s Curse
By Margo Bond Collins
The Mermaid
By Tricia Schneider
The Reef of Souls
By Kai Ellory Viola
Seize the Storm
Kristi Lea
Seize the Storm © 2020 Kristi Lea
All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
Chapter 1
The gently rolling waves caressed Quarie's long, slender limbs, and the setting sun glistened on her face as she floated in her lagoon, weightless and carefree. Crickets chirped from the shore, and the fish kissed her bare, wet toes. Somewhere nearby, their mother played with Quarie's little sister, Illista. Baby giggles danced across the water like the froth of a wave, playful and happy. Below the surface, the deep thrum of the surf mingled with every trill and echo of creatures near and far. The sounds embraced her, coursed through her, beating in time with her own heartbeat.
She would float there forever, if she could. In the rain, in the blazing sun, in the brisk chill of the ever-shorter days, if her parents didn't call her to help prepare dinner or mind the baby or mind her studies. If Quarie could choose to be anywhere, she chose the ocean.
Harsh scraping sounds rang out somewhere nearby, their dusty tones not bothering to echo across the water like it should. Quarie sputtered and sank her head down lower into the water, letting it cover her ears, concentrating on the warm thrumming from below. But when the clangs rang again, the broke through even that. The sound cut the water like dust, dissolving it into nothingness.
She squeezed her eyes shut, willing the dream to come back. Willing the scratchy sleeping mat to return to swirling seaweed, and the fading coals of the fire to rise back into the sky.
It was no use. The dream was gone.
The warmth that had filled her as she floated dissolved too. First it disintegrated into that gaping black spiral that threatened to suck her downward. She wanted to cry. To run away. To scream and thrash against whoever stole that precious life from her.
There was one last scrape and a rustle, and then Quarie felt the bedding shift as Illista slid under the covers.
“Where did you go?”
Illista threw one stumpy arm over her eyes and sighed audibly. “To relieve myself. I'm sorry if I woke you up. I kicked one of the pots when I tried to hang my dress up.”
Quarie sat up and looked around. Despite the dark of night, she could easily make out all of the shapes of the various objects strewn about their tent. There was precious little. A plate and a cup each. A spare set of clothes. The sleeping mat where they both lay. Her sister's dress, hanging from one of the support poles above the dented set of cooking pots. She glared at her sister. “Lucky for both of us it wasn't the brazier. Why are you changing clothes this time of night anyway?”
Illista sighed again. “I didn't see it, okay. I got dust on my dress when I went outside and didn't want it in the bed. Go back to sleep. We have to be up early tomorrow. There's another big celebration, and there will be a lot more work for us.”
“And then we have to pack the whole caravan to travel to the next 'sacred puddle' for the next celebration.” Quarie could not bring herself to call the small muddy ponds that passed for water sources “lakes”.
“Exactly. And we will have to walk the whole way because none of the horses will ever pull a cart with the two of us in it. The other Waki won't talk to us. And it will be nothing but rocks and dust the whole way there. My feet already hurt.” Another sigh.
Quarie laid back and took her sister's hand. She gave it a squeeze, and Illista squeezed back. “Mine too. This isn't forever. And we are safe here.”
“I'm sorry I woke you up.” Illista yawned.
Quarie gave her sister another squeeze. “Good night.”
She settled back in and listened to her sister's breathing steady. We are safe. We are safe. We are safe. She clung to that refrain, and used it to stuff the hole of despair that had threatened to overwhelm her earlier. She was safe. Illista was safe. The ocean held nothing but danger for them both.
The trick to entertainment was surprise. That wasn't the only element, of course. A show should engage all of the senses: beauty for the eyes, scents for the nose, music for the ears, the warm comfort of a fur or a satiny silk for touch, a spiced grol for the tongue. The Ken Segra and the Waki would provide their own furs and grol. The rest of the evening's celebration was up to Zuke.
