Nether Kingdom

by J. Edward Neill

  “And all you want from us today is Saul’s coin?” she glanced between Daedelar and Saul.

  “His coin…” Daedelar smirked. “That ship. And Grim’s hide. Ah, and one thing more: a slow, soaking kiss from you, m’lady.”

  “A kiss? Are you serious?”

  “Serious as the Selhaunt.” He clucked his tongue. “Serious as the storm leaping behind your lovely bottom. One kiss at the time of my choosing. That and your husband’s coins, of course.”

  Saul frowned. Garrett said nothing. At a loss for words, she sank into a chair. “I must have a word in private with my…husbands.” She glowered at Daedelar. “This is no laughing matter, not to me. Leave us.”

  Quick as a clap of thunder, Daedelar bounded to his feet. He bowed to her and nodded to Saul and Garrett before heading for the door. “Just remember,” he said over his shoulder, “You came looking for me. No one else’ll sail to the White Island. No one else will care. If you want me, your husbands know where to find me.”

  He was gone then, a flash of black and a groan of wood as the door to Grafter’s clattered shut behind him.

  “Is it true?” She turned to Saul. “He has a ship?”

  Saul shrugged. “And a crew, if you would believe it. Look, Ande, we scoured the docks for a good three hours. Things are not well here. With the Thillrian ports in the north closed by Grim’s soldiers and storms springing up all along the coast, there’re few sailors willing to take to any voyage. Daedelar though, he’s got something against Grimwain. Garrett thinks maybe he lost family during Grim’s first occupation of Thillria. If Cornerstone is your goal, and if you’ll not hear of us talking you out of it, Daedelar may be your only hope. We can try to find another, but soon we’ll fall too far behind.”

  Saul’s words, wise as they were, were lost to her.

  Cornerstone, she dreamed of a deathly place. And Father. And if not father, another exile. Or maybe every exile, every warlock sent away.

  One warlock. A thousand warlocks.

  If Garrett has the old blood, so might others.

  This is the end game. One mistake and we all die.

  “Ande?” Saul’s voice chased her into the murk. “Are you well?”

  She murmured something back at him, not knowing what it was or whether he heard her. Her eyelids, as heavy as during the most drowning exhaustion, slammed shut.

  “Ande?” Saul pried, his voice sounding so far away.

  “A moment,” she said. “I am thinking.”

  Saul scooted closer to her. She sensed his presence by the familiar tang of oak upon his hands. She opened her eyes and folded her hands beneath her chin. “I will take the gentleman’s offer,” she said flatly. “You must think me mad, but I believe in this. I must go to Cornerstone. I would go alone, but I fear I will need your help. Will you come with me?”

  “Yes,” said Saul.

  And yes, said the look in Garrett’s eyes.

  “What about the kiss?” said Saul. “Do you want us to set Ser Daedelar straight?”

  She shook her head. “No. Whether a scoundrel or a man of his word, he is the least of my worries. Once we are on his ship, he will take us where we want to go.”

  “You believe that?” Saul questioned.

  “I know it,” she answered coldly. “Else into the ‘Haunt he goes. Tell him, if you would. I will be in my room.”

  She rose placidly from her chair and floated toward the stairs. The innkeep, no doubt having eavesdropped, looked startled to see her. Not one of Grim’s, she knew. Too old. Too gentle. Too alive.

  With Saul and Garrett away, she hid in her room, shutters wide-open, and waited. The storm will come tonight, she knew. I did the enemy a favor in leaving Sallow, for now the weather is here.

  The day flitted by, and still she sat on her bed and daydreamed. A half dozen times, the innkeep knocked at her door, but she ignored him. At dusk, she sensed the storm crawling across the city. She walked to her window and looked out across the sea, watching the evening spread its black sails over the sky.

  The rains came thereafter.

  All at once, grey daggers from the sky pillaged Lyrlech’s every cobbled corner. Waterfalls leapt from every rooftop and sharp-spired minaret, and thunder shook the world. Utterly alone, she leaned out her window and soaked it in. The storm, my truest friend, was no longer a sight she despaired at. She allowed the rain to sting her, savoring its touch as it bit against her cheeks, her wrists, and her breasts. Within a few breaths her hair was slicked to her neck and her clothes soaked tightly against her skin. Muthemnal, she remembered. If I had stayed, I would be the only living soul in the city.

