The Crimson Queen

by Alec Hutson

  “Ironheads! Ten, eleven . . . twelve! Just about the best first cast I’ve ever had. Elara smiles on us today, boy.”

  Keilan grinned broadly, more for his father’s good humor than for the catch they’d brought up. In the past year there had been too many days of sullen silence trapped together on this boat, followed by nights of drunken rage and sadness. Since the night they’d lost her.

  They dipped their net a handful of times around the rocks, bringing up a few more ironheads and also a small shark that must have been stalking the school. His father offered a quick prayer to Ghelu for the pardon of killing one of his most beloved children, then slid his boning knife into the shark’s eye and finished it off with a twist. Shark meat was popular in Chale these days.

  His father didn’t ask him to dowse again for fish, and Keilan didn’t volunteer. Doing so more than once in a day left him with a splitting headache the next morning.

  Finally satisfied with their catch, his father took up his oars again and began rowing for home. The sun had started its slow descent by then, burnishing the bare slopes of the eastern hills so that they gleamed like sheets of beaten gold, while to the south the purple stain in the sky had faded to an ominous black.

  Keilan began stuffing the fish they’d caught into a large sack; although almost all of them had stopped breathing, he was still careful of their hooked jaws, as even after death they sometimes snapped shut with a terrible strength. His uncle had told him this was a last attempt at vengeance by a lingering spirit, but Keilan secretly thought that the fish were simply too stupid to know that they were dead.

  As they approached the beach Keilan saw that most of the other fishing boats had already returned and been dragged up into the tall grass where they could better weather the coming storm. Shadowy shapes milled around on the sand, and tarps had been laid out displaying each fisherman’s catch. Long before he could make out faces Keilan recognized the spindly legs and barrel chest of Pelos, the old fishmonger from Chale, who traveled to their village most evenings in his great, rickety wagon to sift through Elara’s bounty. He was gesticulating fiercely with a tall, stooped man that Keilan thought was probably his Uncle Davin.

  When the boat’s bottom scraped against the sand, Keilan hopped over the side into the surf and began hauling on the rope tied to the prow. His father joined him moments later, and together they wrestled the boat partway up onto the beach. Keilan spread out the tarp they used to display their catch, and his father pulled from their boat the sack bulging with ironheads, then began to lay them out carefully in neat rows. While he was doing this a few of the other fishermen who had already concluded their business with the fishmonger hoisted his father’s boat onto their shoulders and carried it up into the beach grass, setting it upside-down beside the others.

  Pelos strolled over, trailed by Keilan’s Uncle Davin, and whistled appreciatively after a moment of careful inspection. “By the Ten, Farris, you had a good day. Two dozen ironheads and a decent-sized snapper.” The fishmonger jerked his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the other catches. “Your brother here insisted there was nothing to find out there today, and I’d just about given up hope that this trip would be worthwhile.”

  For the first time, Keilan noticed that the other catches on display seemed unusually small, both in quantity and the size of the fish, and that his uncle’s mouth was set in a thin, hard line as he watched the fishmonger peruse what they’d caught.

  “There was nothing,” his uncle insisted, with more than a trace of bitterness, “Farris must have brought up everything in the bay worth catching.”

  His father finished laying out his fish and then stood, wiping his hands on his tunic. “I whistled to the fish and they came. Old fisherman’s trick.”

  Davin snorted, gesturing with a bony finger at Keilan. “It’s the boy. He’s just like his mother.”

  Keilan felt a hand on his shoulder, and then his father moved in front of him. “He’s a good lad. He’s a true fisherman’s son.” There was an edge to his voice, and Davin must have heard it as well because his uncle stepped back, muttering to himself.

  Pelos brushed past his father and tousled Keilan’s rain-slicked hair. “Well, if you helped bring up these beauties, I thank you kindly. So do the good people of Chale, as they’ll be happy to have a bit o’ fresh ironhead on the table tomorrow.” The old fishmonger’s face creased in sudden confusion. “Wait, what’s this?” he said, tickling the back of Keilan’s ear. “I think . . . I think you’ve got something caught back here . . .”

