CHAPTER ONE
“ Hold still,” I say, as the fisherman squirms beneath my needle and thread. “How am I meant to stitch you up if you keep moving?”
“It hurts!” he complains. “I figured with you instead of old Arla, at least it might be a gentle touch, Lyra Thornwind.”
I wince because I don't like the thought that I'm causing him pain. I have never been good at doing that. I had hoped that the numbing root would have kicked in by now, letting me work on his wound without a problem. But there is only so long it is possible to wait.
“I’m sorry,” I say, keeping my blue eyes on my work. “There’s no painless way to stitch a wound closed.”
He huffs. “In the city, there would be healers who could close this with a touch.”
“And you would still find a way to complain about it, Benkan,” my mother says, looking up from where she is brewing an herbal infusion to try to stop the wound from festering.
I’m told that I look just the way she did when she was twenty, like me. The same golden cascade of hair spilling down my back, the same fine, almost delicate features. The same slender frame and deep blue eyes. These days, my mother looks worn with years of being Seatide’s healer, working without the kind of magical talents that those elsewhere use for the task. Still, she manages a smile that disarms the fisherman’s annoyance. That’s a talent in itself, with a man as given over to grumpiness as Benkan.
“It’s not that I’m ungrateful,” he insists, as I keep sewing. “It’s just… how soon will I be able to get back on my boat?”
“Two days,” my mother declares, in her sternest tone. “That’s a nasty cut you took there, Benkan.”
“Two days? What am I meant to do in the meantime? How am I meant to feed myself and my family?”
My mother’s expression has no give in it. “Two days. They’d rather have no fish for a night than see you lose an arm when that wound opens again and gets infected.”
She has mastered the art of being tough to be kind. Of telling people the hard truths, and occasionally hurting them when they need to be hurt, so that they will heal cleaner. When a bone must be rebroken to set clean, she can do it. I have a harder time of it.
“It’s not just a question of fish for supper with Aetheria’s officials in town,” he complains. “If I don’t get a good catch, I might not have enough to pay what they demand, and who knows what they might take then.”
“Surely they can only take what you have?” I insist. I barely understand why the officials are here at all. Seatide is not a wealthy village. It is a small place, clinging to a rocky shore, barely surviving on what those within can haul out of the ocean.
Benkan laughs then, which makes his arm shift, almost spoiling my work. "You have a good heart, Lyra, but you don't understand how the world works. These are conquered lands, which means the Aetherian bastards can take what they want. If I’ve no money, they might decide they want me for their mines, or that colosseum of theirs.”
“Somehow, I doubt they’d make a gladiator of you, Benkan," my mother says. "Now, hold still so my daughter can finish her stitching."
Again, she is the one being firm. If it were her doing this, she would probably just hold him in place until she was finished. I can't do that. I have never had the knack of being hard with people. I just have to focus on what I'm doing, moving the needle as quickly and precisely as I can, hoping that the thread won't snap. It is dipped in honey to try to fight off any infection. A trick of my mother's.
It doesn't take long before I've managed to stitch the wound completely, tying off the end of the thread and then cutting it. There is a kind of satisfaction that comes from being able to help someone like this.
My mother is the one who holds out her palm for payment.
“Ah, about that,” Benkan says.
“Is this where you tell me you have no coin, Benkan?” she asks, with no give in her tone.
“I need it all for the official’s demands,” he insists.
“And we don't need it?” Her tone is firm as she gestures to the interior of the home in which we live. It is a small, two room shack, built from wood, and with a floor of packed stone. Shelves around the walls hold the tools of the healer’s trade, roots drying for later use, herbs in small stone jars. There are a couple of books in which she has collected recipes and tips relating to the healer’s art. Much of the space is dominated by the table at which we are sitting, and by a large cauldron that we use to cook up cures when needed.
“I still have some fish from the last catch,” Benkan says, quickly. “I can pay you in that.”
My mother gives him a stern look, then nods curtly. “That will have to do, I guess. But the next time you manage to slice your arm open with your own gutting knife, you'd better bring real payment.”
“Oh, you know half the folk in the village pay you with food,” Benkan says.
