Voyager of the Crown

by Melissa McShane

  Voyager of the Crown

  Melissa McShane

  Copyright 2018 Melissa McShane

  Smashwords Edition

  Table of Contents

  Map of Tremontane

  Map of Dineh-Karit

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Map of Tremontane

  Map of Dineh-Karit

  Chapter One

  The chill autumn wind picked up again, tumbling red and gold leaves down Longbourne’s main street, past the shuttered façades of houses and shops shut up tight against the coming storm. It was well after dawn, but the overcast turned the sun into a dim white disk that gave off little light and even less heat, and lanterns and Device lamps burned behind windows in every building but the one Zara North stood next to. That house, and its attached shop, sat dark and silent, waiting for their new owner. Zara cast her eye over the foundation, over the missing stones near the little-used front door—real business in Longbourne was conducted via the back door—and felt a pang at realizing they were no longer her problem.

  A gust of wind carried more leaves that flew merrily past the loaded wagon, some of them fetching up against the horses’ legs, and disappeared into the distance. Zara looked off down the street after them, toward distant Thorsten Pass. Verity’s shop was just north of hers—she corrected herself again, it was north of where she’d used to call her own—and the lantern over the door swung and creaked with the wind. She could follow the leaves past the post office, the forge, Eleanor Richardson’s laundry, the tavern, all the way through Longbourne and up the valley to where the mountains made a stark gray wall against the sky. It was so overcast she couldn’t see Mount Ehuren, and the illusion of its absence made her shudder, as if Barony Steepridge was erasing itself.

  She tossed one final bag, this one packed with clothing, into the back of the wagon. Its weathered, gray slats snagged the rough canvas like burrs, stopping it from rolling further. She was leaving, yes, she could never return, but it was ridiculous to let herself imagine her beloved home only existed so long as she was part of it. She glanced at her grandniece, who stood nearby, bundled into her coat and bouncing slightly on her heels against the cold. “You don’t need to freeze your nose off just to see me off,” she said.

  Telaine Garrett clutched her coat close around her and shrugged. “You picked quite a day to leave,” she said.

  “Happen I’d control the weather if I could,” Zara said. The wind, carrying the smell of wood smoke from the nearest chimneys, whipped at her heavy cloak; she’d never gotten the hang of those newfangled fashions. Strands of black hair blew into her face, but she didn’t push them away. It felt like weakness, acknowledging that the weather could discommode her. Her reaction to the wind was one of the few things she had control over. “Can’t put it off any longer.”

  “I know,” Telaine said. “You probably should have gone last year.” Her nose was red, probably from the chill in the air, and likely the moisture in her eyes was because the wind carried dust as well as leaves. Telaine was sensible and level-headed, not given to sentimentality. She understood why Zara had to go. That didn’t mean she liked it any more than her great-aunt did.

  “Past time,” Zara agreed. They both fell silent. Zara wished Telaine would go. She wished she’d stay. She wished her life wasn’t so damned complicated.

  “I’m sorry,” Telaine said, and reached out to hug her. Zara, startled, put her arms around Telaine reflexively and hugged her back. The last person she’d hugged had been her sister Alison, the day before she died. It still hurt, though Alison had been eighty-three and was past ready to join her husband Anthony in heaven. Zara was now the last of her generation. And now she was leaving her family behind. Again.

  “I won’t write,” she warned. “No contact. It’s easier that way.”

  “It is,” Telaine said. “But Uncle will know where you are, in case…”

  They both knew there was no good ending to that sentence. Thanks to her inherent magic, Zara was likely to outlive not only her nephew, the King, but her great-grandnieces and nephews as well. Zara clenched her jaw against her own tears. No point crying over something she’d had almost sixty years to grow accustomed to.

  She released Telaine and stepped back. “Have a good, long life,” she said, and climbed up on the wagon’s seat.

