Many drops make a stream, p.1
Many Drops Make a Stream, page 1
part #1 of Droplet Series
Many Drops Make a Stream
By Adrian Harley
Schenectady, New York
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from the publisher and the story’s author. Reviews, blog posts, articles, etc., may use short quotes under “fair use” rules.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters and events portrayed are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.
Many Drops Make a Stream
Copyright © 2023, Adrian Harley
Front cover art © 2023, Roiu Cris
Edited by Nina Waters
Print Manuscript formatting by Hermit Prints
E-book formatting by Nina Waters
Published by Duck Prints Press, LLC
Schenectady, New York
duckprintspress.com
ISBN: 978-1-946472-95-3 (Paperback edition)
ISBN: 978-1-946472-97-7 (ePub edition)
ISBN: 978-1-946472-96-0 (PDF edition)
Tags
Genre: fantasy
Rating: general audiences
Trigger Warnings: character injury (non-graphic descriptions), misgendering (unintentional), speciesism
Relationships: childhood friends, enemies to lovers, f/f, f/f (background), f/f (past), family, found family, pre-relationship
Character Features: amnesia (magical) (temporary), bipoc, bird person, creature-human hybrid, creature transformation (animal), creature transformation (bird), creature transformation (dog), creature transformation (fish), creature transformation (involuntary), criminal, ghost, magic use, magic use (blood magic), necromancy, non-human character, vigilante
Other Tags: be gay do crimes, be gay solve crimes, break-up (past), cults, enslavement, heist, human trafficking, imprisonment, kidnapping, past tense, pov third person limited, religion, rob from the rich to help the poor, summer solstice, there is only one bed
To Mom and Dad
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Acknowledgements
Backers
About the Author: Adrian Harley
About Duck Prints Press LLC
Chapter One
If Droplet had believed Moss about how much time vigilantes spent waiting around for things to happen, she would have been much less eager to take up the mantle.
Droplet had been patrolling the docks of the city of Ninuthen for hours in the form of a seagrass owl—a local bird, and therefore inconspicuous. She carried a necklace of bones in her talons, but nothing else. Shapeshifters could travel light.
Ninuthen-proper glowed. Every street boasted lamps of light magic, and the wealthier businesses had sprung for glimmering murals that shone from their walls at all hours of the day and night. Nobody wanted to shower such extravagance on the dock quarter, though. Perched in the shadows, Droplet marinated in an agonizing blend of boredom and tension.
When the deep bells of the dockside Sea Goddess temple pealed midnight, Droplet took off from a warehouse roof for another circuit. The smugglers she’d overheard in the tavern had not been obliging enough to say exactly which dock they were using. Nor when they planned to arrive.
Mice, rats, drunken brawl, more mice, a couple having an amorous encounter on a warehouse roof, more rats… there! Finally! Two cloaked, hooded figures pulling a large tarpaulin-covered cart between a couple of warehouses. One human and one raptor—she caught a glimpse of featherless hands from under one robe, and a feathery snout and long tail from beneath another.
Aside from the many tiny bones of her necklace clicking together, Droplet’s midair turn was silent.
The two suspicious characters and their ungainly cart headed for a boatless dock filled with similarly suspicious tarpaulin-covered items. Far out on the bay, hard to spot even with owl eyes, a small ship approached despite furled sails and no oars to be seen. They had a talented water mage on the way, then, at minimum. She would have to be quick. Bone sucked up cast magic like a sponge but could only take so much before it gave up, like a bucket of water against a wildfire.
Droplet flew to the end of the dock. The owl form had served its purpose. Time to shift.
In the first instant of the change, Droplet’s body felt stiff, taut, as if her skin was a net that had held her for too long. And then, in the next glorious instant, she broke free. Her muscles and bones and skin stretched, the good kind of stretch that popped stiff joints and shook off fatigue. She relaxed into the form of a gorilla—a male goldback weighing in at 400 pounds. Weather-warped, splintering boards creaked under her new knuckles.
When Moss had first let her go on vigilante missions, Droplet had favored big-cat forms. The confidence that came from walking around with literal handfuls of blades was unbeatable. But without opposable thumbs, her most fearsome nemesis had become that wily foe: the closed door. Shifting was nigh-instantaneous, but it took energy, and a shifter always needed a few moments to adjust to the muscles and senses of the new form. Every second mattered in a fight or escape.
Gorillas were no slouches in the “sight and hearing” department, but after the owl, Droplet felt like a blanket had dropped on her head. But the smells of the bay rushed in—the underlying odor of dead fish and dockside trash left something to be desired, and the salty, clean breeze of night blew in off the sea.
No time to waste. The cart-pushers and boat-driver were coming. She put on the bone necklace—she needed her hands free, and the bone wouldn’t interfere with any necessary shape-changes. Shapeshifting was a part of her; not even a necromancer could stop her from shifting.