“And that is why I have to live in a hovel,” my mother snaps back. “Now, out, you. I'm sure someone else will be sick or injured soon enough, and I don't have space for you to be here as well as them.”
“You’re a hard woman, Arla,” Benkan says. “Not like your daughter.”
“Aye, and don't you forget it,” she replies.
She shuts the door behind him as he goes. “Looks like fish tonight. Again.”
I smile slightly. “I don't know why you're complaining, Mother. You knew from the start that Benkan was probably going to pay in fish.”
She shrugs. “It would just be nice to think that for once, someone would pay us in gold or silver. You heard what he said about the Aetherian official coming around.”
“You think they’ll bother us?” I ask.
She nods. “Of course they will. A place like Aetheria doesn’t exist by being kind, or not extracting everything it can. It takes and takes, every part of the empire feeding the center. A whole empire named after a single city; what does that tell you, Lyra?”
“That the city is important?” I guess.
My mother shakes her head. “That the city is greedy . That it’s a hungry maw that can never be fully satisfied. Most places, they have a city state, a bit of surrounding land, and that’s it. But Aetheria needs an empire . And its emperors are…”
She trails off, not finishing that thought.
“What about the emperors?” I ask. I know who Emperor Tiberius VI is, of course. No one who lives in the empire can avoid knowing that name.
My mother shakes her head. “There are some things it’s better not to talk about, especially when you live in a conquered land.”
I have a hard time thinking of Seatide as conquered, partly because it happened when I was a little girl, and partly because it is so out of the way that no one really bothers with it. From the little I understand, soldiers didn’t come ravaging through. Instead, a few officials showed up one day and simply declared that it belonged to the Aetherian Empire. They took a few people back to the city, but other than that, nothing much changed in terms of everyday life.
“Come on,” my mother says. “We need to finish cutting the herbs. After that, I know you’ll want to go out to the rock pools to listen to the fishes, but you should be careful with the Aetherians around.”
I smile at my mother’s characterization of what I do as “listening to fishes.” We both know it’s more complicated than that. I have a fragment of the magic that has allowed Aetheria to conquer the world. Out here, that is a rarity. My talent is nothing major, though, just enough to communicate with the animals I see. It is enough to turn a rock pool into a fascinating space, filled not just with life but with feelings and thoughts, intentions and hopes.
“I’ll be careful,” I insist, standing and smoothing my simple woolen dress.
“Even so,” my mother begins, but she doesn’t continue the thought, because in that moment, a young girl bursts in, flattening herself against the wall and breathing hard. She looks frightened. In fact, she looks terrified.
“What’s happening?” my mother asks. “It’s Ida, right? Gertha’s daughter?”
The girl nods, still not saying anything.
I crouch by her, looking her in the eye while I put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Did something happen? Something that frightened you?”
She nods.
“Something you're running away from?”
That gets another nod.
“Can you tell me what happened?” I ask.
It takes her several seconds before she says the words.
“A bear. A big one. It already ate someone! And it killed a soldier! Everyone was screaming and running and… this was the closest place.”
A bear is bad news. They grow big out on the coast, and there is little to challenge them. Normally they stay away from human settlements, but if one has wandered in, that's potentially very dangerous.
And it's a danger I can help with.
My mother seems to understand what I'm thinking. “Lyra, no, it's too dangerous.”
“I have to try to help,” I insist. “If people have been hurt-”
“ You could be hurt, or worse.” My mother looks scared for me, but also slightly resigned, as if she knows she will not be able to stop me from doing this. “At least promise me you will be careful.”
“I promise,” I say. It feels like an easy promise to make. It's not as if I'm planning to fight the bear. I just want to see if there's anything I can do to help. “Shut the door after me. You don't want it getting inside.”
Am I really about to do this? It seems that I am. I rush out into the open air, the normal scents of fish and the sea now tinged by blood. There are wooden houses around me, set out on the shingle, as if clustered together for warmth. Boats bob out on the ocean or are dragged up onto the beach.
A roar comes from behind the houses. It must be the bear. Steeling myself, I move towards it, determined to face it.