Clouds End
Sean Stewart
CLOUDS
END
Also by Sean Stewart
Galveston
Passion Play
CLOUDS
END
SEAN STEWART
DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.
Mineola, New York
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 by Sean Stewart
All rights reserved.
Bibliographical Note
This Dover edition, first published in 2018, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by The Berkley Publishing Group, New York, in 1996.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Stewart, Sean, 1965– author.
Title: Clouds end / Sean Stewart.
Description: Dover edition. | Mineola, New York : Dover Publications, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017027350| ISBN 9780486816838 (softcover) | ISBN 0486816834 (softcover)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Fantasy / Urban Life. | FICTION / Fantasy / Contemporary. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.
Classification: LCC PR9199.3.S794 C56 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017027350
Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications
81683401 2017
www.doverpublications.com
CONTENTS
Part One: The Sea Loop
Chapter 1: Out of the Mist
Chapter 2: The Witness
Chapter 3: Sage Creek
Chapter 4: Shale’s Island
Chapter 5: Sere
Chapter 6: The Storm
Part Two: The War Loop
Jo’s Line
Chapter 7: Hazel Twist
Chapter 8: Rope, Biscuits, Pepper
Chapter 9: The Forest
Chapter 10: Ash and Ivy
Seven’s Line
Chapter 11: The Hero of Legend
Chapter 12: The Raid on Delta
Chapter 13: Foam and Shale
Chapter 14: Little Boats
Jo’s Line
Chapter 15: The Arbor
Chapter 16: Garden
Chapter 17: The Spark
Chapter 18: The Pyre
Seven’s Line
Chapter 19: The Shadow Wood
Chapter 20: Willow
Part Three: The Twins’ Loop
Chapter 21: The Wedding
Chapter 22: The Birth
Chapter 23: Jo’s Call
Chapter 24: Copper Brazier, Bramble Ring
Chapter 25: The Story of the Seventh Wave
Chapter 26: The Two Heroes
Chapter 27: The Twins’ Story
Chapter 28: Where All Things Are True
Acknowledgments
PART ONE
THE SEA LOOP
CHAPTER 1
OUT OF THE MIST
SHANDY, FOURTH WITNES of Clouds End, watched from the west window of her tower as the sun drowned and twilight came lapping over her island.
The last boats were sliding in. Crews emptied their holds into waiting fish barrels and tied up for the night. They checked every knot twice, glancing eastward at the dirty rack of clouds building above the Mist. A mean wind kicked up whitecaps and swung boats against the creaking dock.
A new island had been born one day’s sail to the east, crusting around a story in the Mist-time like a pearl forming around a grain of sand. Shandy’s daughter Shale had been the first to see it, out sailing with Rope and Foam, but Shandy had felt it happening for days. As Witness of Clouds End it was her duty to learn the new island’s story.
But still she closed her eyes and waited, scared to open herself to the Mist on a night when its powers were so fiercely surging.
Duty, Witness.
Duty.
She emptied herself, and was filled up with the world, filled up with stone and sea and fire. After all these years it was still a horrible feeling, like drowning; the world filling up your heart, your lungs. Her blood shook as she opened to the speaking night.
If you are tired, the darkness whispered, come to me. I will show you a great secret under the pine’s dim branches. I will show you bare ground and a hollow place between waiting roots. Come find out what the grass has already learned.
Shandy had better things to do than listen to that dark voice. What says the wind? she asked.
And the wind said, This is a story of the Mist-time and the real world, where all things are true, and few things are what they seem. This story is a One Twist Ring: a tale of two empires that is also the tale of two women.
Two women? Shandy said.
And the wind said, Brook.
The next morning dawned windy and clear.
It was Brook’s turn to mind the children of Clouds End. Her band of tiny scavengers swarmed across the rocks and sand, shouting at each new piece of salvage the night’s storm had thrown up. Waves slapped against the point and then foamed across Crabspit Beach. The breeze tugged at Brook’s brown hair, still wet from her morning swim, and swirled deeper, into her heart.
Only yesterday Shale had seen a brand new island forming at the edge of the Mist. Seen it with her own eyes! Because she was quick and strong and fearless, a clever sailor in her own right who got to crew with Rope and Foam whenever she wanted to.
. . . While Brook was stuck minding the children. Again.
Brook had always known in her heart that something magical and strange waited for her, out in the Mist. But it was hard to be patient, to sit at home and sew, or play games with the children, knowing that Shale, who hadn’t a thimbleful of magic in her, was out in the world having adventures.
The breeze whispered in Brook like a secret. She had always felt a destiny waiting for her in the Mist.
A flock of gulls soared overhead, screeching and fighting.
* * *
Shriek, shriek, soar and scream! Yellow feet and beady black eyes; around her the batter of white wings. Below, the old sea, crawling and crawling.
Aiee! Fire crept along the muscles of Jo’s wings. Hungers jumped in her belly like little fish: hey! hey!
Finally, an island underwing. Grey stone, green moss. Shores of barnacled rock, or gritty sand. An elm-shadowed pond at its heart.
