Page 27 of The Girl the Sea Gave Back

I brought the Nadhir’s face to my mind, seeing him as clearly as I had in the glade. Dark hair pulled into a haphazard braid. Deep-set eyes the color of the sea. The tingle cameback up over my skin, as if I could feel him there. As if he was standing just ahead in the trees, his gaze on me.

My head swam, the earth beneath me suddenly pulling me down into it, and the white light of the moon brightened on the ground around me. I blinked, dumping the rest of the seeds onto the coals, and the smoke reignited, pulling up from the bowl in twisting pillars. I breathed it in again, but this time, I couldn’t feel the burn. There was only the sweet taste of the smoke on my tongue and the faint heat lifting from the embers.

“Where are you?” I murmured, the timbre of my own voice strange.

The sound of my breath grew louder in my ears and the warmth spilled out into my body, reaching down into my hands and feet. I lay back into the dirt, my eyes fixed on the black sky, and my weight sank down into the pine needles, my palms turned up at my sides.

I tried to say the words again but my lips wouldn’t move, my face numb against the cold night air when suddenly, he appeared. The Nadhir stood in the darkness before me, the shapes around him rippling like the henbane smoke until I could make out the crude gates of a small village behind him. His eyes locked on mine and I searched the black for the Kyrr. But we were alone. Just the Nadhir and I.

The dark night looked like liquid. Like we were beneath its drowning surface. The wind whipped around us as cold rain began to fall and his mouth opened, but no words came. Instead, it was the voice of the Spinners.

“Utan,” they whispered, the sound echoing through the trees.

The Nadhir stared at me, unmoving until the gate melted back into a twist of dissipating smoke. It wound around him until he was gone, and in the next breath, I was alone. The cold rushed in around me and I searched the black nothingness, feeling bare in the darkness without him.

I searched for the shape of him, tried to feel the run of the current over my skin, but there was nothing. No one. Until a small flickering glow lifted overhead and I looked up, squinting against its brightening light.

There, dangling above my mind, was a soft, wavering flame. I didn’t move a muscle, my breath shallow as I reached for it. Gently, as if it might disappear like the smoke.

Then, in a rush, the light flooded in a desperate, cold wave until I was covered with it.

I was underwater.

The strange, white glow cast down in beams around me, trailing beads of bubbles racing up to the surface overhead. My arms floated up before me, a cluster of yarrow marked onto one hand and a stalk of henbane on the other. They drifted, unmoving, until the blunt edge of realization lit in my mind like the cold seawater filling my chest in the silence of the deep.

I was dead. But this wasn’t a vision.

It was a memory.

10YEARS AGO

Village of Liera, Svell Territory

The rider made it to Liera before night had fallen, and by the time the sun went down, word had reached every corner of the village.

Tova followed the crowded paths with the cloak pulled up high over her head to hide her marks from the notice of the Svell that were pouring toward the ritual house. If anyone spotted her, they’d send her back to the gate. Worse, they’d beat her for coming into the village without Jorrund. But sometimes, if she was careful, she was able to disappear among them.

She slipped through the open doors silently, pressing herself between bodies until she reached the back wall, where a crude ladder reached up into the dark, smoke-stained rafters. She looked over her shoulder once before she climbed hand over hand, melting into the black that hovered over the gathered Svell, and found a place to sit on a wide wooden beam with her feet dangling in the air.

She covered her nose and mouth with the corner of her cloak. The smoke from the altar fire was thick up in the rafters, billowing up before it escaped through the opening in the roof. It stung her eyes, but from here, she wouldn’t be seen. Most importantly, she could see and hear the meeting.

There had been rumors coming from the east for days about an army that attacked the Aska on the fjord. But Bekan had sent his own riders to see for themselves what had happened and in the time they’d been gone, the Svell had already split over what was to be done if it was true. Some wanted to march on the fjord before the fires could even stop burning. Others wanted to keep their years of peace intact. Even the village leaders didn’t seem to agree.

The benches filled, bodies pushed into every open space in the ritual house below, and Tova watched as Jorrund came through the door with a torch, Bekan on his heels.

The crowd made way for them, the voices lowering to whispers, and Tova studied the Tala, trying to see what lay behind his focused eyes. Whatever news the rider had brought, it wasn’t good.

Bekan lifted a hand into the air and the last of the whispers faded, every eye on him. His tiny daughter was cradled in his arms, her pale sleeping face flushed pink at her cheeks. Her mother had died not long after giving birth to her and instead of handing her to a nurse to raise, Bekan had takenthe task up himself. Once, she’d walked into his home with Jorrund and he’d been curled up with her, asleep. Tova had decided then that she liked the Svell chieftain, even if he didn’t seem to like her.

His voice rose above the sound of the fire at his back. “The Herja have attacked the fjord, taking the Aska villages. There is little left. They are now on the mountain, doing the same in Riki territory.”

Tova’s hands gripped the edge of the beam, leaning forward until the light from the flames below hit her face. The silence grew thin, the wind blowing against the ritual house the only sound. While some had hoped for the Aska’s destruction, no one had imagined one army could take both clans. Jorrund had told her the story of the Herja, who’d come ten years earlier and attacked the fjord before disappearing. Many thought them a myth.

“Will they come here next?” a timid voice called out.

Tova looked out over the faces but whoever had asked the question didn’t want to be seen. She could see the same thought in every Svell’s eyes, the excitement over the possibility of war now withered into something that looked much more like fear. Hands drifted absently toward weapons or clenched into fists, and the tension pulled tighter as Bekan stepped forward.

He handed the baby girl to his brother, who stood at his side, and Vigdis took her into his arms, holding her against his broad chest.

---