The drowning kingdom sec.., p.1
The Drowning Kingdom (Secrets of the Sorrowood Book Two), page 1
The Drowning Kingdom
Secrets of the Sorrowood: Book Two
L.B. Black
For those still finding their way home.
Contents
The Drowning Kingdom
1. The Girl Who Talked to the Forest
2. The Garden of Glass
3. The Temple of the Drowned
4. The First Homecoming
5. The Darkness at the Bottom of the Ocean
6. The Wistman
7. The Second Homecoming
8. The Flooded Lighthouse
9. The Land of Forgotten Things
10. The Last Breath
11. The Third Homecoming
Thank you!
Acknowledgments
About the Author
The Drowning Kingdom
Secrets of the Sorrowood: Book Two
L.B. Black
“But it's not right and it's not nice
To try to kill the same thing twice.”
- The Extra Glenns
The Girl Who Talked to the Forest
On a late December evening in the stretch between the holidays and the new year, the fairy queen bought a Snickers bar and a slice of pizza at a gas station and ate them in her car beneath a flickering neon sign.
Christmas lights multiplied by their reflections glistened on rain-washed streets. Even this seemed too bright for the tiredness lingering over the city.
It was the hangover of weeks, Lydia thought, trying to wipe her fingers with a napkin already soaked with grease. She broke the Snickers in half and gave the larger chunk to the raven perched on the headrest of the passenger seat. Isst was a messy eater, but with every journey in this car feeling like it might be the final one, crumbs were the least of her concerns.
“Stop being paranoid. Ailas isn’t here. Although, it might not be bad to have him around with all this wickedness about,” Isst said, when he was done wiping his beak clean on the headrest. Perhaps he’d caught the way Lydia’s eyes instinctively searched the shadows for the fey king’s spymaster.
She turned her head so Isst wouldn’t notice her jaw tightening as she tossed the backpack containing Quinn’s letters onto the passenger seat. This wasn’t a conversation she was interested in having while gas station food burned a hole in her stomach.
“Would you like a riddle?” Isst said, hopping to her shoulder, and nuzzling her cheek. Her armor, hidden from humans by a glamour, stopped his claws from digging into her skin.
“Not now,” she said, knowing he wouldn’t listen.
“Even if you break me, I will never stop working,” he said.
“A little on the nose, don’t you think?” Lydia murmured.
“Not a nose. A heart.”
Lydia sighed and closed her eyes. It was almost too much effort to open them again.
“Oh. My apologies. Do you want to talk about it?” Isst asked, his voice softening.
“No.”
“You couldn’t have known, Lydia. What happened in the palace is not your fault—”
A memory of Quinn and Espen shouting orders over the roar of an enormous bear burned through her. She grimaced.
“Not now. Come on, let’s go for a ride.”
It took a few attempts, but at last the car rumbled to life. She checked the rearview mirror and was startled by her reflection. It had been her friend Natalie’s suggestion to dye her hair and now the blue had all but washed out, leaving it the color of a shallow puddle. Still, it was better than Lydia’s natural white. That color marked her as a changeling—neither quite a part of the human realm nor of the fey.
As she circled the neighborhood, occasionally passing a late-night cyclist, Isst slipped out the window to follow the car from overhead. On either side of the street, telephone poles stood swollen with fliers for live music, clothing swaps, lost pets, and missing people.
No. Not just people—children.
Lydia turned up the radio as a sleepy DJ repeated the news that had dominated every conversation in Portland for the past month.
“In the latest in a string of kidnappings that have investigators scrambling for leads, seven-year-old Laura Caridi went missing from her home earlier this week despite locked doors and alarm systems remaining untriggered. Police are asking anyone with information to call—”
She hit the radio’s scan button, hoping to find some music, a sports broadcast, an interview—anything. Finally, a doo-wop song crackled out, sounding as if it were forcing its way out of a shell. This was something she’d missed about the human world. Fairy music sometimes compelled her feet into a wild, involuntarily dance, but there were only so many lute compositions Lydia could pretend to be enthusiastic about.
When she stopped at a red light, Isst plopped down on the car’s hood, his voice barely loud enough to be heard through the windshield.
“Where are we going at this hour? All this business with the children—you know very well what I think of it.”
Lydia, for all her gifts with language, could not explain why she was not yet ready to return home. Each time something reminded her of her previous life, it was as though she were tearing the scabs from a wound that should have long since healed over.
She’d already fled the Green Country. To flee Portland as well would be proof she was still nothing more than a nervous young librarian, too afraid of the ocean to look out of a western-facing window.
“I won’t be able to sleep yet. I want to drive a little longer.”
The light changed, but Isst didn’t move. A moment later, he made a shaky entrance through the passenger window. He stayed silent until she managed to coax the stalled car back to life.
