When I was a small child, I would sometimes ask my father for something while implying my mother had already given me permission, or vice versa. This is not a special or precocious behavior, but a crude bit of manipulation many children employ. It almost always fails. That is not my point. When I tried it with my father, he made no attempt to dissuade me from the tactic. He was charmed, and even proud: “We may teach you statecraft yet, little one.”
He was not in the least duped, or threatened, by my clumsy negotiation, and he reacted much the same way to my potential future husband’s request to see my face—and my hips—before signing any marriage contracts.
My future husband was no clumsy child. He had inherited a title, but his fortune was of his own making. He owned a fleet of ships and a vault of gold bars. He was rumored to have poisoned two of his rivals, but no proof had ever been found. He was unlikely to stand trial for any accusation, since he had half the Nalitzvan court in his pocket. By all accounts, he was a formidable man. But he was not wealthy, powerful, or calculating enough to be a threat to my parents.
There were no rumors about my parents. They were beneficent, beautiful, beloved.
I must pause here, and digress. I will not apologize for it. The seeds take root and their shoots unfurl in all directions.
Growing up in Laalvur as a young woman of wealth and class, I struggled to find pastimes that did not bore me. I did not like dancing or drawing, novels or needlework. My singing voice is best left unheard. I learned fashion only as a necessity for appearing in the world suitably dressed, and even that was a late revelation for me. I was a charmless and unappealing adolescent, mystified by my fellow young women and utterly ignorant of young men. But if young men had no interest in me, I was equally uninterested in them. There was only one acceptably feminine hobby that sparked my interest, and even that, I pushed to the very limits of propriety: I loved gardening.
I owe my knowledge of gardening to an old woman who worked for our family. I call her an old woman now, although in retrospect she was perhaps fifty-five. Her black hair was lined with silver and she seemed ancient to me at the time. Parneet was a former Priest of Doubt who had given up the mysteries of the priesthood for the certainties of digging her fingers into the dirt. She did not care that I was a sullen and ill-mannered girl; she was stern and rather ill-mannered herself. Parneet, silent, solid, and dressed in shapeless clothing, cared only that I was interested in plants and would do what she told me.
My parents soon gave up sighing over the number of tunics and slippers that I ruined by kneeling in the dirt. When they kept me from my garden, I was moody and difficult and of little use to them. We arrived at a compromise: they would allow me to garden, and I would behave as they wished otherwise.
Perhaps my parents perceived that gardening offered me something I could find nowhere else, although I doubt it. Gardening is a type of creation that no art can achieve. What is a song or a painting compared to new life? And not just one life, but generations of life. There was a whole world available to me in our garden, one that I controlled as I could never control anything else in my life.
Parneet taught me many things, and that knowledge has been the gift and joy of my life. But for now, I will name only one. She was my parents’ chief gardener, and it fell to her to keep our house garden in the most prized Laalvuri style. This required choosing an aesthetically pleasing distribution of shade-growing flowers and sun-growing flowers, planting them in their appropriate habitats in an arrangement that was carefully curated to look natural and wild, then letting their roots and tendrils uncurl and climb over the house and its grounds, judiciously clipping a vine or uprooting a weed here and there. She hated order, neatness, and symmetry, but there was a composition to her work, a balance. Untrained observers cooed over the lush, fragrant wilderness that surrounded our house; God’s Balance had blessed us with fertile ground. More perceptive guests could appreciate the masterpiece, but they knew better than to credit the master.
Parneet worked hard to render her own work invisible. As the saying goes, the gardener’s hand should not be seen.
My parents were gardeners in their own way, and they cultivated their reputation. Like Parneet’s vines, my parents’ reputation appeared to spring naturally from their youth, beauty, power, and virtue. All their ruthless cutting and weeding went unseen.
In Nalitzva, they impose a ghastly, unnatural order on their gardens, planting in stark rows and clean grids and cutting their trees into geometric shapes. I suppose they think it matches their neatly gridded cities of white stone. It is a plodding, hamfisted way of abusing the natural beauty of our world. Trust Nalitzvans to use brute force, even in gardening.
