Page 23 of Daughter of the Dark Sea

Kora stalked, her shoulders hunched and head bowed, winding through the narrow streets of the western side of the port town by Stormkeep Fortress. With a cloak covering her, she blended into the shadows of the leaning overhangs of crooked stores, mindfully skirting around any suspicious looking puddles.

After her spectacle with the fountain, she’d had to change again, this time opting for dark navy with golden stitching. Being seen in the empire’s colours this close to the slums would guarantee a mobbing—or worse. Besides, her undergarments had been uncomfortably wet from her tryst with Blake.

A faint store bell rang several feet in front of her intended path, and she darted into a nearby alleyway. Peering around the corner, two males exited the Silvermaid’s Emporium, chuckling to themselves as they held a peculiar glass bottle, filled with swirling, shimmering pink liquid.

“This’ll do it,”

one spoke devilishly.

“One sip of this, and I’ll be married to Lady Tornton.”

The other jostled him, swiping for the potion.

“Hey! We paid half each—I’m using it, too.”

“Oh really? On whom?”

the first filthy beggar leered.

“I fancy Lady Tornton, too.”

The two males halted by Kora’s alleyway, and she sunk further into the shadows, grasping at the hood of her cloak to cover her glaring white hair.

“You can’t steal my plan! I’m getting out of these shithole slums one way or another.”

“You’re just using Lady Tornton.”

The second beggar pushed him aside, plucking the potion from the former’s grubby grasp.

“I’m in love.”

The first male spat on the floor, croakily laughing.

“In love with a lady? How?”

“I work in her manor. She just needs to . . . notice me . . . that’s all. Then we’ll be together, ayterni.”

Hastened steps followed his voice along the cobbled stones. A potion that could cause someone to fall in love forever?

The first male cursed and lunged for the potion, igniting a sprawling fight, and the vial flew from their grasp, skittering across the waste-infested streets. Kora peeked from the shadows as they chased it between roving bodies walking up the path.

Dated stores lined the street, with market stalls popped up in front. Interspersing the buildings were aged, crumbling statues of the five Devani gods, their cracked hands turned out to accept prayers and offerings.

The western port town was all that remained of the old civilisation of Devania, before the conquest. Stormkeep Fortress had been erected in Azaria’s image, made the new capital of Aldara, leaving the western town to fade into history where it turned squalid with poverty and disease.

Civilians yelled, kicking at the males, who shrieked as booted feet smashed the bottle, the shimmering liquid draining into the sewage systems. In response, the beggars leered, blaming each other for spending their final scrap of coins on the potion. Kora’s lips pressed into a grim line. She wouldn’t be surprised if they participated in the upcoming trials to compensate.

Kora slipped through the iron door of the Silvermaid’s Emporium, and hung close to a darkened corner as she surveyed the store. It was one of the oldest buildings in the port town, achieving a grand three floors of varying trinkets, fabrics, and unique exotic jewellery from unknown lands—including spices that hailed from there, too. In addition to that was a secretive stash of weapons, available to those who were predisposed to appreciate the sharper things in life.

Shelves lined the walls, filled to the brim with the goods, broken apart by large glass cabinets displaying beautiful, shining geodes, impressively cut from the dangerous sea stacks of Narrowfen Pass.

Thick, wooden beams curved upwards from the paint peeling walls into the low ceiling, supporting the aging structure that Kora was sure was four—maybe five—hundred years older than her age. The Emporium had been here long before these lands had been united.

“Are you going to dither all day, or come greet me, child?”

The enticing items for sale weren’t the only reason patrons frequented this store.

On the far side of the room, by a glass counter, stood Agatha Silvermaid. She was curvy, yet bony, with weathered and aging light-brown skin. Glimmering silver threads wove throughout her long, braided grey hair. Yet the striking thing about Agatha, were her all-white eyes.

“I may not be able to see, but I know you’re there, Kora Cadell.”

Her voice was strong, and stern with a hoarseness Kora found comforting.

“Apologies, Agatha, I was ensuring we were alone.”

Kora stalked over to Agatha, placing a gentle hand on her thin arm.

“Sehwani,”

she spoke in Devanian.

“Sehwani,”

Agatha replied secretively. Her white irises glinted mischievously with the use of the tongue of the gods. It was the first phrase Agatha had taught Kora, meaning one could see into another and observe their true self beneath their skin.

Kora’s lips twitched in amusement.

“I see you made those men a love potion.”

Agatha waved a wrinkled hand, age spots blooming on her skin. Her knuckles were so swollen that her fingers had curved inwards, unable to straighten ever again.

“Gah, don’t fret about that. I’ve ensured Lady Tornton’s daily tonic has the ability of protection.”

“Well, they broke the potion anyway.”

