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.
Excerpt
Dream Swimmers
Jo Carthage © 2025
All Rights Reserved
The Arabian Sea
A month before winter monsoon season, Yemen
1227 A.H. / December 1812 A.D.
Noor fell asleep in her hammock onboard the Cormorant and opened her eyes beneath the cold waters off the coast of Gaza, two thousand imperial miles northwest. The full moon revealed the strange shapes the tides had wrought on the rocks deep in the water beneath her. She searched the sea floor for Rami, born the son of Yemen’s rightful ruler, lately a traitor and alam mage for the British invaders. Their shared dreams haunted her sleep as Rami rotted in a British prison, and Noor planned to free him and bring him to face his people’s justice.
She found his body near the lagoon floor and struck out, able to swim in her dreams. Noor couldn’t in the waking world, a still bleeding lacuna from her earlier life when she’d been enslaved by a cruel master in the spice markets of Tadjoura. He’d kept that knowledge and much more from her until she’d killed him with a scavenged dagger and fought her way to freedom. Rami had sunk deeper and deeper in each dream, but Noor didn’t let the burning in her lungs pull her back up. She wrapped her arm around his still-warm body and pulled him to the surface. Once there, Noor dragged him through the shallow waves and into the cave she’d once sheltered in with other families beneath the ancient city.
“Breathe, damn you.” Noor pumped his chest, willing him to live.
Rami gasped and shot up. He struggled away from her, dark eyes wild. The scar she’d given him on the HMS Victory stood out, stark on his dark skin.
“Have it your way,” Noor said and moved to the other side of the cave. In the waking world, she’d spent one week here a half-decade ago, camping out as her then-master Musa sold fake holy water to pilgrims.
But in dreams, all things were possible, so Noor concentrated on a patch of brilliantly white sand, and a moment later, a clutter of kindling lay stacked there as if it had always been. It took no haya magic, no life power, to conjure here in a dream. She would have never been able to turn nothing into something like this on the Cormorant. In dreams though…
“The fire will be ready whenever you are,” Noor called out. She folded her legs and gazed out at the moonlit Mediterranean Sea.
Rami approached. He stood so close the water ran out of his long hair and dripped down the back of her guntiino—the red-and-gold wrap dress she wore—trickling down her spine. Rami knelt beside her, careful not to touch, and frowned at the wood she’d conjured.
“Let me,” he said, and the wood burst into flame, nearly consuming it all in a single fireball.
She laughed at the extravagance, at his powers’ excess.
He stiffened and glared.
She couldn’t help that she found him absurd sometimes now, this terror of a man who had haunted her friends’ nightmares. If he was going to pout, she would just go swimming with the hammerhead sharks and pilot whales off the coast for a few hours before waking up and trying again tomorrow night.
It wasn’t as though he could sulk in the waking world.
And it wasn’t likely his British jailers allowed it.
He moved to the other side of the fire and grumbled, “What’s so funny?”
She bit her lip.
His voice was hoarse and raw. She hated this change in him, the damage done to his deep, soft voice. She’d only heard it a few times during their brief time together aboard the HMS Victory. The Victory had once been Lord Admiral Nelson’s flagship, and Noor had sunk it with her own extravagant display of magic, turning the ship into a burning heap of broken oak planks and sails of flame. It had been enough of a mess to block British warships from taking Aden. And they’d bought Yemen’s resistance precious months to prepare to defend themselves again.
Noor had wrecked the ship and freed Rami from a cruel master who’d taught him only pain and the style of magic that came from it, but she’d been unable to take him with her. So here they were, mysteriously connecting through her dreams as he grew thinner and more ragged under his jailer’s persistent hatred. The British had once seen the mage as their best weapon and now viewed him as a traitor to their empire. Rami’s body showed the wear of their unkind hands, as did his voice’s increasing hoarseness. She figured it was from the screaming, his dream mind not remembering how a voice should sound free from hurt.
Noor hated the guards at whatever prison he was in. It didn’t matter that he had wielded his master’s whip against them when they’d served together on the Victory. No one deserved to suffer like this, night after night after night.
He eased a little closer to the fire, drawn to the heat or the company or something else entirely.
“What’s so funny?” He repeated.
She had to answer that terrible grate of a voice coming out of his irritated, strange-soft face. “You are.”
He huffed and folded his legs, then held two large, sword-calloused hands out to the smaller, swiftly burning fire. She glanced at his arms, but the intricate cuts that had covered them like a trader’s route tattoos when she’d seen him in a dream the night before weren’t there now. Whether he’d healed himself or his mind wasn’t including them, she didn’t know. Noor was grateful for the expanse of clean, dark skin, flecked only with moles.
“I think you need to let me go,” Rami said, and every bit of the fire’s warmth left Noor’s body.
She’d thought they wouldn’t talk about this, not give voice to it.
“Hmm?” she said, hoping he would drop it.
He leaned around the fire, voice darker and steadier. “Your magic—it’s warping. You can’t have missed it. You can’t be both a haya and an alam mage, not in this world, not in this time. I think—” He choked this time, weakening for the barest of breaths, and it squeezed her heart as if he’d slipped his fingers beneath her skin. “I think you need to let me go. I’ll never be free. I’m getting weaker. There’s no way you can get to me in time. After Taiz, after Sidon, after everything I’ve done, there is no one left in the resistance who would want you to.”
Noor stood. “Just you try me,” she said and strode to the edge of the lagoon. She dove in and let the dark sea close her ears.
But speaking wasn’t the only way they could connect in dreams. His words followed her in her mind as, in the darkening deep, she took solace from a world gone mad.
That’s what I was afraid you’d say.
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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.Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Tumblr
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