The boat came from the northwest.
It showed up as a speck first, a black dot crawling along the line where the water met the sky, and for a while nobody on Lirwaa paid it any attention at all.
Boats were normal on the water.
Fishing ships came and went along the reefs every day, and a speck on the horizon at midday meant nothing more than a crew coming home with a full hold.
Then the speck grew, and people started to notice that it wasn’t coming home from anywhere.
It was coming from the northwest, where there was nothing.
Northwest was open ocean.
Northwest was the deep water nobody fished because there was nothing to fish for and no land to run to if the weather turned.
A small kid was down at the water’s edge dragging a stick through the wet sand, and he looked up because a shadow moved across him and he thought it was a cloud.
When he saw the boat he dropped the stick and ran, his feet slapping the wet sand, his voice carrying up the beach ahead of him.
“Mama! Big boat, big boat!”
His mother was on the porch of their house with a basket of gutted fish in her lap, and she turned her head to look where he was pointing.
She looked for a long moment.
Then she set the basket down and stood up and wiped her hands on her skirt.
“Yai,” she said.
“Big boat. Go inside.”
“Mama, but”
“Go inside, Ue said.”
The kid went, dragging his feet, looking back over his shoulder the whole way because he was 6 years old and a big boat was the most interesting thing that had happened all week and he didn’t understand why his mother’s voice had gone quiet.
She walked down the beach instead, toward the group of fishermen who were standing at the seawall with their nets half folded in their arms, all of them facing the same direction.
“How bad is it?” she asked.
The older fisherman shook his head slowly.
He was 60 something, burned dark by decades of sun, and there wasn’t much that got to him anymore.
This was getting to him.
“Can’t tell yet. They’re still far out. Wind’s pushing them in slow.”
“Nobody comes to Fawn,” she said.
“Nobody’s ever come to Fawn. Not in my whole life, not in my mother’s whole life.”
“We know.”
“So what do we do?”
“We wait,” he said.
“That’s what we do. We can’t get word anywhere fast enough to matter. Lirwaa’s on the outer edge of the chain. Even if we sent a runner today, it’d be weeks before anyone reached Harmenjea, and by then whatever’s on that ship is gonna be standing right here on this beach.”
Beside him, the younger fisherman spit into the sand.
He was maybe 20, with the rope-burn scars of a working man and the temper of a man who hadn’t learned yet that being brave and being alive were two different things.
“We don’t gotta wait,” he said.
“There’s 14 of us here that can shoot. Give me and my cousins 10 minutes and we’ll row out there and we’ll ask them real polite what they want. And if they want trouble, we got enough arrows to kill every single person on that overgrown rowboat.”
The older fisherman turned his head and gave him a look.
It was a slow look, and it was a cold one, and the younger man’s mouth closed by the time it was done with him.
“You ever killed a man?” the older one asked.
“No.”
“Then you don’t know anything about it, and you don’t get to decide how this goes.” He turned his eyes back to the water.
“We don’t shoot first. We’re not those people, and even if we were, we don’t know what’s on that ship. Maybe it’s traders. Maybe it’s somebody running from something worse than us. Maybe it’s nothing at all and they just got blown off course. But if we put arrows in the water and it turns out they came in peace, then we started a war over nothing and we’ll be the ones who have to explain it.”
“So what, we just let them walk up?”
“We get the kids inland,” the older man said.
“Right now. The boats stay, the nets stay, the houses stay. If things go wrong, we want every child in this village somewhere we can’t be seen from the water.” Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
The mother’s hand had gone tight around the edge of her skirt.
“All our houses are on the shore. We don’t build in the woods. Nobody lives in the woods.”
“It’s for a few hours.”
“Hours.”
“Few hours at most,” he said, and his voice had softened some, because she was scared and he understood why.
“The forests of Fawn don’t have the monsters the mainland does. You know that better than I do. Nothing in those trees has ever gone after a person. They’ll be bored up there inside of an hour and they’ll come back down wanting food, and that’s it.”
She stood there a second longer, looking at the boat, which was a boat now and not a speck.
You could see the shape of it.
It was long.
It was big.
Then she turned and walked over to where the kids had gathered in a loose crowd around a game of shells.
“All of you,” she said.
“I need you to go get the others. Go get everybody your age, and the little ones too. Then I want you to take them into the trees and stay there till somebody comes for you.”
A boy in front made a face.
“In the trees? Why?”
“It’s a game,” she said.
He perked right up.
“Which game?”
“A hiding game,” she said, and she smiled at him, and it was a good smile, and it cost her more than he’d ever know.
“The best kind. Longest one. Nobody finds you till I come get you myself.”
The kids scattered.
She watched them go, all of them, 20 or so of them running up the beach and into the treeline, and she stood there until the last small back disappeared between the trunks.
Back at the seawall, the older fisherman nodded at the younger one.