  Keilan grinned, knowing what would come next. With feigned amazement the old fishmonger withdrew from behind Keilan’s ear an iron bit, then with a flourish held it out for him to take. “By the Ten, lad, you best be careful where you put your money. All kinds of disreputable folk around these parts.”

  Keilan knew that some of the others his age in the village would have sneered at the fishmonger, trying to show how they were too old for such children’s tricks. He’d seen fifteen winters, after all. Another few moons and it’d be the mid-summer solstice, and he’d have to night-dive for Elara’s bounty and prove to everyone that he was ready to be considered a man of the village. But Pelos was almost family – he’d been pulling the same trick for a dozen years, since Keilan’s mother had first brought him down to the beach to watch and wait for his father’s return.

  Pelos gave him a sly wink and then turned back to his father. “I’ll take the lot. Three imperial drakes and a dozen bits.”

  “Four drakes even, and throw in a few pinches of that salt I know you keep in your wagon.”

  “Three drakes, fifteen bits.”

  The haggling settled into a familiar rhythm, with Pelos offering up outraged protestations and his father refusing to budge from what he thought was fair.

  While they bargained, Keilan allowed his thoughts to wander a few months hence, when he’d have to stand at midnight on the rock with all the other boys on the cusp of manhood, and then leap into the freezing waters of the bay. He wouldn’t be able to return to the village until he brought back something of Elara’s bounty – most others scavenged sea urchins or crabs, whatever small thing they first found so they could get out of the water as quickly as possible, but Keilan had seen a few others return carrying spiny lobsters, which was considered especially blessed, and that’s what he had once told himself he would hold out for.

  Now though . . . the thought of the night-dive had been weighing heavily on him for the past two weeks, ever since his . . . accident. Keilan shuddered, and not from the cold drizzle that was slowly starting to strengthen. Swimming down into the water, pushing into that blackness . . . there were things in the Deep. He had touched one.

  It had started innocently enough. They had been out in the boat, a high summer sun beating down mercilessly, and not a breath of wind to give relief. His father had been hunched at the prow with his cloak drawn up, still smelling of the bottle of spiced rum he’d finished off earlier that morning. While they drifted on that glassy sea Keilan had trailed his hand in the water, idly searching. But there were no fish that day that he could feel, at least anywhere nearby, and his father was in no condition to row them elsewhere, or even finish baiting the nets.

  So Keilan had stretched himself farther into the water, pushing his senses past the rocky mouth of the bay, into the true Deep. There he had found things. Bright, swift-moving shapes he was familiar with, a great school of fish that twisted and turned as if of one mind. And on the edges of that huge constellation hung cold, clear lights he knew to be sharks, and when he drifted closer he had seen one dart into the school. The lights had swirled and eddied, moments later reforming as if nothing had happened.

  Keilan had known he should have stopped then – already he had felt himself starting to tingle with the strain of reaching so far, but he had continued on, into the blackness.

  Several times he had passed small, bright
, darting things, and once a languid, undulating form, and then his breath had been stolen from him as a collection of vast, ponderous souls pushed past, angling upwards.

  Whales, he had murmured, as the giant creatures surged around him. They were different than the other things he had felt in the bay, not warm and clear and predatory, but blazing with inner fire, and almost gentle, their hugeness encompassing him as he floated, awe-struck.

  He had sensed his body back in the boat, so far away, begin to shake, but he wasn’t able to stop now, not after seeing such wonders. So he had dived deeper, his speed quickening, thrusting himself forward into the darkness.

  And that’s where he’d found it. Down there, in the true black, where sunlight never reached. He’d thought the whales were huge, but it had reared out of the gloom like a sudden mountain, vast beyond the limits of comprehension. Terror had sluiced through him, and he knew from whatever tenuous thread connecting him with his body back aboard his father’s boat that he had just emptied his bladder, a distant trickle of warmth running down his leg.

