Starspawn

by Wendy N. Wagner

  Jendara shot him a stern look. “You’ll be fine,” she repeated. She took a careful step down from the porch. Something shifted beneath her feet and she gritted her teeth. There was no way to see what lay beneath the surface of the water—the stuff was as opaque as milk and as dark as garden soil. The worst might be over, but that didn’t mean it was safe.

  It was like capturing a rival pirate ship, she thought, setting her foot carefully before taking the next cautious step. They fought hard on the deck and you felt your blood boil as you cut your way forward, knowing every hand was set to kill you. But that was only the obvious danger. Down below was where the real nasty stuff waited: the injured happy to take someone to Pharasma’s Boneyard when they went, the vicious cook devoted to his captain, the booby traps some loyal mate had set when all seemed lost.

  Back in her pirate days, she’d seen plenty of her crewmates killed after the battle was ostensibly won, and she’d learned a thing or two. She kept her focus on the ground and the debris floating around her knees, and she moved slowly, even if every bit of her wanted to race back to the meeting hall and make sure Kran was all right.

  Then she was there. The porch columns were slick with mud, and some stood at odd angles. She didn’t trust them. She looked around for an alternate route.

  To her left, Kran’s dog barked.

  She turned. The dog stood on the canted roof of the house beside the hall. At some point, a massive fir tree had toppled down on the broken house, and now lay at an angle, its top driven into the colorful wall of the meeting hall and its roots tangled in the wreckage below. The dog must have climbed down the tree.

  “Smarter than you look,” she grumbled. The yellow-and-white mutt wasn’t the companion she would have picked for her boy. It wasn’t a sturdy herding dog or a fine hound bred for hunting, just some stray he’d found by the docks, good for nothing but eating Jendara’s venison. “Come here…” She tried to remember its name. “Fylga. Come.”

  The dog scrambled onto the tree trunk and began climbing back up to the roof of the meeting hall.

  “Or maybe not.” Jendara picked her way toward the base of the tree and gave it a shove. It felt solid.

  In the distance, wood groaned and crumpled. Someone called for help again, the voice thin and tired. She had to get moving; people needed her.

  “Kran!”

  The boy peered over the roofline at her. He pointed at the tree and spread his hands questioningly.

  “It’s safe, I think. But hurry!”

  He came down the tree cautiously, clinging to it like a bear cub. Jendara found herself reaching for him before he even made it to the halfway point. Her lip hurt from biting into it. The meeting hall could collapse, the tree could shift, the house could crumple more—

  And then she had a hold of him and he was on the ground and she was squeezing him tight, tighter than she’d hugged him in years. He was twelve, after all. And he’d never been a cuddly boy, even when he’d been little.

  He kissed her cheek and hugged her back. Then he pulled away, a smile spreading over his face. With his black hair hanging in wet clumps, that smile looked even whiter and broader than usual.

  He pointed at the demolished house beside them, and it took Jendara a minute to make out what he saw in the midst of the broken beams and the sludge of mud. There was only the hint of colorful paint to remind her of the meeting hall’s porch columns, one of which had been driven through the ruins of the house next door.

  And there, jutting out of what had probably been a blue-and-green painted sea star, was the belt knife she’d stabbed into the wood as a handhold just before the wave had hit. Kran wrenched it free with a grunt, and handed it to her, beaming.

  Maybe her stars weren’t so badly aligned after all.

  2

  HOPE STAYS AFLOAT

  She brought Kran to the relative safety of the blacksmith’s porch. Waves still lapped at the bottom of the step, but the porch itself stood above the water. A good two inches of mud coated the stone, dotted with shards of glass and bits of broken lumber. Broken crab pots and smashed wooden pieces lay everywhere.

  Oric sat on one, his face very pale. She remembered his hurt arm and felt a pang.

  “Dara! Are you okay?”

  She sagged with relief at the sound of Boruc’s voice. “We’re okay, but Oric’s hurt,” she called out.

  “There’s plenty of injured on their way to the farms. Let’s get him to the healer so she can patch him up.” The big man splashed his way toward them.

