The Shift of the Tide Read online

  Neither of them wore court garb. Instead they were in casual wear for their day of study. Ursula’s bloodred hair stood up in spikes from running her hands through it, her crown no doubt left back in her room. Dafne looked more composed, as she naturally did, though she frowned at whatever she read, deep in thought while absently rubbing her swollen belly. She wasn’t that far along, but the Nahanaun customarily scanty dress of halter and low-slung skirt revealed her tanned midsection, and the growing bulge within.

  Uncoiling just a tendril of magic, I reached out to the babe within her, sending affection and welcome. The old grief and longing wanted to well up, but I refused it. I hadn’t been able to save Anya’s daughter. I wouldn’t have my own. My destiny lay elsewhere and I would be at peace with that. I had no room for sorrow.

  “You sent for me?” I asked, as neither of them seemed inclined to notice my presence.

  Ursula held up a hand with a raised finger, an implicit command to wait, while Dafne didn’t even move. I sighed lightly. So intense, these two, so focused on the interred words of the long dead. If Jepp were here, she’d roll her eyes and shake her head. But she was off on the Hákyrling with Kral, former prince of Dasnaria, trolling the edge of the magical barrier.

  Once the field that sealed Annfwn from the rest of the world, the barrier had hugely expanded—one of their ongoing projects was mapping the exact boundaries—preventing people from crossing, unless they had magical or Tala assistance. Jepp now had one of those magical tools—the Star of Annfwn, and Ursula had tasked her and Kral to help those stranded on the wrong side to cross over. Those who posed no threat, that is.

  The High Priestess of Deyrr and her minions had to be kept firmly outside the barrier, lest they pursue their voracious hunger for the magic inside.

  At last Ursula looked up at me, her gray eyes unfogging from abstract thought and going to sharp steel, focusing on me. Though she couldn’t shift, she had more predator in her than most mossbacks. If she could shift, I’d expect her First Form to be a wolf. Sometimes I glimpsed the she-wolf in her eyes.

  “Sorry to send Marskal to fetch you,” she said. “We weren’t sure when you’d be back and two time-sensitive tasks have come up for you, if you’re willing.”

  It occurred to me that she’d known Marskal could find me, which meant she also knew that he and his people watched me—likely at her order. My cousin was no fool. She wondered at my agenda also.

  “Why would you apologize?” I asked, with more irritation than I’d realized brewed in me. “Your Majesty commands my obedience.”

  She sat back slightly, considering me with raised brows.

  “My turn to apologize,” I added, going for a convenient half-truth, “I meant to tease you only, but it came out wrong.”

  “Nakoa tells me that it’s the dragon in me speaking when I’m unintentionally waspish,” Dafne said. She’d straightened from her bookish bend, pressing hands to the small of her back and stretching. Then she grinned. “He doesn’t comment on the intentionally waspish ones.”

  “Harlan doesn’t comment at all,” Ursula said in a dry tone. “He just gives me that eternally patient look.”

  “Do you think that’s a real phenomenon?” Dafne asked me, more seriously, picking up her ink pen out of habit. She wouldn’t write down what I told her, unless I gave express permission, but she itched to regardless. “I’m obviously not a shapeshifter and I don’t completely understand what it is that lets me talk with Kiraka mind-to-mind, but do real shapeshifters experience that—the animal within having its own emotions and motivations?”

  “Can we perhaps postpone the academic discussion on shapeshifting until we ask Zynda to do what I had Marskal drag her back for?” Ursula asked in a dry tone.

  Dafne put down her pen, abashed and nodding, then reached for a wooden box and a small scroll. She got up and set both before Ursula, tacitly deferring the decision to her.

  “He didn’t exactly drag me,” I said, amused by them, and letting go of my irritation. “He made for good company on the walk back.”

  Ursula snorted. “You had a conversation? I never can get five words out of him strung together.”

  “That’s because you’re scary,” Dafne muttered.

  “Is it? Harlan isn’t afraid of me.”

