Seaborn and the Seven Seas

Chapter One

I jabbed the metal pick into the soft place beneath the guard’s jaw.

His pick. The one tucked into his belt beside the whip. I’d done it a thousand times in my head while he paced the length of the tables, oyster shells piled high, cold water dripping down to the pebbled ground.

“Faster!” the guard clad in a mud-brown uniform hissed as he passed me by, small stones shifting underfoot.

The word went in one ear and out the other. I’d become numbed to his sharp tone and so had fifty women working in silence. Some my age, twenty-five, a handful older, and one as young as sixteen.

My fingers found the lip of a bumpy shell as I shifted from one foot to the other, my legs aching from standing countless hours. I pressed at the hinge and twisted harder. It opened with a wet, reluctant pop. I reached inside, feeling for the round object nestled in all that soft gooey flesh.

Pearl or empty?

Empty. Damn it!

I tossed the empty shell onto the pile by my feet. Good pearls went into the basket lined with clean cloth. Defective ones into the metal bucket.

I reached for the next one on the table. The smell of them hit the back of my throat, salt and rot, thick enough to taste. I had breathed it in every day of my life, so deep into my lungs that if you cut me open, the sea would pour out.

Cold air pushed through the cracks in the rocky walls, carrying the sound of waves crashing. I had seen the sea once but never been in the water. I doubted I’d ever be free to venture on my own.

The rhythm of the thump and crack of shells dropping filled the cavern, over and over. This was all I knew. This was all I did. Day in and day out.

Six guards approached at the far end of the cavern’s mouth, where the sunlight beamed by the metal gate. Beyond the gate, the compound led to more guards and the ocean. At least that was what we were told.

There was no escape for us. No life beyond this hellhole. A pull in my gut told me outside, just beyond the rock, the ocean waited—patient and enormous and full of secrets—waiting to unfold.

I had to believe life existed beyond this cavern for us. That one day, someone would come for us, though I had no idea who. Not one soul out there knew we existed.

My hands found the next shell.

Jina, the girl to my right, soft-spoken, with pale skin and kind, hazel eyes like mine, knocked her knee against my leg as she cleared her throat, her dark hair cascading to hide her face.

A warning.

I followed her gaze. Captain Agusto, with a sneer plastered on his face, marched toward us.

He stopped behind me. Heat and sweat radiated off him, the smell of someone who’d been working under the sun all day.

I dared not look at him and kept my hands moving.

I’d gotten used to his eyes on me, but he’d never watched me this long.

Minha said once that I had delicate features, which made me laugh. Nothing about this place had ever made me feel delicate. I was tall for someone who had never eaten enough, hazel-eyed, sharp-cheeked, brunette hair reaching my shoulder blades.

Whatever I looked like, it had never mattered here. We were all the same. Nameless. Hands that opened shells.

The distraction came at a good time when I fished out small, imperfect pearls, and I held one up to the sunlight streaming through the crack from the rocky ceiling like a thin ribbon. Stunning as it caught the light. Pinks were rare, and so were twins and triploids.

“Don’t waste time looking, girl.” He yanked it from my fingertips and tossed it inside a metal bucket on the table.

It landed with a soft clink against the pile.

He assumed I would steal it. He was right. I lowered myself, pretending to be afraid he might hit me, and slipped the one and two others into the rolled waist of my pants. Our pants were loose. We folded them up at the waist to walk without tripping, which made them useful for more than one thing.

“We need more,” Agusto barked, making his way along the assembly line.

The young guard in training picked up an oyster that had fallen off the table and yelped, dropping it. He wasn’t the first guard to react like it burned him. Why could we touch them and they couldn’t? Was it the gender thing, or were they different from us?

“Idiot!” Agusto smacked his head.

“I was trying to—”

Agusto shut him up with a snarl. “Mac, stay three feet from me, boy.”

Mac shoved his fingers through his hair and retreated. Up close he was average height, average build, with the kind of face that disappeared in a crowd. The only thing that stood out were his eyes. Too young for the uniform he wore. Too uncertain for the sword at his hip.

Nam, the woman who was a mother figure to the left of me, exhaled. Her dark hair, threaded through with silver, caught the sunlight from the ceiling cracks as she turned her head away from the guard.

Agusto rushed to her. “Woman, you mind your business.”