  She spent time unknowable in the rain’s embrace. Her loneliness came for her, just as she expected. She thought of Marid, of his body lost in some cold corner of Sallow. She thought of her father, who, if he still lived, was heedless of Grimwain’s ship riding the Selhaunt waves.

  The Ur might be there. She shut her eyes against the rain. Waiting on the frozen shore, hungry to turn me to their side. Or perhaps it will be Father. Perhaps he will see me and slay me at last, and my life will come to nothing.

  She slept none that night. Saul and Garrett came to her door, offering dinner and news, but she bid them leave until morning, for we are going nowhere until dawn. Dripping from eyelashes to knees, she retreated to her bed and let the rain’s rhythm serve as the backdrop to a black slate of daydreams. One night or a hundred might have passed her by.

  I do not care.

  At dawn, her wide-open window gave her a glimpse of the tarnished silver sky. She heard the drizzle and saw the Selhaunt rage against the far shore, and she knew she had to leave, lest my storm kill every soul in Lyrlech.

  She heard a knock at the door. She knew it was not Saul. He would be shouting. When she drifted off her bed and placed her fingertips on the dry door-planks, she sensed it was Garrett on the other side.

  “Get your things,” he said calmly. Somehow, he knew she was awake, and where I am standing. “Daedelar has decided. He will deliver us to Cornerstone.”

  “Garrett,” she said, “will you come inside? Just for a moment?”

  “The ship—”

  “…can wait,” she said. “I just…I just want to talk.”

  “We will. A long, cold journey awaits us. We can talk on Daedelar’s decks. Or perhaps, if we are unlucky, at the bottom of the sea.”

  Diary, At Sea

  Third day on Daed’s ship

  I exist now on the Selhaunt, blackest of the world’s oceans. The hour is well beyond midnight, and I lurk at the fore of Daedelar’s ship, inking these tattered pages by the Nightness’ grace.

  I want this to be over.

  I thank the stars I am not prone to seasickness. Daedelar’s ship is not exactly what we had in mind. ‘Shiver’s Pride,’ he and his mates call it, but in truth we cut the waves in a glorified breadbox. The deck is warped. The hull is leaky enough that at any given hour one or two of Daed’s lads are busy carrying buckets of sea-broth from below. If there is anything good about this vessel, I would say it is in the sails, which catch the wind just well enough to send us southward.

  By these fragile methods do we draw closer to Cornerstone, so Daed tells me, so I dubiously hope. I begin to wonder whether we will truly reach the White Island, or whether we will sail off the edge of the world.

  I should not complain. Tonight is pleasant, if cloudy. My storm is behind me, throwing us forward by a strong tailwind. Just as during the last two nights, I am free to walk the sleeping decks alone. I relish it. I see the moon making white faces on the water. I count falling stars by the dozen. I could be a mariner, I think, were things different.

  I miss Marid more than ever. I think about his doting smile and his enthusiasm. I remember our days in Muthem, me the fool and he in love. Those passions seem so far away now, those nights entangled in my bed a world apart from tonight. I blame myself for his loss. I should have spirited him far away while he slept. I should have set him down in s
ome paradise far from Thillria, where he might have begun anew. My err. My fault. I must write no more of him, lest my tears blot the ink and make these memories unreadable.

  If nothing else, I feel certain these next days will weave the end of my tale. I consider the possibilities in my head: The first is that we will reach Cornerstone after Grim has landed. He will have scoured the island for my father only to find him dead. All of Thillria’s suffering will have been for naught, and we will confront Grimwain in a meaningless battle. Grim will have failed, but we will likely die.

  The second possibility is that Father is alive. Who knows what state he might be in? If it is true Cornerstone suffers no time to pass or natural death to occur, he might well be emperor of the place by now. We might be forced to fight him and Grimwain to the very death. The thought makes me sick. If Saul or Garrett should die, I will have nothing left worth living for. I have dreamed a thousand ways of ending my own life should they fall, but I do not know if I could do it.

