This is what I kept as prisoner. This is how I lived my life.
I could not tell Nor these things, these crumpled feelings of rage and despair and pain that ate up my heart from the inside, tiny jaws with sharp teeth eating up all those things that made me Meriel, spitting out replications of my mother instead.
So I sat on the floor, and I twisted the branch in my fingers, and I did not respond. I said not a word.
I heard a scrape of wood against wood, and looked up, just as Nor rose from her chair, sunk down on the floor beside me.
She was too close. She smelled of salt, always soft. She reached across the small divide between us and took up my hand, touched my rough skin with her smooth fingers, held my hand in her own as she drew it close, into her lap.
I stared, unable to move, as she held it tight and close, face hidden by a wave of long, brown hair that swept down and in front of it, concealing her from me as she turned away her face. She was so small, so fragile, as she held my hand in her lap, and the fire crackled, far, far away, as I took in the sea girl’s slight form, the wave of her hair, the arch of her shoulder under the poorly spun gray cloth.
“I have decided,” she said, words so low, I could almost not hear them, “that we are both prisoners, you and I.”
“I’m not…” I said, and stopped myself. Anything I said after that would be a lie. I did many things. But I did not lie.
“Don’t you ever wish…” she whispered, and I could not see her face until she looked up, glanced up at me quickly, wildly, and I saw the tears tracing down her cheeks, leaving a groove of soft, warm silver over her skin. “Don’t you ever wish that it was all over. That things were the way they might have been…if this had never happened?”
I did.
I closed my hand, in her lap, to a fist. She dropped her fingers away from me, I drew back my limb, cradled it close to my chest as if it had been poisoned. I could not look at her. If I looked at her, I would lose my nerve, and I could not lose my nerve.
“You’re trying to get me to say ‘yes.’ It won’t work.”
“That’s not—”
“You’re all alike,” I said, surprised at the words that came tumbling out of my mouth. My mouth, but my mother’s words. “Deceitful. Treacherous. You’re all alike, and I will not yield to you.”
A small part of myself, a lost, lone part, cried out from the dark within me as she rose, quick, jerky, always jerky. I would always be able to tell she’d been an animal. She wasn’t human. She’d never be human.
“What part of you thinks this is right?” she asked me, then, and I could hear the tears in her voice, but dared not look up at her. If I saw them, if I saw her, I would lose my nerve. I could not lose it. “What part of you, Meriel?”
I pointed toward the door, terrified that, if I spoke, I would say the truth.
The old, worn thing crashed against the side of the lighthouse when she slammed it behind her. I waited until I felt her presence leave, entering the coracle and the cold and lonely bay. Then, when I knew she had gone, when there was no trace of her that had possibly remained to be a betrayer of the truth, I whispered it into the air, because I could not keep it inside any longer.
“None of me,” I told the ghost of the sea girl, and sat, hollow, beside the dying fire.
•
That had been too close. I needed to strengthen my resolve, my spells, my promise to my mother.
I had no choice. I must do a Calling.
The amount of energy necessary to do a Calling, the amount of magic I would need to spin, was gargantuan, all gargantuan. And it was the night after the new moon. But I couldn’t think about that. I had no choice. I must.
I gathered bits of dried sea grass along the edge of the beach, the next morning, and I waited for Nor to come. But she did not. I sat along the beginning of the sand, and I twisted the grasses together nervously, and waited and was disappointed when she did not show. Which was sick, a sick reaction, and I knew that. When the sea grasses had been braided together, when I rose and made my way back to the lighthouse without any trace of Nor, I felt relief and pain wash over me in equal waves. It was good that she had not come. And, despite my best intentions, I was sad that she hadn’t.
I built up the fire, laying my braided grasses in a special pattern in the flames. When all was ready, I built the circle about myself with chanted words and gestures, and, when it came, fully formed, I sat in the center of it and waited.
“Grandmother,” I said into the cool calm within the lighthouse. “Come to me.”