Agatha smiled as she expertly navigated her way around, locking the store before leading Kora to a hidden room at the back through a small, narrow door by the spiral wooden stairs.

“You fiending thing,”

Kora chuckled as she sat down at a rounded table beside a slumbering fire.

It was a small, wooden box room, only big enough for a dark-stoned hearth, a small table with two chairs, that Agatha used for secret fortune readings, and a plush, red, velvet sofa, covered in knitted blankets. Drapes in dark hues of purple and red hung from the centre of the ceiling, cascading down before tying up in the four corners of the room.

“Business is business.”

Agatha brewed two cups of herbal tea on the hearth and placed them on the table, sliding into the chair opposite Kora.

“Taxes are increasing every year. I need the coins. I’m an old, blind hag, you know.”

Kora sat in silence, Agatha’s blind stare weighing on her. For a blind female, she was highly perceptive, perhaps the most perceptive person Kora knew. Her skin itched beneath her golden embossed clothes. She would never experience the difficulty of making ends meet. She had the luxury of living with Erick, and being named the heir of the Cadell Manor and fortune, as well as the only female captain in the entire empire.

“For a blind old hag, you seem to be frequented a lot by patrons seeking . . . tonics.”

“Gah,”

Agatha waved her off.

“They pretend they don’t understand what they’re buying. That it’s all just herbs and voodoo gibberish.”

“Isn’t it?”

Agatha’s eyes sharpened, the whites intensely absorbing the space around Kora. She waved her hand again, brushing off Kora’s remark. Agatha knew better than most what a person believed deep down, even when they wouldn’t fully admit it. She just . . . knew things.

Kora’s eyes snagged on the misshapen bony hands connected to Agatha’s otherwise strong, yet aged body. Soon, they’d become so swollen, and too painful to move, and she wouldn’t be able to continue with the Emporium.

Her heart skittered at the thought of someone else running the store. It was one of her safe havens on land to explore who she was; to read and learn about her passions for ancient and mythological history. Maybe she could offer Agatha a room at the manor? Perhaps she’d grow fond of the courtyard, surrounded by nature and herbs to use for her potion swindling.

“You smell different,”

Agatha quipped.

Kora startled at the comment.

“Is that bad?”

She sniffed her own pits, but was graced with sweet scents of jasmine and orange blossom.

Agatha let out a sigh.

“Not your scent, you silly child. I can smell your posh soap from here.”

She wrinkled her nose.

“Your essence is different.”

“My . . . essence?”

Rolling her eyes, Agatha continued.

“Everyone has an essence—a vitality of who they are, deep in their core. It is our very being. Some say it is where our souls are born.”

Agatha held out her knobbly palm on the table for Kora to place her hand on top.

“Some people have special essences that house spectacular gifts—”

Once their flesh touched, Agatha stopped talking and sharply inhaled. Her white eyes met Kora’s dead on, and she swallowed, fidgeting under that stare, and Kora could see the faint outline of where Agatha’s pupils and irises should be.

“What is on your neck?”

Agatha spoke slowly, thickly.

“What?”

Tension seized Kora. She couldn’t tell anyone what had recently happened.

“Nothing? There’s nothing.”

“Do not lie to me,”

Agatha inhaled deeply, closing her eyes.

“You carry something dark and powerful. Maybe dangerous.”

Kora’s hand flew to her chest, gripping the talisman as if she could shield it from Agatha’s perception, whilst Agatha pressed into Kora’s other hand, her long nails biting into her skin.

No, no, no.

What if Agatha revealed her to the empire? She needed the money. They would send Kora to Deadwater Prison for possession of a potentially powerful trinket—a magical charm. Or maybe worse. Mages were hunted and executed right in front of the king. Dragged across the islands and sea to the vast continent, knowing they were being hauled to their death during the weeks it took to make the journey.

All so the king could witness it.

“No . . . Agatha,”

Kora tried pulling her hand from her firm, knuckled grip.

“Please! I-I don’t know what it is.”

She stumbled for words, desperately seeking for where Agatha’s allegiance sat. She may have taught her the history of Devania, but it didn’t mean she wouldn’t sell her out to survive the poverty rife in these streets.

Agatha yanked her forwards, the table painfully pressing into Kora’s ribs. Hovering near Kora’s head and neck, Agatha breathed in Kora’s scent—her essence—and her eyes widened. She clicked her teeth and abruptly let go.

“Where did you find that?”

Each word was clipped, and Kora sat back shakily.

Agatha had always been stern, sometimes scolding, but she’d never been aggressive towards Kora. She’d always displayed a fondness towards her, a sympathy for her unrecovered memories, and it was here in Agatha’s Emporium that Kora had discovered her passion for reading and learning, especially about the ancient gods and the history of magic—or lack thereof.