  Even now my pen hovered for many moments above the page. Maybe I should have spirited myself to Cornerstone alone after all. Maybe. Probably. I must cast the thought aside. It terrifies me, but I must accept the help that is given me. This is their world as much as mine. We must all fight.

  I sigh beneath the clouds. I come back to my journal after an hour of nothingness. I have decided that if anything unnerves me more than the risk we are about to take, it is this: I cannot see the Black Moon anymore. I am not sure why, but I expected it to follow us. Perhaps it hides behind the clouds at our back. Or perhaps it lurks below the far horizon. I wonder, yet I do not know. I have spent many hours scanning the midnight skies, but it is absent, gone as though it never had been. I feel watched nonetheless. The Eye seems a sentient thing, an appendage of the Ur. It sees me somehow. It knows.

  I climb down from my daydreams. I retreat to earthly thoughts, lest I float away. I spoke with Daedelar privately today. If this is the same man who playfully demanded a ‘soaking kiss’ from me in Lyrlech, then surely the sea has changed him. We met in his stuffy cabin, and he made no advances. This time it was he who seemed uncomfortable. The reason for my meeting him was simple. I wanted to know the real reason for why he helps us. I peppered him with questions: Why does he have so sharp a dislike of Grimwain? How did he come upon a navigator’s chart to Cornerstone? Why does he want to leave Lyrlech when he returns?

  These and many more I asked him, and yet he proved as elusive as any of the sea creatures whose shadows darken the waters beside our ship. Deftly, he guided the conversation away from himself and back onto me. He plays at some manner of game, I believe. He keeps his mates as clueless as the rest of us, wanting none to understand him. If I had been in one of my darker moods, I might have cornered him in the shadows and bid the Nightness make him talk. But no, I am not that person, not yet.

  Ah, Shiver’s Pride. If our illustrious captain at least pretends to be polite, many of his mates are not willing to do the same. Some of Shiver’s crew have taken up a new hobby. They make a sport of leering at me, of muttering comments beneath their breaths. I am not an immodest girl, but I know their reasons well enough. I am a woman in their world, a lonely creature with only my two ‘husbands’ to protect me. Their gazes annoy me. In their eyes my flimsy dress must seem inadequate, suggestive, even licentious. A few have even tried to clap me on the bottom, while others couch themselves in dark corners where they think I cannot see them. There are five in particular who do it, five mates not of Daed’s usual crew. I have seen the lust in their eyes. If only they knew their peril.

  I am not afraid. But still I should be prudent. On the morrow I will try a fresh solution. Whenever on deck, I will wrap my blankets tight to my shoulders and conceal as much of myself as I can. From here until Cornerstone, Shiver’s hungriest will see only my eyes. The cold may not bother me, but covering up seems the wise thing to do. I would not want to have to burn any of these men away.

  These are trivial concerns, worries of a woman with too much time on her hands. If only I could put myself to better use, my mind might not wander. There is a reason I linger above decks, and it is not to write in this journal or search the empty heavens for the Eye of the Ur. No, it is something else. I am avoiding sleep, foolish as that sounds. For whenever I sleep, I dream of Garrett.

  At first the dreams were only of he and I together, bound hand in hand while ambling through mist-shrouded forests. It was sweet and comforting. I think perhaps we were going home, wherever my unconscious mind hopes such a place might be. But the dreams that followed were of things I dare not write. I awoke in warm sweats, enjoying a moment of languor before my body went numb again. And then there was the final dream. I fell to sleep, and Garrett’s shade greeted me. He was protective as ever, yet detached in a way which terrified me. His gaze was locked upon a place far from anything I know, and his vacancy felt like a dagger in my side. There was a darkness in him. The same shadow I feel whenever he talks of the past.

  Why? Why should I dream so much of him? We have hardly talked since boarding. I have avoided him, and he the same for me. Surely he does not dream of me. His mind is where it needs to be, fit and focused, dark and full of death. And here I am, preoccupied, avoiding sleep to linger beneath the stars. Awaken, Andelusia. You have no time for romance, no time for anything but Grimwain. Awake and join the rest of the world.