She did.
I had only ever spoken to my grandmother once, when my own mother had done a Calling when I was small, for the nets had broken almost beyond her repair, and she had needed counsel. What I remembered from that exchange, from my first time of seeing the woman who was the cause of all of this, was that she was smaller than I had thought she might be. She had been so strong, shouldn’t she have been tall? But no—she was worn, and stooped, and her eyes were rheumy, even in death, like she couldn’t see before her well, or even at all.
She came now, and she had not changed from my memory. She stood, stooped, leaning on the ghost of a cane. I could see through her, see the crackling flames behind her. She cast about, took in the state of the lighthouse, that I was performing the spell here, rather than the nonexistence cottage, and shook her head.
“Why have you summoned me, girl?” My grandmother, always to the point.
“I needed counsel,” I said guardedly, and realized when I spoke those words, that I had absolutely nothing to say to my grandmother. What could I speak? What could I tell her? That my resolve was weakening for this curse because of a beautiful girl?
That was it, wasn’t it? When I closed my eyes, I saw Nor’s face. When I dreamed, I dreamed of her, and when she had not come that morning, I felt a small part of myself shriveling up, growing weak…dying.
My grandmother watched me work my jaw with an impassive face. Perhaps she could not see me and pass her condemnations. I did not know much of the nature of ghosts, but I could only assume that my grandmother had mastered a ghostly existence, much as she had mastered this one.
“Well? Spit it out, girly,” she said at last, not unkindly. I folded my hands in my lap and stared down at my fingers.
“A seal got through the net.”
“It’s bound to happen,” she said wearily, closing her eyes. “Did you kill it?”
“Kill it?” I choked out. I shook my head. “No…” I couldn’t even fathom such a thing. In that small moment, I could not fathom my existence without Nor.
“That’s what you must do, when they enter the bay. Better to die, make a meal for you, then serve Galo, trapped forevermore…that’s not an existence we would wish on our worst enemies.” She spoke to me as she’d spoken to my mother—imperious, like a child sat before her, not a grown woman with her own wants and wishes.
I watched my grandmother hover, for a long moment, and felt nothing but disgust.
“Be gone,” I whispered, and when she opened her mouth, outraged, she vanished. She’d been about to scold me, surely. Call me weak hearted, like she’d called my mother. I remembered that, now.
I put my head in my hands and breathed steadily for several long moments. I was so tired, so unspeakably tired.
A knock at the door.
I sat, frozen, fear moving through my blood like fire. It was impossible—no creature, living or dead, could come upon my island without my knowing of it. I reached out, questing with my head and heart. I felt nothing. But again, there it was—a knock at the door.
I rose, mouth open. I didn’t know what to do.
Again, the knock.
I opened the door.
She stood there, eyes wide and brown and beautiful, staring up at me as if she had never left. Her mouth was in a firm, hard line, and she did not smile at me like before.
“He made me come,” she said quietly, simply, “to ask the question. Will you take his off
er, Meriel?”
“How are you here?” I whispered to her, stared past her to the meadow, to the beach, to her little, bobbing coracle on the sand.
“I…” she wrinkled her brow, did not understand the question. I took her by the wrist then, circled her fair, pale skin with my rough fingers, and drew her inside.
“How did you get here,” I whispered, “without my sensing you?”
She shook her head, her eyes growing wider. “I just came.”
We stared at one another for a long moment, and I knew I was much too close to her, could smell the salt of her, the warmth of her skin that made my belly turn, doing somersaults within me. She leaned against the door and looked up at me through long, thick lashes, pressing her fingers against the wood my grandmother had lashed together to form a gateway I could never escape from.
“You.” I licked my lips, closed my eyes. “You’re making me want you. With magic.”
She sighed, then, breathed out, and I opened my eyes. Her own shone, and I knew there were tears there, watched them fall, tracing lines down her delicate, upturned nose.
“I am not bewitching you. How could I bewitch a witch?” she murmured back. “Maybe this has nothing to do with magic, Meriel.”
