Chapter 11 - The Surtured Sea

The coast smelled wrong.

Not rotten, not polluted. Just wrong, the way the seam near Vera's farmhouse had felt wrong. Salt and brine and something underneath that she couldn't name. Something that made her teeth ache.

They'd been walking for three days since the fog. The coordinates pointed to a spot maybe twenty miles offshore, which meant they needed a boat. Which meant they needed to find someone crazy enough to take them.

The fishing village was called Thornmouth, though she couldn't see any thorns or any particular mouth. Just a cluster of weathered buildings huddled against the cliff, boats pulled up on the rocky beach, and people who looked at strangers like they were diseases waiting to happen.

"Friendly place," Linn muttered.

"We're not here to make friends."

They found a tavern. There was always a tavern. This one was called The Salted Widow, which was either a name with a story behind it or just the kind of grim poetry that fishing villages seemed to generate naturally.

Inside it was dark and smelled like smoke and old beer. A handful of people scattered at tables, not talking, just drinking with the methodical determination of folks who had nowhere else to be. The woman behind the bar was maybe fifty, gray-streaked hair pulled back tight, hands that looked like they'd done real work.

"We need passage," she said. "Offshore. About twenty miles out."

The woman's expression didn't change, but something shifted in her eyes. "That direction?"

"Does it matter?"

"It matters if you're heading for the stitched waters."

She felt Linn tense beside her. "The what?"

"The stitched waters. That's what we call them around here. Patch of ocean where nothing works right. Currents go sideways, temperatures change without reason, compasses spin like they're possessed." The woman set down the glass she'd been cleaning. "Most sailors won't go near it."

"But some will."

"Some are stupid. Some are desperate. Some have their own reasons." The woman studied her face, taking her measure. "Which are you?"

"Desperate. And I have money."

"Money doesn't spend if you're dead."

"Then I'll pay extra."

The woman was quiet for a long moment. Then she nodded toward a table in the corner, where a figure sat alone with a bottle that was more empty than full.

"Talk to Maren. She's the only one who makes that run anymore. Lost her husband out there fifteen years ago and she's been looking for him ever since." The bartender's voice dropped. "She won't find him. But she keeps going back."

Maren was old. Sixty at least, maybe seventy, with a face that had been weathered by decades of salt spray and grief. Her hands were scarred and calloused, sailor's hands, and her eyes had the flat look of someone who'd stopped expecting anything good.

"I hear you need a ride." Her voice was rough, scraped raw by years of shouting over wind.

"I hear you're the only one willing to give one."

"Willing is a strong word." Maren took a drink from her bottle. "I go out there because I have to. Because every time I close my eyes I see his face and I can't rest until I've looked one more time."

"Your husband."

"Fifteen years ago. Storm came up out of nowhere, the kind that doesn't show on any forecast. We were fishing the edge of the stitched waters because that's where the big catches are. The ones that got pushed out from wherever they came from." She set down the bottle. "Wave took him right off the deck. I watched him go under and he never came back up."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. Sorry doesn't change anything." Maren looked at her with those flat eyes. "What are you looking for out there?"

"An island."

"There are no islands in the stitched waters."

"There's one that doesn't show up on any map. But it's there. I have coordinates."

Maren's expression flickered. Something that might have been interest, or might have been recognition. "Coordinates to a place that doesn't exist. That's a new one."

"Will you take us?"

"How much?"

She named a figure. More than she could afford, but money wouldn't matter if she couldn't get to the island. Maren listened, thought about it, then shook her head.

"Double it."

"I don't have double."

"Then find someone else." Maren went back to her bottle.

She stood there, calculating. Everything she had left after weeks of travel. The coins she'd been rationing, the items she'd been saving in case she needed to sell them. It wasn't enough. It wasn't close to enough.

"I'll work," Linn said suddenly. "On the boat. Whatever you need done. Cooking, cleaning, hauling ropes. I'm stronger than I look."

Maren looked at the girl. Something in her face softened, just a fraction. "You know how to sail?"

"No. But I can learn."

