Title: Monsoon Queen
Series: The War Between Cedar and Oak, Book One
Author: Jo Carthage
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: 11/12/2024
Heat Level: 3 – Some Sex
Pairing: Female/Female
Length: 43300
Genre: Historical Fantasy, historical fiction/1800s, fantasy, romance, lit/genre fiction, bisexual, lesbian/sapphic, anti-colonialism, East Africa, Yemen, conflict, mages/magic users, dark lord, insurgents, torture/whips, pirates, dark prince, woman mage, porqué no los dos
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Description
Twenty-year-old Noor has been hiding her magic and biding her time in the spice markets of 1812 Tajoura as she and her neighbours wait for the ravenous British Empire to sail into their homeport, cannons blazing. But when the HMS Victory arrives, so does the chance of a lifetime to join a found family in the Yemeni resistance. Noor finds herself caught up in the fight against the Empire’s battle mages and Rami, the dark prince who leads them.
In a case of mistaken identity, Noor heals Rami before a decisive battle. She sees the good in him, and her heart is torn.
Noor’s new friend Razan—a brilliant and beautiful inventor for the resistance—has no such qualms. She hates Rami for his role in the raid that killed her parents. Razan has found a way to harness Noor’s power to defeat the British, and the two women grow ever closer. On a perilous camel ride to the coffee roasting city of Mocha, Rami strikes, kidnapping Noor and taking her back to his cruel master on the HMS Victory.
In order to survive, Noor will need to call on everything she learned in the spice markets and the Yemeni resistance.
Rebels, mages, lovers. With the final battle looming and the resistance struggling without her, Noor must keep her eye on the prize: saving Yemen from the British Empire. If she can keep Razan in her bed and save Rami from the Empire, she will have the future she’s always dreamed of. But first, Noor has to survive the storms to come.
Monsoon Queen
Jo Carthage © 2024
All Rights Reserved
Grinning suddenly, Razan jumped subjects. “Do you want to see a trick I made?”
“Uh, sure.”
Razan held up a finger. “Wait.”
She shoved her hands into her pockets and pulled out a long piece of copper wire and two metal cups like the ones sailors used. The bottom of each cup had a hole with the wire tied through it, connecting both of them. Noor narrowed her eyes; it was a waste to destroy cups.
Razan handed her one and kept the other for herself. “You speak into it, and when you want to hear me, you put it up against your ear.”
“But I can hear you just fine.”
“Wait. You’ll see.”
Razan took her cup and walked slowly, stretching her wire all the way across the deck, maybe fifty paces. Usama grinned, then turned back to the sea, clearly having seen this before.
Razan put the cup to her mouth, and Noor dutifully put hers to her ear.
“Can you hear me?” Razan said into the cup.
The words warbled like birdsong but were still recognizable. Noor widened her eyes, and she glanced down at the cup, mind racing. She put hers to her mouth, and Razan cupped hers around her ear.
Noor said, “How does this work?”
“You see how the wire moves when I speak?”
Noor squinted at the wire. But they were on a ship; everything was moving. She shook her head, a blush rising.
Razan gestured for her to raise the cup to her ear again.
“I’ll keep talking, but put your hand on the wire while I do so.”
Noor did, and it was like a trapped bee buzzed against her palm. When she gripped the wire tightly, there was silence even as she could see Razan’s mouth moving. Then Noor took her hand off the wire.
“—sound stops when you touch the wire.” Razan grinned as she walked back to Noor, coiling the wire as she went. Noor reluctantly let go of the can when Razan tugged it from her hands.
“My mother showed this to me,” Razan said conspiratorially. “She discovered it when she was weaving a metal screen. I think our words move on the wire itself. It doesn’t work with the cups alone or the wire alone. She thought the cup focuses the sound and sends it on the wire.”
Noor cocked her head. “You know, when I think about my haya magic, sometimes I think about it as tugging on a thread, pulling the life of those around me closer to me. I don’t know if you saw, but I can make things move with my magic?”
Noor continued after Razan’s nod. “Usually, only things that come in waves. I don’t really know why. My magic came to me when I was on the sand; sand dunes are like still waves. It’s mostly water and sand that I seem able to move.”
Razan’s eyes twinkled. “Do you think you could make the wire move? A little bit, but very fast?”
“I could try.”
“Let’s see!” Razan uncoiled the wire from around her cup.
