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  “Mine are of the store,” he said at last. “Looking in book after book, and finding every page blank. I was hoping you’d know what to do.”

  “Void,” I swore softly. I had prayed that the dreams were only my own fevered imagination. But prayers are rarely answered.

  “It’s the confluence, isn’t it?” he asked. “It doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, this far away.”

  “I think so. We could go back and ask the archpriest if there’s any way to make the connection more flexible, but I don’t think he’d know. We didn’t usually travel all that far, before. And in the water, distance is a different thing. We could ask him to break it.”

  “No! I mean, is that what you want to do?”

  I shook my head. “I want to live where I will, in the place where I need to be. But it would be worse to give up the family we’ve just started to form. The Kotos … what we’ve been through, we’re family no matter where we are. And I could come back for a few days, here and there. But the confluence, much as we love each other, needs this connection.”

  He rested his hand on the workroom door. He didn’t have loving family here, as I did, but he had friends and the business he’d built up over years. “That’s how I feel, too. I guess everything has a cost. It would just be nice to have some advance warning.”

  I rose, embraced him, said nothing. He didn’t need me to tell him how the universe worked.

  * * *

  “I wanted to go back to Innsmouth, eventually,” I told Mama Rei. “But not like this.”

  She put down her sewing and patted the couch cushion beside her. I gave up my pacing and sat, leaned against her side, let her hold me. “You need to be with your family,” she said.

  “I know. I wish they didn’t live on opposite sides of the country.”

  “Yes.” Mama Rei’s father had sent her to school in Osaka when she was young. She never talked about missing the family who hosted her there, and she didn’t now.

  I realized I was crying. I sniffed and rubbed my eyes. Right now, I didn’t want to get up, away from her, even for the sake of finding salt water.

  “Aphra-chan,” she said. She leaned her forehead against mine. I felt the faint creases of her skin, and smelled familiar, familial sweat. “Don’t mourn. We’re here, and you’ll visit when you can. Perhaps we will even fly out ourselves; it must be a more interesting journey than the one over the Pacific. You’ve told me how much happens under the waves, but it is hard to tell from aboard a ship.” I giggled in spite of myself, and she stroked my hair. “Home is where your family is. You have a lot of family, and they will all miss you, but they will all wait for you.”

  “I love you. You’re much more patient than Grandfather.”

  She laughed. “I will come and meet him, and find out.”

  “I’d like that.”

  I imagined it as I packed—as on too little sleep and dreams that sapped our waking energy, Charlie and I crated the store’s inventory for shipping to the newly leased building in Arkham. If the Kotos flew out—perhaps they would fall in love with the New England spring, with my worrisome and exasperating blood relatives, and decide to stay.

  But they had roots here, people and food and the culture of the city that held them fast—as those things would have held me, if I’d had my way. And even if they chose, absurdly, to give all that up, I still had connections in water and air, among different places and peoples, that would never mesh easily. Even if I hadn’t chosen the strictures that now forced my hand, I had chosen to open myself to those intimacies. The vulnerability, the mourning, everything I had to learn from their disparate experiences, were things I had accepted with every conversation offered and every request granted.

  I had not been helpless when I made those choices. And though I dealt with their consequences out of necessity, I was not helpless now.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book owes its greatest debt to Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who invited everyone to play in his sandbox—even the monsters.

  After I wrote “The Litany of Earth,” I thought I was done. I’d said what I needed to about Lovecraft and being a monster; it was time to move on. When people started asking for more, I figured it was just a nice way of saying “I liked it.” But the requests kept coming, and I started explaining to anyone who’d listen why the story didn’t need a sequel.

  My second thanks, therefore, are to everyone who pushed for more of Aphra’s story until I talked myself around and figured out what else I had to say. Eager readers are the best inspiration I can think of—please don’t stop asking.

  An excellent agent does too many things to easily list. Cameron McClure speaks fluent publisher, marketer, and author, and translates lucidly between dialects. In getting Winter Tide ready to shop around, she helped me level up my editing skills, a push that I badly needed. She has been, and continues to be, a pleasure to work with.

  Carl Engle-Laird believed in Aphra enough to make “Litany” his first slush acquisition for Tor.com. He gave my little novelette the red carpet treatment, from an intense (and intensely needed) line edit through hand-selling it to anyone who came close enough to listen. I was delighted to work with him on the novel as well. The book you now hold is far stronger for his encouragement, editing, and squeefulness.

  Jo Walton and Ada Palmer drew attention to “Litany” with early and high-profile reviews. Ada’s “non-review” is a remarkable work in its own right, and all that any author could hope to have said about their writing. My Yith owe much to her discussion of Petrarch and Diderot; the whole book owes much to the bar she set with her praise.