  It did not move; it did not glitter like fish or sharks or pulse with the slow majesty of whales. But Keilan had known that it lived, and then, impossibly, an eye bigger than a wagon wheel had slid open in the blackness and found him, flensed his soul open like with a boning knife and peered into his depths. And he had fled, screaming.

  His father had lifted from his stupor when Keilan had slumped to the floor of the boat, twitching, blue veins etched against milky skin and his wide eyes staring at nothing.

  He had seen a Deep One. And it had seen him.

  The next morning as Keilan pulled on his boots, his father clapped him on the shoulder and told him he could rest, that he would be going out into the bay alone today. Keilan started to say something, but then he glimpsed the bottle tucked into one of the pockets sewn into his father’s cloak, and instead swallowed away his words. This was a reward, Keilan knew, for the excellent catch they’d brought up the day before, but he wondered if there wasn’t something else as well. Yesterday, after his father had finally settled with the fishmonger, he had caught a few of the other fishermen glancing his way as they made the long walk back to the village. These were men he’d known his whole life – Big Benj, Uncle Davin, Cord, Seven-Finger Soman – but in their faces he hadn’t seen a trace of the old friendliness, just thinned mouths and squints of hard suspicion. He’d lain awake much of last night, listening to the storm raging and thinking of the last time he’d seen his mother, of her empty eyes as the same men with the same expressions had taken her away from their small hut, down to the beach and the waiting sea.

  Thoughts of his mother always led to him spending time with her books, so after filling a bowl with some of the leftover fish stew he’d prepared for dinner the night before he dragged out the box from behind his sleeping pallet and began removing its contents. He handled the books reverentially, making a circle of them on the hard-packed dirt floor of their hut with him sitting cross-legged in the middle. Fourteen books, the treasures his mother had refused to live without, the contents of the chest his father had rescued with her from the sea. He felt like he knew every word they contained by heart; his mother had taught him to read using them, and in the years since he’d finished each one two-dozen times. Keilan stroked their dark leather bindings, tracing the letters that flowed in silver and gold script across their covers. The Metaphysics of Reason, A History of Menekar Volume I, When Blood Sings: The Poetry of Dzin keth Dzari.

  To Keilan’s knowledge there were no other books in the village. He would be surprised if anyone else could read, actually, although Old Tannin had made a show of studying the Tractate the last time a wandering mendicant had passed through bringing a copy of Ama’s holy book. That sacred text had been written in Menekarian, like most of the volumes spread before him now. His mother had told him that the language of Menekar was the most widely written in the known world, even outside the borders of the empire. It had become a thread binding together cities and people separated by vast distances, a common basis for trade, scholarship, and diplomacy. But it was not the only language among his books. Two of the titles, The Physiology of Man and Folk-Tales of the Middle-North, were written in High Kalyuni, a much more difficult and ancient script. Even the mendicants who came and preached in the village brandishing their copies of the Tractate wouldn’t be able to understand the delicate, looping writing of the lost Mosaic Cities.

  His mother had taught him so much. While most of the other villagers only knew about this tiny sliver of the world, their homes and the nearby town of Chale, the waters of the bay and the dun hills to the east, his mother had told him stories of the vastness that unfurled in every direction. Farther east, over the Bones of the World, lay the ancient cities of Menekar, where white lions curled at the feet of ruling satraps; to the far north was a frozen waste pocked by crumbling holdfasts locked in ice and sorcery; to the west the Gilded Cities glittered on the coast; and to the south, beyond the sea, was where the mysterious Shan ruled in their Empire of Swords and Flowers. Thoughts of such places had stirred him when he was younger, and he had spent countless hours imagining himself as a bravo of Lyr or a Skein thane.

  He hadn’t indulged in those dreamings since his mother’s death a year ago. No, not her death. Her murder.

  A rapping at the door startled him.

