by the fountain of thirst chapter 1

[figureofdismay]

Asterravia was a new country, not yet even a hundred years old. It was a patchwork land stitched together from the small fiefdoms and princely city states that had once considered themselves their own countries. The warring King Noah had collected many of them together in his scarred, grasping hand, backed by the feudal knights of his hereditary kingdom and the farmer warriors who had banded together in the wet and pestilential years of Noah’s kingly ascension to take the lowlands and the sea cliff lands to secure trade for his growing nation. He took tax of crops and wool and salt fish in return for the promise of protection from foreign sea raiders and freedom from the petty clan squabbling that killed their hot headed sons and burned their fields, installing knights and lords to oversee their provinces and precincts. The old King Noah claimed this quest for unification, for a greater kingdom in the eyes of the world, had come to him in a vision one long and sleepless night, when a star visited him, a burning bright star from beyond the veil come to him in the form of a golden woman wrapped in robes of shimmering brilliance and told him of the power he could have, and the city he should build by the sea, and the legacy his sons could make real. She had then put her hand on his head to anoint him, and seal his fate, and where the star had touched, a hank of his hair grew ever afterwards stark white, even though Noah had been a young man at the time, with coal black hair. Noah named his new kingdom for his celestial lady, Asterra Via, the way of the star.

Noah had two sons, Ewan and Logan, and a daughter, Rose, who had been born in the hard times when their lands were small and their crops were rotting in their fields. Their mother was taken by the winter fever when little Rose was too young yet to cook or embroider or learn her letters, barely old enough to dress herself without her nurse. It was a hard, warring time and the boys were at their training, readying to take on the mantles of war and statecraft in their brazen adolescence, young for it but more than willing. Ewan was the elder, a tall and taciturn boy who looked about him at everything with suspicion, but he was a scholar, if anyone in their rough hewn, near bookless land could be. He asked his father to let the priests come down from the hills and bring their learning and the legacy of civilization with them, but Noah told him that what Asterravia needed was an able navy and strong young men to put down clannish conspiracy and spring livestock raiding. He sent Ewan to the priests instead, telling him not to come back to court until he could boast that he knew everything from every book and riddle the hill priests hoarded and could outwit his good and kingly father. From then on, Logan, the younger son, was the prince at court and on the battlefield, the son who was both Noah’s right hand and the boy who came under his boot, taking the elder brother’s place in every way, the crown settling over his head instead of over Ewan’s, for when the day came that Noah’s hair was all star-white and his celestial lady would come back for him to take him across the veil and away from mortal concerns.

There were some who said, in the dark corners of the castles where the king Noah kept his court where the servants and the urchin children who served even them congregated to rest their feet and take what meals they could after the feeding of the lords and ladies, that the hard old King had not been touched by a star, but by a fire poker wielded by his lady wife to put off his drunken attentions of an evening while she looked after her infant son. That the vision was the product of the hit and the grape or the grain and his own stirring ambition. That the white hair was a product of the scar upon his scalp, indeed some claimed that you could see the white line of an old, jagged cut coming just down to his forehead above his right eye. There were some that said, too, that though the winter fever had taken many that year, the lady Queen Althea was the only among the court who had sequestered at the lowland fortress for the darkest month who had been taken thus. Perhaps she had been weakened by new pregnancy or the loss of one, there were rumors to that effect, but some also said that the royal lady had petitioned Noah to retreat to the small island nation of her people, not so far away long the wide Eastern Sea, and to take her little daughter with her – for safety until the warring and conquering was done. Noah could not abide this lack of trust, this signal that his cities were not safe, that his army wasn’t strong, that his little kingdom couldn’t hold his own. Noah had refused, and by the time the spring thaw came, his wife was in her tomb.

