‘Kat, it’s–’
‘He should be waiting for me on the Placid Shore, not lost out there afraid and alone. Don’t you see? He’ll come back to me, one way or another. The sea will give him up. And when it does, I’ll be waiting right here for him.’
Radomir gave an exasperated sigh. He turned to the path again.
‘You’re too sensitive for this place. Always dreaming… I remember when we cut your first sealskin, you cried like a baby! I thought Borys would keep your feet on the ground, but the two of you were more wrapped up in each other than anyone I’ve ever met.’ He smiled sadly. ‘I’m headman of the village, Kat, I’ve got to make the effort. People are getting restless. Sympathy’s a shallow well, and I think you’ve drawn as much of it as you’re going to get.’
‘I don’t care about their sympathy. They can think what they like.’
He dismissed her with a wave, but before he disappeared back down the slope he turned and said in a low, uncertain voice: ‘This isn’t the kind of night to be out, Katalina, take it from an old man like me. Don’t stay out much longer, please. It isn’t safe…’
Before she left, she paused to read the names on the gravestones, as she did every night. Aleksander Cuffe, Eryk Olsein, Selton Harred. Some of the names were too worn to read, no more than dimpled suggestions in the stone. She ran her fingers over them, wondering if those names now lived upon the Placid Shore, far across the ocean, where the sea was always gentle and kind. Perhaps the very motion of her fingertips over the forgotten letters brought back a spark of memory inside a distant soul?
When the wind died down she headed back to the village. The low dwellings clustered like barnacles against the shore. The guarding totems on the beach gave a last sad clatter, their poles decorated with bloodshark skulls and carved ivory; apotropaic scrimshaw to keep the daemons at bay. The water shushed and rattled across the stones. She paused awhile amongst the dunes to listen to it, this endless music that underlay all life in the village. Some nights she had lain out here with Borys, serenaded by that sound. Now there was only a long and empty evening ahead of her; the meagre fire in the grate, the pile of stinking nets she still had to repair – for even widows have to earn their keep. Home, she thought. It was a bitter image.
She heard it then: a noise in the dark.
She clutched a fold of her sealskin. Silence, nothing but the sea.
Her fingers fluttered to the bone charm around her wrist. After a sour moment it came again – low and strangled, burbling across the night. Her stomach was a shard of ice.
‘Who’s there?’
A skittering against the stones.
Crabs, she thought, picking through the surf. A seal, maybe, wounded and waiting to die. Something was out there…
A sudden, twisted scream lanced out of the dark, and before Katalina could think what she was doing she had flung herself onto the ground, the breath ragged in her chest. The scream came again, agonised, fainter. It clawed against her skin.
She peered through the dry grass. The sound came now as an awful, huffing wail, like a tortured animal, and it was this thought that finally put steel into her nerves. It took all of her courage, courage she thought she had lost the day they came to tell her Borys’ boat was gone, but slowly she stood and stepped onto the shore. If something was hurt out there, then surely it didn’t deserve to die alone.
The beach lay before her like an empty stage, tenebrous and ill-lit. The totems were columns of shadow, and every now and then she caught a glimpse of light from a breaking wave – and there was something else there too; a pale, blue glow that pulsed and shivered and fell. She stared at its afterglow, almost willing it to return, and when it did – still in that same weak pattern of pulse and fade – she moved cautiously across the beach towards it; towards the low slumped shape that floundered in the tide, white-skinned and wounded, gasping for breath and croaking out a single word:
‘Help.’
‘Eat,’ she said. ‘You must eat.’
She tipped the spoon against its blackened lips. The stew dribbled down its chin. Katalina had to still the fear that the thing was going to bite her when she reached to wipe it away.
It coughed. Spit flicked from its mouth onto the blanket.
She tried to make it drink, holding out a cup of water and supporting its head, her fingers splayed against its clammy, hairless skin. The rank feel of it tightened every muscle in her body.
‘Drink,’ she said. ‘You must drink.’ The thing snarled into the brimming cup.
Sometimes when it looked at her its gaze was delirious and vague. Bubbles formed on its lips, and it emitted a moan that reminded her of the deep-whales’ mournful midnight call when they surfaced out at sea. But then the eyes would snap to her like steel traps, pale blue with bitter black pupils.
‘I want to help you,’ she said. ‘You’re hurt. I’ve done the best I can, but… I’ve never seen anything like you before.’
It groaned and rolled away. Eventually, by the laboured rise and fall of its chest, she thought it must have fallen asleep. In the shivering firelight it looked for a moment like a wizened old man, but when the flames leapt higher it felt instead like an image drawn from an old dream she could barely remember.
Her first thought had been of her husband – ‘Borys!’ she’d gasped – but then the tide had turned it over and she saw the pale, inhuman face, the sunken eyes and pointed ears, that narrow, tapering chin. It was wrapped in nothing but rags and broken scraps of what could have been armour, weird, conch-like whorls of metal that were tarnished with salt. On its chest were savage puncture marks. It had gurgled and retched, reaching for a caged shard of glass submerged in the surf. A jewel of some kind, she thought, the source of that dull blue glow she had seen from the dunes. She plucked it from the water and slipped it into her pocket, and despite the low, disturbing scent that clung to its skin, a smell like burning weeds or rotting fish, Katalina had managed to haul the creature from the water. It took her half an hour to drag it up the beach. A mariner caught in the storm, she thought. Flung by the currents towards our lonely shore. The realms were wider and stranger than anyone could understand, but even as she struggled into the dunes she knew this was no lost mariner. It wasn’t a trader from Aqshy blown off course, or a Ghurish merchant sunk with his cargo. This was something else.
Once inside she had stripped off the rags and armour and cleaned its wounds. The creature’s eyes had flickered as she lowered it to the bed.
She crept from its side now and settled herself into Borys’ old chair by the fire, a blanket drawn across her shoulders. A cold wind threaded through the cottage. She tried to rest, tried to ignore the gagging smell exuded by the thing that was sleeping in her bed. It was a scent, she felt, of brackish tides and dead weeds, of shorelines long abandoned.
‘Kattie! Are you up?’
The widow Agata’s grating tones, the older woman screeching her name from the path.
The melancholic light fell clear through a gap in the curtain. Katalina saw the shape in her bed, heard the moist clicking of its breath. She cast off her blanket and stood for a moment gazing down at the smooth and savage blade of the creature’s face, the frown of pain or sorrow that briefly marred it.
There was a brisk knock at the door. ‘Still abed, girl?’ Agata muttered. ‘Up, up. Shift yourself, the day will near be done at this rate!’ Then, with the widow’s maddening familiarity, a second after that the door began to open. Quickly Katalina drew the hanging around the bed.
Agata was stooped and wrinkled like the strings of bladderwrack the villagers hung above their doors for luck, but she wore her widowhood like a well-tailored frock.
‘What is it?’ Katalina protested. ‘You can’t just burst in like this, it isn’t right!’
‘And what do you think I’m like to see, hmm? With your Borys gone I’m sure there’s nothing to offend my eyes. And right or not,’ the widow said, ‘there’s work to be done.’
‘I’ll have the nets ready by tomorrow.’
‘More than nets,’ Agata grumbled. ‘There’s crab pots that need fixing too. The day’s catch needs sorted for market. Think you’re too good for that?’
‘I’ll help, I promise.’
The old woman trundled about the cottage, picking at the mess on the table, peering into the dirty pot on the hearth.