  “Goodbye, aunt,” Telaine said. Zara cracked the reins and the horse plodded forward. She kept her eyes focused on the road ahead, though she’d seen Telaine wave. She’d said her goodbyes to Ben and the children earlier; she didn’t think she could bear any more pleading from her little namesake, who refused to accept that her great-aunt was leaving and wouldn’t come back. That her house had already been sold, that the giant loom had gone down the mountain into storage the week before, that Zara had told everyone she was moving to Kingsport to have a larger market for her skilled weaving. That last was a lie, but she couldn’t exactly tell her friends she was a deathless former Queen who needed to protect her secret. She prayed, as she always did, that the “deathless” part was untrue.

  The wagon left Longbourne and made its slow way down the valley toward the pass. A sprinkling of rain, little more than heavy mist, struck her face. She pulled the cloak lower and tried not to hunch her shoulders. The tall grass was yellow, here at the beginning of autumn, but the golden coins of the aspens outshone its dry dullness. Dusty green pines to the left kept their dark color year round, unchanging unless something acted on them, fire or lightning or someone chopping them down. That was something she understood very well.

  The ride down the mountain was unnaturally silent, without even the birds’ cries to keep her company. All she heard was the rushing of the unseen river that flowed from the distant peaks and rippled over stones. It sounded like a distant party, conversation heard but not understood. She caught herself straining to understand it, and shook her head as if that would silence the murmur.

  She wished she’d let Telaine come with her as far as Ellismere. She felt unexpectedly lonely, something she hadn’t felt in seventeen years, ever since she’d come to Longbourne. The feeling made her angry, because Zara North wasn’t weak, had never been weak. You’re starting a new life, she told herself, you ought to be filled with anticipation, but after so many new lives, starting another one just made her tired.

  Hank’s face came to mind, as it sometimes did even thirty-nine years after his death. He’d been a good man, and she’d loved him dearly. She regretted never telling him the truth about who she was. She’d justified it by telling herself Zara North was dead, she was never going back to that life, and it wasn’t her secret to tell, but the truth was she’d been afraid of how he’d treat her if he’d known she was the former Queen of Tremontane. So much better to be an ordinary woman with ordinary dreams.

  Then he’d died, and to her shame she’d felt the tiniest twinge of relief that she wouldn’t have to face the reality that he was aging and she wasn’t. She shoul
d never have let herself try to make a life with him, but she’d been intoxicated with the joy of being free of all her responsibilities, and he’d looked at her the way he always did— She cut off that line of memory. Hank was dead. She’d moved on.

  She came out of the pass and trundled along to Ellismere. She needed to decide where she was going next. Kingsport wasn’t a bad idea, now that enough time had passed that no one in the great city would recognize Queen Zara North, but making a place for herself there now that weaving Devices were becoming more common would be difficult. She might be good at weaving—she’d had fifty-plus years to become good at weaving—but she didn’t love it enough to fight for it. Ravensholm was another possibility, but that was a long way to ship the loom. And she found she was tired of little towns. She wanted the anonymity of a city, which made her laugh, a short, dry chuckle. She was already anonymous, just another ordinary woman among millions, but it was the wrong kind of anonymity.

  The Hitching Station looked dull under the dark clouds that still threatened snow without delivering it. As she pulled into the yard, Josiah Stakely came out of the inn and strolled over to meet her. “Hey there, Agatha,” he said. “Fine day for a journey.”

  She smiled at his witticism. “Fine day for a hot dinner, I think. Happen I can get one here?”

  “Of course. Stew’s about on, and Joanna made cornbread today.”

  “I’ll be back in a bit, then. Got something to do.”

  Zara didn’t really have anything to do; she just didn’t feel like conversation, though she liked Josiah well enough and considered his wife a friend. She wrapped her cloak more closely around herself as she walked away from the Hitching Station toward the center of Ellismere.