As fate would have it, King Noah would not live long enough to see his hair turn white, or to see Ewan finish his scholarship up in the great hills, or to see Logan marry and have sons of his own. Noah had never given up his warring chieftain ways, though he had reigned the new Asterravia for some fifteen years. He took his son, the new crown prince Logan, out every summer season on the wide eastern sea and the great northern gulf in a fleet of the best war ships, their prows decked with golden serpents who could spit fire and cannon shot to warn or fight, whose sails billowed brightly with the royal colors. The Royal fleet took taxes from the coastal lands under Noah’s control and made raids on the southern isles that contested him, and made royal visits to his royal cousins who ruled the wide icy land of Jutnorpol beyond the northern gulf, and made gifts of alliance with the mainlander kingdoms to the south, to show that his new country was becoming civilized. The king believed these springs and summers of warring and diplomacy would make a good, hard, confident man of his younger son, the way his elder son, gangling, clumsy and contrary, had refused.

The winter before had been a hard one, storms lashing the capitol city on its seaside perch, stalling trade and making flood waters rise in the lowlands. The lovely Rose, motherless these last ten years, had become a young woman of fifteen, tall and blooming, with hair the color of polished copper and eyes the color of a clear spring sky, with cheeks like blushing peaches and a mouth that was ready to smile. She was a stubborn girl, and proud, with her father’s temper, driving away governess after governess in her childhood, she had taken to the games and dances at court with a relish once she was old enough to join in. The king had prepared for her with his cousin a marriage contract with the young scion of Jutnorpol, that she should be wed to the prince, Ivan, in the spring, and go away to the north land to live among the Juttish royals until the pair were old enough to live as man and wife together and cement the alliance by producing the Juttish heir. But Rose had never met Ivan or her father’s distant cousins, she had only known Asterravia’s green hills and sloping beaches, Jutnorpol’s ice and cliffs and mountains did not appeal to her. Rose had also a boy at court named John, a page to one of the King’s knights, a landowner’s son who’d been sent to get an education, who was but seventeen himself and did not yet have money or connections, but would one day inherit a decent, though not princely sum. When Noah sat Rose down one winter night and told her of her royal affiancement, she refused him. She told him all, that she and John planned to marry themselves, and would do so with or without his permission. The King threatened to have John put to death for treasonous congress with the King’s daughter. Father and Daughter screamed and raged, cups and ornaments were flung, servants and guardsmen called for and sent away, and in the end Rose fled to her rooms with a smarting cheek and swelling eye and tears streaming down her face while Noah commanded that she be kept there confined until such a time as she repented, or it would be John who paid for her disobedience.

Rose was stubborn though, and strong from her days riding out and her nights of dancing. She was young and foolish and her temper was piqued. The next morning as soon as the son grayed the sky with light, she wrote a letter to her elder brothers and left it on her pillow. She packed what she could in a sack she could tie over her shoulder and scaled down the castle from her window, and found John in the place where they met, the storehouse by the canal where the king’s river barges and small pleasure boats were kept. John was outraged by the sight of the princess’s swollen eye and once she had convinced him not to challenge him outright, the two of them took the King’s yacht, his smallest seaworthy vessel, and set out into the morning for the southern isles where they planned to beg sanctuary from the King’s rival for the fertile borderlands, and hoped to live out their lives as peasants in that country on their own terms.

It was a hard winter, though, and the sea was merciless. The young lovers sailed into the mouth of a gale that raged for a day and a night and a day, and neither the princess nor the half trained page knew how to pilot a boat at rough seas. The water took the blooming princess, the beautiful Rose, and her brave child-knight. The King was helpless to even search for her, the weather barring the naval vessels inside the harbor until there was no hope. The crown prince Logan began to look at his father with only blame and fury in his eyes.