The guard called us girl, or you. None of us had names.

I gave her one anyway—Nam. I’d tried names for myself too.

Minyoung. Song. Wren. None of them fit. They all felt like someone else’s.

So when Jina started calling me Sis, I let it stay.

It wasn’t a name exactly. But it was mine and someone who loved me said it.

They could take our labor, our pearls, our freedom. But they could never take what we gave each other.

Nam’s back curved from decades of hunching over shells, her hands so calloused they had gone bumpy and thick. Her fingers, once the quickest in the cavern, had begun to stiffen in the cold.

The guard looked at her pile, then mine, and back at hers.

“Work faster, old woman.”

Nam ignored him and reached for another shell.

“Say, yes sir.”

She kept silent and continued.

The whip came from Agusto’s belt so fast I almost didn’t see it. The crack of it against Nam’s back split the air like a branch breaking, loud enough everyone flinched, even the other guards.

Nam didn’t gasp, not a cry, not even a quickening of breath. She stilled for a second, then she reached for another shell, and everyone kept working as if nothing had happened. We had all broken long ago, but we learned to tolerate the violence and keep going.

“Did you hear me, woman?”

When the whip hissed back for a second blow, I did something I had never done before. I threw myself against her back, using myself as her shield.

“Stop.” The word came out of me raw and strange. This quiet rage had been buried a long time and clawed its way up. I wasn’t afraid of punishment. Not today. “Please. She won’t be able to work.”

It was the only excuse that might make him back off. Our ability to open the oysters was the only thing keeping us alive.

Touch her again and I’ll make you wish you never had.

The thought surprised me. I had spent a lifetime learning to be small, swallowing my anger without complaint.

But not today. That whip rising a second time made me forget every lesson Agusto had taught me about staying down.

My self-worth finally cracked open and so had something fiercer.

The part of me that would not watch my sisters suffer.

The guard’s eyes went wide, veins rising across his face, his nostrils flared.

Then the whip came down, slicing across my back, burning a line of fire. My vision blurred white at the edges. I bit down, jaw clenching, and swallowed the scream and locked it at the back of my throat.

Not for him. He didn’t deserve the satisfaction.

At the far end of the table, Minha flinched, jaw tightening, the only outward sign any of them gave.

This wasn’t my first hit, but no matter, they all hurt the same. I would never let this place fracture me. But I feared, the longer I stayed, I might eventually one day.

Jina whimpered, her head lowered, counting in a barely audible tone.

The guard lowered, his hot breath against my ear, smelling of foul boot leather. My stomach churned, nausea rising in my throat.

“Next time. I’ll toss you into the ocean. See if you can swim.”

We all knew what that meant. No one came back from the water.

Asshole. I’ll pay you back one day.

I knew exactly how. The soft place beneath his jaw. I had mapped it a thousand times while he paced these tables. One day I would stop imagining it and just do it.

He straightened, then walked away.

We didn’t work any faster. The grip on wet shells was nearly impossible to find.

I reached for Nam’s hand and held it for just a moment. Her thumb moved once across my knuckles.

I’m all right, she said.

She wasn’t. None of us were. This torment had to stop, or we would all die before our time.

When I pushed away from Nam, she shook her head without meeting my gaze. Her silent way of telling me I shouldn’t have protected her.

Nam was our eldest. The others before her had died from abuse, or the king had taken them as retaliation for whatever small act of defiance had caught Agusto’s attention.

I wasn’t that little girl who needed protection from her. It was about time to do the same for her.

“Are you okay, Sis?” Jina’s fingers moved as fast as her words.

I nodded, tossing a gray pearl into the basket. “We need to get out of here. I don’t know how. I don’t know when. But we’re not dying here. I’d rather die swimming in the ocean.”

“Same here.” She glanced behind her at the guards, talking among themselves.

When Agusto left, no one paid us any mind. We never gave them trouble.

I reached for another shell and popped it open. The inside was nacreous and faintly iridescent, catching the firelight. Grief held me captive for a moment, then rage.

The shell cracked in my hands. I had pressed too hard, splitting along the hinge into two pieces, edges sharp enough to cut.

A thin line of blue opened across my thumb.

I wiped it fast before anyone noticed. Everyone else bled red.

