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.

Excerpt

Monsoon Queen
Jo Carthage © 2024
All Rights Reserved

The jute rope flowed through Noor’s hands as she climbed down into the shipwreck. The shallow waters of the Gulf of Tajoura filled the creaking hold, but the crew deck was just above the lapping waves. She landed, and her sandals crunched on salt-encrusted cedar. Noor breathed a sigh of relief. At least this deck isn’t entirely rotted. Though she’d lived all of her twenty-one years within smelling distance of the sea, she could not swim. She hadn’t been permitted to learn.

Noor stood in a pillar of noonday sun shining through the hole she’d hacked in the deck above. Everywhere else was darkness. Noor peered into the gloom, checking for any cracks of sunlight on the side of the wreck where she knew her master, Musa, had anchored his dhow.

When she was certain he couldn’t see, she let a gentle glow rise in her fingertips, lighting the hold. Musa didn’t know she could cast light or move objects with her mind. He hadn’t been there when she’d found her magic that past summer, her hands on the body of a soft black cat who’d been trampled by a British officer’s horse. If he had seen her healing, he’d have had her killed.

Slaves could not be mages in Tajoura.

Before her magic had come, Noor had thought she would be trapped with Musa for the rest of her life; now, she studied with her imam every chance she got, gaining control over her power and searching for a chink in the world she could pry open long enough to escape.

The shipwreck jerked, a low wave slamming into the side.

Noor got back to work. She surveyed the crew deck, checking every corner and cavity until…there. A small tumble of rags and arm-length splinters of cedar shielded a glint of silver.

She hitched up her guntiino, the long red and yellow striped wrap she wore like an Indian woman’s sari, and raised her hand to light her way into the darkness.

Noor pulled Musa’s leather purse from under her guntiino and began filling it with silver coins.

“Teach that captain to talk too freely in the hookah shop,” she muttered as she swept up the treasure. “Or maybe just to know a thief when he sees one.”

Musa had overheard this dhow’s former captain in the hookah shop the night before, moaning about his sailors abandoning their backpay as they scrambled to escape the wreck two monsoon seasons ago. This boat was one of many. Ever since the British Empire had set their sights on Aden to the East across the Gulf and rumours of sightings of Lord Admiral Nelson’s Victory had been reported from the Cape northwards, merchants who’d never plied Tajoura’s shallow and reef-filled waters were trying their luck on the last free port on the Horn of Africa.

Many didn’t survive the experience.

Musa had sailed her out here on his rickety dhow several times a month for years, ordering her to loot the remains of shattered ships. He claimed any treasure she found or took it out of her hide if she tried to conceal it, to save up enough to buy passage somewhere else, anywhere else. Musa forgets that the alternative to allowing slaves to buy our freedom is having his throat slit in the night. Noor dreamed about it, but she didn’t kill, wouldn’t risk her secret connection to haya magic by using it for violence. Her imam had warned her that to do so might sever her connection forever. But even without knowing she had powers, Musa should have been more cautious. For now, Noor was biding her time, trying to find another way out.

So here Noor was, collecting other people’s pay for someone else’s profit; it wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last. She was relacing the purse when something else glimmered in the heap of mouldering cloth.

Noor’s fingers were delicate and careful of scurrying crabs and cedar splinters. There. She found what had caught her eye: a Yemeni dagger, a jambiya, with a pearl-dotted sheath and a polished moon-coloured lunella shell as a pommel.

It shone in her light.

“What kind of Yemeni man would abandon his family’s jambiya?” she muttered.

Beautiful weapons were impossibly expensive for someone like her and far too dangerous to own. She took a breath and stuffed it down the front of her guntiino. The dagger fit snugly between her belt and her belly. The leather purse went between her teeth. She climbed up her rope, arm over arm. Noor extinguished her light as the sun hit her upturned face. She reached the bare bit of stable hull that she’d tied onto and stood up on it, gripping the gunwale as the rising tide shook the wreck.

Noor glanced over the edge to see Musa glaring up at her from the helm of his tiny, shallow-drafted dhow, bobbing only a few arm lengths away from the wreck. His bald head glittered with sweat. His mouth was twisted and red.

“That’s it?” he shouted, gesturing at the purse between her lips.

She turned to descend the rope ladder, making a face where he could not see. Her sandaled feet slipped on the slimy, fraying rope, hands cramping tightly above the knots. A wave bucked the ship, and she slammed into the hull, the contents of the purse bruising her lips. The rope snapped—

Noor fell, and the warm water was over her head in seconds. She forced herself to hold her breath, struggled to look up, eyes burning with the salt. There it was, Musa’s hand lowering to rip the purse from between her teeth.

The current shoved her back against the hull of the wreck, and she lost hold of her climbing rope.

Noor shoved her panic away and pushed away from the wreck, tried to think of how she could use her magic, but her mind thrashed as the water forced itself between her lips. She couldn’t focus. She crunched against the hull again and turned into it, fingers digging into the rotting wood, forcing herself up one handhold at a time until she got her bruised lips above the water and gasped in sweet, salty air. A wave filled her mouth. She slipped and found a new hold, again and again, each breath a little shallower, until she felt Musa’s fingers dig in around her elbow before wrenching her over the side and throwing her to the deck.

As she tried to stand, he hissed, “You ugly idiot, I got my sandals wet because of you,” and cuffed her hard to the deck.

The jambiya’s sheath jammed into her stomach, and she curled around it protectively.

He hasn’t seen the blade yet.

Musa had already turned back to the helm, cursing her loudly as he adjusted the rudder, his fishing spear bloodied across his back. She had a moment to catch her breath.

Unfortunately, what she breathed in was the smell of a freshly killed dugong. The gentle creatures were like horses or the cows the Afar herdsman brought to the annual bazaar that had started just the prior month. With soft grey skin and silly faces, the dugong bore live babies. Her master liked to hunt them while he waited for her to scavenge for him, though Noor knew it was no real hunt. The sweet things would gather around any boat, as curious as kittens. She rolled away from the corpse, trying to keep her disgust off her face.

Then she froze. Strange bells sounded from across the harbour. Turning, Noor cocked her head, trying to find the source.

Silence.

Somali traders’ ships didn’t use bells. Neither did the double-masted Yemeni dhow that slipped into port under cover of night to avoid British patrols.

Only British imperial warships rang bells when they entered a harbour. She’d heard that from refugees, from women who’d escaped Mocha and Sidon.

No British warship had ever yet entered Tajoura’s harbour.

The bells rang again, and Noor’s breathing kicked up when she saw their source. At the mouth of the harbour, a ship as massive as the biggest mosque in Gaza, crowded out the sky. Its dozen square sails covered the faces of the clouds, each deck painted black and gold in succession, the colours wavering in the golden morning light.

“I’ve heard of that ship,” Musa growled behind her. “Striped like a bee, stung Napoleon in their last wars. The Victory. Their great Admiral Nelson died there.” He slapped at the ropes in the rigging, jerking the knots, swinging the sail out and into the wind. “They’ll blow us out of the water as soon look at us, with their alam mages or cannons or both.”

The bells rang louder.

Noor stared at Musa, the jambiya heavy against her stomach. If Musa stayed facing away from her, she could creep up behind him, slide the dagger out, and slit his throat the way he had the dugong’s.

There was a reason slaves weren’t allowed weapons.

The bells sounded, and she felt the weight of the knife like the promise she’d made to herself years ago: free yourself so you may remain free. She kept her eyes on the Victory as Musa hurried them back to port.

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Meet the Author

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.