In the summer, when the royal fleet met a party of southern raiders on their way to explain to the Juttish court what had become of their prince’s betrothed, the King and the crown prince led the battle fearlessly, side by side. When the raiders were driven off and their dead heaved overboard, it was found that the King, too, had been struck down, with a wound in his gut and a wound in his leg that bled and bled. The king was taken to bed and tended, futilely, while the crown prince stood aside, mute. The royal doctor said that the old King cried out while gripped with the fever that carried him off, pleading with his Rose and his Star for mercy and forgiveness. The doctor could not say if either of them had obliged the King as he faded away from the mortal realm, only that his torment slowly quieted. The doctor also said that it was strange, in fact, that the King’s son, the new King Logan, must have seen his father wounded but he had not fetched help, or indeed said one word from the start of the battle until her murmured his thanks to the doctor upon being informed of his father’s death.

So then Logan the prince was Loganus Rex, king of all his Star-blessed country. Over the youthful, harrying years of his reign gobbled up more and more city states and earldoms, made treaties or blazed through with his armies, taking territories at swordpoint, or with the soft words of pact-making that held the taste of sharp steely threat behind them. By the time King Logan’s true heir played in his royal nursery – the second such true heir to play there, but mention of the King’s mad-stricken cast off wife and the now illegitimate son she had given him was forbidden – the borders of Asterravia stretched from the edge of the Northern Gulf down to the Southern Sands and over the flat tablelands to the great Western Mountains, with agreements struck with the southern isles of Angla for mutual fishing safe passage with the Mainland kingdoms, and trade arranged with the Kyburnians over the mountain passes for their spice and silk and gold in return with contact with the world beyond the Eastern Sea. Logan and his Star-land stood as one of the proud powers rigning the known world, and he’d one himself an equal footing with the mainland Kings and equal right to ally himself with or against them.

*

Spring, 1448 by the Promanus Calendar, the 20th year of Logan Roy’s reign


The young Prince Roman, the third son of the king, was seven years old when he had his first brief interaction with the royal Selkie, the king’s Ministress of Prophecy. The seal-woman had been among the nobles at court for five years, long enough for some to forget that she was not simply a human woman, a highborn Lady and wife to the King’s Chancellor of Law. She had been a favorite of Logan’s for most of that time, only set somewhat aside in the last year now that Queen Caroline had re-established herself at court. There were rumors about the king and the seal-woman that even the Queen’s furious reemergence from the country palaces where she had been keeping the Royal children away from the tumult and half-savage manners of Court.

The young prince was taking the air with his nurse and her ladies in the ornamental gardens one late spring afternoon when he saw a beautiful lady walking along the rose arbor from the other direction. She was a small creature, though to a child’s sense, she towered over him. She wore a gown of shimmering blue-green silk with its belled sleeves turned back to show their sapphire-blue insides and the sheer linen of her shift sleeves, girdled with a gold sash wrapped tight around her tapered waist. Her hair was an unbound cloud of black curls tamed slightly by a jeweled circlet settled across her high, smooth forehead. Her eyes were huge and all-seeing and dark, like the clear sea at midnight. Her soft mouth was set firm and her small-pointed chin was lifted as if in challenge. It was this above everything else that captured the prince’s attention, the absolute frankness and pride of her gaze and her stride, assessing the highborn ladies and the royal child in their charge as simply and completely as if they were all fishwives and their child.

And then, to Roman’s surprise, the Duchess of Bladely who had charge of him, who was his mother’s pet and made obeisance to few but the queen, curtsied low to the lady in blue, and Roman realized who this fine lady must be. The Ministress of Prophecy acknowledged the Prince, and the Duchess, much more faintly than the prince was used to – the Sea-Lady was still less used to humans’ good manners even after some years, they said, didn’t they. The women exchanged vague courtesies about the gardens and the settling of the Queen’s train at the Sea Castle and then continued on past each other to go about their days. The prince sidled away from the Duchess’s guiding hand on his shoulder and followed her slowly for a minute, casting glances curiously over his shoulder before running back to catch up to his father’s special advisor from the sea.

“I know who you are,” Prince Roman said to the seal-woman. He put out a small hand and touched a stiff fold of her full skirt.