Droplet lifted the tarps. Under them sat three crates sealed against light and sound. Simple spells. Astonishingly, the spellcasters had not thought to spell against a gorilla’s arm strength. She grabbed the side of the closest crate and ripped it clean away.
Inside the crate was a person.
A hybrid.
Humans, curse them, probably wouldn’t use the word “person” to describe hybrids. Casualties of old magic gone wrong, a blend of at least two different animals and permanently stuck in between, hybrids could be dismissed as “not really people” whenever it was convenient for the humans and raptors in charge.
Droplet didn’t know why these people were locked up, and she didn’t care. She just needed to get them out.
The person in the first crate, by all appearances a normal, large gray dog, growled “Thank you!” before fleeing into the night.
The second crate held a person with a more balanced mixture of cat and human. Her gray tabby fur puffed up all over; tufts extended around the collar of her fish-scale dress and the straps of her sandals, and the Sea Goddess clip on her head stood up vertically. If the situation hadn’t been so dire, the effect would have been comical. Her ears lay flat, and her pupils were so wide that her eyes were almost black.
“Okay. Okay. A gorilla. I was not expecting this, but here we are,” said the hybrid. Droplet stood back to allow the chattering hybrid out of the narrow box. She slunk out, her fluffed-up tail getting in her face as she emerged. She stood on hind legs nearly as long as a human’s but jointed like a cat’s, and she stretched as tall as she could, ears flicking in every direction. “They grabbed me at The Mouse’s Last Stand and said something about ‘quota.’ Maybe ‘two more until quota’? One said he’d be glad once midsummer was over.”
Droplet nodded at the cat’s words, encouraging her to continue as she described more of the smells, sights, and sounds she’d observed before she’d been put in the crate. The woman didn’t seem to look at the nod but kept narrating anyway, scanning the shoreline.
The hybrid in the third crate—a feather-covered human—screamed at the sight of a gorilla effortlessly tearing open crates; they leapt past Droplet and dove into the water. Droplet couldn’t blame them.
“Look out!” the cat-hybrid shouted, shoving at Droplet’s right side like a duckling trying to move a boulder.
Spooked by the touch more than the shout, Droplet jumped to her left and heard something whiz past her ear. She whirled and stood on her hind legs. The cart had arrived at the dock, the two mysterious cart-pullers now armed and ready. The raptor held up their hands, preparing to cast a spell; nothing for Droplet to worry about with her bone charm on.
The human had a crossbow.
Great.
Thankfully, reloading a crossbow took time. And Droplet had been itching to take them head-on.
Droplet dropped to all fours, squared her shoulders, and charged, bellowing as she pounded down the dock, boards shaking under her feet. The raptor mage waved their hands in a quick arc, and a rope of fire whipped through the air toward her. Trusting in her bone necklace, Droplet charged on.
When the fire did burn her, sheer momentum kept her barreling down the dock. She bellowed again, instinctively, out of
In a just universe, the sight of a bellowing, charging gorilla who was literally on fire would have sent these people fleeing.
Instead, the mage raised their hands again.
Droplet kept charging for a few more feet, until she smacked into a wall of air with a soft fwump that rattled her from head to feet. At least the impact put the fire out. Once stopped in her tracks, she finally realized what was going on.
The mage was using blood magic.
Immensely powerful, immensely illegal, blood magic could do almost anything when the caster had enough willing or unwilling blood donors. Droplet’s bone necklace, a formidable shield against the everyday elemental magic she’d thought she’d face, was about as much use as a paper dagger in a pub brawl.
Droplet would have to think her way out of this.
She hated thinking her way out.
She weighed her options. None were good. Shifting was only so much help. They’d stopped one of her larger forms with ease; a smaller form would fare no better.
Behind the humans, the cart still held its tarp-covered cargo. At least one person could be under there—maybe more, depending on the species. But the blood mages could be carrying provisions and supplies. A gorilla’s senses weren’t keen enough to tell the difference, even without the burnt-fur smell interfering. A large broom was painted on the tarp—a street sweeper’s cart? Had the blood mages stolen from street sweepers?
In the pause for thought, the pain from the burns settled deeper even though the flames had gone out. And over the lap of water came a distant muttering…
“…and yes, I know this is a bad idea. She can tell me ‘I told you so’ later,” said the cat-hybrid.
With dread in her stomach, Droplet looked over her shoulder.
The hybrid held giant splinters of the crate walls. She tucked them under her arms, took a deep breath, and charged.
“RREEOOOOOW!”
She ran like a person constantly on the edge of tipping over a cliff. She had no real grip on the bulky fragments of wood. And wood absorbed some magic, sure, like any dead matter, but it wasn’t as efficient as bone.
The cloaked people exchanged a look. The blood mage left one hand upraised toward Droplet, moving the other toward the cat.
The archer finished reloading the crossbow and raised it to point at Droplet’s heart.
With all the strength in her gorilla legs, Droplet leapt right and shifted mid-leap, diving toward the bay. For an instant, she was overstretched, overextended, until her body collapsed in on itself and settled. She became a barracuda. Barracudas were fast—she planned to speed under the docks and come around the other side, taking them by surprise, so she’d have time to shift again, grab the hybrid, and get out of there.
