by Grace Draven
He set down his cup and captured his wife’s hand. “Sit down, beauty.”
Zigana smiled at the endearment, even as Frishi plopped into the chair adjacent to Odon’s with bad grace. Her mother wore the lines of age and hard, daily labor. Gray streaked the braid pinned at the back of her head, and her hands were red and rough. Still, Odon saw her as she had been when they first married—young, lively and beautiful enough to catch Lord Boda’s eye.
“Ziga’s a woman grown, and she handled herself well last night. Have faith she’ll continue on as she has. Her water-sight is true, truer than mine. If she thinks it’s safe to trawl, I trust her word and her gift.” His gaze hardened when he turned his gaze to Zigana. “Next time, you rouse me from bed, even if you have to put a torch to my feet. Understand?”
“Yes, Papa.” The underlying tone of his voice warned she would never be too old to turn over his knee for a swat if she scared him like that again.
Frishi harrumphed her displeasure but stopped haranguing Zigana, preferring to sulk and put her back to both her and Odon.
“We have to tell the council today, Papa.”
He nodded. “I’ll go to them this morning once the chores are finished. I can get Elek’s oldest to take Voreg out with you and Gitta. Elek will be grateful for half of whatever Voreg hauls in as payment.”
A sudden thought occurred to Zigana, and she rubbed her face, groaning. “I almost forgot. Jolen’s daughter is visiting the beach today with her father. I’ve promised she can have a ride on Gitta after I trawl.”
“Are you sure that’s safe?” Frishi scowled, snapping the dish towel she held at a pesky fly. “With the way Gitta acted last night, can you trust her?”
Zigana bristled. “Unless young Tunde Frantisek is a sea monster in disguise, I don’t think we have anything to worry about, Mama.”
“But this is Lord Boda’s grandchild.”
“And Gitta is Gitta. Besides, Tunde won’t be in the saddle alone; I’ll be with her.”
Odon rose from the table. “You should tell his lordship what happened when he’s there.”
“Agreed. Something like this shouldn’t be kept from him. Even if he’s a stranger among us, he’s also the lord in residence at Banat. He has a right to know.” Zigana didn’t say it, but she’d bet a fat purse that once she told Frantisek about the creature, he’d pack up his wife and his daughter and ride out of Banat before sundown. And she wouldn’t blame him in the least.
She loaded her cart as usual, helped Elek’s son harness Voreg and set off for the beach with Frishi’s admonishments not to do anything foolish echoing in her ears. The waters under her hand revealed their secrets to her as before, bearing remnants of the sea spider’s nightly hunt but nothing else. They trawled as they always did, and Gitta exhibited no hint of her aggression from the previous night.
Zigana had almost not bothered with the blinders on the harness this morning. Used to shield a horse’s eyes and keep them focused on their task without being startled by every movement around them, they seemed superfluous now after Gitta decided to challenge a sea monster and only fled because of her mistress’s terrified pleas. But anything different incited questions, and Zigana didn’t want to answer a cartload of them before the council called a meeting.
During their break after the first trawl, she spotted Andras Frantisek striding toward her on foot. She had expected him to arrive on horseback. Instead, he was the horse. A small child perched on his wide shoulders, grasping his hair and drumming her heels into his chest. He flinched at one hard pull as she commanded him to “Go faster, horse!”
The shrimpers spread along the beach bowed as he passed, some grinning at the child’s antics, others following their progress with raised eyebrows. None were used to seeing one of the nobility strolling along the beach, especially in such a fashion.
The little girl fell silent as they passed the first trawler horse, her lips pursed in an “o” of amazement. Andras reached Zigana where she waited next to Gitta, his memorable face wreathed in the devastating smile that had stolen her ability to speak the previous day.
“Fair morning, Mistress Imre. I’ve brought a companion.” He winced a second time as his rider yanked a lock of his hair to rein him to a stop. “A demanding one.”
Zigana bowed and offered a smile of her own. “My lord. Is this your daughter?”