“Likewise, your highness,” she said, looking down at him with wry frankness.

“You’re the Selkie woman who decides our fates,” he declared, and it was half a question, trying to understand.

“I prefer to go by Lady Geraldine,” she said drily, deep eyes icy and assessing, “And I prefer princes who keep their hands to themselves.”

Roman obediently let go of her skirt and clutched his hands behind his back instead. “They say you’re going to marry my father instead of my mother, is that true?”

“No, your highness,” said Lady Geraldine “Not likely. I’m already married, for one.”

“They also say that you’re really my mother instead of my mother the Queen. Because of my eyes. And because I don’t get sick when we go on my father’s yacht and my brother and sister do. That’s also not likely, right?”

“Impossible, even,” agreed Lady Geraldine, her mouth twitching in humor, “Seeing as how you and your royal siblings were already playing in your nursery when your father found me on the beach and brought me to Court.”

“Really?” he exclaimed, though relieved that the Ministress also believed the rumor against his mother was silly, he was surprised, “My father talks as though you’ve always, always been here with us, since we began.” Since Asterravia began, he meant, with a child’s sense that, as the country began before his father’s rule, it had begun with the beginning of time.

“Yes. Your father is clever that way.”

“I don’t understand,” admitted the prince, frowning.

“Your highness, come away,” called the Duchess, having noticed her charge had gone wandering, “It’s time we were going in for your lessons, you don’t want Master Grindle to be cross again, do you? I’m so sorry, Lady Ministress, we did not mean to trouble you. His highness Prince Roman is still young and young, he does not know his manners as well as he will. I’m sure he meant no slight to you.”

“No, I’m sure he did not,” agreed Lady Geraldine with a steely smile, “His highness’s frankness is refreshing in a society where slights are dressed in sugar and fed to one another as comfits. But you and your women might consider, as you gossip over your embroidery, how well even such small princes can hear and remember what you say.”

“Thank you for your consideration, Lady Ministress. I’m sure I will remember it,” said the Duchess stiffly. She might outrank the Selkie according to the noble derbfine, but the Sea Prophetess with her hands on the fates of the country and the lives of all their sailors stood above all save the King in supernatural ranking and was due every courtesy.

So Roman had hurried away with a confused last look at Lady Geraldine, a vivid figure in a trailing gown, her soft-voiced frankness, the curious distance in her eyes. But there were oddities enough at Court – not to mention the mercurial hugeness of his father’s whims, the roaring of a king at the height of his power – that she didn’t occupy his young mind too greatly for very long. At least not then, not until years and years later, in a different age.

*
Winter, 1442 by the Promanus Calendar, the 14th year of Logan’s Reign


As King Logan’s lands and might grew, so too did the demands, or needs of the people who found themselves now citizens of Asterravia. The trade routes were not yet ready for the demands of an enlarged nation, and the clannish chieftains were not used to bowing the knee to any higher lord earl or king. The scrim of triumph over Logan’s rule covered over creeping unrest, hungry people who resented their taxes and independent people who still saw the Asterravian authority as foreign rule. Some who had accepted Noah as an anointed king of the land were less sure about Logan in his place. Too ambitious, too hot headed. The winter fever had come strongly last year, wasn’t that a sign the gods didn’t bless him? The hops were blighted this year, wasn’t that a sign, too?

Noah had had his Star, Logan’s advisor’s had warned. Even Prince Ewan the Overlooked had come down from the hills to comfort him and advise him to look to his spiritual health. The Star who visited Noah had mentioned his sons in her prophecy, but she hadn’t visited Logan, had she, and Noah’s death had come under a cloud. There whispers that Logan had hastened if not arranged it.

“If they say that they speak treason, and I’ll have them up on charges.” Logan had snapped, but Ewan had simply shrugged. Everyone knew that some rumors came from no specific throats but from a general air of discontent.

