Heiresses of Russ 2013 Page 19

  “Hello,” said Nor, coming to greet me, smiling shyly, hand extended. Today, I took it, felt the smooth, perfumed skin brush against my calluses and too-rough fingers. She held my hand a bit too long, and dropped it awkwardly. Still not human enough.

  “Today…” she began, but I shook my head.

  “No,” I told her, as I would always tell her.

  She nodded, still smiling, as if she’d expected my answer. “Is it all right if I sup with you? I brought lunch…”

  I opened and shut my mouth and nodded. What could I say? It was an almost free island.

  It was a quiche, with bits of seaweed sprinkled throughout, giving it a delicious, albeit fishy, aftertaste. I wrinkled my nose from time to time, but ate my portion without saying anything, staring down at my hands and small, china plate, and not up and across at my visitor who ate her quiche with a knife and fork and had folded her napkin upon her lap.

  “Are you ever lonely?” she asked. I shook my head.

  “You’re brave,” she said. “I would be.”

  I shook my head again. I wasn’t brave.

  She leaned back in her chair, took in the roundness of the lighthouse, the scrubbed cupboards, the neatly made husk bed at the furthest swell, opposite the table. She got up, ran her fingers along the wood and stone, circled the room as I watched her from hooded eyes, nervous. Would her touch leave a linger of her perfume? It was not unpleasant, but it was different, and I did not like different things.

  “You live here, all alone?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “Did you grow up alone?”

  I sighed. “I grew up with my mother. She died when I was fifteen.”

  “Was that hard?” She sat across from me with her wide, brown eyes, and I knew it was not a joke of a question, but a genuine one. She was genuinely curious.

  I cleared my throat. “In some ways. In others, no.”

  This seemed to satisfy her, for she stood and gathered her things in her small, plain basket, brushing her fingers over mine when she reached to take my plate. I shuddered, but she seemed not to notice, and she smiled at me when I rose.

  “It was lovely to talk to you. You are not a bad witch. I have decided it.”

  I was too stunned to say a reply until after she had left, withdrawing out of my old, worn door, the memory of her scent remaining in the small space. It was not too different.

  What I said after her was: “Thank you.”

  •

  “Show me Nor,” I whispered to the stone, pressing my hands together. When I looked down at the stone, held between them, it showed a muddy, distorted image and then there she was.

  She was laughing, throwing back her head and laughing at something a tall, thin man said, bending down almost double at the waist to whisper a word in her tiny, shell-shaped ear.

  She was surrounded by people, and they stood in Galo’s house, the largest of them all in the town. There were tapestries along the wall, and thick carpets along the floor, and I had never once felt sorry for him in all that finery.

  He came striding down the staircase now. He was dressed in too loose pants, and a dirty white shirt. His hair rose up and about his head like a creature, in and of itself, and he said something to Nor, who sighed and shook her head, but did not look the least bit afraid. I wondered if I would be afraid, confronted by that angry of an elder, with hair that moved as if alive, with teeth sharper than the shark men. He said something else, and the people backed away from Nor, but she shook her head again, folded her arms.

  He turned and stood along the far wall, looking through a window. I could see the view through that window, knew it looked out upon the bay, and, past that, to my own island.

  I covered the stone with my hands and put it away.

  I drew water from the magicked well and washed my face in it. It was so cold, I shuddered, put my hands upon the well rim, stood for a long moment, letting the waves of chill pass through and away from me. The salt breeze was blowing from the north today, and my mother had often told omens by the wind’s direction. North was ill tidings, always ill tidings, she’d whispered to me so many times, spinning the circle about herself as if it could protect her.

  Nor came a second time that day, so my mother might have been right.

  “I brought you dinner,” she explained, not even greeting me, but brushing past me where I stood on the hillock before the shore, staring at her, open mouthed. “Do you like biscuits? I brought you biscuits, and a good, fish gravy.”

  “My answer is still ‘no,’ ” I told her, following after her, pressing my hands together to keep my fingers from shaking. “I will not ever answer his demands with a ‘yes.’ ”

  “And I did not ask you, did I?” She looked up from setting my tiny, meager table, and her eyes were flashing, and her wide smile turned her lips up at the corners, almost teasing.

  “Why else would you have come?” I asked her, voice quiet.

  “To keep you company,” she replied, and spread a bright red and white checked cloth over the table. It hid the cracks and the well scrubbed surface, and made it almost cheerful.

  “Come, sup with me,” she said, then.

  And I did.

  •

  That night, when I walked out to the shore, and my tree trunk, and my vigil, thoughts chased each other in my head, and I almost tripped, climbing up the bark to stand at my usual, well-worn place.

  The dinner had been very good.

  I shielded my eyes against the almost new moon, even though it shed too little light to really obscure my vision. I watched the processional of the sea peoples out of their houses and hovels, making their own well-worn ways down to the shore of the sea. They stood, one beside the other, stretching all the way around the bay, and they raised up their faces to the scent of the surf, and the stars, and they trained their eyes to the deep blue waters, and they did not move, they did not speak, they did nothing but stare with a longing I could almost understand.