He whistled as he lined up each of the small paper-wrapped packages in orderly rows and measured out each of the ingredients. Saltpeter and borax. Copper and sylvite. Minerals distilled from the morning mist off a lake, or from the dried moss of a
particular tree. Shavings of a stone that is only found on the highest peak of a singular mountain range to the south. Some additives produced fabulous colors of flame, and others exploded loudly or with a slow burning hiss. The smoke of some packages would blanket the air with the soft aroma of roasted herbs. Each firestar was unique, each designed to stimulate a new reaction. Each a surprise.
Zuke loved the familiar challenge of arranging a firestar show. Choosing the colors, the timing, the variety. And tonight's performance offered a fresh dimension: danger.
The Ken Segra people, his friend Joral's mother's people, inhabited the high plains where grass and winters were long, and the weather was extreme. This year, the weather had been exceptionally terrible. The drought had been growing for years until its infamy had spread as far as Caleia and even to the Frozen Lands. The rains had been so miserly that deep furrows had begun opening in the hard packed soil and even the heartiest of grama had retreated to ring the few mud-holes that passed for water sources.
Zuke was intrigued by the problem.
When news had reached him that his childhood friend, Joral, had left Lord Ralein's principality to align with the Ken Segra, Zuke made swift plans to join him. Most communities welcomed a medicine man with open arms, for a short while at least. In Zuke's case, the welcome tended to end when his past caught up with him.
The Ken Segra had received Zuke coolly, with a hearty distrust of strangers. But their distrust had given Zuke plenty of time to study the weather and the terrain, as well as the people of the camp. He hoped to understand the drought, and perhaps gleaning some new knowledge from it.
And it gave him more than ample time to solve the immediate challenge of how to light the sky on fire for entertainment, without setting off a wildfire that would burn through the grizzled tinder that passed for grasslands and destroy what was left of the fragile landscape.
A cold wind raced through the tent, disturbing his carefully measured grains of saltpeter as the heavy silks at the entrance burst open.
Zuke swore without bothering to look up. Only one person in the entire camp would dare blunder his way into Zuke's tent in the middle of the night. He carefully closed the vial of raw materials in his hand and tried to count the grains in the remaining piles. Just a few specks too many, and the packet would explode too fast for any colors to appear.
Joral knocked into the stack of firewood, sending tinder skittering across the floor before dropping to his knees and letting out a loud belch.
“You're nearly as graceful as a boar, but only half as eloquent,” Zuke quipped as he quickly tied off the open packages. Clearly, the time for precision and delicacy was finished for the evening.
“Sss…sorry,” slurred Joral from somewhere near the fire. “Tripped.”
Zuke turned from the storage case, now tightly locked and moderately protected from danger. His friend lay sprawled on a fur near the fire brazier, looking both drunk and muddy. He tsked. “In the grol again? What did you do, climb into the barrel to drink?”
Joral snorted. “Just the toasts. But I fell in the lake.”
“Your engagement celebration didn't take you anywhere near the lake. How could you possibly have fallen in?”
“Haven't the foggiest. Probably would have drowned there, too, except for the water sprite.” Joral yawned and groped about for a fur.
“Water sprite?”
But Joral was already snoring.
Technically, the man had his own tent, in the heart of the Ken Segra's camp, near where his mother, the chieftess kept hers. But often as not, he made his way to Zuke's and slept in a spare bedroll. At this point, Zuke just considered that spare bedroll to belong to Joral. He didn't blame his friend. The chieftess was a woman of discipline and fastidiousness, and didn't take well to her son and heir stumbling back to his tent at odd hours.
Joral was adjusting to life among the Ken Segra, but it was a very different culture than the southern mountains where both men had grown up. It was harder, more spare, and both freer in some ways and far more restrictive in others.
Zuke liked these people, but he had no plans to stay with them permanently, and had made few attempts to adopt their ways. He especially had no desire to adopt their style of living. His quarters were overly large, overly ornate, and filled with the fruits of his travels—herbs, chemicals, tools, books and scrolls, materials and oddities of all descriptions. He knew the use for them all, and was always in search of more.
