Prologue
The boy was young when he was stolen from his home. He could never remember how old he’d been, just that he wasn’t old enough to have become an apprentice. Where the boy came from, all children became an apprentice in a trade when they turned eleven. He never made it.
He grew up by the sea, in a land known as Eire to the world of trade. He just called it home. Back then, the boy never cared what his country or even his village was called. Had he known then he’d one day be taken from it, he may have paid closer attention. After all, how could the lad have known then how big the world was? Or how he’d never be able to find his way back?
The boy was taken in the dead of night. Boots thudded over the straw-covered mud that made the floor of the stone house more bearable to walk on. He startled awake as rough hands grabbed at his head and forced his mouth shut. A sack was shoved over his head, blinding him, and he was pulled from his parents’ house before he could make a sound. He stumbled along at the fast pace of his captors, tripping over something beneath his bare feet. He heard the rush of the wind and the crash of the ocean against the cliffs, he smelt the sea air, he stumbled in the sand. Then he heard footsteps thudding on wood, his soles scraping against the rough grain. When they finally uncovered the boy’s face, he saw the inside of a ship. That’s all he saw for a couple of days, other than two other children stowed away with him. Not from his village, but he thought he recognised the boy from the next village along the cliffs. The girl, he’d never seen before.
The children weren’t allowed on deck until the ship was long out at sea. There was no hope of squinting into the distance and recognising the shape of the land to one day identify it as their long-lost home.
Only a few days after they’d been taken, the girl was pulled from their stowing place and taken elsewhere on the ship. She died, screaming. She screamed a lot that night. Sometimes it was muffled, sometimes not. The boy didn’t know how or why or where at the time. He could just hear the screams. It would scar him forever. When the screaming stopped suddenly, the lad held his breath and waited. A splash. He knew her body had been thrown overboard.
A soul for the great sea witch.
The other boy died days afterwards. He went pale and grey and thin like the ghouls from the scary folk tales the people from the lad’s village tried to scare children with to get them to behave. He tried not to think about those scary stories. Instead, he guessed the other boy hadn’t taken to the conditions of life on the ship or had eaten bad food. He knew some folks didn’t handle change well, especially when the change had been that forced. Years later, he’d learn the other boy’s condition had been more like the scary folk tales.
Another soul for the great sea witch.
He didn’t ask what had happened to either of the other kids. He learned early on that if you ask questions, you get beaten. He’d learned that the hard way—the same way he learned scars never faded, that they acted as lessons for the future.
The young boy slaved on the pirate ship for so long that he lost track of how much time had passed. The days were strange out at sea, and sometimes he didn’t even go up into the light or into the dark, depending on shifts. Like that, a long time passed. His body grew less frail and weak. It became less easy to manhandle, and the pirates knew that. It was time to move him on—to sell him, get the money, and start again.
The boy, likely well into his teen years then, was moved onto a different ship. One just as vile and from the same pirate group. This one had room for a lad his age, and they were just as ready to beat submission into him and make sure the questions were kept beaten out of him. They’d killed the previous youngster this way—too fierce with a punishment. Someone died, you got them replaced. He knew it would be the same if he died. He’d just be another soul sent to the sea witch. So, he refused to die. The lad knew within days on that godforsaken ship that he wouldn’t die on it, just like he knew he wouldn’t die on the last one.
Among these villainous pirates, he plotted his escape. He planned and imagined it as he worked and as he lay in his stinking hammock at night, plotting until it became impossible to fail. It was just a matter of timing. The lad waited until their crawling eyes stopped observing him as much. He let them believe he’d resigned himself to the ship. He got older. The lad became one of the crew who killed and stole from merchants. He became one of the crew who crept onto land and into homes and stole other children from their beds. He saw them kill and attack the children, never learning why they bothered kidnapping the children if they were just going to kill them anyway.
He wondered why they’d never killed him.
The lad learned what happened when the pirates stole girls. And the weak boys, too. Lots of screaming, sometimes muffled, then finally a silence and a splash as the corpse was thrown overboard.
Another soul for the great sea witch.
Sometimes, they made him watch, wouldn’t let him cover his ears with his hands or turn away to stop from seeing. They smirked and laughed and told him to join in. The boy threw up each time, and they laughed harder, pushing him out of the way and saying he didn’t deserve to join in if he would act like that. He didn’t want to. He never wanted to. He learned how to tune inwards, to see but to become blind. The lad ran through his escape in his head instead, trying to ignore the screams.
