Other Earths (collection)

I picked up a cloak and the hazel twig and went out into the evening. A fog had come up from the Thames and hung over the box hedges, playing around the fountain in watery coils of its own. Late November and the taste of mist in the mouth …Water rising, in times of war. When I reached the fountain, I held out the hazel twig. A moment, and then it twitched. From the map, the Winterbourne lay beneath. I followed it back to the wall of Coldgate, hastened back down into the cellars.

It took a lot of searching before I found the little door, hidden and dusty behind a stack of barrels. It had once been locked, but the lock was rusted, and I pulled it away. It was unlikely that what lay behind it had been deliberately concealed—the lock was there to prevent people from wandering down beneath the cellar. Steps led down, and I followed them.

I did not get far. The smell of water struck me halfway down the slippery stair, and then it was all around me—I clung to the rail, in a minute of sheer panic during which I thought I would be swept away—but it was not real. The ghost of the Winterbourne was rising, spectral water all around me. My lamp showed diffuse and dim, rocking my hand, and around it I glimpsed a shoal of eels, tails flicking as they sped along. Standing in the race of the water I felt like a ghost myself. I backed up the steps and looked down into the foaming torrent.

It wasn’t just the spirit of the river that was rising. Magic was rising, too. It was all around me, tugging, curious, and I did not want to be noticed in this way. I slammed the door to the wine cellar shut with a muttered spell and went to tell Lord Oldmark to get me a boat.

Thamesside, looking back at Coldgate. We rocked on an icy current, the river slapping our little boat back and forth. Behind us, heading for Tower Bridge, one of the huge coal barges churned slowly downriver, the horse-team on the opposite bank patiently padding along toward the eastside docks.

“You had best be correct in this, Mistress Dane,” the seated figure at the prow said. Aeve’s voice was river-cold.

“Your Majesty, if I am not, my reputation is in any case gone, and I do not care what happens then.”

The queen inclined her cowled head.

“The navy has been ordered to continue out into the North Sea,” Oldmark said to me, in a low voice. “All but five ships, which are heading back to London.”

“Even the navy will not be of much help, if I am right. Aeve must appeal to Thamesis, as rightful ruler of the river’s city.”

Oldmark nodded. “You have explained. She knows what she needs to do, if it comes to that.”

It will, I did not say. I was sure that I was right, but arrogance is best left undisplayed. “Watch the palace,” I told him.

I could sense it in the air, magic building up, as if behind a dam, with the strong mossy taste of Under-Hill. “It won’t be long,” I said, beneath my breath. Aeve turned, irritably, with the impatience of queens.

“Nothing is happening.”

I couldn’t really blame her for the irritability: It was foggy and freezing out here in the middle of the river. I was surprised that she’d agreed to come at all. And as if prompted by my thought, the queen came to a decision.

“We will go back,” Aeve said and rose.

“Wait,” I said, forgetting to address her as I should, but as I spoke, Oldmark echoed me, “My Lady, wait.”

Before us, across the black, choppy expanse of the river, Coldgate was fading. Magic was humming in the air like a beehive, so strongly that my skin prickled and burned. Aeve gasped as it struck her. Instead of the palace, its grounds, the streets that lay beyond its walls, we were facing the mouth of the now-buried Winterbourne, a ghost shore, muddy and strewn with stones. A single post rose up from the mud, tapered to a point and covered with weed: some ancient marker from the time before the Romans came to London. It shimmered, and I saw the skull that crowned it, grinning.

Aeve put out a hand, as if touching enemy magic.

“Your Majesty, be careful—” I started to say, but Aeve was already beginning the incantation I had given her, her own power rising now, the authority of the rightful ruler of Albion, calling upon her ancestors, summoning up the protection of the dead.

It was protection that was needed. A ship was coming down the mouth of the Winterbourne, a galleon with tattered sails, sides so encrusted with barnacles and shells that the ship looked more like some dredged wreck than a proper vessel. I saw the pilot standing at the wheel, a white face beneath a tricorner hat. The Lowlander. The Dutchman. And a ship that would sail the seas forever, unless someone not human offered another choice, an unrefusable bargain.

They say the Dutchman ruled the seas beyond death and all who sailed upon them …Behind his ship came others: Spanish flags flying, French, a longship with a boar’s crest. Dozens of ships, all those that had gone down in the seas off the coast of Albion, the wraiths of enemy vessels, conjured by the Queen-under-the-Hill.