He swung the girl off his shoulders where she immediately skirted behind his long legs to peer up at the snoozing Gitta. Andras tugged her in front of him. “Tunde, your greeting.”
Tunde dragged her gaze from the giant horse to Zigana. Woman and child stared at one another before Tunde tilted her head and said “You look like my mother.”
Zigana crouched in front of her. “That is a fine compliment, indeed, my lady, for I think she is the most beautiful woman in the world.” She glanced at Andras, whose face had taken on a guarded expression, before returning to Tunde. “And you look like both your parents. A very pretty girl.”
She didn’t lie. Tunde was pretty, a combination of good looks inherited from both parents. She had her mother’s lighter hair and arched eyebrows, and her father’s gray eyes as well as the high cheekbones hinted at under the baby fat.
Tunde inclined her head, the formality of her response at odds with her high, childish voice. “My thanks, mistress.”
Zigana chortled. “You can call me Ziga, my lady. Your mother does.” She gestured to the mare. “This is Gitta. My best trawler and dearest friend. Would you like to pet her?” Tunde shrank back against her father’s legs, intimidated by Gitta’s size. “It’s all right,” Zigana reassured her. “She’s gentle as a lamb.” If one didn’t count last night. She kept that thought to herself.
Gitta held still as Tunde’s small hands patted her legs. She even lowered her head so the girl could reach her nose and the salt-matted forelock between her ears. Andras joined her daughter, instructing her on where a horse liked to be scratched and warning her to keep an eye on Gitta’s feet. Zigana kept her hand against the mare’s shoulder, sensitive to the flex and quiver of every muscle.
They would have continued like that for the next hour if Zigana didn’t have work to do. “I have to trawl now,” she told a disappointed Tunde. “But you can watch from the shore or help Vencel there sort the rest of the shrimp from the crab and fish.” She gestured to the boy, a few years older than Tunde, bent over a cluster of baskets and harassed by a gang of gulls.
Tunde’s eyes lit up before they clouded again. “But I want to ride Gitta!”
Zigana looked to Andras. “If you’ve no objections, Tunde can ride with me along the beach when I’ve finished my haul.”
“Why can’t I ride Gitta now?” Tunde’s lower lip pushed out, and she scowled at her father. The expression reminded Zigana so much of an indignant Jolen, she had to bite her own lip to keep from laughing aloud.
She took Tunde’s hand and guided it along Gitta’s side. “See how big Gitta is?” The girl nodded. “She’s strong too; one of the strongest horses I know. Even her name means ‘strong,’ and she uses that strength to drag the nets through the waves. It’s hard work. The sea is powerful, and the waves push against her so hard that she needs all her strength to push back. The more people we put on her back, the harder it becomes for her.”
The child listened, wide-eyed and without further protest. The well-being of big Gitta was far more important than satisfying the wishes of adults. “I’ll go sort fishes,” she said and scampered away toward Vencel.
Andras’s soft laughter caressed the air between them. “Well done, Mistress Imre.”
She shrugged and avoided looking at him. What about this man did Jolen despise so much? And had it always been this way, or did she love him once only to have that love sour?
“I have no objections,” he continued. “She’ll enjoy it. Tunde is used to being on horseback, though Gitta will be the first like her that she’s ever ridden.”
He volunteered to help her reset the nets
and boards, his movements quick and efficient. In no time, she was back in the water with Gitta.
Her second trawl was as uneventful as the first, for which she was grateful. She split her attention between searching the sand bottom for depressions so she could guide Gitta around them and watching her sister’s child throw crabs to gulls or show her father a particular fish from the basket she helped sort. Sometimes she felt Andras’s gaze on her and Gitta as they trawled the shallows.
He hadn’t told Tunde the reason why Zigana looked so much like her mother or that the two were sisters, and Zigana had held her silence as well. It would have done nothing but confuse the girl and make her wonder how the sun-browned peasant woman in an old frock and bare feet could possibly be her aunt. When she was older, she’d make the connection—if she even remembered Zigana and her big gray sea mare.