“The paths between the Green Country and the human realm are open again,” he said. “Even before the Mapmaker abducted you, fairies used to steal children. We really should tell the King of the Barrow folk about—”
“Humans do horrible things to one another too,” Lydia said, but it was a new instinct guiding her as she turned the car westward toward the river.
Quinn’s voice, with its softly lilting accent, drifted through her mind. Running water won’t stop all fairy creatures, but it will slow some down. Even the Gyfoal hated going over bridges.
It wasn’t as if she was particularly fond of bridges, especially after having to jump from a burning one, yet her late-night drives often brought her to the Willamette. The river that divided the city in half was dark even on the clearest summer days, as if it was afraid of revealing some secret hidden beneath.
Rain hit the car in a rhythm-less song, until the cloud passed, leaving them with nothing but the droning night radio. Downtown still looked alive at this time of night, all gleaming glass and steel, the opposite of the wooden towers in the fey realm.
“Look there, Lydia,” Isst said.
His voice snapped her out of a memory where she’d been dancing with Quinn at the Night Market in Astoria. They’d both been masked; she, a hare, and he, a fox. Their muzzles bumped together awkwardly each time he tried to kiss her.
The raven used his beak to point toward the river, visible beneath the occasional burst of moonlight as clouds parted.
“I don’t see anything except for a few boats,” she told him. Even that was a stretch. There were only distant yellow orbs bobbing in the dark.
“Not merely boats. Sailboats. They’re moving against the wind and too quickly. I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Isst said, shooting through the open window before Lydia could protest. She hated the tremulous feeling she got when he wasn’t in her line of sight. It reminded her of her first time in the Green Country, when Isst was her one remaining link to home.
Once over the river, she turned her car in the direction he’d flown. As she left the cluster of restaurants and bars, the streets emptied again. The road followed the curves of the river, separated from the water by a swathe of grass and skeletal cherry blossom trees awaiting spring.
The boats were close enough now to see their silhouettes. They were larger than the hobby vessels that usually floated these waters, and each one had a single tall mast.
The fleet moved against the river’s current with such speed that she would have guessed they were motor boats, if not for the sensation prickling in her chest. All magic had a feeling to it. This she had known even when she’d been too afraid to test the limits of her power. Fairy magic was wild, capricious. The back of her neck sizzled like she was standing in the place where lightning was about to strike.
Whoever sailed these boats used glamours to conceal themselves, but with Lydia’s Aés-Caill blood, she could see through them as easily as wiping a window clean.
Her palms grew damp against the steering wheel. She knew she should turn the car around. Belimar still had supporters in the Northwestern Court, not to mention the other wicked things that might slither through doors once closed to them. But a missing person’s poster of a child’s face fluttered through her mind as if had been torn off a pole by a strong wind.
She pulled her car to the side of the road and waited until the procession passed close enough to get a better look. The lanterns allowed her to glimpse a figurehead of a stag with a massive tangle of antlers jutting from the lead boat. The others were monstrous; dragons, water hags, ghoulish bears, all with the same exaggerated proportions Lydia recognized from the Sorrowood.
It took a moment to realize that the high-pitched trill of a flu
Oh, a-hunting we will go,
A-hunting we will go
We'll raid their lands and steal their babes
And never let them go…
She forced her toe to stop tapping.
“What the hell?” Lydia muttered, searching the sky for Isst.
His words came back to her—fairies used to steal children—and some of her fear was replaced by bitterness. She thought of the poppet left in her place when she was taken from her bed as a child. A crude doll made of bogwood and alder held together with red twine.
She’d read plenty of tales about changelings. It was said some fairies, unable to nurse children on their own, swapped their babies for human ones so they could be raised by mortal mothers. Others stole children to use as servants, leaving poppets in their place. It had taken the Sorrowood to put an end to that practice, when the old paths between worlds were sealed. Perhaps if Belimar was still on the throne, he would have tolerated a revival of the tradition, but surely Quinn…
Lydia’s headlights flickered off as she crouched low in her seat, watching the river through her rearview mirror. A sensation swept over her as though someone had rear-ended her with no warning and she could have sworn her body rocked with the impact.
A hand fell to her sword, in a sheath attached to the armor Quinn's mother had given her. She wore both compulsively, even in the human world, hidden from view by the first bit of fey magic she had managed to perfect.
Isst’s suspicions were right.
The missing children. It was fairy work
“Fuck,” she whispered, as the final boat passed, black sails billowing. Did they already have a child onboard or were they on their way to steal one now?
Isst’s claws tapped on the roof as he returned. He waited until the last boat was far ahead before hopping back into the car. His feathers were pushed to one side as if battered by a strong wind.
“I can’t believe it,” he said, pausing for so long that Lydia began to worry he’d gone into a trance. Isst was not known for pensive silences. “It’s the Wild Hunt. Half of me hoped they’d end up in the Land of Forgotten Things. They haven’t ridden since before Llewel’s time.”