  Jo has provided empathy, honesty, and high-level writerly geeking since well before I even thought of Aphra. As a salonière and hostess, she facilitated this book’s birth in very practical ways. In her Balticon hotel room, I awoke worrying that “the next Aphra novelette” looked like it might actually be a novel—she gave me tea and assured me that it was okay to have a novel. Six months later at her home in Montreal, fortified by more excellent tea, I finished the draft at 4 a.m.

  Elise Matthesen, professional muse, provides Aphra’s jewelry.

  I have the best beta readers. They provided structural advice so scary and correct that every round of editing involved a large component of just doing more of what they told me to. Lila Wejksnora-Garrott picked up on themes I didn’t even know I had. Kathryn McCulley’s snarky comments made me giggle—a powerful antidote to editing anxiety—and showed me which bits actually worked. Anne M. Pillsworth represented the faction of Lovecraft lovers, reminded me that readers can’t read minds, and helped ensure that deviations from Mythos canon were deliberate. Marissa Lingen spoke for the faction that loves Lovecraft not; she also encouraged me to move romantic relationships out of my head and onto the page. Allen Berman gave all-around useful commentary and represented the faction that doesn’t read Lovecraft at all—feedback well worth printing out the book’s very first hard copy.

  Anne is also my Best Co-Blogger on Tor.com’s Lovecraft Reread series. Thanks to her and our community of commenters, I’ve had excellent company in my efforts to assimilate the whole Mythos for easy deconstruction. They are all delightfully cyclopean, perhaps even rugose. There are not enough places, online or otherwise, where one can comfortably critique Lovecraft’s racism, wax enthusiastic over the architecture of Y’ha-nthlei, and geek about historical understanding of plate tectonics—all flame-free.

  The problem with historical fantasy is the history—for giving mine some resemblance to actual events and experiences, I’m indebted to many libraries and used bookstores. My reading list was long, but I want to make particular mention of George Takei’s To the Stars. While it’s not exactly a standard historical reference, his child’s-eye-view portrayal of the Japanese American internment, and the community’s postwar recovery, were invaluable touchstones. (While I’m at it, I’ll also thank him for his kindness to an eleven-year-old Trekkie who managed to get the date of the costume cont
est wrong at her first con—also an important contribution to my writing, in that I stayed with fandom rather than getting scared off.)

  My followers on Twitter and Livejournal patiently answered hard-to-look-up questions like “I know people smoked everywhere, but libraries?” and “Even in the rare book room???” The past is another, smellier country. Finally, the docent at the National Japanese American Historical Society in San Francisco’s Nihonmachi provided helpful guidance on postwar cuisine along with a variety of other research materials. All errors—of which I’m sure there are many—are my own.

  My parents’ stories of growing up in the ’40s and ’50s helped color Aphra’s world. If I’d known that writing about a gay Jewish New Yorker who works for the government in the ’40s would evoke so many details about my great-uncle Monroe—very clearly a relative of Ron Spector’s—I would have done it a lot sooner.

  I hope my in-laws will forgive my borrowing a few names, since I didn’t ask permission. Lovecraft populated the Miskatonic Valley with Uptons; the Skinners and Trumbulls and Crowthers followed naturally. The real ones are all very nice people and none of them are in fact possessed by eldritch abominations.

  Householdmates Jamie Anfenson-Comeau, Shelby Anfenson-Comeau, and Nora Temkin provided moral support throughout the writing process, appropriate admiration of cover art, and dramatic exclamations that they “knew me when” every time an author copy appeared in the mail. Bobby, Cordelia, and Miriam do not facilitate the writing process, but do inspire it—and are delightful in many other ways as well.

  First and finally, my wife, Sarah, is alpha reader, continuity checker, patient listener to artistic wibbling, seneschal, child minder, epigrammatic problem solver, and source of potent slash goggles. I could not have written this book without her.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  RUTHANNA EMRYS lives in a mysterious manor house on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., with her wife and their large, strange family. She makes homemade vanilla, obsesses about game design, gives unsolicited advice, and occasionally attempts to save the world. Her stories have appeared in a number of venues, including Strange Horizons, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and Tor.com. Winter Tide is her first novel. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  WINTER TIDE

  Copyright © 2017 by Ruthanna Emrys

  All rights reserved.

  Cover illustration by John Jude Palencar

  Cover design by Jamie Stafford-Hill

  Edited by Carl Engle-Laird

  A Tor.com Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-9090-5 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-7653-9091-2 (ebook)

  e-ISBN 9780765390912

  Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at [email protected].

  First Edition: April 2017