You see now why my betrothed was no match for my parents.
In my youth, I did not care for any of this. Childish attempts at manipulation aside, I resisted all of my parents’ efforts to educate me about politics, social graces, and the ways of the world. I did not want to live in their world of quiet dinner conversation, all trade agreements and tedious compromise.
And yet they had uprooted me from my garden and plopped me on the deck of a ship. It had taken me a whole triad to stop feeling sick, and I had only just emerged. Laalvur was a smudge on the horizon. Even the red Dayward coast was receding from sight. My gloved hands gripped the wooden railing. Certainty took firm hold of my heart: I would wither and wilt in the cold light of Nalitzva. What my parents called a betrothal was a death sentence. I could only flourish in the red earth and warm air of Laalvur. Our ship rowed Nightward, and I turned my face toward the Day one last time.
I am not proud of it: I began to cry.
It seems foolish now, that I could not think my way out of even the simplest of traps. But to tell the truth—as I strive to do in these pages—I did not truly become myself until I met Arav. Parneet had shown me what it was to dig my fingers into the earth, to sow seeds, but the earth is a beginning. It is the sun that calls life to the surface, bursting forth, unfurling, reaching its fullness.
I did not know that when I met him.
“I hope you can swim, crying girl,” he said. “Because I’m not jumping in after someone whose name I don’t know.”
He leaned one large, callused hand against the railing. He did it so casually, with such confidence and ownership. For sailors, a ship is more than home. It is a part of them. Arav’s arms might as well have been sculpted from the same warm brown wood as the oars. He was very, very beautifully made.
“You know my name,” I said stupidly. Everyone on the ship did. They were charged with delivering me safely to Nalitzva, and I was precious cargo.
“But you don’t know mine,” he said. “It’s Arav.”
“I’m not going to jump,” I said, although the thought had crossed my mind. I was a sixteen-year-old girl weeping over a ship’s railing.
“Good,” he said, and grinned. Arav had a full mouth and an extraordinarily prominent nose. The beauty of his body was readily apparent, but the beauty of his face revealed itself in the quirks of his thick eyebrows and the quickness of his smile. He was always in motion. “Because I’m not fighting off a medusa over some girl I just met.”
“You couldn’t.”
“I could and I have.”
“They have poisonous tentacles as long as this ship,” I retorted. “Besides, there aren’t any around.”
“Which one of us do you think has seen more medusas, crying girl? Me or you?”
“Stop calling me that. I’m not crying anymore.”
“Well,” he said. “Look at that.”
He smiled again, and I understood his purpose at last. It was pure generosity on his part. The other sailors knew better than to try to befriend someone so high above their station, and they teased Arav about social climbing. Their mockery was tinged with jealousy. Young men do the backbreaking work of rowing and sailing in the hope of clawing their way out of poverty, and perhaps eventually captaining a ship. The others thought Arav was trying to skip
the hard part by flirting with a rich girl.
Perhaps, in the same way that a sixteen-year-old girl weeping on the deck of a ship cannot help but briefly contemplate jumping, a poor boy speaking with a rich girl cannot help but contemplate her fortune.
I try to look at these facts with a cold eye, but for once, they are unnecessary. They do not capture what happened. Arav saw a crying girl and he wanted to make her smile. He was that simple. He was that sweet. He was the opposite of my complicated, calculating parents, and I liked him immediately.
Arav had big dark eyes and his shiny black hair constantly flopped into his eyes and had to be brushed back—to no avail—while he talked. Even when he was at home in the city, a clean sea-salt scent misted his brown skin.
He stayed and talked to me for hours. Our conversation began as a way for him to distract me from my troubles, but he had excited my thirst for knowledge. Arav, who had joked so easily about having fought a medusa, was curiously reluctant to tell me the whole story. I had to ask him all kinds of questions, circling around my real goal of hearing him describe the encounter.