Instead, no more than three feet from the dock, still midair, she thudded into nothing and dropped, disoriented. She splashed into the water. The saltwater. Stars above, she had not thought about what that would do to the burn wound. She writhed in the dark water and felt that thunk again, different from the air barrier.
The boat! They’d made their getaway boat invisible. She had to get back on the dock now, get the hybrid out before the boat arrived—
A blast of red light and heat seared the water, almost reaching her. Droplet swam under the docks, thanking the stars that this type of fish could navigate in dark water. Picking a fish that could handle these conditions had been pure luck; she tended to avoid her oceanic forms.
No new attack came, but the burn was a constant assault on its own. Droplet steeled herself, dove, and then propelled herself upward, tail beating madly. She broke the surface, arcing toward the dock, and shifted into a tiger midair, as if her rage and anger and pain were taking on weight and claws and fur of their own. Roaring, she landed in a crash and twist of claws digging into wood, barely clearing the dock.
The dock was empty.
The cart was gone.
Even with tiger ears, she heard only the faint slap of water on wood and stone. The smell of burned flesh and fur overwhelmed any subtler scents the boat might have left. The placid water shimmered in the moonlight, unbroken to the horizon.
They couldn’t have vanished. That was impossible.
But the illusion was seamless.
Droplet ached from nose to tail, which was decidedly unfair, as she hadn’t even had these tailbones until moments ago. She hadn’t done such rapid shape-changes in a long time, and her chest and shoulders still screamed, the pain compounded by shifting. Even if she could find the boat, she wouldn’t be any good against a blood mage—plus another mage and the archer, at minimum.
Defeated, resigned, she changed into one of her comfort forms: a goose. Although she wouldn’t trade the freedom of shapeshifting for anything in this world or beyond, sometimes, after a rough day, a shapeshifter had to rest easy in a body where the limbs and senses were all familiar. Droplet had many goose shapes to choose from, unlike the other species of the evening. She picked the shape of a friend she’d made many years ago whose hobby was terrorizing wealthy mages in their gardens.
Night closed in, goose eyes useless at making out anything other than the garish glow of Ninuthen in the distance, but she could feel the lines of the world, now, stretching beyond the horizon, a better map than anything people could create. And a goose could endure a long flight home.
She took to the air with all the grace and ease of a fish trying to flop its way out of a fisherman’s bucket. She flew over the bay once, searching, but to no avail.
Curse them to bloody, nameless chaos, thought Droplet as she begrudgingly turned toward home. May their mothers learn of their sins and be very disappointed in them.
Stars, I hope that hybrid’s okay.
Chapter Two
Droplet and Moss had settled into a manor west of the city a couple months ago under human personas: an eccentric Nortakian businessperson and her loyal retainer, moved down from the north. Here in Makido, common wisdom held that Nortak was a wild, lawless, icy land ruled by demons. No Makidan questioned why a wealthy Nortakian would move to their vastly superior country.
The nebulous, unspecific cover of “trade” gave Droplet an excuse to talk to the wealthiest humans of the city. One of Moss’s first lessons: to find the person responsible for a crime, you looked at the ones with the most money. Conversations and connections with respectable businesspeople had given their former organization most of their leads on where to find and help exploited people.
Like the other manors on this side of town, Droplet’s manor dated back several hundred years to the final centuries of the Aulian Empire. It had wide balconies on upper stories—arriving to a gathering by air had been a sign of status for some time. Droplet landed on the eastern balcony and glared at the door leading inside.
We meet again, door handles.
Groaning, she shifted into her human form with the flattest chest for as little distortion to the burn wound as possible. Nonetheless, when she stretched into the new shape, her skin and muscles flared with pain as if the fire had broken out all over again. The burn stood out in angry red against her pale skin. Even lifting her arm toward the door hurt. She gently turned the handle, shuffled inside, and eased the door back shut.
Shapeshifters had an innate gift for language. Droplet knew three different human tongues, and she’d lost count of the languages of other animals she knew. Then there was the shapeshifter language—full-body gestures, movement, and basic vocalizations, with different dialects for quadrupeds, birds, and other forms.
Sometimes, though, a person just had to scream.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH.” The cry echoed around a small, empty antechamber and down the spiral stairwell leading from the room, furnishing the bare spaces with sound.
She sank to the checked marble floor, still naked, and lay on her back. Her brown hair flopped into her eyes; she attempted to blow it away once, twice, and gave up.
“Moss! Mooooooss!”
After several interminable moments with nothing but echoes, she heard the faint zip of tiny wings. A jewel-blue hummingbird flew up the stairs and hovered over her, examining the burn marks. The hummingbird—Moss Growing in the Sunlight on a Boulder, Droplet’s one remaining parent—fixed her with a disapproving glare and landed on the ground, the better to gesture.
