Heiresses of Russ 2013 Page 18

“I never even knew you were sad.”

  “But Zoe, don’t you see? The sadness didn’t matter. Not for me, anyway. Maybe that’s what they sent me back to learn. That feeling sadness was better than feeling nothing.”

  “That’s what I felt, before you died. Nothing.”

  “That’s what Hell is.” She strokes my cheek, her rough fingers moving beneath mine like muscle sliding beneath skin. “I’m not going back there, now. I’m going to be happy, Zoe, happy like I’ve never been.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, but she covers my lips.

  “Hush. This was never about you.”

  (She never used to push me away.)

  She crawls into bed beside me. I wrap her damp body in my arms and hold her until she stops breathing.

  •

  “I suppose it hurts,” Mother says, “that she didn’t let you play a part in that story.”

  We are sitting on a flannel blanket in my back yard, watching the moon bleach the colors out of the roses on the patio. From tonight until the winter solstice, the days will get shorter. I will spend more time in a colorless garden, with only the moon for company.

  Mother refills my glass. Vodka and orange juice—fortifying, she said, as she said of the sturdy black suit I wore to Emily’s funeral. Makes you stand up straight. Makes you pay attention.

  I find myself thinking, again, that I never paid enough attention to Emily when she was alive. I never felt for her. And now the crocus is there, smiling out of the yew. Dear child, this has nothing to do with you.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, it hurts like hell.”

  “You never used to cry,” Mother says.

  It’s true. I wipe the sticky tears from my cheeks, touching them lightly, with wonder, as if I’ve never touched tears before. Mother watches me for a moment, then folds me in her arms, rocking me back and forth.

  “Oh, honey, it’s okay. My honey, my korë, it’s okay. You came back, honey. You came back.”

  •

  The

  Witch Sea

  Sarah Diemer

  I knew what she was. When she came up the path, feet upon the stone steps, quiet, deliberate, I knew it from the way she moved, the web between her fine toes, how she faltered when she reached the lighthouse landing, like she had never seen things like stairs before. I knew, and I said nothing, because we were all, in our own way, monsters.

  “Nor,” she said, sticking out her hand as if she expected me to shake it.

  “That’s what he named you?” I asked, arms folded before me.

  “That’s what my mother named me,” she said, the first of a thousand lies.

  I did not touch her then.

  She had come by boat. They all did. They could not touch the saltwater. He wouldn’t let them, anyway, and they must obey him, but if they touched the water, if they could, the spray made them scream, cry out, mouths wide, tongues distended. A wave made them crumple, skin sagging and bloated, until it fell apart, obliterated by the blue, leaving a clean, new creature beneath. Sometimes, a seal, wet coat slick, brown eyes still human. Sometimes, a walrus broke through the man’s pelt, growing until it burst apart, revealing tusk and tooth. Sometimes, it was a small, silver fish that would flop helplessly until it reached the water, or did not, lying, rotting, in the sunshine.

  She wasn’t human, Nor. But neither was I.

  “They call you a witch,” she said, smiling, moving facial muscles into a ferocious grin, like a kind of growl. “Are any of the stories true? Do you keep the fish from the bay, so that the people starve? Do you dance in the moonlight? Did you sell your soul?”

  She had not yet asked my name.

  “I am not what you think I am,” I said, and let her into my house, with her wet brown eyes and hands she kept clasped in front of her, skin over knuckles so white, like waves. If I had shut the door, if I had kept her out, she would have remained on my island anyway. He had sent her. We both knew he had sent her. He was dauntless.

  “They call you Meriel,” she said, then, sitting down at the table stiffly. “Is that your name?”

  “It is the name I use, yes.”

  “You hate us.”

  “I do not.”

  “You hate me?”

  A seal’s eyes are innocent, contain no malice, no human anger or rage, and though she showed a human shape now, she was still seal. Her eyes were limpid, wide, when she looked up at me, hands on the table, widespread. They were webbed, too, but only a little. He was getting better.

  “I do not hate you,” I told her. It was not a lie.

