Tidewater by Emmie Mears

Author:Emmie Mears
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epic fantasy, quest, action & adventure, non-gender, science fiction, sagas, literary fiction
Publisher: BHC Press
Published: 2019-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

DYAVA HAD his hands submerged in soapy water when the frantic knock sounded at his door. He tried to shake off the remnants of the low buzz of headache that had plagued him for the past several turns, but to no avail.

Gathering a towel to dry his hands, he hurried to the door. The knot of tension that always expected Lyari tightened his shoulders. The headache wouldn’t get better on account of that knot.

But when he opened the door, it was Calyria on the other side, not Lyari.

She barged through the open door before he could greet her, wringing her hands.

“Close the door,” she said. Panic cracked the edges of her words, brittle and crumbling.

Dyava obeyed. Calyria’s hands twitched, but they stopped the wringing motion.

“I came here as fast as I could,” she said. “I was untapping the sugar trees for the winter, and one of the fur traders from Cantoranth was coming down the road. He was speaking to his companion—that tall woman with the hair that went grey after her Journeying—and he didn’t see me.”

“What did he say to get you so worked up?” Dyava’s hands were cool with the stirred air from the open door, a chill where they and the towel he’d used to half-dry them hadn’t fully chased away the damp. His voice sounded distant. He had a feeling he wasn’t going to like whatever Calyria said.

“He didn’t see me,” Calyria said. “Neither of them noticed me. They were speaking of Reynah. She wanted them to keep quiet about what is happening in Cantoranth.”

Reynah. Cantoranth’s soothsayer, the person Saryn had come to convince Dyava would gracefully guide young Lyari if he would do his duty to the Hearthland and convince Lyari to accept such guidance.

“What is happening in Cantoranth?” Dyava asked.

Calyria’s eyes were wide, afraid. When she said the word, it came out coated in fear, because it was a strange word, one learnt on the Journeying and used never, one the folk of Haveranth and the rest of the Hearthland never had to think about, because it didn’t exist to them outside the distant past.

“Illness,” she said.

Dyava went very still.

“Tell me everything,” he said.

• • • • •

The first words out of Dyava’s mouth when Calyria finished were, “You have to go tell Lyari. Immediately.”

His mind ran a thousand leagues for every heartbeat in the silence that followed. If folk in Cantoranth were falling ill, it was only a matter of time before people in Haveranth and Bemin’s Fan did too. There would be panic among the children, and Dyava suspected most of the adults locked away memories of their own Journeyings in order to go about their lives without guilt. It was something that happened over there, not here, not in the Hearthland. Therefore it didn’t matter.

But now it did.

He and Calyria had two choices, as Dyava saw it. They could stay silent and let the shock hit Haveranth the way he was certain it had hit Cantoranth—that was one option, and on the surface it didn’t seem like a horrible one.

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