Once she was in position, Noor tried. At first, the wire made a low, pounding sound, like the biggest of drums at the beach bazaar. She concentrated, thinking about moving it back and forth, faster and faster, until it was a high-pitched screaming whine—
Usama marched over, clapping his hands around the wire. “Habibati,” he said, his usually cheerful face as close to stern as Noor had seen him get. “Perhaps it is worth it reminding you both that we are—” He held up a finger. “—on a pirate ship—” He pointed to Mianning and held up another finger. “—transporting resistance leaders—” Pointing to himself and Razan, he held up another finger. “—wanted deserters from the Royal Navy—” He now pointed to James and then to Noor. “—escaped slaves—” A fifth circled his head. “—in the middle of imperial patrolled waters. And so, perhaps, we should not be making loud noises at this time.”
Razan coiled up the wire, shame-faced.
Noor shared her blush.
“Sorry, Usama.” Razan shoved the cups into her abaya’s pockets, a few small shells falling out. She picked them up and fiddled with them as she and Noor sat together, backs against the curving hull.
Noor adjusted her jambiya so the lunella shell pommel didn’t jab into her stomach.
“May I?” Razan asked, reaching for the weapon.
Noor slid the Damascus blade out of her belt and handed it to Razan, hilt first.
Razan examined the pommel, not the waves on the blade, her long, slim fingers careful on the delicate-looking shell. “When I was a little girl, we would go down to the beaches of Sidon and collect shells. When we found big ones such as this beauty, we’d put them to our ears. My father would tell me we could hear what the animal inside it heard, the sound of the deepest oceans, the heartbeat of other oceans, oceans I’d never seen, never even heard named.”
Noor’s gut tightened, the nudge of haya magic. It rose in her like a tide. “Do you have a bigger shell?”
Razan turned to her, noting the change in her tone. “Yes,” she said slowly.
Noor’s words were distant now. “Do you have two?”
Razan went to her workstation and rifled around in the bag that hung from one end of it.
“Here.” she said, handing Noor the shells. “But what—”
Noor interrupted, voice still distant as the tide tugged inside her. “I must do some magic before the feeling passes, but I will explain after.”
The lunella shells were shaped like the turbans of Sikh men, only small, the size of a young girl’s fist. Noor closed her eyes and brought the two shells together in her hands, openings aligned gently. She pulled at her haya magic, pulled and pulled, took a little bit from Usama and James, a bit more from Razan, from the fish below her, the whales and sharks, the birds flying high above the sea. She left Mianning alone, not wanting to compromise their navigator. She pulled until the light between her hands glowed against the backs of her eyelids.
Until Razan whispered, “Whoa.”
Noor pulled a little bit more, and then she pushed the energy into the shells and whispered to them, “You are connected.” It took the same inner muscles as twisting stiff metal into the links of a salvaged chain, locking them into place so they made something contiguous that had previously never been whole.
Noor let the magic ease back and opened her eyes. She tilted her head all the way back.
Razan, James, and Usama stood over her, staring down with wide eyes. Razan spoke first.
“Did you use some of my life?”
Noor’s eyes felt heavy as fishing weights as she nodded. She’d used much more of her own.
Razan’s face was tight. “How about you ask me next time?”
Noor’s cheeks heated, but the shame was as distant as of the cresting wave dizzy giddiness that came from such a big piece of magic. She was tired.
She handed Razan one of the shells, aware of Usama and James’s eyes following. “Try it.”
Razan looked down at the shell, face querulous but game. She moved to the far end of the dhow and held the shell up to her ear.
Noor held her shell to her mouth. “Can you hear me?”
And Razan’s eyes got huge. “No,” she gasped, and Noor frowned as Razan stumbled over herself. “Yes, I mean, yes, I can hear you!”
Razan put the shell back to her mouth. “How far do you think this goes?”
“We’d have to test it, but I don’t think distance will affect it. It’s—” Noor sagged against the hull, even as she tried to stay upright with two men standing over her, even as her eyes crept closed. She mumbled, “It’s more about sameness.”
Razan spoke again, beyond excitement with joy. “Noor, do you know what you’ve done?”
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Jo Carthage is a bi, cis woman living in Silicon Valley. In her career, Jo has worked with survivors of labor and sex trafficking in DC, helped get incredible women and queer folks elected to state and national office in three states, and thinks politics and science fiction go together beautifully. Jo’s grandfather worked as a nuclear physicist at Oak Ridge in the 1950s, but it wasn’t until a 2019 family road trip veered off course and she spent an afternoon at EBR-1 that she started to write Atomic Age fiction.
Jo was honored to have Nuclear Sunrise favorably reviewed by the Director of the Mescalero Apache Cultural Center and intends to donate a portion of proceeds to their important work. As a writer, Jo loves slow burn, hurt/comfort, queer history, enemies-to-lovers, and happy endings.
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