  I smiled at the thought of her muscle-bound, former mercenary Dasnarian consort being afraid of anything.

  “That’s why you love him,” Dafne retorted. “Which first, Your Majesty?”

  Ursula shot her a sharp glance. “We’ve been arguing priorities,” she explained to me, handing me the wooden box. “Start here.”

  I took it and peered inside. It was full of what looked like small pieces of driftwood, worn smooth by water. “May I touch?”

  “We have and nothing bad has come of it,” Dafne said, and Ursula nodded, watching me with keen interest.

  Just to be cautious, I caressed them with a tendril of magic. Another sense I didn’t have in animal form, and one I at times greatly missed. Magically inert, the wooden pieces seemed to be not much at all. If I’d found the box, I’d have discarded it as no more than a child’s collection of “treasures.” Ursula and Dafne, however, must perceive something more about them. I set down the box and took one piece out, turning it in my fingers. Small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. Mostly flat, with series of indentations, both rounded and sharp, on each vertical side, like a double-bladed knife with notches might have. But these were clearly not sharp enough to be a weapon. Like most inanimate objects used by people for a long time, the one I held hummed with deep remanence, impressions of many different hands, along with sun, sea, and wind.

  And a stronger memory, embedded by someone more like me, with shapeshifter blood running strong and clear in his veins. His hand with long, brown fingers, holding the wood and comparing it to a coastline, the feeling of waves buoying the moment. One of the ancients? Excitement coursed through me.

  “A map?” I asked that man, forgetting in the strength of the image where I truly stood and why.

  “Ha!” Ursula smacked a palm on the table and pointed at Dafne. “I win that one, librarian.”

  “I don’t see how it’s a fair test for her to simply hold it,” Dafne grumbled. Then she narrowed her pretty brown eyes at me, the caramel shine sharpening with acute insight. “Unless you have other ways of knowing?”

  “Simply a guess.” I shrugged, then set the piece back in its box, rubbing my palms together to shed any remanence that clung to me. Dafne noted that gesture, too, though I’d never explained the significance of the practice. Truly only another magic user should know. Hard to say what Kiraka had been teaching her, however. “Is that what they are—maps?”

  “I think so.” Ursula leaned forward and plucked one of the pieces out of the box, holding it up to the light and tracing the edge with a bony finger. “Inlets, coves and peninsulas. Perhaps showing the route between chains of islands. I could wish we had Kral’s shipmaster Jens here. I bet he’d confirm it.”

  “You’re hoping these are a map to N’andana,” I said. Which would be something. All we knew, from fragments of tales and records—and a few hints dropped by the High Priestess of Deyrr herself—was that Deyrr wanted what the N’andanans had died to protect. Dafne wanted to find their forgotten islands because she believed knowledge would save them. Ursula wanted to find them because she reflexively considered everything inside the barrier—and the N’andanan islands now would be, almost certainly—her responsibility.

  “Without Jens, unless Zynda can confirm, we’re simply speculating,” Dafne countered. “They might simply be pretty objects. Driftwood carved by idle hands.”

  “The fact that they were kept in the library indicates deeper meaning,” Ursula replied.

  “Why bother to carve a map into small pieces like this?” Dafne scowled, though she plucked out another piece, rapidly sketching the shape onto paper. “It makes no sense to me.”

  “Maps are bulkier,” I pointed out. W
hile such a small carved piece would be easy to carry in one’s talons or mouth. Very interesting solution.

  “And paper gets wet,” Ursula agreed. “Ink and paints smear. Hides rot in the humid conditions aboard ship. Sea salt is abrasive. This makes sense to me as a durable, portable guide.”

  Dafne glanced between us. “Two of a kind, you adventurous types. They still don’t match anything. Look at this.” She stood, taking a moment to stretch again, grimacing. “Ugh. I feel like I ate an enormous steak and it’s sitting on my bladder—is this going to get worse?”

  Ursula looked mildly horrified, holding up her palms to ward off the suggestion. “Don’t ask me.”

