Tharalen

FROM THE MANUSCRIPT · READING EXCERPT

Enter the story

Dalen Sellen had always distrusted the third step. He had promised to mend it before winter, then let the nets, the roof, and the boat that earned nothing on shore take precedence. By the time he reached the lower harbor that evening, every excuse sickened him. The step was wet with retreating spray. A severed length of mooring line hung beneath it, its frayed end moving in the water like something still trying to escape.

His son slept in the house above the cove. Dalen had told himself so a dozen times since the healer left, and still he had gone back twice to check the boy’s breathing. Tarin was breathing steadily, Miri said. The healer had listened to his chest, and the red mark around his ankle had begun to fade. What stayed with Dalen was the other thing she had said, almost under her breath: the one who saved him had come out of the sea. Not off a boat, not from the far side of the harbor. Out of the water itself.

From where he stood, the houses above the harbor looked ordinary enough to convince a passing sailor that nothing had happened. A lamp glowed in the net-mender’s window. A shutter knocked against a loose latch three doors uphill. The man who sold lamp oil had left a handcart in the lane and would complain in the morning when someone moved it. Dalen had built his days around details like these. A village could be frightened or hungry or sulking over some argument and still be the same village when the next tide came in. Tonight he couldn’t make himself believe that. He kept seeing the neighbors who had gathered at Miri’s shouting, how they had looked first at Tarin and then at the figure crouched beyond him, and how their faces had changed, as if a second emergency had arrived before the first one ended. One man had called for a rope. Another had called for a weapon. Both thought they were helping.

Dalen had been a fisherman before the war and a fisherman after it, but in between he had learned what men could do with a rumor when a harbor was full of frightened vessels. Syrath had left him with a finger that would never straighten and a dislike of official assurances. Eight years now since the Battle of Syrath Harbor, and he seldom spoke of the men who hadn’t come back. Still, some nights the smell of wet timber and hot pitch filled his mouth with the whole of it. The crowns had argued over waters and tariffs and routes. The men ordered aboard the boats had paid for those arguments without ever seeing the rooms where they were made. If word reached Syrath that something unknown lived below the approaches, it wouldn’t arrive as a child’s rescue. It would arrive as a question of who controlled the harbor.

Earlier in 510 AA, before the main battle at Syrath Harbor, Dalen was thirty when a boatload of wounded came back from fighting along the harbor approaches. The village learned the war was not confined to banners and proclamations. His father gave the men the net loft because the floor was dry and the doorway wide enough for stretchers. Dalen remembered scrubbing blood from the planks afterward, not because he had never seen it before but because seawater had never seemed so poor at washing anything clean. The men called one another enemies while lying under the same roof. A soldier from Korrath woke in the night and tried to crawl outside, certain the family feeding him meant to hand him to an Ardathi patrol. Dalen blocked the doorway and swore at him until the fever broke. By morning the man was thanking Miri for the broth. Nobody thought that worth remembering.

When the levies came later that year, Dalen went because refusing would have cost the men who owned the boats with him. His crew hauled men and supplies through the fighting at Syrath. A chain struck his hand while they struggled to bring a damaged boat alongside. By the time the three crowns agreed to an armistice late in 510 AA, the finger had healed crooked. He came home with an aversion to anyone who described a battle by the number of vessels taken. He had watched fishermen drown while armies congratulated themselves on securing an approach. Families in Lareth still counted their dead by the boats that never came home. A stranger in the water could become the center of another fearful story without lifting a weapon. Dalen could hear the first rumors forming, even in his own head.

◆

End of excerpt. This site presents a selection from the manuscript.