  The wind carried with it the biting sharp scent of snow, the promise of the season’s first storm. Probably not more than a few flurries, but the children in Longbourne would shriek with delight and scrabble the fine drifts together to make marble-sized snowballs. Here in the lowlands, not even that much snow would stick, and the storm wouldn’t be more than an inconvenience, certainly nothing that would delay her journey. Wherever she ended up going.

  She stopped outside the city hall and bought a newspaper, but the wind rattled the pages so violently she went inside the telecoder office to read it. One of the operators looked as if he wanted to object to her using the place for shelter when she wasn’t there on business. She fixed him with the blue-eyed North stare, and he subsided.

  She’d tried, early on, to be demure and polite, modest and submissive, but it never lasted. Finally Hank had called her on it—You weren’t made to hide who you are—and once she’d done laughing at that in private, she’d had to admit he was right. It wasn’t as if Queen Zara North was the only forceful, quick-thinking woman in Tremontane.

  She flipped idly past stories about politics and business, past the society pages, to the advertisements at the back. Those interested her more than politics these days. You saw so much of people’s natures in the kind of things they asked for, whether it was employment or goods or even romance. More and more cottage industries were fading as Devices became more prevalent; there must have been two dozen advertisements for skilled Devisers and another score asking for men and women trained in the use of Device-powered looms, sawmills, or the tailor’s trade.

  She turned another page. Men and women seeking each other out. People offering things for sale. People looking for lost things. There might be an inherent magic for that last one, though if there were, prejudice against inherent magic was still strong enough that anyone possessing it wouldn’t dare offer her services.

  She turned to the back page, which was half-filled by a line drawing of a tropical beach lined with remarkably chipper palm trees, above which was the word ADVENTURE‼! in letters the length of her pinky finger. Below, in slightly smaller letters, she read:

  THE CHANCE OF A LIFETIME!

  EXPERIENCE FOREIGN TRAVEL!

  MEET STRANGE AND EXOTIC PEOPLE!

  ONLY A FEW SPACES LEFT!

  She read on, then scowled. It was just an expedition into the jungles of southeastern Eskandel. They were thoroughly mapped and explored, but remained overgrown enough they looked like wild, uncharted territory. She’d gone once and had nothing more exciting happen to her than contracting a jungle fever her inherent magic had cured in a matter of hours when it should have taken days. That had required some clever talking.

  And yet…the word ADVENTURE had caught her imagination. For a few seconds, before she had read the entire advertisement, her heart had beat faster at the idea of doing something…she wasn’t sure what, but something different. Something Agatha Weaver would never do because it was bold and dramatic and attention-grabbing. But Zara North had been dead for sixty years now, and maybe she couldn’t use her own name, but there was no need to hide anymore. The more she thought about it, the more she realized how much she wanted to do something outrageous. Not a week’s journey into Eskandel’s tame wilderness, but something truly different.

  She threw the paper away and walked back to the Hitching Station. The snow had finally started falling, tiny specks that pricked her cheeks and hands, and everyone she passed had their heads down against the wind. As she entered the yard, she breathed in the rich, dark smell of beef stew and the higher, sweeter smell of cornbread, and her stomach rumbled.

  She pushed the door open and was surrounded by the muggy warmth of the taproom and the quiet mutters of people conversing over their meals. “Josiah,” she called out.

  “I’ll get you a bowl,” the man said from beyond the door to the kitchen. She sat at the bar and pushed back her hood.

  “Where’s the farthest place from here you can imagine?” she asked when Josiah emerged. He blinked at her in surprise.

  “That’s an odd question. You planning to travel far?”

  “Happen I might. Well?”

  Josiah leaned against the bar and stretched out his long, thin arms. “I suppose north of the Eidestal,” he said. “Not sure how hospitable that is.”

  “This time of year, happen it’s unreachable,” Zara agreed.

  “Who’s going to the Eidestal?” Joanna Stakely said. She set an armful of shot glasses on the counter and began putting them away out of sight. “Not you, Agatha?”