When she returned, Andras was in conversation with one of the other trawlers while Tunde played chase games with some of the village children who had come to the beach. He left the conversation and gathered his daughter to bring her to Zigana.
The girl’s hair was windblown and tangled, and a stray crab claw was stuck to a fold of her skirt. She’d lost her shoes somewhere on the beach, and sand coated her shins in a gritty layer. She clapped her hands, eyes bright with excitement. “I can ride Gitta now!”
Zigana raised a staying hand. “Not yet. We’ve more sorting to do, and if you help me, it will go fast. Then we ride.”
“I’ll help as well. Just tell me what needs to be done,” Andras said as he pushed the sleeves of his shirt up past the elbows. Zigana showed them how to unhook the net, clear it of the catch and sort and sieve the shrimp from the other catch. When they finished, she delivered the catch to Elek’s son who had trawled with Voreg while Odon met with the council.
“Payment,” she told him. “And give our regards to your family.”
He thanked her and promised to brush down Voreg and set up her feed and water when they returned to the barn.
Zigana returned to her guests. “Now we ride,” she announced to Tunde and laughed when the little girl cheered.
“Find your shoes first,” Andras instructed. Tunde raced away to hunt for her abandoned footwear. He watched her as he spoke to Zigana. “Thank you,” he said. “You’ve given her the gift of free childhood.”
Zigana titled her head, puzzled by the remark. “What do you mean?”
He sighed, and the faint droop to his broad shoulders hinted at a weariness that went beyond the physical. “Jolen takes her role as Lady Frantisek very seriously and wants Tunde to do the same. She doesn’t approve of Tunde spending her day playing on the beach instead of attending to her lessons with her tutors or dance instructors.”
Zigana’s eyes rounded, remembering just the day before when Jolen rode behind her as they trawled and sang sea shanties at the top of her lungs. The woman she knew as her sister embraced the carefree times she spent on the shore. The Jolen Andras spoke of was a stranger to her, and obviously the one she was familiar with was a stranger to him.
“I’m glad Tunde has enjoyed herself so far,” she said, careful to avoid asking for anymore clarification. “Though I will have made life hard for you this evening.”
His gaze swept to her for a brief moment. “How so?”
“You and Tunde reek of fish. Jolen will never forgive me for it.”
He laughed, the sound carrying down the beach to where Tunde sat to put on her shoes. She waved to her father who waved back. “Jolen will tear a strip off me anyway when I return. Fish smell will just give her a ready excuse to do it, so put your mind at ease.”
Tunde dashed back to them, shoes loosely tied and encrusted with sand. “I’m ready,” she proclaimed.
Zigana mounted Gitta first and slid back against the saddle’s cantle to allow room for Tunde in front of her. Andras lifted the little girl and set her into the seat. “Ready?” Zigana asked.
“Ready!” Tunde’s voice quivered with excitement.
Zigana clicked, and Gitta set off, slipping into the same rolling gait she used when they plowed through the water. They traveled a short length of beach before Zigana coaxed the mare into a trot, then a canter. Tunde laughed and cried out “Faster, faster!” They rode back to the waiting Andras, at full gallop, slowing gradually as they drew closer until Gitta lumbered to a stop.
Andras helped his daughter off the mare. “What do you think, Tunde? Is it like riding a giant?”
She giggled. “I like Gitta much better than your horse, Papa.”
He put a hand to his chest as if the words pained him. “Bui runs much faster than Gitta.”
“But he isn’t nearly as strong,” she argued.
Andras chuckled and grinned at Zigana. “Your horse has found a champion.”
Zigana dismounted and patted Gitta’s neck. “She is stronger than those high-spirited horses you keep stabled at the castle.”
“True,” he agreed, that weighty gaze resting on her face. “And she’s unique. A child of earth at home in the sea.”
His words sent invisible sparks over her skin. They were innocent enough, a compliment to Gitta, yet Zigana sensed he spoke of more than the mare. The heat of a blush crawled up her neck and she bent to Tunde. “Why don’t you look for a few shells to bring home for your mother?” Tunde liked the idea and immediately set off to scour the beach for treasure.
