Title: Dream Swimmers
Series: The War Between Cedar and Oak, Book Two
Author: Jo Carthage
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: 07/29/2025
Heat Level: 2 – Fade to Black Sex
Pairing: Male/Male, Female/Female/Male (Female/Female interaction)
Length: 47400
Genre: Historical Fantasy, anti-colonialism, bisexual, conflict, dark lord, dark prince, East Africa, Fantasy, historical fiction/1800s, hurt/comfort, insurgents, lesbian/sapphic, lit/genre fiction, mages/magic users, pirates, porqué no los dos, romance, sexual assault, torture/whips, woman mage, Yemen
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Description
Every night, Noor saves a drowning prince.
In her dreams, she finds him drifting deeper, ever farther from the midnight stars of a half-remembered Gaza. She hauls him to the surface, forces him to breathe, to talk, to tell her where he is.
He doesn’t know.
Noor awakens on the Cormorant, a once-and-future pirate ship searching for Rami, the former prince of Yemen whom she aims to rescue from his British captors before it’s too late. While Rami fights to survive the secret British prison, Noor will have to use her magic, cunning, and skill to find him. But she won’t be alone. Her found family is with her. Lovers, inventors, pirates, rebels, and deserters, they all must come together as they hunt the Arabian Sea for the lost prince.
Dream magic connects Noor and Rami, but in the end, what saves him won’t be magic or science or even love, but the stars themselves.
Dream Swimmers is book two in the War Between Cedar and Oak Quartet and reading the books in order is advised.
Dream Swimmers
Jo Carthage © 2025
All Rights Reserved
Noor met Rami in a dream again three days later. For three nights, she’d opened her eyes under the blue-grey waters off of Gaza and found herself alone. She’d searched and searched, once swimming far enough out to sea the currents took her, and no matter how hard she fought, she could not get back to land. She’d had to force herself awake before she drowned. Each night, when Noor had come back to the dream, she’d headed straight for shore. She tracked the sweep of the moon as she gathered firewood, prayed, and swam into other dreams, all the while stretching her growing magical senses out, searching for him.
On the third night, she awoke underwater and saw him right in front of her. His hair was a mess, his eyes wide and unseeing. He appeared wilder with her scar pale across his face. She wrapped her arms around his waist and dragged him to the surface, even as he struggled, trying to return to the dark, the quiet, the drowning deep that sometimes seemed to call him.
“Get off of me!” he sputtered.
She released him.
Rami immediately sank, the weight of his British Navy–issued winter coat tangling around his arms and feet. She gave him a moment to soften up and then dove down again. Hauling him up so his face was above the water, she then manoeuvred him, towing them both to the cove.
After he caught his breath, Rami started fighting again, struggling to get free, sinking when he succeeded. Her breath caught in her lungs as she dove again to yank him up.
“Stop,” she snapped. “Just stop.”
He didn’t—because, of course, he didn’t. Rami was here and not here. He didn’t stop thrashing until she got him up onto the pale sand of the cave. She laid him on his back, and he writhed for a moment before settling down, anguish on his face, his eyes shut tight again.
Rami’s hurts wrenched at her chest, and she said for the first time what she’d thought had been obvious. “This is a dream. You can control it.”
When he squeezed his eyes tighter, she leaned forward and shook his blue wool collar hard enough to get his attention.
“You’re dreaming. You can wake up if you don’t want to be here.”
He ignored her, his black hair covering his face and longer, more tangled than she remembered from their fight on the Victory. She thought he might be trying to get himself so mussed up, so tangled, that even when he had to open his eyes, he would only be able to see darkness.
Noor raised her hands slowly to his face, wanting to catch the thick strands and push them back behind his ears.
She stopped herself.
She didn’t think it was pity that moved her, nor kindness, but something else. Like when she’d held an injured, hissing black cat in the souq and then healed it. Noor didn’t require the things she cared for to appreciate her—you’d die waiting for a cat to say thank you—but she enjoyed the feeling of fixing a problem, even a small one. It’s a dream. What could it hurt?
She smoothed his dark hair back so he could see.
He arched towards her touch, eyes shut, hunching his shoulder closer to her, trying to catch her hand with his cheek. He didn’t raise his hands, did not try to touch her, but tracked her movement, following—what, the warmth of her? Or the tenderness of touch?
She got her fingers caught in a tangle and gentled her grip, but not before he winced and tried to lean away from her into the cold, wet sand at his back. It had no give to it, no more than her hands did. She changed the pressure and eased her fingers between the strands of hair, bringing them into some semblance of order as his breathing evened out, slowed. The texture of it fascinated her, thick and curling, nothing like her tightly kinked, sun-thinned hair. His was dark and rich, like Mocha coffee, like the scrap of velvet Mianning insisted was from his lady love. Like the softest fur on the sweetest animal, but the kind of sweetness that hid a lion-toothed smile.
Noor was so focused on his hair, on thoughts of whether his body in the waking world was in danger or had some semblance of peace, that it took a moment for her to realise he’d opened his eyes. Not entirely—just enough so he could see her through lashes so thick she didn’t know if he could make her out. She kept her fingertips gentle against his scalp, and in a fluid movement, he turned to give her his back, his cheek on the soft cloth of her knees with his hair spread out across her palms. She wanted to push him, to turn him over, to tell him, no, no, you don’t know if you can trust me—I don’t know if I can trust me with you.
But here he was, trusting her.
She would have to do her best.
They had been dancing around this for the past three weeks. Getting more comfortable touching and being touched, a necessity when every dream started with her deadlifting him from the ocean.
Noor let her fingers trail from the back of his head to the sopping navy blue of his jacket, and he shivered.
“Are you cold?” she asked.
He shook again, not responding.
“Rami, you don’t have to be cold. Imagine yourself in dry clothes. This is a dream.”
He tensed, clenching his jaw so tight it made a muscle pop in his cheek. Rami held his back and stomach muscles stiff, perhaps trying to control his shaking. He covered his face with his arm, the wet cloth mussing the hair she’d just straightened.
“You can change it,” Noor said with a thread of desperation. “You’re in a dream, you don’t—” She sighed; she was going about this in the wrong way. Noor raised her hand, closed her eyes, and then, a new and larger fire glowed, warm and crispy in front of them.
“Look, Rami, can you see the fire? Did you see any wood there before? How do we always have wood here in this deserted cave?”
He moved his arm away from his face and peered at the crackling fire through the mess he’d made of his hair.
“Someone must have left it.” His voice was so much worse than usual, a ragged scrape.
“We’re in a dream, Rami, one you can change if you want to.”
He shook his head, and she sighed. She didn’t want to force this, but she wanted him to have some place where he had some kind of choices, some kind of freedom.
Noor leaned over him a little, hands outstretched towards the fire, her clothes already drying. She’d imagined herself into an already-dry guntiino after they’d hit shore every night and cursed herself for taking this long to wonder why he always stayed in whatever clothes he started in. She had assumed it was contrariness, a personality trait she would now try to leverage.
“If I’m right, and it’s a dream, what do you have to lose by proving me wrong?” she asked. “If it’s a dream—”
“If this is a dream, then it means I have to wake up,” he hissed.
She ran a hand over his back, trying to calm him. At his flinch, she yanked her hand away and paused, a sickness flooding her that the wetness on her hand was not just water, and the darkness of the jacket was not the navy fabric alone. It was stained through and through with blood.
“If this is a dream,” Rami continued doggedly, “then I have to remember what happened before I sleep—and I don’t want to. I want to be here. I want to be here.”
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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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