"Learning takes time. And the stitched waters don't give you time to make mistakes."

"Then I'll make my mistakes fast."

Maren almost smiled. Almost. "You remind me of someone. Young and stupid and too stubborn to know when to quit."

"That's basically my whole personality."

This time Maren did smile, brief and humorless. "Fine. Your money plus her labor. We leave at dawn."

The boat was called Persistent, which seemed less like a name and more like a threat. Forty feet of weathered wood and patched sail, the kind of vessel that looked like it had survived things it shouldn't have.

"She's ugly," Maren said, reading her expression. "But she floats. And she comes back when other ships don't."

They cast off at first light. Maren at the tiller, Linn scrambling to follow orders she barely understood, the protagonist staying out of the way and watching the coast shrink behind them.

The first few hours were normal. Open water, steady wind, the kind of sailing that happened in stories where nothing went wrong. Maren pointed out landmarks on the coast, explained the currents, talked about fishing spots she'd known for decades.

Then they hit the first seam.

She felt it before she saw it. That wrongness in the air, the same heaviness she'd felt near Vera's farm and at the edge of the fog. Her skin prickled and her teeth started to ache and the compass in her pocket went dead again.

"Here we go," Maren said. Her voice had changed. Tighter. More focused.

The water ahead looked different. Not obviously, not dramatically. Just a subtle shift in color, blue to blue-gray, like someone had drawn a line across the ocean and filled in each side with slightly different paint.

Persistent crossed the line and everything changed.

The temperature dropped ten degrees in an instant. The wind, which had been steady from the southwest, suddenly came from three directions at once. The waves, which had been rolling swells, became choppy and confused, slapping against the hull from angles that didn't make sense.

"Hold on to something," Maren called.

She grabbed a rope and braced herself. Beside her, Linn was doing the same, face pale, knuckles white.

"This is normal," Maren said. "This is just the edge. It gets worse."

It got worse.

They sailed for hours through water that couldn't decide what it wanted to be. Patches of warmth next to patches of cold with knife-sharp lines between them. Currents that ran sideways, pulling the boat off course, forcing Maren to constantly adjust. The sky overhead was clear but the air felt thick, heavy, like they were sailing through something that didn't want them there.

"The stitched waters," Maren said during a lull. "That's what this place is. Pieces of ocean that got sewn together after something was removed. They don't fit right. They never will."

"What was removed?"

"Islands. Whole archipelagos, if you believe the old stories. Places that used to be here and then weren't." Maren adjusted the sail, compensating for a current that had suddenly reversed direction. "My grandmother used to talk about an island chain called the Sorrow Seven. Said you could see them from the coast on clear days. But nobody else remembered them. Nobody else could see what she was pointing at."

The Sorrow Chain. The Cartographer's Daughter had mentioned them. Seven islands connected by impossible bridges.

"She wasn't crazy," she said. "Your grandmother. She was remembering something that got erased."

"I know." Maren's voice was flat. "I figured that out a long time ago. Right around the time my husband disappeared into water that shouldn't have been able to take him."

"You think the stitched waters killed him?"

"I think something in these waters took him. Same way something took the islands. Same way something takes everything that doesn't fit into whatever the world is supposed to be." Maren looked out at the confused ocean, at the seams where different pieces of water met. "I keep coming back because I keep hoping I'll find him. Floating on a piece of wreckage, living on some spit of rock that nobody else can see. But I never do."

They sailed on. The sun moved across the sky and the seams kept coming, one after another, each transition jarring and wrong. By late afternoon they'd crossed maybe a dozen, and the ocean looked like a quilt made by someone who didn't care if the pieces matched.

"There," Maren said suddenly.

She followed the old woman's pointing finger. Ahead, floating in the water, was wreckage.

Not much. A few planks, some rope, what might have been part of a mast. But enough to show that something had been here. Something had broken apart in these impossible waters.

"Can we get closer?"

Maren adjusted course. They approached the wreckage slowly, carefully, the choppy water making every movement unpredictable.