  “What’s the farthest away you can imagine?” Zara said.

  “That isn’t the Eidestal? Maybe Eskandel.” Joanna polished a smudge off a glass with a corner of her apron. “Or—I suppose Dineh-Karit is further than that.”

  “It is,” Zara said. “Though they don’t let northerners into their cities.” Dineh-Karit. The mysterious country on the southern continent, even more reclusive than Veribold. So reclusive they had no political relations with Tremontane or any of its neighbors. They’d rejected a Tremontanan embassy in her father King Sylvester’s time, and she hadn’t bothered to make overtures during her reign. She had no idea what Anthony and Jeffrey had done, whether they’d even made overtures, but in any case the Karitians weren’t enemies and they weren’t friends. Tremontane hardly even traded with them; Karitian merchants only went to Umberan in Eskandel, and northern merchants who wanted to trade with the Karitians in their homeland were confined to a large island called Goudge’s Folly in the bay of Dineh-Karit’s largest port city, Manachen.

  “So you are thinking about it,” Josiah said. “You’re out of your mind.”

  “Why? Because I want a change? You know I’m going to be put out of business in a few years by these Devices.”

  “Yes, but…by heaven, Agatha, you’re forty-five. Isn’t that past time to settle down?”

  Zara glared at him. “I’ve been settled down for nigh on twenty years. I think it’s past time for a change, is what I think.”

  Josiah put up his hands palm-out in self-defense. “You know I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “Josiah lives with his foot in his mouth,” Joanna said. “I think it sounds exciting.”

  Zara shrugged. “Can’t say I�
�ve made up my mind,” she said. “Happen I’ll go to Kingsport and look about, see what kind of life I can make for myself there.” She took a bite of stew and regretted it instantly, because it scorched her tongue and the roof of her mouth. She breathed in around the stew to cool it. “And who knows what might happen?” she said when she could finally swallow.

  In her heart, she’d already sold the loom.

  ***

  Five whirlwind days later, Zara stood in front of the small mirror in her rented room and examined her reflection. Yes, she could pass for thirty-two; she certainly didn’t look the forty-five everyone in Longbourne and Ellismere believed her to be. Time to leave Agatha Weaver’s life behind.

  “I’m Rowena Farrell,” she told the mirror, letting the name settle over her like a blanket. Almost her mother’s name. “Rowena Farrell from Overton. It’s nice to meet you.” Ben Garrett was from Overton, and from what little he’d said, she’d gathered it was a small town near Aurilien whose citizens she wasn’t likely to run into on the east coast.

  Shedding her northeastern accent was harder than losing the name. She’d trained herself so well to say “happen” and “certain sure” it felt strange to say “maybe” and “of course” instead. “Miss Farrell,” she said. “Mistress Farrell. Miss Farrell.” No, on the whole it was better to be a Miss. No dodging inconvenient questions about her nonexistent husband. “Miss Rowena Farrell. Pleased to meet you.”

  She scrutinized the corners of her eyes and mouth, the lines extending from the sides of her nose. There were the beginnings of crow’s-feet, which cheered her. Eighty-six years old and finally showing some wrinkles. She laughed, not too loudly because the walls of this inn were thin. If she looked to be in her early thirties when she was actually in her mid-eighties…no, she didn’t want to do that math and work out how many more years she might live. She was starting an adventure and she refused to entertain depressing thoughts.

  Finding a job had proved to be easy, and she hadn’t even had to resort to the forged letters of reference “Rowena Farrell” came with. Sarah Falken, the daughter in Falken & Daughter, had sounded desperate for someone, anyone, who had a strong personality, was well organized and quick with numbers, and was also willing to travel to the farthest ends of the earth. Now Zara was their newest employee, setting out for Goudge’s Folly to oversee the importer’s inventory and receiving. It was nothing she’d ever done before, but that made it even more interesting. New job, new name, new country, new life.