Her blush was gone when she motioned for Andras to walk with her a little ways back from Tunde. “My father and I feel you should know about this since you are now the residing lord at Banat.”
A thin frown line appeared between his eyebrows. “Go on.”
“He’s meeting with the village council now. They’ll likely request an audience with you later to give you the same information. We’ve a monster prowling these waters at night, and it’s already killed one of our own.”
She described the events of the past three days. Solyom’s death, her own experience with the creature and Gitta’s reaction to it.
“No one knows what it is,” she said, “but I think the noise it makes births nightmares and despair. A terrible sorrow that sends people willingly to their deaths. Those grieving over a loss of a loved one are even more vulnerable. The thing doesn’t even have to try hard then.”
“I’ve never seen one myself, but the deep water ship captains call such a creature an obluda,” Andras said with a scowl.
Zigana stopped in her tracks to gape at him. “You know what this thing is?”
He halted as well and shook his head. “I’m not a sailor, but my brother was. He was first mate aboard one of the great ships that sail the black waters where the ocean has no floor and the leviathans sleep.” He stared over her shoulder at the Gray. “My brother said there were things that crawled on the tops of the waves, like you described. Big heads and skeletal bodies, like deformed men starved of food, with fish faces.”
“And teeth,” she added.
“A great number of them,” he agreed.
“How do we kill it?”
He lifted his hands in a questioning gesture. “I wish I could tell you. What little knowledge I have of them came from my brother.”
Zigana tapped her lip with a finger, thinking. “Maybe a net to capture it. We could drag it ashore. It might be like any other fish and not survive away from the water long.” Or they could beat the obluda to death. The violence of it made her cringe inside until she remembered the thing’s furious wailing and the maw full of teeth, the fleeting images of Solyom ripped apart in the surf by a thrashing of claws and bony hands. And if Gitta hated it, that was good enough for her to lose any sympathy for it.
Andras whistled to Tunde and waved her back to them. “We have to return home. Tell your council to come to me once they’ve concluded their meeting with the village. I’ll help if I can.”
She bowed. “Thank you, my lord.”
He cocked his head to the side, his mouth curving upward on one side. “You will consider calling me Andr
as in the future, and I will call you Ziga? We’re family now.”
The offer, made in the spirit of generosity by a man blind to her bastardy, shocked her. Zigana almost said yes. Almost. She shook her head, regretting her words before she even spoke them. “No, my lord,” she said. “We are not.”
There were barriers to maintain, and not just those of birth and class. Even more so now when she felt drawn to a man so forbidden to her, she might well have set her sights on the king himself.
A mask fell over his face at her rejection of his overture, the same one he wore when they first met. He bowed stiffly, and his voice was indifferent instead of warm. “As you wish, Mistress Imre.”
Tunde’s return halted any further conversation in that vein. “What is it, Papa?”
He patted her head. “It’s time to go. Your nurse is probably worried. Your mother as well.”
She pouted. “Do we have to?”
“Yes.”
She huffed out a dramatic sigh before giving Zigana a wide grin. “It was fun, Ziga! Can we do it again another day?”
Zigana glanced at Andras who looked past her to the sea’s horizon. “If your parents agree to it, then yes.”
“What about tomorrow?”
Andras did meet her eye then, and she knew he was thinking the same as she. They had to get rid of the obluda first. “That’s too soon, Tunde. Mistress Imre and Gitta have tasks to attend. We’ll come back another day soon. Do you want to ride home on my shoulders?”
“No, I want to walk.”
He took her hand to lead her back to the castle. “Our thanks for today, Mistress Imre,” he told Zigana in that cool, uninflected voice.
She bowed, sad that the brief camaraderie they discovered was gone. “My lord. My lady,” she said softly.
Tunde shook off her father’s hand and skipped ahead, pivoting to wave. “Goodbye, Ziga!” she called out before sprinting off, blithely ignoring Andras’s command to slow down.