“You’re magic,” I told her, and when the words had left my mouth, I knew how true they were, how deeply true. She was magic to me, a sort of beautiful spell that I could not make, could not understand.
She stepped forward. It was tentative, uncertain, when she put her hands up through the space between us, drew them about my neck as if I could be easily broken and she did not wish to break me. She leaned up and against me, and on her tiptoes, she pressed her mouth to mine.
Her lips were salty, her tongue hot and smooth and soft, and I realized my hands were tightly about her waist long after I had placed them there. Heat rushed through me, and I felt my toes upturn, and then I stepped forward, pressing her to me, wrapping my arms about her so tightly, her breath rushed out, and she laughed a little against my mouth, a laugh of delight, high and soft. I wrapped my arms about her, gentle, then, and I pressed my lips against hers, and my tongue against hers, and our teeth clicked against one another. I was graceless, desperate, and when I shoved her against the bulk of the door, picked up her leg, put my hand beneath her bottom, I heard a sound like a whine, a sad, pathetic thing that came from my own lungs. I was starved, and she knew it, and she loved it, for her lips raked my skin, and her tongue trailed down my neck, and her hands were suddenly sharp as her nails raked down my back when I pressed her harder against the wood, fumbling with my fingers, completely unsure of what to do with something so lovely.
“Here,” she said, and she took my hand, closed her fingers around mine, and guided my palm up and along her thigh where her skin was hot and soft and wet. I closed my eyes, and I stopped, in that moment. Every thing I was strained against the pause, crying out, screaming and roaring within me. She stopped, and I heard our breath between us, sharp and short and hard.
“What is it,” she whispered, haltingly, not a question. She knew. I knew.
“I can’t do this,” I told her, and I gritted my teeth, satisfied to feel the pain of it thunder up and through my skull, bringing a red clarity. But I did not move my hand.
“Why can’t you?” she asked, panting against me. She moved her body, then, brought her hips down upon my fingers, brushed her lips against my jaw. “There is no law against this. This does not break the curse. Everything you do remains safe, Meriel. This will not damn you.”
And then, she whispered, “Please.”
When I closed my eyes, I saw my grandmother’s disapproving face, my mother’s weak one, the line of sea creatures along the shore, the way that Galo put his head in his hands every afternoon and remained for hours in despair. When I closed my eyes, I saw my long, lonely years of unchanging monotony, the times that I fell asleep listening to the roar of the sea and the wind and wishing for…I didn’t even know what I wished for, sometimes. Others, I did, a drumming of blood within me that called for something I knew I could never attain. Freedom.
I closed my eyes, and when I did, this all flashed in an instant. And when I opened them, there she was, in front of me, in my arms, bare skin against my hand, eyes wide and beautiful and wild and not the least bit human. She was a monster, I was a monster, and when I bent my head and kissed her again, tasting the salt of an ocean that was prison and home to us both, I forgot everything else but that kiss, but Nor. It didn’t matter, nothing mattered, and when we found the bed, when I pressed down on top of her and in her and for her, our blood rushed at the same pull of tide and shore, and when she cried out, I cried out, the wind that roared and whipped the sea up into a frenzy carried our voices away into the great nothingness of blue.
We were so small, but in that span of moments that turned into hours, I merged into something that did not have a name. I felt, for the first time, the only time, that I mattered.
At dark, she said my name, kissed my neck, bowed beneath me.
I did not know what love felt. I wondered if I knew it, then.
•
She left the bed that night. I woke with the shifting of the thin mattress, watched her in the dark as she gathered up her underthings, her skirt, her blouse, and put them on slowly, letting the fabric drape along her warm skin. She left the cottage without looking back at me, and slowly, stiffly, I followed her.
Nor went down to the edge of the sea, her small form bright beneath the tiniest fragment of moon that hung in the sky, suspended. She came to the shore, and she straightened herself, stood, tall and unbending. I watched the mass of sea creature peoples on the bay’s edge, watched as she looked to them, as they looked to her, as the only sound that roared about us was the sing of water and wind and the howling of an approaching storm.