I learned from Arav that there were dozens of different kinds of medusas, from the smaller ones that drifted through the water in huge, glowing colonies, which were harvested for lamp fluid and came in all colors, and the rarer, massive ones that floated alone. In five years on the sea, Arav had seen only one.
Once he began to tell the story, he could not stop. It poured out of him in one long rush.
Their ship had been close to the Nightward coast, and the water had been dark. A ghostly shape glinted deep beneath them. Was it a reflection from a lamp on the ship? A trick of the light? The other sailors and Arav had argued fiercely. If it was a medusa, it was the biggest one any of them had ever seen.
Medusa venom, extracted with precise care and tempered with other ingredients, can be made into a liqueur that brings burning bliss to drinkers. Some believe that in the perfect blend, in the right dose, it can be a cure for pain. In the wrong dose—or the right dose, depending on your purpose—it is lethal. Whatever uses it can be put to, people in all the cities of the world pay handsomely for the venom.
Unlike lamp fluid, which comes from smaller and less dangerous medusas, the giant’s venom is a rare commodity. Only the islanders know the true secrets of hunting giant medusas, and they live in isolation and protect their knowledge by sinking any ship that ventures too close. They do business with a select few trusted traders in Nalitzva, Laalvur, and Adappyr, and that arrangement has made everyone involved very rich.
Mainlanders have been trying to learn to track and catch giant medusas for years, with little success. Arav and his friends knew all this, but they were young. Dazzled by the promise of wealth and glory, they thought none of it mattered. Other people had failed, but they were not other people.
The Balance had swung in their favor and brought them a medusa.
A monster, if it caught them.
A prize, if they caught it.
Arav and five friends lowered two rowboats into the water. They took every spear and blade they could find, along with the sturdiest net. Giant medusas can weigh as much as four men.
Lamplight medusas float together by the dozen, or sometimes by the hundred. Aimless, they go where the water takes them, trailing tentacles. To our knowledge, they do not possess sight or hearing. They are predators, but they hunt by ambush, waiting for prey to wander into their tentacles so they can sting and swallow it whole.
Arav and his friends thought that giant medusas must hunt like their smaller cousins: deaf and sightless, drifting and waiting.
Something bumped the underside of their rowboat. It began to rock.
“An accident,” Jai said. “It can’t see us. It doesn’t know we’re here.”
It thudded against the boat again, and the boat tipped side to side. Cold water splashed over the side and hit Arav’s hand. He only caught a glimpse of the thing moving, stretching and compressing its gelatinous body to propel itself through the water. Mushroom-shaped, transparent green, the medusa pulsed with silent power, ropes of tentacles slithering with each thrust. It was huge. Arav looked to the second rowboat, where Tsardeya, Katvar, and Rahal had a clearer view. Their faces were lined with terror.
“It knows,” Arav said. His heart was wild in his chest, a rhythm at odds with the rocking of the boat. But he was not yet afraid. The thing in the water could still be his salvation. Money to keep his family in silk and silver for all their lives. “Spear it next time you see it. Right through the bell.”
The next time the medusa knocked into their boat, Arav was waiting with a spear in hand. So was Tsardeya, standing in the other rowboat.
Arav punctured the bell, but not before Tsardeya threw his spear with such force that the second rowboat rocked. He missed. Spears and beast disappeared under the water.
They waited, staring at each other across their boats. Arav could hardly think of anything except the next surfacing, but the empty readiness of his mind was threaded through with one question: how could it know? How could the medusa know they were there?
“It’s wounded,” he assured the others. “We’ll get it next time. One spear all the way through, and we’re rich.”
The medusa shot up from the depths and slammed into the second rowboat. The boat flipped. Tsardeya, Katvar, and Rahal were dumped into the water. Into the tangled nest of tentacles.
They screamed. They stopped screaming.
Their bodies seemed to vanish into the water, into the monster’s body. An arm would bob up, and then a leg. Only after long moments of horrified staring did Arav comprehend that the thing’s poison was dismembering them, dismantling their flesh, dissolving their bones.