  “Can you help Oric?” Jendara asked.

  “I can walk,” the boy snapped. “It’s just my arm.”

  “Spoken like your father’s boy.” Boruc grinned. “None of our kin’s ever been much for complaining. Give me a minute to catch my breath—had to clear a lot of rubble to get here.”

  Behind them, something crumpled and crashed. Probably a tree’s roots giving out, Jendara thought, or a damaged house giving in to the pull of the outgoing current. The whole village could fall down into the sea with this kind of flooding. She thought of her own little cottage and wondered what condition she’d find it in.

  “Help! Somebody help me!”

  Boruc caught her eye. “Sounds like you’re not the only one who got stuck down here. Want to lend a hand?”

  Jendara nodded. She’d come to the island of Sorind to be part of a community, and helping out in an emergency was part of being a good neighbor. “Kran,” she said. “You start clearing out a place for hurt people. We’ll need places to sit and a spot big enough to lay someone down. Oric, you help as best you can, but take it easy till we get that arm bound up. I’ll be back with more folks as I find them.”

  Kran gave her a mock-salute. Boruc paused a moment.

  “I almost forgot why I started toward your house this morning. Happy birthday, Jendara.” He held out a linen-wrapped package, it shape roughly triangular and about half as long as her arm.

  Kran grinned knowingly. Jendara raised an eyebrow. “Were you in on this?”

  The boy nodded. She unbound the length of linen and smiled at the beautiful creation in her hand. Boruc was a true artist, and though stone was his preferred medium, the work he’d put into this piece of wood and steel made it something outstanding.

  “A new handaxe.” She tested its balance in her hand. “It’s amazing.”

  Her heart felt suddenly too big for her chest. The year before, she’d lost the handaxe that had belonged to her father—the only token she’d had left of her family, wiped out by raiders before Kran was born. In the time she’d spent on Sorind, Boruc had come to seem like a brother, part of the extended family she’d made for herself from crew and islanders.

  The big man consented to a hug. “You’ll probably get some good use out of it today.”

  He was right. The day crawled by as she shifted timbers, chopped open jammed and broken doors, and bandaged small wounds. Folks from the farms came down to lend a hand and bring lunch. The healer took Oric away to join his family, although he protested about leaving the repair work.

  The tsunami had cruelly battered the island. Many of the houses on the higher ground in the village stood strong, needing only some surface level repairs—but a few were just gone, the island’s clay soil washed out from under them. The town’s gardens were ravaged, the livestock decimated. It would be years before the village fully recovered from the great wave.

  After working most of the afternoon, Jendara and Kran finally headed toward their own home on the edge of town. Jendara had purposefully avoided looking in its direction all day. The roof of the house looked fine, but as they drew closer, she could see the massive driftwood log that had stove in the front wall of her house. Kran stopped beside the garden fence and stared.

  “Well, shit.” She kicked the fence, then kicked it again. “Shit!”

  Kran tapped his chest as though his heart pained him. It probably did.

  “I don’t want to go in,” Jendara admitted. She’d buil
t this cottage herself, working with Boruc and his brother Morul to frame the building with wood they’d felled in the forest beyond Yul’s farm. The Milady’s caulker, the green-haired gnome named Glayn, had helper her sew the curtains from fabric she and Kran had picked out on a trip to the mainland. The ship’s first mate, Tam, had helped her build the boxes for the bees in the garden.

  The bees were probably all dead now.

  She walked up to cottage’s splintered door, but found she could go no farther. After all the ruin and trouble she’d seen today, she was just too tired to think of clearing out the entrance of her own house.

  She thought of the day of her wedding, only four or five months ago, when Vorrin had tried to carry her over this threshold, and instead knocked her head against the doorframe. She’d had a goose egg for a week.

  She patted the frame with its ruined door. Their first home they’d had as a family, and she would have to rebuild most of the place.

  “Could be worse,” she said out loud. “Plenty of folks lost everything they had.”