I walked across the meadows, drawing my nightgown up and over my head, shivering in the cold, but unstoppable. I came, and I stood beside her.
“Why do you do this?” I asked her, then. I didn’t expect an answer. For my entire life, the peoples had stood in silence all night, every night. But she opened her mouth, and she said:
“Because we must.”
I waited for her to continue, but she did not. She did not even look at me. She stared at the water, and she said no more words.
“Why must you, Nor?” I reached out and touched her arm. She did not move beneath my fingers.
“Because we miss it,” she said, and she said it so quietly, I almost did not hear her. Together, we stared at the ocean. I felt myself unraveling.
“I don’t know why I do this anymore,” I said then, gulping down air, rubbing at my face. Now that it was out in the open, I couldn’t take it back. She didn’t move, didn’t stop watching the water. But she sighed.
“We all do what we must,” she said, after so many heartbeats, I had forgotten that there was anything left in the world but the water and the stars and the heartless moon overhead.
In the dark, she moved her hand until it was in mine, curling her fingers about my own.
The unraveling stopped.
•
“It’s been three days,” she whispered, when she kissed me. “I can feel him. He’s calling me back.”
“Don’t go,” I whispered, swallowed, felt my heart breaking. “Please don’t go.”
“I must obey his summons,” she said, and traced her fingers along my collarbones, down my ribs, over my hips. I shivered and moved closer to her, pillowing my head over her heart.
“When will you be back?” I asked her, curling my fingers about her waist, feeling her pulse beat beneath my skin.
“Soon.” She kissed my eyes, my nose, my mouth, my heart. Nor rose then, dressed, left the cottage. I lay on the mattress, crippled, unable to breath. I had not felt her come upon the island because she was part of it, now. I knew that. But when she left, I felt myself leaving, felt some small piece of me remove itself, launching out upon the waters and away from my flesh and bon
es. I felt her go, and I felt myself breaking, and I did not know what to do for the longest moment of my life.
I had not tended the nets for three days. I remembered that, as I lay, breathing, and I rose, felt my bones creaking. I raked my fingers through my hair, put on a clean shift, climbed out of bed.
The nets had about twenty small breaks, but nothing substantial or terrible. I stared for a very long time, trying to wrap my head around what I was supposed to do. I remembered, but it took too long, and I was frustrated as I began to mend the nets. Angry. I did not want to do this thing, this chore. I hated it, I hated it passionately, deeply, and as the first mend began to repair, I broke away from the energies and spells, felt them ricochet about and finally lodge in a small boulder at the edge of the water.
Disgusted, I turned away and went back inside.
“Show me Nor,” I whispered to the small stone. I knelt beside the bed, and I held it in my hands, and I waited.
She was in Galo’s house, and she sat beside him. He lay on the thick carpet before the empty fireplace, and I stared in horror. The old man wept, wept piteously, burying his face in her lap as she stroked his hair and stared ahead, eyes and face completely blank.
She wept, too, silver tears tracing down a face that had been meant for them.
I threw the stone away from me, heard it breaking as it hit the lighthouse wall, shattering into tiny pieces that could never be patched back together. I breathed out and put my face in my hands, and I felt my body shaking.
“I don’t know what to do,” I wailed, and it came out broken, disjointed, taken up by the wind that whistled through the open door, and carried out and away from me, over the open sea. “I don’t know what to do,” I whispered, then, and I kept the words close to me, whirling about me as I stood, as I hugged myself, as I paced the floor of the lighthouse over and over and over again, feeling the familiar wood against my bare feet, feeling the grooves I knew by heart beneath my toes, and then my knees when I knelt down again beside my bed, pressed my fingers to the sheets, to the threadbare blanket that had covered us both.
If I left.
Heiresses of Russ 2013 Page 20