The Devanian magic system had been broken into five factions. The first blessed from the gods in the form of the elements, and they bestowed it on the first humans that walked their lands as a welcome gift. Shortly after, witches evolved and emerged, honing their own special grasp on magic through the written hand, and chants echoed from their mouths, learning how to channel the magic without the blessings of the gods.

What interested Kora more were the fables. When the gods withered and faded, they breathed their final dregs of power into the land, and from it sprung three new divisions of power that blended with humans. She’d never discovered readings on what each faction contained, only that they were named the physical, illusion, and divine—along with elemental powers and witches. Creating the five forces.

But humans had grown greedy and lustful in their conquest for power. The gods’ gift wasted upon their narrow-minded souls. They stopped praying, stopped granting offerings to the gods who’d blessed their ancestors, and magic died, withering like rotted roots in blighted lands. The Devanian scholars faded away along with the gods, and then the islands were united by Admiral Darkon during the longest war.

It was a mystery as to how many mages remained. Either their power had been leached through generations of ignorance to the divine, or executed by those who could never wield it. It was a historic tale Kora had delighted in frequently. And a pastime she’d kept secret from Erick, Blake, and Bree for the whole ten years of her carefully constructed new life.

“I found it on a pirate ship.”

She couldn’t say too much without giving away valuable information.

Agatha’s lips pulled back in a grimace.

“That’s a relic from the Silver Sisters clan, in the Shannara Territory.”

Kora stilled. The most vicious, feral, and highly organised of the witch clans. Surely the witches wouldn’t have gifted an ancient relic to Cannon? It must’ve been stolen.

“What is it?”

Kora asked, not daring to look down at her chest in fear the talisman would come alive and swallow her whole. Her heart pounded.

“A vessel to contain formidable power. A way for mortals to harness gifts that couldn’t be bestowed upon them by the ancient gods.”

What was Cannon doing with a talisman like this? Did he have any idea of the power he beheld in a necklace casually discarded in a chest?

“Magic doesn’t exist.” Anymore.

But . . . maybe it did? She’d manipulated water. It had terrified her, and something otherworldly had guided her hand, but it’d still happened. This talisman had to be doing something to her, making her hallucinate or channel some kind of presence, like the voice.

As far as she knew, no one else still prayed to the mysterious beings that created these lands—but perhaps the witches did? The last she’d heard, they were potion swindlers like Agatha, but also practised ritualism, and conducted wild voodoo chanting to scare off trespassers.

Nothing more than filthy wenches, as Blake would say.

“Don’t speak of that drivel he has been feeding into your mind,”

Agatha snapped, spitting the words.

“You do not come to me, to my home, for all these years, and still insist that magic isn’t real. That the history I have taught you is lies. Magical power never disappears, not completely. It is simply lost and reborn.”

“I’m sorry,”

Kora bristled, her mask creeping in at the edges.

“I must continue with this fa?ade. You know citizens who believe in the gods are outlawed. Exiled to the Silent Tundra for heresy, or Deadwater Prison . . . or hanged.”

Agatha huffed at the mention of heresy. To believe in the gods was to deny King Staghart—Emperor Staghart soon—the chance to be regarded as one. Kora huffed with her. There had been endless writings discovered on the Devani gods, and the language from their reigning era still lingered to this day. Secretly. Despite that, it existed. It was a history—true history—that the empire denied.

“I-I don’t understand. This necklace is harnessing power from someone?”

A small smile bloomed on Agatha’s lips.

“No child, it is harnessing power from you.”

The words she dreaded to hear.

“I don’t have any powers! I’m not a mage,”

Kora denied, shaking her head, her ears ringing at the mere thought.

“You may not understand it yet, you may not see it yet, but it is there, deep within you. I can smell it.”

Agatha knowingly looked down, as if she could see right through Kora to her core.

Where something rumbled back, gleefully attentive.

She did know it. She’d seen it.

The water in the fountain. The water she’d choked on in the medical bay. The seas that ebbed and flowed, favouring her commands. The tide always on her side wherever she sailed. The splashing laps of water that flicked at her legs whenever she wandered along the bay. The thought of being contained to land, to forests, to dry deserts, made her stomach churn, and drove her to dive into the nearest lake and swim until she was surrounded with the expanse of blue.

“The empire may have tried their hardest to quash magic from this world, but it’ll return. Power will be reborn,”

Agatha said.

Kora frowned.

“Magic disappeared long before the empire spread through the islands. It was eons ago. Before the conquest.”

Agatha paused, clasping her mangled hands together.

“A lesson for another time. We need to figure out what to do with it.”

Her all-seeing blind eyes warily gazed on the talisman, as if it could hear them speaking.

