Home From the Sea: An Elemental Masters Novel

  NOVELS BY MERCEDES LACKEY

  available from DAW Books:

  THE NOVELS OF VALDEMAR:

  THE HERALDS OF VALDEMAR

  ARROWS OF THE QUEEN

  ARROW’S FLIGHT

  ARROW’S FALL

  THE LAST HERALD-MAGE

  MAGIC’S PAWN

  MAGIC’S PROMISE

  MAGIC’S PRICE

  THE MAGE WINDS

  WINDS OF FATE

  WINDS OF CHANGE

  WINDS OF FURY

  THE MAGE STORMS

  STORM WARNING

  STORM RISING

  STORM BREAKING

  VOWS AND HONOR

  THE OATHBOUND

  OATHBREAKERS

  OATHBLOOD

  THE COLLEGIUM CHRONICLES

  FOUNDATION

  INTRIGUES

  CHANGES

  REDOUBT*

  BY THE SWORD

  BRIGHTLY BURNING

  TAKE A THIEF

  EXILE’S HONOR

  EXILE’S VALOR

  VALDEMAR ANTHOLOGIES:

  SWORD OF ICE

  SUN IN GLORY

  CROSSROADS

  MOVING TARGETS

  CHANGING THE WORLD

  FINDING THE WAY

  Written with LARRY DIXON:

  THE MAGE WARS

  THE BLACK GRYPHON

  THE WHITE GRYPHON

  THE SILVER GRYPHON

  DARIAN’S TALE

  OWLFLIGHT

  OWLSIGHT

  OWLKNIGHT

  OTHER NOVELS:

  GWENHWYFAR

  THE BLACK SWAN

  THE DRAGON JOUSTERS

  JOUST

  ALTA

  SANCTUARY

  AERIE

  THE ELEMENTAL MASTERS

  THE SERPENT’S SHADOW

  THE GATES OF SLEEP

  PHOENIX AND ASHES

  THE WIZARD OF LONDON

  RESERVED FOR THE CAT

  UNNATURAL ISSUE

  HOME FROM THE SEA

  *Coming Soon from DAW Books

  And don’t miss:

  THE VALDEMAR COMPANION

  Edited by John Helfers and Denise Little

  HOME FROM

  THE SEA

  The Elemental Masters,

  Book Seven

  MERCEDES LACKEY

  DAW BOOKS, INC.

  DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, FOUNDER

  375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  ELIZABETH R. WOLLHEIM

  SHEILA E. GILBERT

  PUBLISHERS

  www.dawbooks.com

  Copyright © 2012 by Mercedes Lackey.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Jacket art by Jody A. Lee.

  Jacket designed by G-Force Design.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1588.

  DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA).

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-58859-8

  First Printing, June 2012

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

  To Occupy.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Profound thanks to Dr. Colin Dival of York University for invaluable information on the British rail system in the late 1800s. Not only did Dr. Dival make sure I actually sounded like I knew what I was talking about, he saved me from some very embarrassing errors!

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  1

  BETWEEN the howling of the wind, the pounding of the rain on the roof, and the tumult of the ocean, Mari Prothero knew there was no point in listening for anything else. The damp, chill wind found a hundred little cracks and chinks to whistle through, and only near the fire was it at all warm. At least the wind wasn’t sending the smoke down the chimney instead of up.

  This was the sort of day that the wives and daughters of fishermen dreaded. It had begun with a red sky, always a bad sign, but by the time the sun was up to give the warning of rough weather to come, Mari’s father Daffyd Prothero was already gone fishing. And not out in his little river coracle for salmon, no. Out in his bigger boat—still a coracle—out on the wide ocean, for herring. Whether meant for the river or the ocean, coracles were still unchancy boats, being little more than great round dishes made of wood and hide or canvas. Granted, the ocean coracles had sails, but still! You had to be a mad sailor as well as a fine one to take one on the ocean in the teeth of a storm.

  Oh, thought Mari Prothero, her heart full of anxiety, and my da is both…

  She bent over the fire and stirred the coals, adding a little more sea-coal and a little more driftwood on top. Flames sprang up, blue and gold and green, colored by the salts in the wood and the coals.

  By midmorning the threatening sky had made good on its promises, and there was a full-throated storm churning the ocean. The wind howled about the cottage walls on the hill above the beach and wailed about the chimney.

  And had Daffyd Prothero come scudding in ahead of the storm? Of course not. Because he’s mad.

  Mari’d had to latch the shutters tight on the seaward side, and even so, wind-driven driblets of rain crept over the sills whenever the rain drove hard against the windows. The drafty air inside smelled of the ocean and the storm, and not the lovely hot pie and bread she had baking.