Though long dead, Llewel’s face was familiar to her from the statues of him and his queen, portrayed riding kelpies, or lounging in enormous scallop shells scattered throughout the Cloud Palace.
“The Wild Hunt?” she repeated. A hundred folktales competed for attention in her mind, but as with everything she had learned in the Green Country, it was difficult to pick out grains of truth from centuries of both fey and human embellishment. Still, there was a common trait to every story: a group of fairy riders—or in this case, sailors—with death following them like a ship’s wake.
She remembered the telephone poles, bulging with missing person’s posters, and wondered whether her parents had driven up and down the Oregon coast, pining her picture to every bulletin board. Or if they had organized search parties and re-traced their steps, over and over, until their daughter’s face was obscured by the fog of memory. After her return to the human world, she’d tried to find them, but every thread had unraveled as soon as she’d tugged it. She suspected the Guild’s founders had the wealth needed to bribe record keepers into misplacing a handful of files, but even if they’d lacked money or connections, they had plenty of magic.
“Lydia, I know you don’t want to go back to the Cloud Palace, but we need to tell—”
She revved her engine before he could finish the sentence, and rubber shrieked against damp asphalt. Lydia knew this road well. It followed the river for another two miles. Despite the Hunt’s preternatural speed, even her clunker of a car could keep up.
“What are you doing?” Isst snapped. “We should be driving away from the Hunt. This is no time for a curious whim.”
“We need to see where they’re going.”
“And do what? You’re one changeling with a sword. This is a job for the kingswatch.”
“They might be on their way to steal another child.”
“There is nothing you or I can do about that. We’re only wasting time by not alerting Astoria,” the raven croaked. His talons scratched lines into the already-tattered upholstery.
She knew he was infuriatingly correct. There was no Sorrowood here to command and so doing magic in this world was like attempting to write a book on a scrambled typewriter. Even the simple glamours to keep her sword and armor hidden made her feel so light-headed that she always kept a cup of juice beside her bed when she performed them.
Her knuckles bulged as she tightened her grip on the steering wheel. “I know, dammit. We’ll head north and I’ll slip you through with a message once we’re close to Astoria, okay?”
When they reached a stretch of marinas consumed by blackberry brambles, Lydia spotted a few homes scattered among abandoned warehouses. Most were missing windows and covered in illegible graffiti but at least one had lights on behind the murky glass. The glowing triangle of a Christmas tree flickered on the first floor.
Isst hissed her name and Lydia’s boot slammed the brake, snapping her neck painfully as the car skidded to a halt.
An enormous black stag trotted across the road in front of them.
No. Not a stag, Lydia thought as her eyes watered. A cloaked figure disguised by glamour. Though a hood obscured their face, their antler headdress was impossible to miss. It was a crisscrossing mess of sharp points, adorned with strips of golden twine.
The figure didn’t spare a glance at Lydia’s car as it continued across the road, holding a yellow lantern that cast a long shadow behind them.
Isst clicked his beak and moved deeper into the darkness.
“That must be the Herne, leader of the Hunt,” he muttered.
They watched as the figure strode toward the house before disappearing. A tickle moved across Lydia’s neck, like someone was whispering a horrible secret in her ear.
“The radio said no alarms were triggered and that the doors were locked. He’s using magic to take them,” she said.
“Keep driving, Lydia,” Isst said. “He assumes the glamour worked. Don’t give him any reason to think otherwise.”
She wondered why the Herne wasn’t using fairy paths. Perhaps the Aés-Caill could slip through wherever they liked, but the fey needed metaphorical roads; a ring of mushrooms, a barrow, or a winding trail leading out from beneath a hill.
The Hunt’s fleet had fallen silent, aside from the creaking of wood as the boats bobbed in the water.
Isst is right. We should leave, she told herself again, though she couldn’t stop from glancing at a glowing window on the second floor.
“Lydia,” Isst urged.
She blinked tears from her eyes and took her foot off the brake.
The engine stalled.
“Fuck,” she whispered, putting the car back into neutral just as a high-pitched scream came from the house.
Lydia’s eyes snapped to the window, where an antlered silhouette loomed. The car rumbled back to life, but instead of leaving she banked the steering wheel sharply to the left, pulling it off the side of the road.
Isst barked something in a panic as she grabbed her backpack and almost tumbled from the door.
“It’s only one fey. I can’t let him take a kid.”
Her hand flew to her sword hilt as she slipped into the Green Country for the first time in weeks. Lydia blinked and in an instant was in a heavily wooded area, dominated by firs double the size of those in the human realm. It was easy to spot the Herne’s trail. A massive tree stump a few yards away could align with a second-floor room.
She was grateful she’d signed up for a free trial at the climbing gym again. Lydia used the thick shelf mushrooms to pull herself up as she repeated Quinn’s oft-used sparring advice in her head. You’re a human, so everyone will underestimate you. Let them.