Death had been instant. Decay was nearly as fast.
Jai and Hoshekur picked up their oars in horror, intending to get back to the ship and as far from the water as possible.
Arav picked up another spear.
Jai grabbed his shoulder. “Are you crazy? Didn’t you see that? No fortune is worth that, Arav.”
Arav shoved Jai’s hand away. “I’ll sleep better if that thing’s dead.”
He would not let them die for nothing. Bloody foam scummed the surface of the water. The monster feasted on his dead friends in full view of his living ones. A trail of luminescent fluid leaked from its wound in a glimmering dribble of green, tainting water and viscera with its touch.
Anger had spurred Arav to grab the spear, but it was the thought of returning to their families in Laalvur that kept the weapon in his grip. Like him, all three of them were from the Marsh, where parents, children, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, young and old alike, slept side by side on straw pallets in single rooms, crowded into creaky wooden houses stilted over the water. Tsardeya was married. Katvar was barely seventeen years old. Rahal was the elder brother to four siblings. Arav did not want to climb the stairs to their families’ doors with only bad news in hand. Your husband, your son, your brother is never coming home. Even if he himself never took home a kalap of profit from this creature, he would drive the life from its body and sink the worthless remnants of its corpse to the depths of this watery hell. At least then, he could offer them this reassurance: I killed the thing that killed him. He would do this so he could say: It will not take anyone else’s life.
It would be a small comfort, but Arav could offer nothing else.
He did not consider his own life. Only the death of the monster mattered. There was rage in Arav’s veins, and that was its own kind of lethal venom.
For a moment, there was only the water lapping at their boat and the wind wafting over their skin. Arav ignored the chill. Perhaps the medusa was sated and no longer cared about three little humans in a boat. Or perhaps it had stopped sensing them because they were not rowing.
Arav forbade Jai and Hoshekur from dipping their oars in the water. He stood perfectly still.
The boat drifted closer. Closer.
Arav struck. Swift, decisi
ve, he pierced the bell with force. Ripped his spear out, its deadly tip now glowing green, and thrust again.
The medusa did not move.
Jai and Hoshekur stared, and then Hoshekur said, cautiously, “Is it dead?”
Arav rocked the boat experimentally. The medusa remained still. He nodded at Jai and Hoshekur.
The problem of collecting the monster’s carcass was a difficult one. Even before broaching that, Arav wrestled with whether it was worse to profit from the monster that killed his friends, or to leave a potential fortune floating dead in the water.
The thought of touching the corpse, stained with his friends’ blood and leaking green lamp fluid, made him shudder. He wanted to leave it in the water, to forget it forever. But forgetting was impossible. The alien wrongness of the creature—a thing with no bones and no blood, a thing that belonged to another world or another time—and the nightmare of his friends’ deaths, their blood bubbling on the surface, would haunt him no matter what he did.
Jai and Hoshekur were right: no fortune was worth this.
But they owed their friends’ families whatever they could offer them.
Capturing the thing’s bell in netting and rigging it to float behind the ship was the effort of eight sailors over the course of an entire shift. Even in death, the medusa was a formidable enemy, its tentacles still spiny with venom. The luckiest of the sailors who worked that shift were hauled back up to the ship sickened and exhausted, with whiplike thin black scars wrapped around both forearms. The unluckiest was Hoshekur, who died after two shifts retching and writhing in pain. Jai lost his left arm up to the elbow, the tissue blackened and dead.
I had never heard such a horror story, and I was left open-mouthed and speechless.
“I’m sorry about your friends,” I managed to say, after a moment.
He nodded.
I could hardly grasp the reality of it—had he really lived through that?—until he held out his palms to show me the strange tangle of scars on each arm. They were so thin that I had not initially noticed them, but once my attention was on them, I could not resist tracing the latticework with the tip of my finger. Wavy lines crossed his wrists and the backs of his hands, and whorls of black marred the skin of his arms up to his elbows. Where the scars were, he had no sensation in his skin.
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