Zuke cleaned his teeth and set to his other nightly ministrations, including a ritual of stretches and massage for his lame leg. He was stiff from having sat still so long working on the firestars.
Joral's words rippled through his mind. “Probably would have drowned there…the water sprite.”
There are no water sprites living on high plains that were practically deserts. And drunken men who fall face first into lakes don't live to stumble home. There was more to this story than grol-induced ramblings.
Chapter 2
The cookfire in the center of the mess tent burned low and hot and red and sent waves of heat shimmering through the vent toward the open sky. Quarie hefted a stack of dirty platters and utensils and waddled out the back toward the wash tent where other Waki would scrub and clean them and return them to the cooking tent.
She moved slowly, steadily, in no rush from one job to the next. Illista would hurry. If her sister were here, she would chatter impatiently about something. About how the horses skittered when the sisters were nearby. About tomorrow's firestar show, and the chances that the magician, Zuke, would put on another display at the conclusion of the long wedding feast next moon. About how the stew was singing.
Quarie's pace didn't falter. Her feet never slowed. But they felt like lead, heavier and heavier with each step.
Illista could hear the singing of the water in the stew.
That was new. And it was terrifying.
If only her sister knew that water didn't just sing. It also roared and sobbed and raged and purred. Water could talk. Water remembered.
Quarie had known the voice of the ocean for as long as she could remember. The sea wasn't a “he” or a “she”, but a “they”. They were complex and of many personalities. They could be giving and nurturing or torturous or spiteful. They were everything at once.
But Illista had never heard the ocean. She loved the water as much as Quarie, but in all their girlhood by the shore, Illista had never shown the slightest inkling that it was more than just water. It was Quarie, and their parents, who spoke with it every day. It was Quarie whose feelings were swayed by the waves, and whose happiness or sadness ebbed and flowed with the tide. The sea was Quarie's best friend. Illista simply swam in it and bathed in it and cooked with it and lived near it. Quarie lived it.
She longed for their mother. There was so much that she didn't know. So much knowledge lost. She didn't have the first clue how to guide a sister who may be finally, slowly, coming into her true self. She had no one to ask, no advice to give. The Waki people with whom they lived didn't even know that the sisters weren't Waki. The bloodstone pendant she wore around her neck ensured that no one would ever suspect.
She shoved past the flap of the wash tent and lowered her stack of dirty dishes into the waiting bins. She eyed the small amount of precious cleaning water, the last step of the process, long after all food and char and debris were scrubbed and scoured and polished. The Ken Segra people had so little water here on the high plains that every drop was sacred.
The cleaning water was silent and still. No singing. The water here never sang. Not to Quarie. She collected a stack of clean platters to return back to the cookfire for the evening's dinner.
Maybe Illista was mistaken. Maybe she misheard the revelry of the Ken Segra wedding feast for the singing of the stew. Maybe Illista would be safe for a while longer.
Or maybe Quarie had simply lost her own ability to hear.
“Quarie.” Nunzi's soft, squeaky voice broke through Quarie's reverie.
The Waki woman wore a bright red apron over her shapeless, grungy work dress as a sign of her authority. The sign was mostly for the benefit of the Ken Segra people, Quarie had long ago realized. Humans paid such little attention to their Waki workers that they could never tell one apart from another.
“Yes, Nunzi?”
“Your sister will not be working in the cooking tent any longer.”
Quarie's stack of platters shifted in her arms and one nearly slipped from the pile. “But…but what happened? If something is amiss, I will talk with her. She can be my responsibility—”
Nunzi cut her off with a short wave of her hand. “There will be no need. The magic man, Zuke, requested her as an assistant for his work.”
Quarie gaped as the Waki woman walked away, her footsteps light despite her round girth. She hefted the platters again and hurried to deliver them. Without a word to the other workers, she slipped from the tent and wound through the camp to the far side of the Waki encampment where she and Illista shared a tent.
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