TIDES OF CRIMSON SPRING: The Between-World Chronicles Book One

SERA'S POV The fish are wrong. I notice before anyone else does, because I’m the one waist-deep in the water at five in the morning, dragging Old Borin’s nets back to the dock. The catch is heavy, too heavy, and when I haul the last section up onto the black rock, I understand why. They’re all dead. Every single one. Not eaten. Not tangled. Dead before they hit the net. Their scales have gone grey and flat, like something reached inside each one and switched it off. Their eyes are open and milky and they stare at nothing. I count fast. Fifty, maybe sixty. A full night’s catch, worthless. “Mara.” Borin’s voice comes from the dock above me. “What’s the count?” “Nothing,” I say. “They’re all dead.” He goes quiet for a moment. “Again?” “Again.” He curses and pulls off his cap. This is the third time in two weeks. Before that, it was the Kellys’ catch. Before that, Danu Wren’s entire lobster haul, dead in the traps, nothing to explain it. The harbour master filed a report. The coastal survey sent a man who looked at the water, wrote something on a paper, and left. Nothing changed. The sea around Calla’s Reach is dying. Nobody knows why. I have a guess. I keep it to myself. I climb up to the dock and rinse my hands in Borin’s bucket. The bucket water smells clean. Normal. Behind me the ocean doesn’t. It smells low and wrong, the way old meat smells when it’s turned past the point of saving. “Going to have to report it,” Borin says. “Third time brings the harbour board in. Maybe inspectors.” “You should report it,” I say. He looks at me sideways. He’s always done that, looked at me like I’m a sum he can’t finish. Eight months I’ve worked his nets and he’s never asked where I came from. That’s exactly why I chose him. “You’ve got seaweed in your hair,” he says, and goes inside. I pull the seaweed free and stare at it. It’s green. Fresh, bright, healthy. The only green thing that’s come out of this water in weeks. It grew on me. They always do. I tie my hair back and walk the long way to my room above the chandler’s shop. Calla’s Reach is four hundred people on one main road with two taverns and a fish market that’s been running short since the killing started. I know none of their names. That’s also by design. My room has a lock, one window facing the sea, and a loose board under the bed where I keep three things. A knife. A pouch of coins. A piece of black volcanic rock I’ve carried since I was five years old. I’ve tried to throw the rock away twice. I always go back for it. I sit on the bed, still in my boots, and listen to the water. It sounds wrong, slower than it should, like something’s forgotten how. Three weeks ago I told myself I’d be gone by now. The problem is every time the sea smells worse, every time a net comes up ruined, something in my chest pulls toward the water instead of away. Like a hook in soft tissue, dragging. I hate that pull. I’ve hated it my entire life. There’s a knock at my door. I’m on my feet before the second one, knife in hand. “Who is it?” “Message for you.” A boy’s voice. Young. “I don’t get messages.” “Man on the dock paid me a silver. Said to say the word first. Said to say, verenei.” The knife is steady in my hand. My heart goes very quiet. Not fast. Not loud. The particular silence that comes right before something breaks. I open the door. The boy is twelve, gap-toothed and unremarkable. He holds out a folded paper. I take it, flip him a coin, close the door. Then I go to the window before I open it. There’s a man on the dock. Dark clothes, pale face, standing completely still in the pre-dawn grey. Too far to see clearly. But something about the shape of him makes my skin pull tight. The way he stands isn’t human-still. It’s something older-still. He raises one hand. Not a wave. Come. I close the curtains. Sit on the floor with my back to the wall. Open the paper. One line. Mer-script, ancient dialect. The kind the Tidal Courts stopped teaching three centuries ago. I can read it. I was never taught how. I’ve been able to read it since before I could read anything else. We found you, little spring. Come home, or we will remind this town what you are. I fold the paper and put it in my boot. I take the knife, the coins, and the rock. I don’t say goodbye to Borin. I don’t pay the chandler for the rest of the month. I’m out the back window and onto the road north before sunrise. I’m fifty yards from the chandler’s when I hear it, a sound I wasn’t expecting. Not behind me. Not from the dock. From inside the chandler’s shop. A thud. Then silence. Then the particular wet quiet that follows something irreversible. I stop walking. Every instinct I have says keep moving. Don’t look. You don’t know what that was. I go back. The chandler’s front door is open. That’s wrong. Old Pell never leaves it open before sixth bell. I push inside and find him behind the counter, on the floor, eyes wide and breathing in short, shallow pulls. His neck has two punctures, clean and deep. He’s alive. Barely. And sitting on the counter above him, still as carved stone, is a woman I’ve never seen before. She’s dressed like a surface merchant. But her skin carries that particular shimmer, the kind that only shows under certain light, the kind only I seem to notice because I have it too, a fraction of it, buried deep. She’s mer-folk. High court, from the jewellery on her wrist. She looks at me without surprise. Like she was waiting. “You weren’t supposed to run yet,” she says. “We had a schedule.” “Who are you?” I say. “Someone who’s been keeping you alive for four years without your knowledge,” she says. “The man on the dock wasn’t ours. He’s a Voss hunter. He was going to take you tonight. We moved first.” “You bit my landlord,” I say. “He’ll recover,” she says. “Unlike you, if you go north alone.” She slides off the counter and holds out her hand. In her palm is a small token, flat, bone-white, carved with a symbol I know. The Abyss Court sigil. The deep-water mer-folk. My mother’s people. “Come with me,” she says. “Or go north and die before you reach the Shore. Your choice, Sera.” She used my real name. Not Mara. Sera. Nobody in this town knows that name. I take a step back toward the door. She takes one step forward. And then the window behind her explodes inward, and something comes through it that is not human and not mer-folk and moves like smoke given bones, and it has the Voss crest on its collar and its eyes are already red, and it is not looking at the woman. It is looking at me.