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A flash caught my eye, and I looked up just in time to catch a coin singing through the air. I stared at it, flat and nearly filling my bare palm. A solem. A whole solem, silver and embossed with a relief of Aeadine’s matronly Queen Edith. The only other time I’d held one of these was the day I’d become betrothed, and my father had presented me with the single solem he’d put away for my wedding dress and other wifely provisioning.
I’d never gotten a chance to wear that dress. I imagined it was still packed away in the attic of the inn, along with everything else that might be called mine.
“You’ll need to buy new clothes,” Demery said, by way of explanation. He tucked his hands back into his pockets and started through the town. “I’ll not have my Stormsinger looking like an urchin.”
“I’m not your Stormsinger,” I grumbled, but I was distracted by the coin. I slipped it into the pocket of the short sailor’s coat Widderow had given me and held it there. A solem should be enough to buy passage back to Aeadine if I played my hand correctly.
But the word ‘Stormsinger’ dredged up a host of questions, the foremost of which slipped from my lips. “Does Lirr truly have my mother, Captain?”
Demery looked at me, his gaze level and without a hint of falseness. “Yes. But the street is not the place to speak of such things. Tomorrow, or tonight if your mind is fit for it, I’ll answer all your questions. But not now. There are some things that shouldn’t be spoken under an open sky.”
I pressed my lips shut. My questions still burned, but I kept my head down as we pushed through the crowd.
Scents wafted past me. Pastries, mulling wine. Woodsmoke and tobacco. Coffee too, along with the ever-present crispness of the Winter Sea, the musk of horses, manure and mud. They were the scents of early winter and the approach to Festus season, the month of celebration that marked the beginning of the long, hard winter. They were scents tied to a host of pleasant feelings and childhood nostalgia.
But as we wandered, a newer, stranger feeling overtook me. Vague and warning, it crept up from the ground, from the wood of lintels and beams, and it grew stronger as we went.
The people and buildings gave way to a churchyard on the northern side of town. The feeling was strongest here, where tombstones and statues were arrayed on a sweeping hill beside the sea, each sad monolith bastioned by snow and harried by wind. The abandoned fort rose on the forested hill beyond it, but only a few trees dared to grow in the graveyard itself: all huge, ancient, and unmistakably ghisten.
The central one was an ash, its unseasonably lush canopy covering half the churchyard and weighted with snow. Even without the greenness of its leaves, there was no questioning the tree’snature—Ifelt its draw and I picked up my pace, edging ahead of Demery. He let me go, falling in behind on a narrow, well-worn path between banks of snow.
I paused under the branches and raked cool air into my lungs, relishing the familiar energy of a ghisten tree. It was an intangible thing, like the quiet of an empty chapel, or the hush of the graves all around. But the ash wasmore…alive,more insistent. It was fingers around my ribs, tugging me forward. It was the strongest pull I’d ever felt to a ghisten tree.
Then I noticed the coins. There were hundreds ofthem—no,thousands, tens ofthousands—wedgedand stuck and grown into the thick bark. They’d become part of the tree itself, like scales of a hundred different sizes and metals and origins. I scuffed snow away from the roots to find they, too, had been armored with coins, and when I looked up, even the highest branches bore the same.
“What is this?” I breathed as Demery drew up.
“The Tithe,” he said, offering me a small copper coin between two fingers. “Find a spot to stick it.”
“Why?” I took the coin, warm from his pocket, and held it as the cold sea wind blew around us.
“Because if you spend a night in Tithe without making an offering, this island will try to kill you.” Demery took his own coin, then circled the tree until he found a hammer hanging from a leather tie. He took it up and circled more, squinting. At length, he spied a spot where the bark had grown up around previous coins. Flipping the hammer around, he used a spike on one side to break the exterior of the bark, then set the coin in on its edge, and flipped the hammer back around.
Tapping rang out in the quiet churchyard. The coin sank in and Demery stood back, holding the tool out to me.
“Try to kill me, how?” I asked, taking the hammer. Its haft was cool and smooth. “Why?”
“A few hundred years ago, Usti settlers used ghisten wood from their ships to build homes.” Demery nodded back to the jumbled roofs and rising hearth smoke of the town. “A dangerous decision, true, one that went ill for many others in the past. But here, the humans and the ghistings found an accord. The ghistings vowed to protect the island in exchange for not being sent back tosea—anda ghisting’s vow can never be broken, not unless the other party breaks it first. The humans kept their end of their bargain, and eventually new ghisten trees started to grow. Here, ghistings and humans live in harmony.”
I looked up at the sweep of the ghisten ash’s branches over my head.
“Ghistwolds like this sprout where many ghistings converge,” Demery continued, looking at the tree instead of me. “If there’s a Mother Tree’s seed among them, anyway. So now, all who’d visit Tithe must pay their respects to the island’s rulers: the port mistress, and the ghistings.”
“All who visit? Will your entire crew come here?”
“If they intend to stay a night on shore,” Demery said with a nod. He turned, indicating the other trees in the graveyard, and the glint of coins told me they’d undergone the same tradition. “I told you, Tithe needs no forts, no castles. The ghistings guard this place. It is The Tithe to theSea—bothour Winter Sea, and the Dark Water.”
The Dark Water. That was what sailors called the Other, the realm where ghistings, morgories, implings and even lantern dragonflies originated. It was also where Stormsingers, like me, sourced their power.
I ran my fingers across the coin-mottled bark of the ash. Branches clacked and the sound of the sea rushed past my ears, but as I began to sing under my breath, the wind, for once, subsided.
Demery watched me keenly, noting the change in the wind as I began to circle the ash, trailing my hand as I went.
The bite of the cold faded. I found a narrow spot of unbroken bark between a Mereish dette and an unrecognizable tin piece, then tapped my offering into place.
When I finished, I passed the hammer back to the pirate and he hung it on an iron hook. Then, desperate to recapture the feeling of the Wold, I pressed both palms into the bark of the tree.
I closed my eyes and instinctively reached. The impulse might have unnerved me, but before I could acknowledge it, I saw something with my mind’seye—atrumpeting angel with bladed wings, his face forever frozen in a pious, heavenward gaze. The tree’s ghisting. A guardian. A herald. A warrior.