  This was the first night I saw Nor among them.

  I looked for her tonight, doing my best to see far away shapes—I was too far for faces. I felt Galo’s presence to the center of the line, and there was Nor, beside him on the right. I don’t know how I knew her, but I did, and she stood, just as still and silent as her brothers and sisters, which surprised me, and I didn’t really know why. I supposed I had expected her to be different from the others, for she was already different to me than all the others.

  I dreaded the new moon. Tomorrow.

  I did not sleep that night. I tossed and I turned, and—once or twice—I rose to peek out of my curtained window. The threadbare cloth did little to block the light during the day, or even during the night if the moon was bright, but it made me feel secure in the fact that—no matter what—the lighthouse was secure to the nighttime attentions and gazes of the sea people. I didn’t know what I was afraid of, or why my skin crawled sometimes, and not others, when they made their nightly line and watched the ocean. My mother’s stories were loud in my head that night, though, and I remembered how she said they waited and watched for weakness, waiting to destroy me so that they could be free.

  I was exhausted by morning.

  “You do not look well,” said Nor when she arrived, when she dragged her coracle up on the shore, met me at the edge of the grass and the sand. I sat, tiredly, my head in my hands, and when she bent down beside, I did not even move farther away from her, though she sat much too close, the warmth of her body hot against my leg.

  I did not answer her, and when I gave no answer, she handed me an apple, sun ripe and hard, and a piece of thick, crumbly bread.

  “Breakfast,” she said, and did not look at me, but rather, back the way she had come, toward the town. I ate in silence.

  With her hands clasped in her lap, her hair disheveled and tossed in whichever direction the wind teased it, she looked calm and content, though wild. I envied the townspeople sometimes, and felt shame for that envy. She was prisone
r to an old, forgotten god, kept from her home, probably never to see it again, and yet—the way she sat, poised, calm, clear like a full moon night, she looked much happier than I, the witch who contained them all, the jailer with the key.

  I could not finish my breakfast, dropped the half eaten piece of bread to the ground as I rose. An angry gull swooped in, audacious enough to land beside Nor, and scooped it up and down into his gullet before either of us could protest. He took off with great sweeps of his wings, and flew out to sea.

  “They are despicable, vermin,” I spat out, realizing from some far, removed place, that my mother had said the exact same thing, in the exact same voice, once.

  “He was only hungry,” said Nor, upturning her eyes to me, face drawn.

  She left without asking the question.

  •

  Even though the moon was new, I could sense where it hung in the sky, suspended and ponderous, out of reach and dark to us. I shivered within my cloak, even though the breeze was warm, and drew it closer about myself, as if I could bind safety to me with its worn, patched fabric. It smelled of seaweed and salt, fish and sweat, and it smelled like my grandmother and my mother, and I suppose that, now, it smelled of me. In that line, there was nothing that differentiated my scent from that of my mother’s or my grandmother’s, and that—for some reason—filled my heart with alarm. I was already nervous from the moon’s dark ascension in the sky, and when I climbed the tree trunk, waiting for the procession, my heart beat a rhythm that the waves could not drown.

  The moon affected my powers, but never so strongly than the new and full nights. On the full moon, I was drunk from the energies. The shining nets, suspended underwater, glowed so brightly that the entire bay shone from it. But on the new…

  No living creature got past the nets. Save for on a new moon night.

  Nor had come on the last new moon.

  I rubbed my eyes tiredly, remembered the night, a month past, clear as glass, like a moment ago. I slept badly on the nights leading up to the new moon, tossing and turning as I thought how best to keep my lineage’s oath, how best to thwart Galo’s plans. But the more I thought, the more I worried—the more I worried, the worse I slept. And then, the night came, and I was exhausted and nervous and shaky, and absolutely terrified that I would be the disappointment of a line of women who had given their lives to a curse.

  I didn’t want to be a disappointment. I did my best. Sometimes, I failed in that. Like last month.

  It had been such a cold, black night. A storm had kicked up during the afternoon, and when I came out to keep my vigil, the driving rain lanced down slantwise, and I could not see, save for the breaking waves, and a slowly creeping mist that hung suspended over the water.

  The seal bolted through the net. I know that much, but not how. She might have gotten spooked in the water—maybe a shark chased her. But, however she did it, she came through, slicing through the silver strands of the net, and I crumpled when she did, for the net was tied to me like all other parts of the island. When she broke it, I cried out from the pain, hand over my heart, falling to my knees in the roar and rush of the gale. I could feel her, the seal, darting through the bay toward the shore, and I knew that Galo called her. I did my best, in that biting rain, to repair the break, and I mourned the fact that yet another sea creature had lost its freedom.

  My mother had told me that Galo called to the sea always, and that all of its creatures wanted nothing more than to please him and answer that call. That’s why it was so important to maintain vigilance, to never falter, to repair the nets whenever there was the slightest break. Every new creature that rose from the seas to be transformed by Galo was another nail in the coffin of humanity—a fact my mother told me, day in and day out. What she didn’t say, but what was understood, was that every creature that got through the net was our failing.

