"By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars" by Premee Mohamed in Strange Horizons Fund Drive 2024 by Premee Mohamed Narrator: Kat Kourbeti
Format: ebook, podcast
Source: podcast, supplied by publisher via Hugo Packet
Formats available: magazine, podcast
Genres: fantasy, short stories
Series: Strange Horizons Fund Drive 2024
Pages: 24
Length: 1 hour
Published by Strange Horizons on April 21, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website
Goodreads
In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Kat Kourbeti reads Premee Mohamed's Hugo Finalist Novelette 'By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars'.
My Review:
As much as I enjoy audiobooks, I don’t listen much to podcasts. Howsomever, last year when I finally realized that a lot of the shorter works nominated for the Hugo Awards were available as podcasts, the penny dropped and I dove in.
Last year, I opened my Hugo reviewing with a short work by one of my favorite authors, and this year continues that trend, albeit with a different author. So here we are with one of the Best Novelette (7,500-17,500 words) nominees, “By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars” by Premee Mohamed, originally published in Strange Horizons Fund Drive 2024.
Strange Horizons as a whole is also nominated for Best Semiprozine, and Premee Mohamed also has a Best Novella nomination for The Butcher of the Forest. Which I read, and liked at the time, but it’s grown on me over the intervening months as I read stories that were similar but not nearly as good and ended up referring to it surprisingly often.
This story reads like a fantasy, although there’s a possibility that the wider world we don’t see is post-apocalyptic. But consider it a fantasy because that’s what we have in front of us, even if the reasons for the world being the way it is might be elsewise.
At first, the story seems to follow a typical pattern, that of the master and their apprentice. Which is never a bad trope for a fantasy to follow, as it allows for more than a few shortcuts to keep the word count down to fit into a shorter work and still come to a satisfying conclusion.
But that’s not the road this one takes, and it’s all the more fascinating for it. Because the ‘Great Wizard Firion’ that the village of Weystone relies on, well, isn’t. Isn’t great. Isn’t all that sure she’s even still a wizard.
The magical spark of Firion’s power is gone – and she can’t figure out how to get it back, although she’s certainly tried. And exhausted herself in trying.
But she still has all her knowledge – even if her possession of wisdom might be debatable under the circumstances. So when the university sends her an apprentice she hasn’t asked for or even looked for, Firion concocts a desperate plan to keep her secret – along with her credentials – from both the university AND her new apprentice.
Because she needs him to solve her other big problem. There’s an enormous sea dragon out in the lake who invades the shore – and the nearby village – once every eight to twelve years. All the signs are present that this year will be one of THOSE years. The Bouldus is coming. And Firion needs her unlooked for apprentice to do all the heavy lifting in keeping the dreaded sea dragon away from the people that she’s supposed to protect.
All she has to do is live up to that old saying that Firion is feeling with every breath she takes, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, TEACH.”
Escape Rating A-: Short works often end up at A- for me, even at their best, because there’s never quite enough and I always wish there were more. Which is certainly true in this case, as I’d really like to know both what this world is like outside Weystone, what Firion did to herself to cause her magic to burn out – and what brought Apprentice Cane to her door – or to the door of the University at all.
Actually, I’m pretty sure that Firion would like to know that last bit too, but the whole point of this story is that they work together on keeping each other’s secrets along with a message about being able to rise to the occasion, no matter how desperate or dire, with the right teacher, the right teaching, and the right encouragement.
We don’t get enough of Cane to know what he came from, but we do get plenty of hints. This could have been his coming of age story, but that would have been a more typical story. I think I enjoyed it a lot more because the story was told through Firion’s eyes, so we get her wry observations, her feelings of impostor syndrome, her sense of her powers and abilities fading away and her desperation to hold on, and last but not least her sense of duty both to her apprentice and to the village that believes in her so much that she has to come through for them even if she can’t do it with her own two hands. She still has to get it done.
That she trains her apprentice by making up numbered rules for him to follow whenever she’s at a loss for words or instructions or simply wants him to stop interrupting and pay attention was a nice little homage to a character that I never expected to see invoked in fantasy – but fit in perfectly in this particular instance.
This turned out to be a terrific start to this year’s Hugo readings, and the reading by Kat Kourbeti certainly helped! I’m happy to say that I’ll be back with another short work in a couple of weeks – or whenever the mood strikes next.
Nice post 🌅🎸