Other Earths (collection)

Oldmark thought for a moment. “It would be the cellars, where we keep the ale. They say the foundations date from the days of the Romans. I do not know whether that is true, but certainly there are a great many steps leading down to the cellar …”

“Please take me there, Lord Oldmark, and I will see what is to be seen.”

He was right about the steps. I counted forty, leading in an arc down into the musty depths of the cellar. The floor was made of flags, a glossy gray stone. The cellar smelled of wine, of moss, of rivers. Oldmark left me in a small pool of light cast by a candle; when he had gone, I blew the candle out and stood alone in the dark.

At once, the drowned were all around me, sensing my presence as they might sense the spirit of water. I felt a chill breath on my face. Damp fingers trailed through my hair.

“Hush now,” I said, softly so as not to frighten them. “I don’t mean you harm.” The spirits of the water-dead are rarely hostile, tending rather to a fluid sadness, and they must be treated gently.

One of the spirits floated into view, releasing her own phosphorescence, a green-pale glow. A girl, only a little younger than myself, with a purple mark around one eye.

“Who are you?” I asked. I put ritual weight behind my words, speaking in the Tongue of Water rather than my native English. “Why are you here?”

At the sound of the Tongue, her face grew still and slack, and I felt a little guilt at that. “My name is Sarah Mew. I was told to go with the others and wait for the boat.”

“Which boat is that, Sarah?” Had she been left on the shore, been taken by the waves? But she answered, “The boat that is coming. The one that leads the fleet.”

“Sarah, you must tell me what you mean. Which fleet?” It struck me that, for all her mention of the future, she might still have been speaking of the past: one of the interminable skirmishes with the Spanish navy off the shores of Albion, for instance.

“The fleet that is coming,” she whispered. Her drowned face contorted with the effort of speech: she was enspelled, I saw, and my own magic was trying to counter that which had been placed upon her. And that other magic was stronger. I felt it sweep through the cellar like a tide, washing her away. She spun through the dark air and through the wall, no more than flotsam, and was gone. I was alone in the cold chamber.

I went slowly back up the stairs and found Oldmark. He was standing disconsolately by a window, staring out at the rain streaking down the leaded panes.

“Mistress Dane! Is everything well?”

“I am well, Lord Oldmark, but I’m afraid that I have some bad news. I have spoken with the drowned. They tell me of a fleet that is coming, a fleet of ships, and from the magic that was placed upon the spirit with whom I spoke, we face considerable danger. This was not an ordinary spell. It swept my magic away; only now is it beginning to creep back.” This was true. I could feel it starting to seep into my soul again, refreshing its parched ground.

Oldmark blanched. “Danger! From which quarter?” “I could not say.” This, on the other hand, was not true. In that moment when the tide had caught the spirit in its grasp, I’d sensed something distinctive, familiar—a mossy greenness, a sudden dank and earthy taste in the air. The magic of Aeve’s cousin and mortal enemy, the Queen-under-the-Hill.

Faery magic, then. No surprises there. But Aeve would not be pleased.

The queen wanted me to find out more about the fleet. This time, she spoke to me herself. I was granted audience in the great hall of Coldgate, myself on bended knee, head bowed, Oldmark fidgeting off to one side, and the queen—in the quick glimpses I got of her—sitting upright on the carved stone throne, her skin the whiteness of the stone itself, lending her a statue’s look. Her hair was the pure blood-red of faery, her gaze a slanted green. She did not look to be a hundred years old, but then, in terms of her own family, she was little more than a girl.

“You look afraid,” she said, when I hesitated in the course of my explanation. “Are you?”

I saw no reason to lie. “Yes,” I told her. “I am afraid of the magic of under-hill.” Of your relatives. Old magic, root-and-briar magic, coiling and twining and dragging you down into earth and dreams …I’d chosen the river rush, after all, or been chosen by it. I wanted something clear and clean.

“You are wise, then,” Queen Aeve said. “Tell me. Can you find out more, or are you too afraid?”

“I am afraid, but I will do as you ask.”

I felt, rather than saw, her smile.

“You’ll be rewarded,” was all that she said, but she did not say how.