  She sat down again and picked up her work. She had her shawl wrapped tight about her, her flannel skirt and petticoat tucked in around her legs, so she was warm enough. Tucked into her chair at the hearth, if her da hadn’t been at sea, she’d have been content enough. Such a storm! The fire burned bright, and the lantern was near, and even so it was hard to see to mend the net in her hands. Not that her hands didn’t already know the work so well she probably could do it in the dark. She could knit in the dark, and had most of the winter, for there were always socks to knit as well as nets to mend. But net-mending required concentration and knitting didn’t, and she was trying not to think about her da off on the unforgiving sea.

  By now, oh surely, even the salmon fishers were in off the river. But not her da; no, she knew him. He’d be out in the storm, stubborn as any donkey, pulling in fish where no other man could. And even when he had as much as the boat could carry, he still wouldn’t come home. First he’d be off to Criccieth to sell half of it, and on a day like today, he’d get the best prices, there being no one else fool enough to be on the water. Only then would he come home to sell in Clogwyn, perhaps to trade a few for a salmon or maybe a treat from the baker. Everyone wanted Daffyd Prothero’s herring; they were always the fattest, the tastiest.

  A gust hammered the shutters and she flinched. A lash of rain battered it, sending a fine mist of droplets through tiny cracks in the wood. Oh, how she hated days like this one. It never mattered that he always cam
e home unscathed, with herring or salmon or trout in his bucket, with whatever else he fancied they needed in a bag over his shoulder. It never mattered at all, because every time one of these storms blew up, someone generally did not come home, and Mari always dreaded the day it would be her da who didn’t.

  Tears stung her eyes; she gulped them down past the lump in her throat. She sniffed, wiped her cold nose on her handkerchief, and ordered the tears to go away, telling herself that he was probably in Clogwyn by now. At that moment her nose told her to check on the pie in the oven. The Prothero cottage was superior to most—for they had an oven built into the side of the fireplace, unlike most of the Clogwyn cottagers, who had to make do with hearth-cooking or buying bread from the baker. That was not the only way in which the Prothero cottage differed; most made do with a pounded and limed earthen floor, but the Prothero cottage boasted a wooden floor, and today she was mortal glad of it, for an earthen floor would have been mud by now. She put down the net and string, wrapped rags around her hands and carefully pulled down the cast-iron handle of the little door at the side of the fireplace. The rabbit pie was not quite done yet; the rabbit was a trade from yesterday, and its skin was drying over a rafter in the loft. The bread was done, though, and she fetched it out with a bit of plank. It smelled divine. She hoped her da would be here in time to eat it warm.

  Outside, this cottage looked like all the others down in Clogwyn: weathered stone, tiny windows, slate-shingled roof. Thatch was for inland; it wouldn’t last here, so close to the ocean. Inside, was where this cottage differed from all the neighbors’, with an ancient wooden floor made of ship’s planks gone black with age, glazing in the windows as well as shutters, ships’-timber beams on the ceiling and the oven built into the hearth. Only the houses of prosperous farmers and the baker and shopkeeper were as fine as this. There were not one but two handsome dressers on either side of the door, one displaying copper pots, the other the bits of pretty china that Prothero women had gotten over the generations. Off to the side of the fireplace was the larder, with shelves full of preserves in glass and pottery jars, little casks and bags, and the keg of beer her da bought once every few months. Floor to ceiling, those shelves went, on two sides of the larder. On the third, the window side, was the sink. Opposite the fireplace there was a loft with a mattress where Mari slept; her da took up the bed in the bedroom beneath it. She preferred the loft, except when storms raged. It was a bit unnerving to listen to the wind howling right above you. But it was always warmer than the bedroom beneath it, and in summer, you could open the little window and let the cool wind off the sea come right in, and the gentle sound of the waves would sing you to sleep.

  She put the bread on the table and covered it with a towel. No use going to the landward window to look for her father either; with the rain lashing outside, she wouldn’t see him when he came—

  If he came—

  No. She wouldn’t think that way. He always came home. He swore he always would. She had to believe him.

  “He’ll be home,” whispered a giggly little voice. “It’ll ne’er be water that kills Daffyd Prothero.”

  Mari shivered and did not look in the direction of the voice. She knew what she would see if she did. A small woman, translucent, with seaweed hair and knowing eyes and not a stitch of clothing on her, only seaweed, sitting on the edge of the water-barrel.

  For the thousandth time, she wondered, was it a touch of the Sight that made her see such things or a touch of madness? Mari had seen her before, many times, and others like her, and heard her, too. Always, always around or about water.

  She had seen such little creatures all of her life. And there had been the great black horse that came up out of the river, looked startled, bowed to her and went back down again. And the golden-haired beauties she had seen beneath the moon, walking or dancing together on the surface of the water as if it were a floor, and the great herd of red-spotted white cattle that she had seen one night, going down into the waters of the lake as though they were merely going down into a valley.

