The Curse of Many Currents

“The river ran backwards on the day the Queen vanished.”

It was a phrase that had become a familiar, flat string of words to the people of Petrichora, because just like any story about something spectacularly horrific, simplicity was king.

But if the largest river on the continent can suddenly transform and change course, so, too, can the words we speak.

Only several passersby stopped in front of the stage the voice had emanated from, their mild interest piqued by the masked man sat on a stool in front of it.

They'd never seen the narrator wear a mask before, and wondered if some new element had been added to the story.

The narrator craned his neck to look behind him, but the stage remained empty. He sighed with an audible grumble, and took a deep breath.

"THE RIVER RAN BACKWARDS ON THE DAY THE QUEEN VANISHED," he boomed, almost knocking himself over from the shock of his baritone, and the other performers hurried out from behind the curtain.

The play had begun, but so had something else.

The echoes of the man's voice shot up into the air above in a flurry of life and purpose, and this time, that familiar string of words was anything but flat.

Instead, it hovered pensively above the din of the crowded street; a fishing line caught in an unexpected gust of fate.

And then, as quickly as it rose, it fell to the crowd below, navigating nimbly through a group of sea-worn fishermen, diving brazenly between the spokes of a moving carriage wheel. Around and around the humans and animals and industry it danced until its anchor dropped decisively, and with a peculiar precision, into the right ear of Alyce Strand.

The heels of Alyce’s cracked leather boots dug into the muck of the road as she skid her quick pace to a halt, nearly getting bowled over by the broad-shouldered cooper who had been walking behind her.

"Sorry-" she muttered, and quickly stepped under the eave of the nearest building. The crowd rushed by, unbothered. Had they not heard it, too?

Of course, she was on the road known colloquially as the Spear; the great thoroughfare of the sprawling city of Ivessborough. Boasting a half-mile wide bridge over the Tiberian River in the center, it connected the northern foothills of the Magress Mountains all the way down to the southern marshlands. The only day it had not been an almost uncontrollable throng of color and motion, was the day it was underwater.

Alyce sighed.

She had only been back mere minutes from a year at sea, the salt of the ocean still embedded in her dark, long bramble of curls, and yet here they were again. Those words, echoing in her mind, as if they had never left. As if even the roar of the sea could not drown them out.

Ran. Vanished.

Suddenly dazed, Alyce felt her feet, still half at sea, take her across the crowded road, nearly colliding paths with over a dozen irritated pedestrians, until she reached the other side.

A small stage had been erected on the side of a beer hall.

Theater troupes, she thought with a grimace.

The narrator saw a new audience member in Alyce, and his eyes brightened.

“Her name was Annora,” he continued emphatically, his tone taking on a disingenuous hush.

Her name was Annora.

So began the version of the story people in Petrichora used when they wanted it to end in a neat fashion— that is, before it really began.

Before they would have no choice but to try and explain why their kingdom still had no king- or queen.

Before they would have to gloss over the fact that it was, instead, run by a council of ancient men who did nothing but try to kill off one another, and weren’t even good at doing that.

Before they would have to dart around the somber truth of why the great windows of the Climbing Castle, which used to cast golden light down upon the city's canals every night, remained dark and empty.

Alyce took one last tired look at the hopeful, oblivious faces of the performers, and turned on her heel.

She didn’t need to hear the rest. She’d already heard it a thousand times. ,

Her daze from before had sharpened into an angry focus as her lips silently worded the narrator's script as she trudged away.

“A woman of the Eastern Marshes, with hair white as winter, and eyes grey as glaciers,

"A strange woman, who was called Witch almost as long as she was called Queen,

“A cunning woman, who poisoned the mind of her husband, our beloved King Albion, until he abandoned his own counsel and receded into the caverns of his mind, as he did the depths beneath the Climbing Castle,

“A treacherous woman, who desired the Ivied Throne above all else, and murdered the weakened Albion in his sleep to get it,

“A spiteful woman, who fled the King’s grieving generals with a bitter scowl, and as she left, hexed the very River she had once blessed,

“A cursed woman, forced by her own cowardice into the depths of the Fell Forest, and further on to the craven North, all to suffer the same fate of her late husband’s mind,

“And so it is believed Annora wanders there still, her crown of emerald ivy still laid upon her head, wilted and sick with rot against her pale brow.”