  I shrugged, my horror coming from another place. I could survive many things, but I doubted I could live through holding another infant while she died. Certainly not my own. It didn’t bear considering. “No help here.”

  “Figures.” Dafne arranged sketches from the pile in front of her, then pulled over a large map—an illustrated one on paper—of the extensive Nahanaun archipelago. I’d seen mossback maps of this style before, at Ordnung, and had used them to orient my journey as a hummingbird to spy for Ursula. An even smaller carved piece that showed the edges of land features, that I could’ve carried tucked up against my body, would have been far more useful. The hummingbird brain had been good for remembering direction—and worked perfectly for returning home—but I’d been forced to periodically stop and shift back to human, simply to remember the map I’d memorized.

  Would I have to do the same with the map-stick? It would be interesting to test if a bird brain could analyze the symbology. Hummingbirds understood shape and color quite well, so it was possible. If not, a corvid form certainly would, as they comprehended and even invented tools to solve problems. That wasn’t a form with the same speed and endurance for extended journeys as a hummingbird was, but the trade-off of not having to stop and expend energy to shift forms and back again might make it worthwhile.

  The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that a shapeshifter had crafted this mapping method. That feeling of restlessness prickled at me. The sense of that hand, cupping the stick, waves moving me up and down in a gentle sea, the feel of salt spray on my face and… something in the distance? It felt like a vision of the future, but also not. Perhaps the sense of a greater mind moving over my own. Could this be Kiraka noticing me—my invitation, at last?

  “Zynda?” Dafne had her brows raised, a line between them for my inattention. “Do you see an overlap between my sketches and the map?”

  I shook my hair back, then wound it into a coiled rope, pulled the pin out of its pocket and fixed it up off my neck. The library was too close, overwarm with no cooling breezes. I took a moment to master the instinctive urge to flee, gentling the bird inside that wanted to batter itself against the glazed windows.

  “Are you all right, cousin?” Ursula asked. She rarely called me that, and it helped to ground me as myself again. I gave her a grateful smile, wondering if she understood that. Of all of Salena’s daughters, Ursula had known her mother the best. She’d been ten when Salena died, and so must have witnessed the sorceress’s decline—and perhaps devised ways, as daughters do, of bringing her mother back from the lands without borders.

  “I think so,” I told her.

  “Is there something… tainted in these wooden pieces after all?” Dafne rubbed her hands together, imitating me, consciously or not.

  “Not like you mean,” I replied. “But they are potent, and somewhat unsettling. Also,” I laid a finger on the map of one of Nahanau’s neighboring islands. “I think this could match this notch, here.” I indicated one of the sketches, where the bottom tapered to a point.

  They both cocked their heads, studying.

  “I don’t see it,” Dafne muttered, sounding irritated. She never liked when she couldn’t immediately grasp something. Probably she tried to understand the sticks as she did language, breaking them into parts and pitches, instead of seeing them as one piece.

  “Unfocus your gaze,” I suggested. “Look as if you were a bird in the air—and remember that the wood represents the spaces between—the ocean—not the land masses.”

  “May I?” Ursula asked and Dafne handed her the pen. With a deft hand, Ursula shaded in the areas outside the lines of Dafne’s sketch, adding shadows that made those parts look like forests and mountains, while in the part between—which would be the wood—she drew small waves. An enviable skill. I nodded in affirmation, glad she’d been able to do it. Though I’d tried to learn to use Dafne’s scribing tools, they never felt right in my hands. Perhaps I was too Tala. Still, King Rayfe had learned, and he was as pureblood as any of us.

  But he had been determined to become king, to take control of deteriorating Annfwn by waging war to make Andromeda our queen. She’d at least been able to step into her mother’s shoes to use the Heart to manage the permeability of the barrier, putting us better off than we’d been a few years ago. We all have our roles to play. It was coming time to play mine.

  “All right.” Dafne lined up Ursula’s colored-in drawing with the map. “I can be convinced, but I still think we need one more test before we send ships to look for N’andana.” She glanced at the fading light. “But she can hardly do it in the dark.”

