Song of the Current (Song of the Current #1)
Sarah Tolcser
CHAPTER
ONE
There is a god at the bottom of the river.
Some folks will tell you that’s just a story. But us wherry folk know different. When the reeds along the banks whisper that a squall is rushing across the marshland, we listen. When the tide flows up from the sea, flooding the river with muddy brown water, we know enough to watch.
The god in the river speaks to us in the language of small things.
That’s how my father knew something was wrong even before we rounded the bend into Hespera’s Watch.
“Caro, take the tiller.” Pa leaned over the stern to dip his hand in the river.
Our wherry was loaded up with timber for the lumberyard in Siscema. The boat rode low in the water, so he had no trouble reaching the surface. A tiny wake curled after his fingers, forming a wobbly line of bubbles. The sun had disappeared below the moss-draped trees, and the river grew stiller by the moment.
He pulled his hand back as if it had been stung.
I sat up straight. “What was that?”
“I don’t rightly know.” He looked as if he wanted to say more, but he only added, “He’s unsettled tonight.”
He meant the god in the river. Everyone knows it can be bad luck—even dangerous—to speak of a god by name. The wherrymen usually call him the Old Man.
“Fire,” whispered Fee. The frogmen aren’t a people of many words.
Pa turned to her. “You feel it too?”
Fee perched on Cormorant’s cabin roof, her webbed toes spread out upon the planks. Her skin was the slick greenish-brown of a river bullfrog. With yellow eyes that protruded from a bulbous forehead, she stared unblinking at the water. The hem of her linen dress was shredded, threads trailing away behind her.
It’s said that many thousands of years ago, time out of mind, the god in the river fell in love with a sailor’s daughter. Their children became the frogmen. The land folks wrinkle their noses and call them dirty, but inlanders are ignorant about many such things.
I sniffed. “I don’t smell any smoke.”
As I spoke, the wind shifted and an acrid smell poisoned the air. Any moment now we would come into sight of Hespera’s Watch, the first town south of the Akhaian border. I gripped the tiller so tightly my knuckles turned pale.
Cormorant’s stiff black sail swung halfway out on the starboard side. The heat of the day still warmed her planks, though the sun was gone. I spread the fingers of my free hand upon the decking, as if peace could somehow seep from her into me.
The god in the river doesn’t speak to me like he does to Pa. Not yet. “The day your fate comes for you, you’ll know,” Pa always tells me. “The way I knew when it came for me.”
Well, it seems to me my fate might hurry up a little. Pa was fifteen when the god in the river first whispered his name. I’m two years older, and I’ve yet to hear anything. But I keep my ears open, because I’ll inherit Cormorant someday. Eight generations of Oresteia captains have plied their trade on these rivers. All of them were favored by the god.
We slipped onward through the shadowy water. The trees fell away, and the port of Hespera’s Watch was before us. Or would have been.
“Xanto’s balls!” I swore, my eyes stinging. I grabbed the sleeve of my sweater, holding it over my face.
Smoke poured from the warehouse roofs. The masts of sunken ships stuck up like dead tree trunks in the ugliest, most desolate swamp. This part of the river wasn’t deep, so a few of the wherries were sunk only to their cabin tops. One had been ready to sail—the gaff and boom floated, sail billowing between them, under the surface. It looked like the dress of a drowned woman. Coals smoldered orange on the blackened posts, and bits of ash drifted on the air. The docks were gone.
“Those wherries—” Dry coughs racked me. I returned the sweater to my mouth and drew in a blessedly clean breath that tasted of yarn. No matter how I squinted at the wreckage, I was unable to make out any of the boats’ names. “Pa, those wherries don’t belong to anyone we know, do they?”
Cormorant’s sail gave an angry clap, making me jump. In my shock, I’d loosened my grip on the tiller. I tore my gaze away from the debris, hastily straightening our course.
Pa hadn’t even noticed my steering lapse, which wasn’t like him at all. “Give the dock a wide berth.” He squeezed my shoulder. “We don’t want to run up on any wreckage. Find a spot on the bank, near to the road as you can get, and head up into the wind.”
“We’re anchoring?” My mind leaped to our second cargo, the crate of muskets roped to the deck and surreptitiously covered by a tarp. We never stopped in towns when we were smuggling. “I thought we were making for Heron Water.”
Pa rubbed the stubble on his chin, surveying the ruins. “A wherryman always helps a wherryman in need.”
The sight of those lonely wrecks made my skin crawl. Where had all the people gone? I didn’t need the god in the river to know something was very wrong.
Pa and Fee went forward to drop the sail. Pushing the tiller over, I steered Cormorant in a slow arc until her blunt white-painted nose pointed into the wind. She inched through the water, easing to a stop. Pa paid out the anchor rope, and we went about our ordinary tasks of stowing and settling the wherry.
Smoke permeated the air belowdecks, making the cabin seem even more cramped and close than usual. Pa shrugged on his good wool overcoat, arranging the collar so it fell just right. His somber manner heightened my worry. He only wore that coat to temple, or to pretend he hadn’t drunk too much the previous night.
Candlelight flashed on something metal at his waist—his best flintlock pistol.
I paused with my hand on the locker door. “Weapons, then?”
“Better safe than sorry,” he said gruffly.
I grabbed my leather-sheathed knife from the locker. Stuffing it in my pocket, I bounded up the cabin steps.
We rowed the dinghy ashore and walked into town, our footsteps scraping the gravel road. It was the only sound but for the mournful murmur of reeds along the riverbank. Pa kept glancing apprehensively at the river. Fee’s head was cocked toward the water, listening with that elusive sixth sense I would’ve given anything to possess.
I swallowed down my envy, goose bumps prickling my arms. It was spring in the riverlands, and the temperature still dropped after sundown, but the chill I felt was mostly inside me. Why hadn’t the god in the river protected the wherrymen whose ships had been sunk? And what did Pa and Fee know that they weren’t telling me?
We found the dock inspector standing beside a pile of crates, surveying the docks with reddened eyes. From the haphazard way the boxes were stacked, it seemed they’d managed to salvage at least some of the cargo from the fire.