“What does it all mean? What will this talisman do to me?”

Kora’s voice strained.

Agatha shrugged.

“I don’t know much, only that it will continue to absorb from you the longer you wear it. You have an affinity with a specific power, and it will leach whatever it can from you. You must keep it close. Do not let anyone see it. And try to not use your power too much.”

“How can I get rid of it?”

Kora pleaded.

“How can I learn more?”

The need, the drive, to discover more propelled her forward. A thirst for knowledge and truth that was constantly parched.

“You’ll have to ask the Silver Sisters. For they created many of these vessels for mankind, and they guard them with their lives. I don’t believe simply throwing it away will be wise. If your power is already leaking into it . . . you don’t want it falling into the wrong hands,”

Agatha warned.

Travelling to the Shannara Territory was an ordeal. She had ten days to escort the royal sentinel across Aldara before she could return to Hell’s Serpent and sail north for answers, and she was already building a list of questions for the sisters in her mind. To discover what they knew about the talismans, what it meant for her, and how she could safely dispose of it. Why she even had these powers.

“Why is this happening now? Surely mages manifest their powers at a younger age.”

Facts surfaced in Kora’s mind from the many dusty tomes stashed away under Agatha’s creaky floorboards.

Agatha’s smile broadened wickedly.

“Who’s to say it hasn’t?”

Kora traced her scar, following it from her temple to where it curled around her eye and cheek. A tingling sensation ran along the length of the scar, to the base of her skull and down her spine.

Had she been a mage before she lost her memory?

Were her family mages? Was that why they’d been murdered?

Who am I?

“Remember . . .”

the voice echoed in her mind. It was a fleeting whisper, so quiet Kora was unsure if she’d heard it. Agatha shifted in her stool, her knobbly knuckles grazing the ends of her braid.

Gods, she was getting a headache.

“I have to venture across the land soon, I’ll be gone a couple weeks,”

Kora mumbled, sipping her tea now it had cooled, in hopes it would ease her swimming mind.

She reached into the hidden pocket lining the inside of the cloak, and dropped a small bag of silver bits onto the table. The sound perked Agatha up, and she fumbled for Kora, clasping at her forearm in gratitude.

“Thank you, my dear.”

If Agatha could see, she’d realise the coins donned the symbol of Demon Sea Siren, stolen from Captain Cannon’s personal stash of loot hidden within his desk. It was all Kora could offer her for now.

She would visit Agatha whenever she made port at Stormkeep Fortress and give her anything she could shave off the top of Hell’s Serpent’s plunders to help her get by. Agatha had granted Kora a haven, a place to explore and learn. She’d taught her the tales of Devani gods, the creation of the islands, and the beautiful language they spoke. Agatha had even let her assist in potion swindling, learning what herbs contained medicinal remedies, and which could cause a bout of sickness, paralysis, or even death.

Kora always presumed Agatha saw her as a daughter she never had—or may had lost once. Whenever she tried to pry into Agatha’s past, she was met with a book flying across the room straight for her head, or the slam of the back door where Agatha would curl up and hide beneath her pile of blankets on her red velvet sofa and weep softly.

Kora knew better than to creep up on a crying, blind female with terrifyingly precise aim.

“I’ll get you some books for research.”

Agatha rose from her chair, lifting her skirts and tapping on the floorboards with her heeled boot until a hollow sound followed.

“Research is vital for learning. You may need all the help you can get before you reach the Silver Sisters.”

Kora knelt, assisting Agatha in collecting two leather-bound tomes, the squared edges covered in rusted iron metal. One was dark blue, the other dark green, both embossed with flakes of pure gold into the lettering. It was hard not to let her eyes bulge from their sockets. The scripture was in Devanian, and she frowned, trying to understand the complexity of the words.

Agatha gently placed her hand on Kora’s shoulder.

“Don’t worry, it’ll come to you. I expect these returned here—in pristine condition.”

Kora sheepishly smiled, remembering a time she’d accidentally set one of Agatha’s ‘spell’ books on fire by dropping it in a puddle of spilt oil near the blacksmith’s, followed by knocking over a lit lantern. Agatha had made her sweep and clean the floors of the entire Emporium for a month.

“I’ll miss you,”

she admitted.

Agatha let out a single laugh and traced Kora’s face, memorising the planes of her features. Her crooked fingers hovered over her cheekbones, lightly touching each one, before planting a kiss above each of her fluttering eyes.

“So will I, my child. Please be careful.”

Agatha placed a curled hand on Kora’s chest, resting gently on the talisman, and sharply inhaled before retreating, wistfully wishing her a well voyage.

As Kora slipped into the darkening streets of the decrepit town, she couldn’t shake the feeling of unease growing and seeping into the rest of her body.