When the time came for his escape, all the boy knew was how to sail, steal, and kill. And drink. They got him into drinking pretty early, which he grew to be glad for. That way, he could hide the things he couldn’t stand. As tough as the lad got physically, he was still the young boy from Eire, the land of magic, old tales, laughing people, and music, and the place people worked hard to make an honest, modest living. Somehow, this boy from the land of magic managed to survive the rough months and years on the streets of a shitty port and on just as shitty ships until he slowly made his way far to the east. He hoped they’d never find him there. The years passed as he worked a boring but honest life aboard simple ships, hauling cargo and supplies and delivering them. Eventually, he found a land he wanted to stop at. Hizen, in a region called Hié. There, he became a hunter and a workman, doing chores and physical work for people in return for payment. Less money and less drink, but it was enough for him. By this time, he’d become a man. And all he wanted was to be the man he could have been if he hadn’t been stolen.
Another soul for the great sea witch.
1
A New Beginning
The ship lurched beneath Gora’s feet, and icy spray spotted across his face. No matter how often it happened, it still made him wince. Here, at the bow of the three-masted galleon his daimyō Ii Yoshiko had entrusted him with when she made him captain of her new navy, headed by his ship, the Sea Guardian, Gora could see the forever that was the ocean. Miles and miles of nothing but the boredom of the wide sea. He almost didn’t care what ocean it was. They were all the same when you were sailing in them. Each just as temperamental as the other and all relying on the mood of the moon. And, until people could control the mood of a giant object that lived in the sky, the oceans would do as they wanted. Today, that meant tossing Gora and his crew about like a drunk bastard carrying a basket of eggs.
Gora turned towards the voice, using his fingers to roughly comb back his soaked auburn hair to get it out of his eyes enough to see a young Hizen lad skid across the deck towards him. They both scrunched up their faces as more icy water crashed against the hull and over the gunwale. The boy’s name was Miyoshi Yūki, but many of the crew on Gora’s ship called the lad by his given name, Yūki, as a nod to his youth and their affection. Miyoshi’s gentle name and features and how he tied his long hair back in the traditional ponytail of his countrymen meant he was often mistaken for and treated like a young girl. Here, the crew liked to play on that, too. As for Gora, he treated the boy like anyone of his crew—calling him by his last name, as was fitting in the captain–crew relationship.
He took his new role from Yoshiko seriously.
‘What is it, Miyoshi?’ Gora’s frustration at the cold spray forced his words out more like a growl than he intended, and the lad’s eyes flashed for a moment with indignation.
‘Shingo wanted you to see something.’
Gora took one more resigned look out into the great stretch of grey-blue liquid hills that crashed around them. There was nothing more to see here for now, anyway. His eyes lingered on the figurehead for a moment—a beautifully carved dragon lady: woman in body, but with the scales and regalia of a dragon—before he grunted for the lad to take him to Shingo, Gora’s first mate. Sprightly as ever, Miyoshi slipped and skipped across the deck, stopping regularly to look back at his captain with wide eyes and to bow apologetically for running too far ahead.
Just like a puppy. Gora sighed, wondering why he didn’t just slow down and walk.
‘Be careful when the seas are rough, lad,’ Gora said as he caught up and pulled the lad in closer, guiding him by the shoulder.
They met Shingo holed up in his quarters, which offered him blissful privacy from their crew, which, stuck on a ship in the middle of the great expanse of nothing for weeks on end, meant luxury, even if the small wooden cabin was sparse, with little but a hammock, a chest, and a desk where a greying, stocky Hizen man gave a quick nod of his head as his captain crashed into the room.
‘Shingo.’ Gora strode over to join Shingo at his desk, wondering if his black hair was peppered with more greys than when they first met. ‘You’ve been admiring that there map, now, since we left port. What more can you see in it that we’ve not already?’
Gora had stared at that map so much he was sure he could see it perfectly in his sleep. But Shingo, as precise and diligent as ever, couldn’t drop it. It was as if he was memorising every route in the section of the world that had been inked onto that parchment.
‘Captain.’ Shingo stood, grunting lightly at the effort. He gestured towards the map with his hand as he spoke. ‘I’m concerned about chasing pirates through their own domain. This part of the ocean is riddled with dangers, and our crew don’t know it well enough. You said yourself it’s been years since you sailed these waters regularly. What if something changed?’
‘There’s no doubt it has changed,’ Gora stressed, shoving a cold hand into his pocket for warmth, hoping to bring back the feeling to it. ‘The ocean always changes. If we were to sail back home to Hizen tomorrow, we’d meet a different sea to the one we came in.’
‘That I can agree with. But more changes in ten years than you may think. New ports are built, rock forms break and form ribs in the sea for ships to crash upon, pirate towns move out, and sea monsters move in.’