  A sailor walked past me just now. Yawning, his eyes heavy with weariness, he did not see me beneath the boom. Even now he wanders to the far side of the ship, patrolling the night as though he could actually see something in the darkness. Now is my chance. The sailor will not be able to see me. I shall stow this journal, sneak behind the mainsail, and conjure a gust of such powerful black wind as to propel us at twice our current speed.

  No one will know. Well, maybe Garrett, maybe Saul. But they will not mind.

  Cornerstone

  Alone at the forecastle of Shiver’s Pride, Andelusia watched the sun rise sorrowfully atop the sea. She saw the tips of Selhaunt’s waves turn from black to grey, all colors muted. High above, colonnades of clouds walled off most of dawn’s light. Grey, grey, and more grey. She rubbed her eyes. Enough to drown us.

  Wide-awake despite having slept none, she tightened her blanket to her shoulders and lowered her gaze to the sea. The Selhaunt spit and frothed before Shiver’s prow, greyer even than the sky.

  “Will we ever get to Cornerstone?” she asked. Though no one was near to answer.

  Today was her tenth day upon the Selhaunt. According to every chart Daedelar had showed her, Cornerstone was but a day and half away. She could not help but doubt it. The sea gave no sign of the White Isle, being naught but an endless surge of unfathomable broth. How Daed and his crew managed to navigate it by the mostly starless nights and dreary days, she could not guess at. And yet everyone seems so certain. We are almost there.

  If anything, the Nightness whispering in her ear made her begin to believe Cornerstone just might be near. Even now, even as the sun rose to wage its losing war against the clouds, she felt an itch on the back of her neck. As always, it began like a spider’s bite, dizzying her, allowing the shadows to creep into the corners of her eyes. But today it felt more intense. Her eyes went dark and her vision blurred. She swore she saw an island in the distance, an icy, twenty-taloned claw jutting from the water. She snapped her eyes shut, reopening them after a dozen slow breaths.

  She saw nothing.

  There was no Cornerstone, only the sea.

  The morning drew on. The clouds thickened like boiling stew, and the sunlight failed to penetrate the shadows in the sky. She remained a figurehead at the ship’s fore. So content was she to watch the sea slide past and the waves crash against the hull that the rest of her senses dulled, all sounds other than Selhaunt’s thunder fading in her ears.

  It was during these moments Garrett approached. Quiet as falling mist, he emerged from the shadows and came to a stop at her side.

  “Ande,” he said her
name.

  Garrett…

  She looked at him. As though dreaming, it took her many breaths to remember his soothing, stoic smile. His chin was freshly shaven, his sand-shaded hair closely cropped. After a breath, she saw the bowl of piping hot pottage in his hands.

  “From a friend.” He held the bowl out to her.

  “From Saul.” She managed a smile.

  “Indeed.”

  She took the bowl and cradled it close, but made no move to eat. She was not hungry, especially for gruel, especially with Garrett here. “Saul always worries.” She looked to the ocean. “The both of you do.”

  She set the bowl down on the deck. If Garrett minded, he showed nothing. Resting his palm on the pommel of his sword, he leaned against the fore-railing and gazed across the churning water the same as she. His eyes mirrored the ocean’s grey while his sword bobbed upon his belt. But nothing in the world is steadier than him.

  “You are thinking something,” she remarked. “What is it?”

  He drew in a slow, serene breath before exhaling. “Many things. I think of Rellen, who should be here instead of me. Of Saul, whose family must think he has abandoned them. I think of Grimwain, and of you.”

  “Are you afraid?” She pushed a wayward stripe of hair from her cheek. “Of Grimwain, I mean.”

  She knew what she expected the answer to be. Of course he is not afraid, she convinced herself. He fears nothing.

  “Yes.” He nodded expressionlessly, stunning her. “I am.”

  “You? Afraid? I do not believe it.”

  His gaze was still stoic, his jaw steady as steel, but something in the way he breathed belied volumes of the restlessness behind his calm. “There is hope in me, however small, that Grim is not as I believe. But it seems unlikely. I shot him in the heart with my sharpest arrow and filled his supper with poison so virulent as to lay twenty men in their graves. He has yet to die. If we see him, if we are so lucky, I will do my best to be his destroyer. But in the end I know it will fall to you.”