  She knew what all these things were supposed to be, of course. When she was too little to bide in the cottage by herself, and her da thought she needed a caretaker, she’d gone to dame-school in the village. That was where the old woman who pretended to teach the village children letters and numbers had told them all tales between her naps. They were the Fair Folk, the Pharisees, the Tylwyth Teg. The black horse was the water-horse, of course, the cattle were Gwartheg Y Llyn, the Fairy cattle, the beautiful women Gwragedd Annwn, the water-elves. The black horse Ceffyl Dwr, who carried people off to drown, or just to frighten them, was the oddest, because he’d not offered to harm so much as a hair of her head. She wasn’t sure who the little women were; they never figured in the old woman’s stories. Mari had been seeing creatures supposed to be Tylwyth Teg for as long as she could remember.

  But those were just stories. Nobody believed them but children and old women. Half the time Mari was afraid she was going mad; the other half, she was afraid she really was seeing them, even though they had never harmed her.

  Quite the contrary. Even though she tried to pretend she saw nothing, heard nothing, they helped her. They showed her where to find sea-coal and driftwood washed up after storms, where the best shellfish and kelp were, and a spring with the sweetest water. Once, one had led her to a gigantic lump of greasy gray stuff with a strangely sweet smell. She brought it home and her da had taken it to Criccieth and come back with silver coins he put with the others he kept under the hearth-stone. “Ambergris,” he’d said it was, and that the men in towns that made perfumes would pay dearly for it. She hadn’t told her da she’d been led to it. She’d only tried that once, when she was still in leading-strings. Something about his face when she’d babbled about her “friends” as that tiny child made her shut up about them and not say another word since.

  But that hadn’t stopped her thinking. The more she was alone, the more she thought about it.

  Was she mad? Had her mother run mad before she died? Had it not been a rogue wave that had taken her, but her running into the waves?

  Or was this something devilish? The creatures had never offered her anything that wasn’t wholesome but… but… when she sat in the chapel of a Sunday morning and listened to the preacher, she had to wonder. When her da sat all hunched over and silent and looking as if he had a guilty conscience, she had to wonder.

  And if it was the Sight, well, wasn’t that dangerous too? Those tales were also of those with the Sight, who had eventually Seen things they shouldn’t, and been blinded, or carried off, or cursed for what they had Seen. Though that seemed the least likely of the three… still… in no interpretation was there likely to be a good end.

  The shutters shuddered, and she flinched. Oh, how she hated these spring storms!

  And just as she thought that, she heard the thumping of her father’s boot on the door, which meant he had his arms full, and she ran to open it and let him and a gust of wind and water into the warm, safe house. Her heart filled with happiness again.

  He had a welcome bag of sea-coal and herrings strung on a bit of cord. She relieved him of these things, and he stripped off his old oilskin and went to the fire, shivering. Then she got out the pie, cut him thin slices of warm bread spread with butter and jam and poured a glass of beer. A glass of beer with his supper was one luxury he allowed himself. In this much, her da was a very careful man, for instead of spending extra money on luxuries, there were carefully hoarded silver coins under the hearthstone. She knew why; he worried that he might be sick or hurt and not able to fish. “For a rainy day,” he would say, with every coin that joined the rest.

  “Bad out on the water, Da?” she asked, bringing him his plate and his glass, and settling herself in her seat on the other side of the fire with her own dinner. He was a handsome man, still, was Daffyd Prothero, and women still looked at him, though he hadn’t eyes for any of them. Welsh to the core, as she was, dark of hair and eye, le
an and fine-featured, and with a look about him of melancholy that women seemed to find irresistible.

  “Only in the coming into port,” he said. “That was when the black waves hunched up their backs like so many angry bulls and foamed at me.” He was warming now, and he gave her his lopsided grin. “But you know your da. I never ran from bull nor wave, and never shall.” Then he told her of his day, and she listened, loving the music of his voice. She knew folk who said that the Welsh were either mad poets or poetically mad, and she reckoned whoever had said such a thing was mostly right.

  “Then I got into Criccieth, and I was the only one who’d got out on the water,” he said, after telling her of the shaft of light that had broken through the clouds “like God’s own finger,” and the great shoal of herring it had pointed out to him. He chuckled. “Ah, if it weren’t for the difficulty of it, I’d wish every day was a storm day. I think every woman in our little village was waiting for me on the docks. Oh, and they filled my ears full of the news.” He took a sip of his beer as he finished the last of his bit of pie. “Such a fluttering and cackling and crowing in the henhouse as you never heard in your life. There’s to be a constable stationed here.”

  She blinked at him. “A—what?” she asked, incredulously. “And for why, Da? Clogwyn’s never had a constable before!”

  “Now, what d’ye think?” he countered, his expression darkening. “The strikes, of course. Up at the mines.” He smiled a bit bitterly. “Our English overlords have never heard of the word of God not to bind the mouths of the kine that tread out the corn. Begrudge a man a fair day’s wage for dirty and dangerous work, and wonder why the men won’t take it anymore. I would reckon there’s being constables placed in every village bigger than two houses, just in case someone might be offering aid and comfort to miners who want a decent wage for their work and a bit less chance of dying under the earth.” He handed her the empty glass and his plate; she took both, and while he stretched out to warm himself, she did the tidying up.