  “You want me to fly and see if I can navigate according to the map-stick?”

  “Exactly,” Ursula replied. “Though it can wait until morning if the light is too low.”

  “But—” Dafne started, and Ursula flicked a steely glance to stop her.

  “Zynda’s safety is more important. Jepp can wait a day.”

  “Has something happened at the barrier?” I asked.

  Ursula sighed, tapping a piece of paper small enough to fit around a crow’s leg. “Jepp sent a message via one of Ove’s crows. They believe our old friend is alive and attempting to cross the barrier.” A ghost of pain edged the corners of her eyes at mentioning the High Priestess of Deyrr, and she passed a hand over her belly. Not like Dafne, with her maternal habit of checking the child, but in memory of being gutted by the foul woman in her attempts to steal the Star of Annfwn. Ursula had aged since the nearly mortal blow. Not obviously, but in the thin skin around her eyes and mouth.

  “It would have been too much to hope that she’d died,” I said. None of us knew the priestess’s name—or if she even had one. I’d expected them to try again, though not this soon. No wonder the visions of death had increased. That shark… could it have been part of this incursion? A strange way to attack, if so.

  Ursula glanced at me with a wry lack of amusement. “And yet hope for it, I did.”

  “Are they sure?”

  “Of course they’re not sure,” she snapped, her irritation for the lack of certainty obvious. “I would give a great deal for the simplicity of someone telling me that an army is marching or besieging me. Not this …” She waved both hands, wiggling her fingers like worms. “Magic.”

  “The missive came a few hours ago,” Dafne explained. “She didn’t have much room, obviously, and she used the Hawks’ cryptic language, so it’s not a lot of information—”

  “Even for that and knowing Jepp, it’s terse,” Ursula broke in. “She wants you to come see—by ship, she recommends, not swimming or flying, and I agree—but to come soon. She used codes for danger and Deyrr, with immediacy but not emergency. I’d go myself, but—”

  “But you’re High Queen of the Thirteen and you can’t,” Dafne interrupted in turn. “I’ll point out that you should be back in Ordnung, ruling, not chasing ways to stop Deyrr from invading.”

  “If they invade I may end up with nothing to rule,” Ursula snapped back and Dafne held up her hands in peace.

  “I’m only saying you’re needed there—for many reasons. Should I remind you of Ami’s message of a few days ago? The volcano beneath Windroven is no more restive, but they’ve had strange encounters with odd beasts that she thinks are related to the dragon’s presence. We ne
ed to make a decision about how to deal with that. Who’s to liberate that dragon?”

  “If we even should,” Ursula countered darkly.

  Dafne looked aghast. “You’d leave it to die in there—one of your own subjects?”

  “These dragons are no more mine than Zynda and her Tala ilk are, as she so adroitly teased me with just now.”

  “I apologize.”

  “Don’t.” She said it sharply, but her mouth twitched in a slight smile. “You’re good for my humility. Besides,” she returned to the argument with Dafne, “you still don’t understand Kiraka and what she wants. Loosing more of her people on the world could be irresponsible.”

  “We also don’t know what not releasing the dragon will do. What if it means the volcano will erupt? That would mean the destruction of Windroven and likely most of Avonlidgh.”

  “Does that mean you’re volunteering? You and Nakoa will sail there and free another dragon?”

  Dafne shook her head, almost absently, rubbing her belly and staring at the bookshelves as if they might provide answers. “That’s not an option. Even if it were, I think it wouldn’t work. Kiraka was ours to awaken. The Windroven dragon will answer to someone else.” Her gaze slid off the books and onto me. “What do you think, Zynda?”

  I shrugged. “I am not the one to ask about dragons.” There. A neat dodge.

  Ursula narrowed her eyes at me, then tapped Jepp’s scroll, returning to the immediate question. “Jepp asked for Zynda specifically for a reason. The map-sticks can wait until she returns.”

  “Kiraka asked for Zynda specifically, too.”