  Now, it was another new moon. I had never let a creature through, had never faltered enough to truly fail, until Nor, but it had been a great failing. Galo was using her to get to me. I knew it. I scrubbed at my face, tried to peer through the mist.

  Sometimes, I dreamed of what Galo must have been like before he assumed his human shape. The stories my mother had told me to frighten me were always fresh in my mind, dripping with dark water, clouding the bright days. I scrubbed at my eyes again and climbed the tree trunk. My skin rose in pimples, and I was chilled, strung taut, like a bow, and twice as tight.

  Galo called the sea creatures—he always called to the sea creatures. I glanced uneasily over my shoulder at the dark night, and the ever present shush of the waves on the side of the island that looked out to the sea. They battered the rocks there, day and night, the rocks that held up my lighthouse.

  What if…what if Galo ever called up a monster? What if Galo called up something so gargantuan, so sinister, that no amount of magic could combat him, no net could keep him out? What if the lighthouse, a massive structure, was dwarfed by his great bulk…what if he blocked out the stars…

  I started so violently that I almost fell off of the tree when a loud splash sounded ahead of me in the mist. Fish often leapt up, sometimes dolphins came nosing around the bay, but my imagination traced dark grooves back to my worries and fears, and the hair along my neck rose, and I felt myself quake.

  I had been alone for so long that I never thought about what it was to be with someone, that solidity of companionship that I would have, in that moment, given my heart for.

  That’s when I heard it.

  Soft, small splashes came across the water, sounding loud and echoed in the misty stillness. Oars. A boat. Someone came from the town, at night, on a boat. This had never happened before.

  The sea peoples, since the curse began, came together, at night, along the beach. They formed a silent line, and—together—they watched the ocean. All night. Every night. This had never changed, had never wavered, was as dependable as the seasons spinning on or the moon waxing and waning. I climbed down from the tree, filled with dread. My mother had taught me that changes were never good. I had always believed her.

  The coracle was small and shadowed in the wake of the mist, and when it nosed up and onto my shore, I stared. Nor, small and sleek, leapt out of the boat, careful to keep her feet from the lapping waves, and dragged her small craft up further onto the sands.

  “Hello,” she said, quietly, staring up at me, eyes unblinking. “Good evening.”

  “What…” I said, and licked my lips, cleared my throat. I carefully folded my arms over my chest. “What are you doing here?”

  She shrugged her shoulders, and—in the darkness—I could not see her expression. “I have been here a month.”

  I watched her.

  “Don’t you ever want this to stop?” she whispered.

  I was so surprised by the question. I stood, and I opened and closed my mouth, and knew that there was no good answer to give her. Yes, I wanted it to stop. Every day, I wanted it to stop, I wanted it to be over. Sometimes, I thought about what it might be like if I’d been born to another mother, if I had not been raised on an island to nurse a curse that was not my own. Sometimes, I watched the seagulls and felt a welling of desire in me so fierce that it burned through me like a fire, a tongue of flame that licked my skin and spoke a single, sibilant word in my ear, over and over and over again:

  Freedom.

  She had not moved, but simply watched me, standing, hands clasped and folded before her, on the sands of my small, lonely spit of beach.

  “What are you doing to me,” I asked her. My voice cracked.

  “Nothing,” she said, tiredly. I believed her.

  I felt paralyzed. Should I invite her in? It was so cold, so wet out here in the dark and the mist. She had come all this way, and she hadn’t said why, but there she stood, on my beach, hands clasped, small mouth closed, wide eyes searching mine. I stepped aside, held out one hand, pointing to my lighthouse.

  “Come,” I told her, and ushered us both inside.

 
; The night held a new tone, a new sensation as she hung up her cloak over my cloak upon the peg, drawing out the chair she usually sat in, taking off her wet gloves. There was no fire in the grate because I had already banked it, but I set about asking it to wake up with a few bits of sea grass, and a liberal push of magic.

  “Do you use magic for everything?” she asked me, voice soft in the quiet of the lighthouse. I nodded, didn’t look at her.

  “I use it a lot.” I fed the fire another handful of grass.

  “You are what keeps the nets going.” It was not a question.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  I sat down upon the ground, turning a twig over and over in my hands. I had never touched a tree, often felt base wonder when I brought a load of wood to my island. I liked to feel the bark, tracing my fingers along the branches, the knots and whorls of the wood that would feed my fire. I could feel how it had been alive, if children had played beneath it, if it had been too small, when cut, if it had cried out on a level no human could hear. A witch wasn’t human. I felt certain, every time I touched a twig, that I would have heard the tree scream, if I had felled it.

  I didn’t know how to answer her question, felt broken as I tried to think of an answer, of any response. I didn’t know why I kept up the curse that had been my grandmother’s business, why I had listened to my mother’s stories with anything other than a healthy dose of skepticism. But I had listened to them. I had believed her, that we were the last wall of goodness between a monster and the annihilation of the human race.

  Sometimes, when I saw Galo in my stone, I laughed, put my hand over my mouth, held back a sob. He looked old, worn, tired—as far from a monster as I could have imagined.