So that autumn, Logan quietly consulted the hill priests and the most reputable sorcerers that his closest advisors, Lord Vernon of Leecliff and Lord Kellman of Beleister could secretly usher to Court. He took the best advice he could about securing a vision of his own, and raged at it for its vagueness. For the way the priests urged purity, fasting, the dearest offerings, things he didn’t think he could bear to part with. Something real to earn the blessing and mercy of the Stars.

Logan didn’t want to fast or pray or live abstemiously, or promise even that now illegitimate first born son with the uncertain wits to the cultish priests in the hills. He’d seen what they had done to Ewan, he said, turning him from a proud royal prince to a self-effacing mongrel, a murmurer of scolds, and coldly arrogant in his own way. That certainly hadn’t earned either of Noah’s sons their own visitation.

“Tell me what goats or horses to slaughter and where to pour their blood,” he shouted to Ewan, tell me what sacred spot to visit on what astral alignment, what peak to climb and what sword and spear, what bolo net to carry imbued with what magic to go up and tear down my own star from the heavens. I mean to take her hostage if I have to. Keep her on a leash and parade her at Court and up and down the length of this land, you just see if I won’t. I’ll show them all how fated my rule is, my power bigger and better than Noah’s ever was, that drunken fool.”

“Well you’ll never get one now,” warned Ewan with a disgusted grimace, “Since you said that aloud for every celestial ear to hear.”

“If the celestials are so damn clever and all knowing, shouldn’t they know what I wanted whether or not I said it,” Logan had countered acidly, and Ewan had found no answer.

Doubts and furies aside, Logan had set out with a small company and the sorcerer he found most credible, his working most proven and true, armed only with a golden spear that the sorcerer forged and blessed and imbued with a whole dark season’s working. The company traveled on now-outmoded longships to show their humbleness, all the way up the twisting coast of Asterravia to the northmost curl of an archipelago, the last point before the land gave way to the Northern Gulf. They arrived in time for three day’s fast before the spring equinox, the most hopeful time for great beginnings.

Perhaps it was coincidence, or fate, or perhaps there had been a celestial hand guiding Logan’s party, even the scholars and sorcerers couldn’t say for sure. Logan dozed on the northern spit of beach, lulled by hunger-exhaustion and the buffet of fair salt wind through his hair, wrapped tight in his red cloak which looked dark as black blood on the first spring night, nestled in among the sea grasses. When they had begun three days ago, the sorcerer had built a small fire and bid the king cast upon it an oiled linen bag that had contained a spell, and told him to say a word that had since removed itself from his mind. That fire with its brief, acrid puff of smoke was long burnt out and buried with wet sand. The moon rose broad and bright, illuminating the sands.

All was still ,and then it wasn’t. When Logan awoke, there was a new figure on the beach, a person. A woman, her perfectly curved silhouette glossed and silvered with moonlight and seawater. She was laying something out beside her, a darkly gleaming bundle she shook out and fussed over. She gleamed, too, with a light greater and more interior than moonlight, Logan had thought in his stupor.

He waited until she settled on the flat sands, basking in the moonlight in the shelter of the great crest of rock he had been using, too, as a windbreak. Her wet hair glistened as if it contained every star. I’ve got one, he thought, without sense, I’ll show that bastard, I got one, too. He hefted his anointed gold spear and crept up to her, moving only with each gust of wind.

He held his spear like a staff, both ready to brace himself and ready to fight, to bar her path.

“My Lady Star, I am your King,” declared Logan, “Since you have heeded my call, I bid you tell me what message you have for me and my Kingdom. Are you the same Star that visited my father?”

“I’m not,” said the woman, in a strange soft, laughing voice, “I’m neither. You have the wrong address. No stars here.”

“But you are clearly no human. Are you a demon?” said the king, off balance. He leveled his spear at her with an uncertain hand.

“No, sir,” said the woman, rising carefully. She seemed unconcerned of her modesty, though she was naked in the moonlight before a king. She pushed her long hair over her shoulder, sea-dark eyes assessing, glittering, seeming to glow with their own light. “Who are you to accost me so, sir?” she asked cooly.