  Kran tossed a smashed crate out of what had once been her potato patch and then made his way back to the garden fence. He paused to pet the dog and then climbed up to perch on the top fence rail. After a moment, she joined him. It was probably more comfortable than anything inside her soaked house.

  Kran tapped her shoulder and pointed to the harbor. A tall ship glided across the water, its yellow-and-blue pennant snapping proudly from its tallest mast. The Milady. At least they’d have a dry place to sleep tonight.

  * * *

  Jendara watched from the beach as the dinghy approached. The four rowers stowed their oars, and the humans of the group began climbing out of the small craft to drag it onto the shore. Vorrin, her husband since early summer and her best friend for the past seven years, moved the fastest. Next to his massive first mate, he looked almost scrawny, and his neatly trimmed dark brown goatee stood as a contrast to the full beards the men of the islands wore. Even his hair, neatly clubbed back instead of left loose and decorated with sewn braids, marked his Chelish background.

  Amid the humans, she saw Glayn the caulker, still clambering out of the dinghy. Despite his small size, the gnome immediately took his place with the others, working to get the boat ashore. Kran’s yellow-and-white dog kicked up a spray of water as she raced to meet them.

  Jendara waved at the group: her closest friends—her family, really—gone the past week to repair the Milady. The rest of the crew must be waiting on board the tall ship, worrying. The island had to look terrible from the harbor.

  “Thank the gods you’re all right!” Vorrin let go of the boat and ran to meet Jendara on the beach. He held her tight for a long moment. “We waited till it was safe to come into the harbor,” he murmured. “I thought I’d die from the wait.”

  “It was pretty bad,” she admitted. “The flood surge wiped out the cottage.”

  He leaned back to read her face. “Is it—is everything—?”

  “The house is ruined. All the furniture soaked and smashed. I don’t think anything’s worth saving.”

  “Oh no.” He reached out for Kran and gave him a hug. The boy didn’t mind. Even before Vorrin and Jendara had married, Kran and Vorrin had been close. The man had always been there for the boy.

  The others approached. Tam, a giant islander with wild yellow hair, beard, and eyebrows, called out: “Is it as bad at it looks, Dara?”

  “Is our cottage ruined?” Glayn blurted. He and Tam had finally built a place on the island after years of bunking on board the ship. Glayn loved the little cottage.

  Kran was already writing on his slate. It’s fine!

  “Wish we’d built as far up on the hill as you two,” Jendara added. “A tree fell on one end and smashed up your roof a bit, but nothing like ours. We’ve got nothing.”

  Sarni, the newest and youngest crew member, not even twenty yet, patted Jendara on the shoulder. “I’m sorry about the cottage.” She sounded unusually solemn. Though the girl had been a part of their crew for less than a year, she had grown as close to Jendara as a younger sibling.

  Then Sarni grinned, brown eyes crinkling in her round face—her usual expression. Everything about the teenaged girl was cheery and compact and brown, like sea otter who had decided to join human company. “Tell her the good news, Vee!”

  Vorrin sighed. He didn’t care for his new nickname, and the young deckhand irritated him. But Jendara had taken Sarni under her wing after finding her running with a gang of vicious thieves raiding boats in Halgrim’s harbor. Perhaps because Jendara had saved Sarni’s life in that first meeting—or perhaps because Sarni knew that Jendara, too, had once run on the wrong side of the law—Sarni had been overeager to remold herself in Jendara’s image ever since.

  “It was amazing.” Glayn beamed up at Jendara.

  Tam nodded. “We only saw it for a moment—”

  “You wouldn’t believe how beautiful it was!” Sarni interjected.

  “Hey,” Jendara barked. “Shut up and give me the news straight.”

  “A new island,” Vorrin explained. “It was unbelievable—we were on our way here, and the sea went crazy. Off to the west of us, the water looked like it was boiling. Orcas were racing to get by, leaping up in the air.”

  “That part was terrifying,” Glayn interjected.

  “I thought we were dead,” Sarni added. “But Cap’n Vee wasn’t scared.”

  “I nearly pissed myself,” Vorrin corrected her. “Thirty-seven years at sea and I never saw anything like it.”