A shoal of human children went darting and drifting across the shingle. A young woman moved among them, her dress blue as stream-water, her rippled brown hair bound in islander braids.
Jo cocked her head and screamed, falling down the long sky. A swoop, a gliding arc, a chestful of wind cupped between her wings—and then her webbed feet touched at last the solid rock.
* * *
Brook had always felt a destiny waiting for her in the Mist.
She broke apart her little sister’s braid. “There’s a story swimming by these days. It came in very close last night. I felt the wave of it. I felt the island rocking.”
Finch looked over her shoulder. “You’re trying to scare me. This isn’t The Island That Went Back, you know.”
“A Hero was passing. Hurrying by.”
“You heard a Hero?”
“Fires. Lots of fires.” Brook wove her sister’s hair into two square knots, to dangle fetchingly beneath Finch’s ears. “Like boats burning on the water.”
Gulls swirled overhead.
Finch squirmed, curious in spite of herself. “Fires! If it was a Hero, then, it would be Sere. If it was.” She squinted narrowly at her big sister. “If you heard anything at all.”
Gulls swirled down, all white breasts and grey backs, drifting onto Crabspit Beach or standing importantly amidst the seaweed at the water’s edge.
And then, as Brook watched, the largest gull stretched and blurred, its body oozing like hot wax, changing shape.
With a yell, Brook jumped to her feet and grabbed Finch
by the arm.
The children turned to look where Brook was staring.
“Brook!” little Toad wailed. From between her legs he stared at the Mist-creature on the beach. Its white back rippled like blown water.
“What is it?”
“Will it sting?”
“I want my daddy!”
“B-r-o-o-k!” Toad wailed again.
“Hush now. Don’t be frightened,” Brook said, remembering her duty. The children were panicky, staring at her, trying not to cry. “Finch! Take them back to the village. Tell Shandy there’s a Mist-thing on the beach.”
“B-but, what about you?”
“Do what I tell you!”
Finch nodded, herding the children up the Ridge path. Again and again she looked back, hoping her big sister would follow, but Brook did not come.
* * *
A stink of crab, yes? Hey?
Rattle him, rattle him! Yaw! Split split split!
Aiee! Mine!
Aiee! Hssss! Hss!
Gull voices spat and screamed, and the sea ate the sense from them as Jo fell back to earth. Their harsh tongue broke apart, its meaning splintered by the rush of wave on rock, the hiss of foam, the stone’s deep voice, the great humming silence of the sky.
She was alone.
And oh, the terrible emptiness of this moment as her body spilled and ran, hungry for a shape. The terrible sucking need. The world in its madness pulled on her from every side. The stone spoke his hardness through her skin; she was drugged by the smell of salt water and wet sand.
The wind poured through her like a river.
Alone, shape-shifting, she was surrounded by the voices of the world: the stone’s old, dark, clean thoughts; the shrieking gulls; the sly wind; the ceaseless waves.
Is it time yet? the Seventh Wave said.
for flood.
a cleansing.
the stone understands.
and we are (I am) restless.
and we are the strength of cold fathoms.
and we are the keepers of the voiceless dark. Not yet.
not this season. not this time.
we (I) do not yet dream the High Dance.
I (we) sing the Wave: and the stillness under.
So the waves argued, bold and mild and murderous by turns, every seventh one their deeper, truer tongue. How well Jo knew them.
With ferocious will she pulled herself together, shutting out the roaring world. She had to be human, she remembered that. But it was hard to craft a body from memories the Mist had confused. Hard to make a woman from wind and waves, from the stone beneath and the indifferent sky above.
She needed someone to shape on.
She listened.
Listened into the knot of children, their panic and their wide eyes and their trust; listened for the young woman minding them. Yes: that was a woman the villagers would trust.
She wound herself around the young woman’s voice, pulling together sea and stone, cloud and sky—knotting the elements into human form. And then Jo reached out to the person behind the voice, and took that pattern for her own.
Brook. Brook was their name.
* * *
Brook trembled, twisting a bracelet of blue shells around her wrist. Magic crawled and shivered in her like a fever. To watch the Mist-creature take shape before her was terrifying: precious: secret.
All her life she had treasured the moment when things called to her from out of the Mist, strange and heavy with meaning. But never had she felt the magic as she did now, alive and bitter in her blood. Something inside her had broken, some dike against madness. This was the terrible magic, the Mist that had swallowed Rope’s father on a sunny day fifteen years before.
Mist poured from the gull’s body. Its tiny head grew; its round eyes narrowed and silvered. Its beak re-formed into a strong hooked nose. Its head-feathers unravelled into hair, a drifting mass of white spider-web. It stirred, hissing like a gull, and stared at Brook with inhuman eyes.
As the gull-woman held Brook’s gaze her pale flesh tanned. Her white hair thickened into four brown braids, looped behind her neck. Bones erupted from her wrist and hardened into a bracelet of blue shells. Her body rippled and shrank, melting down like a candle before Brook’s eyes, changing into a young woman in a dress of bluedyed sailcloth and eelskin boots.
“A twin,” Brook whispered: for it was herself she saw.
She was going to die.