I had always bled blue and my wounds healed fast. I didn’t know why that pertained to only me.

We worked until moonlight dimmed the cavern. Jina and I dragged our feet side by side, Nam ahead of us. We gathered around the firepit and roasted clams, mussels, and seaweed. On nights we met our pearl quota, the soldiers rewarded us with seaweed soup with rice.

My favorite time of the day. No guards watched over us.

I stretched out on the dirt, the earth cooling my achy legs, and popped the mussel meat into my mouth.

Jina did the same beside me. Sohee, tall and lean, a few years younger than Nam, gathered moisture from the wall with a cloth and dipped into crushed pearl we had stashed under a makeshift hiding place.

She helped Nam loosen her tunic. The whip had left marks across her shoulders, visible through the torn cloth.

A lump moved in my throat, but I had no tears left to shed. I’d run out of those early in my youth. Sohee dabbed on Nam’s wounds. Nam never winced or gave any indication of pain. Then Sohee approached me.

“Next time, you don’t take the hit for her.” She untied the back of my tunic and let the shirt fall around my shoulders.

I didn’t mind since I’d healed fast and no one saw my blue blood.

“Hmmm.” Sohee rubbed at her temple. “He never hits you with a full force. No bleeding as usual.” She leaned closer. “You’re like a daughter to her so it hurts her more to see you take her hit. Next time, stand down.”

There better not be a next time, or I might do something I wish I’d done many times in my dreams to Agusto.

I nodded to ease her heart. But I would always take the hit for Nam. I would do it for anyone here, the only family I’d ever known.

“Tell us a story.” Bora, the youngest among us, nestled her messy, curly head on Nam’s crossed legs.

Nam set a wooden bowl down after taking a sip of water, the wrinkles around her eyes deepening as she inhaled a deep breath. “Gods once ruled everything. Water and sky, life and death. Every feeling you’ve ever had—grief, rage, love—there was a deity who owned it.”

“What did they do with that power?” Bora shifted and peered up, her beautiful green eyes catching the firelight.

“They kept the balance.” Sohee chimed in, tossing wood into the pit. “Each held their piece of the world in check.”

“But the balance tilted,” Nam added, “when goddess of sea and god of sky fell in love.”

“A forbidden love.” Jina sighed as if it were romantic. “Don’t tell me the other gods intervened.”

Nam split a large piece of seaweed, then handed the half to me. “Their reunion caused chaos. Hurricanes. Tornados. The kind of havoc that swallowed whole villages. They became indestructible.”

“The other gods imprisoned them, didn’t they?” I said around a mouthful of kelp. “To never be together. Power is always feared.”

The fire snapped.

“Like us.” Minha, about my age, lean and sharp-featured with pale skin, brown shoulder-length hair, and hazel eyes, chimed in, “The guards fear the oysters they cannot touch.” She reached behind her in the dark shadows and pushed the rocks aside.

“I’ve been making these while you sleep.

” Her bunny-like nose crinkled as she handed me a four-inch dagger made from the oyster shells, the handle wrapped in the same rough material as our tunic—thick and scratchy.

I held it up into the firelight, the blade smooth and iridescent. The perfect size to place it inside my pants. “Can I have this?”

“Not a good idea.” Nam shook her head.

I’d never disobeyed her. None of us did. I handed it back to Minha as I winked. She understood my meaning. I would take it when everyone slept.

After Nam finished her story, she gently set Bora off her leg and rose. “We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow. Get some sleep.” She headed toward where the water trickled along the wall to do her business.

Then softly, almost to herself, she sang. Low and gentle, the same melody every night, so familiar none of us thought to ask what it meant or where she learned it. The tune captured my heart no matter how many times she sang it.

Where the water runs deep and our home holds our name,

We lived in the blue and the oceans were ours to claim.

Seven gods watched the tides and the world stayed the same,

Till the kingdoms grew hungry and conquered without shame.

We gathered our bodies by the fire. I curled up between Jina and Minha, the same position we took every night.

“I wish a goddess would come to save us,” Jina whispered.

I closed my eyes, hoping the same. When everyone fell asleep, I grabbed the dagger and placed it in the secret pocket of my pants. I got back into place, the blade cold against my skin, and closed my eyes—dreaming of Agusto, and the soft place beneath his jaw.