  “A new island?” Jendara shook her head.

  “It just came up out of the sea,” Tam explained. “Real slow at first. It sounded even stranger in his matter-of-fact delivery. He was an islander, born and bred, and took things in stride.

  “What do you think made it come up?” Jendara asked. “The earthquake?”

  “That had to have something to do with it,” Glayn said. “Maybe it broke off of something at the bottom of the sea and floated to the top.”

  “Rocks don’t float, Glayn,” Tam noted.

  “Pumice floats!” Glayn shot back.

  “Maybe,” Vorrin said, his dark eyebrows drawing together. He rubbed his neatly trimmed goatee, a sure sign he was thinking hard.

  “All of this doesn’t matter,” Sarni blurted. “What matters is the gold!”

  “Gold?” Jendara’s voice was sharp.

  Sarni nodded. “We saw it through the spyglass.”

  “I didn’t dare get close to it. But we could see the entire surface was built up, like a city covered it. And it practically sparkled in the sun—we could see the gold shining on the tops of buildings,” Vorrin explained. “It all looked really, really old.”

  A golden city on an island that had just popped up to the surface of the sea. If it had been inhabited by sea creatures, they were probably dead or desperately escaping back to the ocean. If it had been inhabited by air-breathing creatures—well, they certainly weren’t going to still be around if the thing had been underwater.

  “An abandoned city of gold.”

  “Hail, Jendara!” a voice called.

  Jendara glanced up. Another dinghy approached from the Milady. Half the crew had stayed in Halgrim for the winter, taking on extra work at the shipyards or staying with family. The four in the approaching dinghy and the four on the beach were all longtime friends, teammates who’d been on board the ship since the day Vorrin inherited it. Glayn had been with her even before that, serving alongside Jendara during the dark pirating days. Every last one of them was worth three of the cottages she’d lost. The thought eased a little of the hurt of losing her possessions. Possessions could always be recovered if there was gold at hand.

  And perhaps there was gold at hand. “You didn’t see any other ships out there, did you? No one else was staking a claim on this new island?”

  Kran looked from Vorrin to Jendara, a smile spreading across his face. He already knew what she was thinking.
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br />   Glayn chuckled. “If your house was ruined, your boy’s going to need an all-new winter wardrobe. And a new bow, and a spear, and a new—”

  Jendara cut him off. “If that island has as much gold as your story makes it sound, Kran can have his own armory.”

  “Are we headed back out?” a woman nearly as tall as Tam called from the second dinghy. It was Zuna, the Milady’s navigator. The sun winked off the tiny silver bells and glass beads woven into her many black braids. The dark-skinned woman and her comrades jumped out of the boat and began dragging it ashore.

  Jendara and the others walked down to the meet this second group. Zuna put an arm around Kran. It had taken Zuna a few years to warm up to Jendara; the woman had served on too many merchant vessels to trust a pirate, repentant or not. But Zuna was dead loyal to Vorrin, and she’d learned to like Jendara well enough. Kran, no one could help but love.

  Vorrin looked back at his ship. “We still have supplies on board from our trip to Halgrim, but not many. We’ll need to lay in some stores before we commit to anything. It might not seem like it, but winter’s coming. This warm streak won’t last forever.”

  The group divided itself, long experience making instructions unnecessary. Three crew members hung back to ask Jendara about their kin in the village; they agreed to help get Vorrin restocked for the journey to the golden island, but were too concerned with Sorind’s well-being to sign on for this kind of adventure. Jendara couldn’t blame them. The Milady was a trading vessel. The crew, no matter how stouthearted, wasn’t all cut out of adventuring cloth.

  Jendara kissed Vorrin on the cheek and left him to finish settling up with the crew members who were staying. She hurried to catch up with Kran and the long-legged Zuna, looking the other woman in the eye. “You sure you’re up for this?”

  “If you’re asking if I’m up for a chance to make a fortune scraping gold off an abandoned city that’s been lost beneath the waves, then yes. I wouldn’t mind being rich.” Zuna broke eye contact and studied the ground, careful of debris underfoot.