Chapter 1 - The Frozen Star

Charleston, South Carolina — 1886

The hull was my own work. I had shaped the three-masted clipper ship until her lines ran true and the wood was solid. It was hard to think of the timber as green oak. It had been wet and heavy the day the sling snapped and sent it crashing to the earth. The men gathered in a circle and watched it. They could not move it.

I reached down and took the oak in my hands. I did not look for the winch. I lifted it and felt the weight settle into my legs and the small of my back. I carried it across the yard and set it down on the saw table, and it made a solid sound.

The crew stood with pale faces. I should have used the machine. It is difficult to look like a simple carpenter when you do such things. One of the caulkers made the sign of the cross every time I asked for a mallet. I had spent three weeks trying to convince them I was a simple man from Savannah, but now they looked at me differently. They saw that I was built of something else.

My name is Nathanael. I knew what they saw. My hair was dark and long. My skin was olive and took the sun without burning. I kept my beard neat. My eyes were brown and steady and they looked back at me from the mirror the same way they always had. I was not a large man, but I was broad through the shoulders and built for work. I looked thirty years old. I had looked thirty for a long time. The scar on my left forearm from the recent injury was healing. Pale now, gone within the month. I had carried a hundred wounds in three centuries and could not show you one of them.

That was the problem.

I was born in London in the winter of 1630. My father had owned ships and he told me a great comet slashed the sky the night I was born. The midwives called it a frozen star. They said a child born under it would never know rest. That was the only thing said that night that held its shape over the centuries that followed.

We are Ốẚḡenn. We do not age and we do not die the way others die. We only die if the steel is sharp enough or the lead is fast enough. The fevers in the shanties did not touch me and the cancers did not show interest in my blood. I sat in rooms where men were dying and my blood stayed cool. It is a long time to watch things break. You change your name on the manifest and find a port where no one remembers your father. I had been Nathanael and Nicholas and once, in Antwerp, I was a Dave. The hardest part is remembering the name you must answer to.

Now it was 1886 and the air in Charleston was heavy and smelled of salt marshes and pine tar. I climbed the gangway of the ship and felt the wood under my palms.

That night the harbor water was flat and black. The lantern in the cabin hung steady over the charts. My wife, Maria sat at the table. Her skin was olive and her dark hair was pulled back. Her face was angular with a strong jaw and a straight nose and dark brows. Her fingers moved over the Winchester rifle with a mechanical grace. She was built hard. She did not look up when I came in but her eyes tracked my gait.

“The oak was heavy today?” she asked.

“Heavy enough,” I said. I leaned against the doorframe. “The men noticed, Maria. I’m getting careless.”

She held the rifle barrel up to the light, peering through the bore with an eye that had sighted more targets than I cared to count. The ridiculous urge came upon me to hide my own Winchester behind my back before she found the rust spot I’d missed on the barrel. She had a way of looking at a poorly maintained firearm that made me feel like I’d forgotten our anniversary.

“The tide is turning, Nathanael,” she said. “And your brother is close.”

“He’s always close.”

I thought of Elgin. I remembered a jeweler in Marseille who showed him a gold watch. Elgin did not look at the face. He opened the back and watched the balance wheel swing. Then he closed his hand and crushed the gold and the springs snapped. He dropped the ruin into the dust and watched the jeweler until the man went silent with fear.

“Elgin is finished with the quiet, Maria,” I said. “He looked at chaos and saw a crown. He wants the short-lived to look up and see him. His hirelings failed.”

She snapped the lever of the rifle down and back. It made a sharp clack-clack on the deck. “He used humans again,” she said. “They break when the pressure is high.”

“The swamp took the ring back,” I said. “The Keeper lived years in the pine barrens and thought the moss would hide him. But Elgin found him. The Ốẚḡenn Council has spoken. I am ordered by them to go with Elgin, like it or not.”

“He’ll offer a truce,” she said. “He always offers a truce.”

“He has offered it already. He wants me to bargain for the ring and put it away with him, brother beside brother.” I said it flat. “It’s a lie. He means to have the ring and to have me in the ground.”

“And you’ll go to him smiling.”

“I’ll go to him smiling. It is the only way to be close enough when the time comes. The ring cannot leave that swamp on his hand. That is the whole of it.”

“Tomorrow is a massacre,” she said, “you are going to stand between him and his crown again.”

I took the rifle from her. The steel was warm. “Someone must keep the balance. If we do not, we are no better than the short-lived.”

“Then you are a fool,” she said softly. “But you have been a fool since the comet.” She looked at me and did not speak again. She watched the dark line of the shore.

“Take the wagon,” she said. “The blackwater creeks are high. You’ll need the clearance.”

“I’ll be back by sundown.”

“See that you are,” she said.

I went to the cabinet and checked the pistol. The ship was ready and the weapons were ready. The next morning the sun rose red through a thick mist. We lowered the boat and the wood creaked in the dawn quiet. I took the oars and rowed toward the docks. The smell of salt faded and the smell of the swamp replaced it. It smelled of wet earth and rot and black water that had been still for a long time.