  Keilan hurriedly repacked the books and slid the box back behind his pallet. Reading was looked upon with some suspicion by most of the other villagers.

  He crossed the hut’s one large room and opened the door a crack, then flung it wide when he saw who was standing there.

  “Sella!” he cried, bending over to embrace the little, blonde girl. Her hair was matted and dirty, and as always smelled like she had slept in a barn – which was possible, as her father worked one of the farms clustered along the road running north to Chale. She hesitated a moment, and then Keilan felt her small hands on his back.

  When he pulled away she glanced at him reproachfully from under long lashes, shifting her weight between her feet. “Thought you’d forgot all about me.” Her mismatched eyes, one green and one blue, looked hurt.

  Keilan took her by the hand and pulled her inside. He led her to one of the sitting mats, and when she flopped down he walked over to the hearth and removed the lid from the big iron cook pot. “Do you want some stew? It’s cold but tasty. Even got a pinch of salt in it.”

  Sella nodded gratefully and accepted a bowl. As she slurped it down he studied her, looking for how she’d changed in the months since he’d last seen her. Sella’s dress was a bit more ragged than he remembered, and she must have grown, as her sandals now appeared painfully small. She was only a few years younger than him, maybe eleven or twelve, but she still looked like a child, with her smudged cheeks and scraped elbows and thin, knobby arms and legs.

  She finished with a satisfied sigh and handed the bowl back to him. “You never come round no more. You getting too big to play?”

  Keilan smiled and shook his head. “It’s not like that. I got to help my da out on the water.”

  Sella’s face soured, her mouth drawing down into a pout. “But the other boys your age don’t help their das. How come you have to?”

  Keilan drummed his fingers on the side of the bowl she’d passed to him, thinking of the best way to explain things to her. “Well . . . you know, Sella, that working the nets needs two. After . . . after my ma was gone, my da didn’t want to fish with Uncle Davin anymore. So he asked me to come help him. I know it’s not natural for boys to fish the bay before they do their night-dive, but my da never really gave much care to how things are supposed to be done.”

  She was quiet for a moment, chewing her lip in thought. Keilan had other suspicions as to why his father brought him out onto the water almost every day – to keep him close, keep him safe. But he didn’t think Sella would understand, so he didn’t mention that.

&
nbsp; Sella’s expression relaxed as she arrived at some decision. “Well,” she said, “you’re not fishing today, yeah? So how about we go down to the rocks, see what the storm tossed up?”

  Keilan felt some tension he hadn’t even known he’d been holding leak away, and he grinned. “That sounds great.”

  Sella took the lead, as always, slipping through the grasping branches and brambles like some forest spirit, while Keilan followed behind, pausing constantly to unhook something that had snagged his clothes or tangled in his hair. The path had been worn clear back when they used to go down to the rocks most every day, but the stunted little forest that separated the village from the rocks had spilled into it over the past year. Or maybe he’d just gotten bigger and clumsier.

  “You still go to the rocks sometimes?” Keilan asked, scrambling over the rotted remains of a dead tree, beetles the length of his thumb vanishing into the scarred wood.

  “Sometimes,” Sella called back over her shoulder. “It’s not as much fun without you. But no one bothers me, which is nice. Don’t have to weed the garden or muck the pens, and the others don’t ever come here.”

  The others. Keilan knew she meant the children of the village, the sons and daughters of the fisherfolk. The relationship between the village and the northern farms was frayed – scratching sustenance from the ground and raising pigs was no way to live, and Keilan suspected that the farmers thought the same of those who reaped Elara’s bounty. The farmers had arrived ten years ago, refugees from one of the interminable wars that always seemed to be simmering somewhere in the Shattered Kingdoms, bringing not only their plows and horses but also the golden sun of Ama. Many of the villagers had even begun wearing the copper discs of the faithful in the years since, and Keilan had heard more than a few fisherfolk grumble that the poor harvests brought out of the bay recently was a sign of the Deep Ones’ displeasure with this encroachment by the eastern god.