  “He hopes that you will reconsider his offer, you know. He is not a bad man. He never was a bad man.”

  “No,” I said.

  I should not have let her in. It was the first of my mistakes.

  “I will come again tomorrow,” she said, and she stood, too sudden, jerky. “I hope that you will reconsider, too, Meriel.” Her voice was soft and lovely, skin smooth, brown, beautiful.

  She held out her hand again, when she departed. I did not take it.

  I watched her as she walked away and down the dirt path. Her hips swung softly, from side to side, the shape of the skirt lying along the curves.

  He had tried everything else, and this was a last resort, we all knew it. Again, he would fail, she would fail.

  But I thought of her that night, hand over my own breast, listening to the crash of the waves against the rock outside my window, seeing the faint flash of silver upon the ceiling, reflection of my finely woven net of spells that kept the fish out of the bay.

  In the morning, I checked the line, standing on the shore, hands extended, feeling the push and pull of the tide and waves as I crawled over every inch of the silver net with my head and heart, testing it and pulling it and mending it where mends were needed, shaping the magic in long lines, crisscrossed, always crisscrossed. The bright sunshine reflected off the water, blinding me, and I did not see her approach in the little boat, did not see her get out and climb the path to me. I felt her, though, felt her when she stepped off the coracle and upon the sand. I rose from my work, and I went to meet her, bright spots along my vision like flashes, outlining her in a riot of color.

  “Good morning, Meriel,” she said, and she curtsied. She moved smoother than the day before, graceful. It did not take them long to get used to the land, to how their new limbs and muscles worked. She seemed almost human now.

  “Good morning, Nor,” I told her.

  “He wishes to ask if you will reconsider today, Meriel. He has said that he will double his offer, if you will cease.”

  “I will not,” I said, and it seemed so laughable, the formalities, how pretty he’d dressed her, how he’d double or triple his offer of gold, of house and land and a hundred thousand things he thought might seduce me. It did not, it would not. I wondered when he would tire.

  The sea was patient. He was patient. But patience could wear thin.

  “Oh,” was what she said, and it was obvious she thought today would be the day when I would smile, nod, agree to his demands. She opened her mouth and shut it, so like a fish, they were always like fish.

  “Go back,” I said, not unkindly. “Tell him ‘never.’ ”

  “He will not accept that, you know,” she lowered her voice, looked over her shoulder, stepped closer. She smelled of salt. “He will send me, every day, Meriel.”

  “As you will,” I said.

  She left.

  •

  I was born on Bound Island. My mother pushed me out, and—that same night—had to tend to the nets. Back then, it was roughly every seven days that breaks would occur, that magic would have to be woven back into the silver strands. Now, it was every day.

  Nothing living could slip through the net and enter the bay. If it did, it would…change. And become his—Galo’s.

  So I tended the nets.

  One night, my mother told me the story of Galo. She banked the fire, drew me close, traced a protective circle in the dirt about our forms. S
he whispered it.

  Long ago, before man or woman or stories, there was the sea. It crashed and roared and boiled, churning life into being. At the center of the sea swam Galo. He was larger than the island, larger than the bay, with four fins that turned into tentacles that turned into legs, and a long, equine nose with teeth as long as oars and sharp as stars. He had been in the sea from the beginning, rising from the muck and mud at the bottom of the world, fully formed. He was the oldest sea god, and the most powerful. Storms came from him, whirlpools followed his hooves that sometimes changed to fins. His heart was black, and he knew only chaos, and everything in the sea feared him mightily.

  Land came, then. And some things from the sea ventured upon it, exchanging their fins for legs, their gills for lungs. Man came into the world and the sea was forsaken. They forgot their origins, forgot their fathers who had crept from the salt, and shook their fists at the water. They built boats and crossed the seas and believed they had conquered the waves.

  Forgotten, Galo slept at the bottom of the world. One day, he awoke and saw how much had changed, saw how man defiled his mother, the sea, saw how there was no reverence in man’s heart for the ocean that had given him life. Galo’s black heart grew even blacker, and he thought and he thought, and he formed a plan.