It was a ship. Or it had been. The pieces that remained were made of wood she didn't recognize, dark and dense and carved with patterns that looked almost like writing. The construction was wrong too. Joints fitted together in ways that shouldn't have worked, techniques that didn't match anything she'd ever seen.

"How long has this been in the water?" Linn asked.

Maren reached out with a boat hook and pulled one of the planks close enough to touch. "Should be centuries, by the look of it. But the wood isn't rotted. Isn't waterlogged. It's like it went in yesterday."

"Time works different in the seams." She said it without thinking, without knowing where the knowledge came from. "Things that get caught in the stitches don't decay the same way."

"How do you know that?"

"I don't know. I just do."

Maren looked at her for a long moment. Then she let the plank go and returned to the tiller.

"Your island is another two hours out, according to your coordinates. We'll anchor offshore for the night and approach in the morning. I don't navigate these waters after dark."

"Why not?"

"Because the seams move at night. During the day they're mostly stable. But after sunset, they shift around. Get caught on the wrong side of one when it moves and you end up somewhere you didn't mean to be." Maren's jaw tightened. "That's what happened to my husband. We were anchored in what we thought was safe water. The seam moved overnight. When I woke up, he was gone and we were somewhere else entirely."

She thought about that. Seams that moved. Boundaries that shifted while you slept. An ocean that rearranged itself in the darkness.

No wonder nobody wanted to sail here.

They anchored in a patch of water that Maren said was "probably safe." Not definitely safe. Just probably. In the stitched waters, probably was as good as it got.

Night came fast. One moment the sun was setting, painting the confused sky in oranges and reds. The next moment it was dark, stars emerging overhead, the ocean going black around them.

They ate a cold dinner on deck. Salt fish and hard bread and water that tasted like the barrel it had been stored in. Not much, but enough to keep them going.

"Tell me about the island," Maren said.

"I don't know much. It's on old maps but not new ones. Someone I'm looking for went there. They found something and then they were erased."

"Erased."

"Cut out of the world. Made so nobody remembers they existed."

Maren was quiet for a while, chewing her fish, staring out at the darkness. "My husband," she said finally. "I remember him. His name, his face, the sound of his voice. But nobody else does. Not the other fishermen who worked with him for twenty years. Not his own mother, before she died. They all looked at me like I was making him up."

"He was erased?"

"I don't know. Maybe. Or maybe he just got lost in a place where the rules are different." She took another bite. "Does it matter? Either way, he's gone and I'm the only one who remembers."

She thought about that. About the loneliness of being the only person who remembered someone who used to exist. She'd been living that for months. Maren had been living it for fifteen years.

"How do you keep going?" she asked. "After all this time. How do you not just give up?"

Maren looked at her with those flat, empty eyes. "Who says I haven't?"

"You're still sailing. Still looking."

"That's not the same as not giving up. That's just habit. Momentum." Maren set down her food. "I stopped believing I'd find him a long time ago. Now I just come out here because I don't know what else to do. Because stopping feels like betraying him somehow, even though he's gone and nothing I do will bring him back."

"That's not giving up. That's loyalty."

"Is there a difference?"

She didn't have an answer. Wasn't sure there was one.

Linn had fallen asleep, curled up near the cabin with her pack under her head. Young enough to sleep anywhere, even on a boat anchored in impossible waters. She envied that. Couldn't remember the last time sleep had come easily.

"You should rest too," Maren said. "Tomorrow's going to be hard."

"What about you?"

"I'll keep watch. Someone has to make sure the seams don't move while we're anchored in them."

She wanted to argue, but exhaustion was winning. She found a spot near Linn and lay down, the deck hard beneath her, the boat rocking gently in the confused currents.

The stars overhead were wrong. She noticed it just before sleep took her. The constellations weren't quite where they should be. A few degrees off, maybe more. Like the sky here didn't quite match the sky everywhere else.

Another seam. Even the heavens were stitched together from pieces that didn't fit.

She closed her eyes and let the darkness take her.

Tomorrow they'd reach the island. Tomorrow they'd find out what the sibling had discovered.

Tomorrow everything would change.

She just hoped she'd live long enough to see it.