“Go up to the village and tell the chief. Tell him everything we know, which is nothing. Then send somebody south along the shore. We got bigger villages down that way that can send help if help’s needed. Two days there and two days back, if they don’t stop.”
The younger fisherman’s jaw worked.
He looked at the boat, at the 14 men with nets in their hands.
“If I go south and I’m right,” he said, “then I’m two days away while it happens.”
“Then don’t be wrong.”
He wanted to argue.
It was all over his face.
But the older man just kept looking at him with that same cold patience, and eventually the younger one threw his hands up and started running, up the beach, past the houses, heading south along the coast where the path got narrower and the mud got deeper and the journey was 2 full days if nothing slowed him down.
The older fisherman watched him go, then turned back to the water.
Back on the boat, Bjorn the Glutton was leaning on the bow railing with a section of salted fish in one hand, chewing with his mouth open, looking at the island like a man looking at a buffet he hadn’t been invited to.
“Looks a lot more lively than I figured,” he said.
“I thought it’d be nothing. Three huts and a dog. There’s got to be 40 houses down there.”
Pickem was sitting on Bjorn’s shoulder with his little legs swinging and both hands shading his eyes.
At 2 feet tall and perched 8 feet up he probably had the best view on the whole ship.
“They’re human,” he said.
“All of them. Far as I can see. Bit darker-skinned than us, but that’s just the sun, we’re further north or closer to it or something. Faces look normal enough. Lot of kids down there.”
He paused.
“Kids are running into the trees.”
“What?”
“Kids are running into the trees,” Pickem said again.
“Mothers pointing, kids going up the beach and into the woods. All of them.” New chapters come out on g.com first.
Bjorn chewed on that along with the fish.
“They spotted us.”
“They spotted us hours ago, you great lunk. They’re not idiots.”
Down on the main deck, a knot of the crew had gathered along the rail, and the conversation had already taken a turn that had nothing to do with strategy.
“You see that one?” a man with a broken nose said, pointing with his chin.
“The one in the blue skirt by the water. All the way from here and I’d still climb down and swim it.”
“Don’t,” said another man, laughing.
“We’re barely off the ship. Give it an hour.”
“An hour’s too long.” Broken Nose shook his head.
“I’ll tell you what, though. I’ve had it with Fluvenmire women. Every last one of them. Dotsy, the whole lot. You try to have a decent conversation and they’re already figuring out how to take your coin before you’ve finished your sentence.”
“You try to have a decent conversation?” the second man asked.
“When?”
“Every time I’ve got coin to spend.” Broken Nose shrugged, unbothered.
“And every one of them wants something. Every single one. You buy a girl a drink and suddenly you’re paying for her mother’s medicine and her brother’s boat. Or she’s married twice over and lying about it, or she’s got a man in the next town, or she’s gonna rob you in your sleep and be gone by morning.”
“Some of them are alright.”
“None of them are alright. It’s the whole kingdom. Fluvenmire women are all schemers. That’s just the truth of it.” He nodded at the shore.
“But look at these ones. Look at that. Whole villages of them, living simple, working the water, no politics, no money games. A Fawn woman would make a proper traditional wife. Wouldn’t she? One that does what you say and keeps her mouth shut and doesn’t try to cut your purse strings when you turn your back.”
A third man leaned in with a grin.
“You’re gonna walk up to some girl on that beach and ask her to marry you?”
“I’m gonna walk up to that beach and see what happens.”
“You’re gonna walk up to that beach and get a spear in the gut.”
“Then at least I died happy.”
They laughed.
The whole knot of them laughed, loud and stupid in the way men got when they’d been on a ship for 3 months and could smell land, and the conversation spiraled off into who’d take which one, and what they’d do with a house down there, and whether you could really get a Fawn woman to do this or that thing they’d heard a Fawn woman would do, and none of them had ever spoken a single word to a person from Fawn in their lives.
Buck V Henderson stood about 20 feet away near the mast, out of the light, arms folded, saying nothing.
His stomach was in knots.
It wasn’t the seasickness, either.
The seasickness was always there, a low hum under everything, but this was worse.
This was a cold rock sitting in his chest and it had been sitting there since the crow’s nest had called out shore.
Two ships.
72 souls.
3 adventurers, and 2 of them were a giant with a butter-knife hole in his arm and a 2 foot tall man who’d tried to choke him out with a headlock last night.
That was the entire army.
That was everything standing between 72 people and an unknown continent full of unknown people who were currently running their children into the trees because they’d seen them coming.
He looked at the beach.
He looked at the fishermen standing at the seawall, all of them lined up facing the water, nets in hand, not a single one of them running and not a single one of them smiling.
He looked at the treeline where 20 small backs had just vanished.
Please, he thought.
Please let them be friendly.
Please let there be somebody reasonable standing on that sand.
Please let there be a chief, a king, an elder, anybody I can talk to and pay off and smile at and get this over with.
He watched the shore get closer and he prayed, quietly, silently, with both hands in his pockets so nobody could see them shaking.