Gently, Brook stepped forward. She had to kill the twin before it killed her.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said.
She had to get ten strides closer.
Eight.
“I won’t hurt you.”
The twin was on a spit of rock with the sea behind it and a sharp drop to the right. It was Brook, Brook in every detail: the woman she saw reflected in Teardrop Pond every day. No one would know it wasn’t her. No one would be able to tell.
But she would be gone.
Six strides.
An empty crab shell splintered under her heel.
The twin frowned and fluttered. It yawped, a bird’s cry from a woman’s mouth. It blinked and coughed.
Brook’s heart was hammering and her throat cramped when she tried to speak.
“I won’t hurt you.”
Another step. “We don’t get many strangers here.”
Four strides.
“There will be jerries when the boats come back. Smoked eel and pickled gulls’ eggs. We always offer travellers the best of our catch.”
Three strides.
The twin stepped back. Its skin bleached to gull’s-belly white. Its brown eyes turned gleaming silver, like fish scales.
Trying not to look like me, Brook thought. Trying not to scare me.
Gulls screamed overhead.
Two strides.
Brook lunged forward. The twin flung itself to the right, into the sky, but its white wings were gone. Betrayed by its human body, it fell badly and slammed its head against the rock.
Brook scrambled after it, slipping on the slick stone. She saw a sharp-edged shell and dove for it. Ripping it out of the cold grey sand, she turned, hoping to slash out the monster’s throat.
The twin’s silver gaze slid into her like a steel hook. She felt herself jerk, her hands twisting at her sides. Sobbing, she fell to her knees, transfixed.
The twin touched its salt-white cheek. Its fingers came away spotted with blood. “Aiyee! Hurts.” And then looking at Brook, it said, “You hurt me.”
The moment was slipping from Brook like the tide, the sand shifting and draining out from underneath her; her anger dwindling into fear.
She had been twinned.
She was going to die and no one would know. She would never have a baby and she would never sail to Double Eagle or the Harp, and the Brook who made love to Rope at last would not be her.
And she saw that in the Mist this destiny had always been awaiting her.
* * *
Jo twinned Brook, and took much knowing from her.
She was on Clouds End. Shandy was Witness, Stone was Trader. Her best friend, Shale, had long legs and a short temper and you could crack oyster shells with her sharp laughter.
Rope was her love. He was steady as an anchor and he had sailor’s hands, so tough you could blunt a bone needle on his calluses. Though he was only twenty-one, he had a boat of his own—he was that reliable—and he would marry her one day.
Or rather, Jo thought pleasurably, he will marry me.
Deeper still she reached into Brook, drinking her like water. She had been in the Mist so long, lost in Sere or the Gull Warrior, that she had forgotten how good it felt to escape the magic’s fever-grip; to sink into a real life as if skinny-dipping in a shady pool.
(Oh and being Brook ten years old on the beach before dawn, playing the pretend game of what Clouds End would be like if she were dead. Thinking, What secrets the waves must tell the shore, if only you could hear them!)
Fear started in Jo, splas
hing and rippling. She had forgotten how deep a life could be. Now Brook was running into her like water, filling her up, clogging her lungs and heart.
(And seven years old, the day her parents drowned, pulling her mother’s shawl around her shoulders while Trickfoot’s Witness looked at her with teary eyes, and the Trader told her about the boat ride to Clouds End, where she and Finch were to be fostered.
The shawl still rich with her mother’s smells.)
Brook closed over Jo like the sea.
She filled Jo up until she ran through her heart and spilled from her eyes, and their currents mixed into a single stream.
Jo felt a knot cinch tight around her life, binding her to Brook. Brook the fool, she thought angrily. Brook the girl still young enough to long for magic in her life. Shale had a traveller’s heart, and Rope a sailor’s eye, but what did Brook have? A pocket full of stories?
Brook the foster-child. Brook the idiot who sent the kids away but stayed because she wanted to see the magic all by herself. Wanted to feel the touch of the Mist.
Fool, fool, fool! Jo raged, weeping. Brook she loved just a little bit too much to kill.
Yet.
CHAPTER 2
THE WITNESS
THE HAUNT no longer looked like Brook. She was tall, with salt-white skin and hair. Her narrow silver eyes were set far apart on either side of a strong arched nose.
Trudging behind her, Brook felt empty. Gone.
She had been twinned. If the stories were true, she was as good as dead, destined to vanish into the Mist. She’ d had her moment of bravery and let it slip away. Now she broke around the haunt, like water against white stone. “You are one of the people of the air, aren’t you?”
“That’s right.” As Jo strode up the path she wiped the blood from her cheek and licked her fingers. The scratches faded, leaving only whiteness.
Sun! Sun on face! Ooh, that tickles! Mind your step! said the wildflowers bobbing beside their feet. They squeaked when Jo trod on them.
Up the Ridge path and across the east meadow. Then they were at the village, thirty small stone houses. They passed old Stick, whittling on his stoop. Long years of sun and wind had left his skin tough and creased as turtle-leather. Don’t look, Brook thought desperately. Stay away. As if one glance from the haunt could splinter him to pieces.