“I told you, I am the king of this land,” he said. Logan took another step.

“Oh. Things have changed, then, up here. The last we knew of this land, it had no king. It was ours.”

“Up here? So you are a demon,” Logan said, hurrying to close the distance between them.

“No, King,” said the woman with a shake of her head. She bit her lip in thought and looked between the man and the spear-tip. And then she looked, just a glance, at the dark bundle she had laid by the edge of the beach grass. It was this that changed her fate, if she’d simply taken her skin and run for the waves, the weakened king wouldn’t likely not have been able to outpace her. But she did look, and he followed her gaze.

“Ah, I see what you are, Sea Woman,” said Logan and stuck the point of the spear into the glowing dark folds of the selkie’s skin, holding it in place.

“No!” cried the woman. She lunged for the king’s spear with her small hands and sleek, strong arms. Logan had fasted for three days on nothing but clean water and sacred tea, and the selkie woman was fit, well nourished, aware of her own strength even though she was not used to having her feet planted on earthly sands. In the tussle, the king cried out and his sleeping guards woke and came running.

When the guards found them, their swords drawn, they saw a small, silver white woman with dark flowing hair and a defiant expression threatening the King with his own ceremonial spear. The king looked unconcerned, though, he stood grinning, and clutched in his fist the Selkie’s skin. The guards came up to press her with their swords, sure that the strange, bare woman would lunge for the king with his spear, but Logan waved them aside.

“No, never mind boys, you’re not to harm her. Don’t you know the curse you’d bring on you if you hurt a Selkie?” called the king, still grinning, elated. He had won a different prize than his father, but the Sea’s blessing was gift enough to secure any seafaring dynasty. They said selkie women lived two hundred years and could guard the fates of their masters in their hands. Better than a visit from a Star, he thought, and more tangible. “Anyway, she can’t touch me, so long as I have this, isn’t that right, My Lady?”

“Give me your cloak, sir,” the Selkie said coldly, but calmer now. Her narrowed eyes and cool mask of a face said that she’d read the situation, how she was trapped and was trying to make what she could of it. She was still ready with the spear. “If I’m to go among you and stay on your land, I won’t do it naked. That’s the human way, isn’t it?”

Logan laughed. “Of course, My lady, you had only to ask,” he said, and sketched a little bow. He unhooked his large gold and pearl cloak pin and flung the garment to her, pin and all, the fine wool and Kyburnian embroidery of royal stags crumpling by the selkie’s bare toes in the sand.

Carefully, while holding the spear level with one hand, she wrapped the cloak around her, protecting her new human nakedness from neck to foot. When this was done, she laid the king’s spear aside, and tried to make herself ready to meet what her new life might be.

“Home, then!” Logan cried, and bid the sorcerer to see the selkie woman settled comfortably in the back of the royal cart. To give her every care, because she was unused to our roads, wasn’t she, and she was their honored and powerful guest. He called for food and watered wine to eat on horseback as he led the way back south. All the time he admired and guarded Selkie’s soft, gleaming skin in his grasp. The soldiers and their swords guarded it with him.

And so, as the King laid his plans before the trapped sorceress from the sea, she kept her own council and thought and thought. She was given every courtesy, and every luxury. She asked for and was given good clothes to wear at the first town they passed with a loom. She slept unmolested in the night, in the back of the cart. The soldiers guarded her from the king and the king from her. She was promised riches, rank, anything she wished to protect and govern the fates of Logan’s country and its sailors – anything, save her skin, which the king would keep. Logan took her purse-mouthed silence and slight nod as acquiescence if not acceptance.

On the road back to the Capitol, the sorcerer suggested the name Geraldine, in honor of her bravery with the king’s spear. She accepted this, too, with grace. She would not see her selkie skin again for another 30 years.