Alyce sighed heavily, her pace slowing.

Hand-wringing mayors, tongue-tied parents, and threadbare schoolteachers all recited it to their given audiences like one of the prayers we learned as children before we understood that words are like a dark cloud; it’s only a matter of time before their true nature is revealed.

But Alyce didn’t need the rain to know that nothing was ever what it seemed.

She turn around the next corner, and all of her senses were shocked into a familiar overwhelm.

Scalestreet.

What began as a small alley off of the Spear for fishermen to sell their bounty, became a massive international market.

The scents of fresh blackberry hand pies, tanning leather, botanical oils, and sweating bodies competed with visions of jewel-hued spices, towers of fried honey sweets surrounded by swarms of euphoric bees, and millions of threads woven into every pattern the mind could conjure.

Alyce's eyes flitted to a stall almost entirely hidden behind rows of shouting merchants. Clad in velvet and gold, they clamored as they each tried to push to the front, their heavy bags of coin clinking in offbeat orchestra.

It was one of Ivessborough’s only mapmakers.

Alyce shuddered and quickened her pace, grateful to have been spared the view. Anyone else would look at a map of the Riverlands after the Reversal and see only new brooks and borders, and while they wouldn’t be wrong, Alyce had always seen something else. Something terrible.

A year after the Tiberian Reversal, the weary routers and rangers who had survived their journey came together and put their new notes and measurements upon parchment, and it was almost as calamitous as the disaster itself.

It took days, even weeks, for anyone to see the maps up close, but when Alyce finally did, her knees buckled beneath her.

It looked as if Mother Nature itself had been dragged by its feet to the North along with the Queen, the new waterways which splintered jaggedly off the Tiberian like claw marks running deep, desperate divots into the earth as a last ditch effort to freedom.

Alyce winced at the image despite herself, and leapt into an empty space between stalls to catch her breath.

Fifteen years had passed since then. Three at the orphanage, and twelve on every and any ship crew that could take her away.

Away from the claw marks. Away from the horrible sound of a thousand boats and bodies crashing through the center of a city.

Away from the look of terror in her father's eyes as he pushed her foot up with all his might so she may reach the top of the river wall.

Away from how the words"I love you", ones she heard a thousand times, transformed into one in only a moment.

"Run."

Alyce dug quickly into the inner pocket she sewed into all of her tunics, and pulled out a single gold sovereign. She closed her eyes, and flipped the heavy coin in her hand over, and over. She could've spent it a thousand times, and bought a thousand things. All the days without dinner, all the nights without a bed. She looked down at the object and smiled sadly.

"Looking to buy something, love?" a kind voice sounded from her left. Alyce started, and looked up. An elderly woman had been standing several feet away with embroidered tunics draped across her arms, her pale blue eyes fixed on the coin in Alyce's hand.

Alyce smiled.

"They're lovely, but no."

The woman nodded, and began to turn away when she suddenly stopped.

"That's not one of ours, issit?" she asked, motioning towards the coin.

Alyce smiled.

"Oh, it is. It's just an old one. More for luck, than anything."

"Well," the woman began, and set the tunics back into their wooden trunk.

"I'd be careful if I were you. Looks like your luck is almost all worn out."

Alyce hummed and looked down again.

The woman hadn't seen anything there, because she couldn't. But whenever Alyce looked at it, she saw a woman with two eyes, grey as glaciers, look back at her.

Just as they did the day the coin was first set into Alyce's hands sixteen years ago, from a woman called Witch almost as long as she had been called Queen.

The coin wasn't worn, the Queen hadn't vanished, and the river didn't change its mind.

Alyce stepped back out onto the street, and after a mile of stalls and pubs, continued on to her destination.

This time, she wasn't running. This time, she was heading North.