  He changed his equine form, shed his fins and sharp teeth, and crawled upon the land, now a man with a blacker heart. He shaped a town from mud, and he turned back to the waters and gave a great cry. And out of the ocean crept all manner of creatures: the whales and the fish and the octopus and the shark, and they began to shed their animal forms and become people, too.

  “We will make a great army,” he said to them, “and when we have enough, we will punish the humans for their sacrilege. We will destroy them on land, we will devour them upon the sea, and man will cease to be. The ocean will reign again.”

  The sea people, as one, gave a great shout, and said, “We will obey you, Galo, for you are mighty and strong.” And more creatures began to come from the sea, and more and more, until the beach teemed with people who had shark eyes and whale hearts and dripping hair and tusk teeth.

  But then, the parade of animals stopped. For, at the mouth of the bay, upon our own Bound Island—though it was not known as such, back then—stepped a witch. Your great grandmother, Meriel, for whom you are named. She drew down a star, and from its shimmering bulk, she fashioned something so large, so ludicrous, it stretched across the entire mouth of the bay, both ways.

  She said, “While those of my blood live, Galo, you will never get your creatures. I curse you to remain in the town you have built, trapped and unable to summon the sea to your aid.”

  And, because Galo was small and human and no longer mighty, the curse stuck.

  I sometimes wondered at the audacity of grandmother. The oldest god of the sea took the form of a mortal man, and—in that moment—she wove a net and curse so tightly that he was spellbound by it. Did she ever fear retribution? Did she ever look through the curtains of the tiny cottage at night and watch the people come to the edge of the water, all along the beach of the bay? Did she watch them stand, silent, looking out to the sea they could no longer touch, would never touch again, as long as the curse remained? Galo was cruel. While he must remain in the town he had fashioned, he demanded that all of his creations did, too. The people would stand, at night, along the shore and look out to the sea and mourn its loss. And curse my grandmother.

  And my mother.

  And now me.

  I used to think this was bigger than all of us. My mother would tell me the story of Galo and of my grandmother, and how we must remain, for all time, upon the island. We were the axis for the world, she’d told me, dusting my nose with flour or tossing me into the air. We were important. Though I never believed I was.

  My mother told me, before she died, how she’d seduced my father to the island. How I, too, would have to seduce a man here to keep the lineage going. If the lineage did not continue, the curse would not remain, and the world would end. I must seduce a man. She’d said it so matter-of-factly, hands upon the washboard, drawing the tea towels over the ridges again and again, scrubbing the stains out. I watched her hands go up and down, and felt a remorse like fire rake through my stomach, my heart. I would not seduce a man, and there was no good way to tell my mother this. So I never did.

  The year she died, I brought a woman to the island.

  Marguerite had traveled from a far town by the name of Celena, and she came because I summoned her. I used the same spell that my mother had taught me to bring flour, vegetables, bits of meat to our pantry. We could not leave the island, so we could enchant small things we needed to us. “Never use it for any other reason,” my mother had admonished me. But my mother was dead.

  Marguerite was witty and charming and beautiful—everything I had spun into the spell. When she kissed me, she tasted of strawberries, and when we were together, I saw stars. I thought I loved her. Magic should not be used on mortals, as the old laws went, and though I loved her, and she thought she loved me, it was the threads of the spell and nothing more. She left in a storm and did not look back as she paddled for shore, and I felt the small newness of my heart break that day and never mend.

  My mother had left me the island and a legacy and a stone. The first two were a burden, the last was my saving grace in those first lonely days. It was a plain stone, the size of my palm, and clear. When I stared down and within, it would show me what I wished to see. Not fantasies, but facts, as they happened—real, true life.

  I watched the townsfolk, and I watched Galo in the stone’s depths. If they ever thought an outsider could see them, watched them, they made no movement to indicate it. They moved within the stone like little pictures, stories, lives I could not touch.

  Sometimes, when I was little, I had whisked away my mother’s stone (it did not have a name, nothing in our tiny span of existence of the island had a name. I had a theory that my mother had only named me because it was after my grandmother, her mother, her entire world). I would peer into its depths, and I would ask it for friends. It would show me some of the inhabitants of the bay town, then, would show me the women with hair like tentacles, the men with shark eyes and sharp teeth, and I would wonder why it would show me something so contrary to what I asked it for.

  Over time, over the years, they did become my friends. In a way.

  •

  When Nor left me for the second time, I dusted my hands along my apron pockets, and climbed up and into the lighthouse. The shack along the lighthouse proper, where a lighthouse tender should have lived, had long since disintegrated, crumbling to the ground like any man made thing left too long near the unforgiving kiss of the sea. I had to live in the lighthouse itself now, a solid stone structure that towered up towards the heavens, and wouldn’t disintegrate for as long as I was alive, anyway. That’s all that mattered, then.

  I tugged up the corner of my mattress and took out the comforting stone, shaped like a tiny pillow, able and capable of filling my entire palm with a sense of peace. I pressed its worn curves to my hand and closed my eyes, cleared my mind.

  “Show me Galo,” I whispered to it, and as light spiraled out from the center of the stone, it began to comply with my wish.

  At first, there was always dark shadows spinning out over the stone, and then it focused, as if waters parted.

  Galo had never been a handsome man, not even when I was little, and stole the stone to frighten myself with his visage. He sat at a small table, now, and had his head in his hands. His long, tangled hair—white as the crests of foam—curled around his ears and down and over his back and chest.

  Sometimes, I pitied him.

  There was no sound to accompany these pictures, so when the cottage door opened, when Nor entered to stand behind Galo, I started. Almost tenderly, she stepped forward and touched his shoulder with one fin-long hand.

  He shrugged her off, quickly, said something, pointed. She drew away from
him, mouth downturned, and left the room.

  I put the stone away.

  That night, I gathered my cloak about me, my grandmother’s cloak, much patched and mended, and wandered out of the lighthouse into the star soaked night. I went down to my own, small shore, and stood up on the trunk of a tree that the last storm had washed onto my island. I shielded my eyes against the grinning moon and watched the procession of the townspeople.

  They came from their houses, from their shacks, from their mansions. Sometimes, when my mother told the story of how Galo had made the town, forming it from mud, she would smirk beneath her hand, would say: “He didn’t know what a town was made of, so he shaped the houses to what he’d seen from the water. He didn’t know how they functioned, how they worked, what walls and windows were, and what the sea people were left with was empty hovels and doors that did not open.” But I’d seen the inside of those houses, knew that this part of my mother’s story wasn’t quite right. Perhaps they’d gotten what they needed from other towns, trading fish or stories for chairs and bowls.

  The people came, now, trails of people, men and women, walking stately, jerky, graceless and graceful in turns, down to the edge of the sea in the harbor, a spit of beach as smiling as the moon.

  They gathered in a long line, one after the other, all turned toward me, but not really me. They were looking out to the sea, the ocean that could not embrace or touch them, the water closed off to them.

  They stood, on the sand of the beach, and they did not move. They did not speak. The splash of the waves was silent upon my own little shore, and I watched them, as I did every night. And they watched me.

  The moon shifted overhead, slowly, silently, and I grew tired as a sentinel, and stepped down from the tree trunk. I went back inside, shut and locked the door as I had done a hundred times before, a thousand times, and I went to bed while the sea people stood along the shoreline and stared, unmoving, at an untouchable sea.

  •

  I felt her before she stepped upon my sands this time. It was morning, again I checked the nets, mended the breaks, spun the magic to replace the strings that were too faded, did it all from the edge of the water, eyes closed, hands extended. Her little coracle bumped upon the edge of the sands, and I paused, opened my eyes, turned to take in her small shape as she dragged the boat up onto the beach. She moved like a girl, now, all trace of animal gone. You’d have to know what to look for to see it. I saw it.