Page 8 of The Girl the Sea Gave Back

He took the rabbits and I followed him in silence. The warmth of the earth returning after winter meant fresh meat and green herbs. Both gave me excuses to leave my little house on the outskirts of Liera that at times felt more like a cage than a home.

We came through the door and I hung my bow and quiver of black-and-white-flecked feather arrows on the wall. I lit the candle even though the sun was already rising over the trees and my cold hands hovered over the wavering flame, the heat stinging my palms.

Jorrund watched me as he set the rabbits on the table. His white hair curled around his face, his beard twisting down his chest. He still hadn’t slept and the tiredness pulled at his eyes, making them more slanted than usual. After I cast the stones, he’d spent the early hours before daylight behind the closed doors of the ritual house with the Svell leaders. Their voices had carried almost to the gates as I made my way back into the forest.

“What will they do?” I watched the melting wax drip and pool on the wood where it turned to a milky gold as it cooled.

“Bekan will meet with the leaders of the Nadhir. He’ll make an offering of reparation.”

I arched an eyebrow at him. “An offering of reparation?”

He nodded, his eyes leaving mine, and I realized he didn’t want me to see what he was thinking. But I could already guess. Jorrund didn’t want war, but the stones had convinced him that the time had come for it. He’d never say it aloud, but he thought Bekan was making a mistake.

I’d heard of offerings of reparation, but never between clans. It was something enemies did to squelch a blood feud between families before violence took hold as a heritage. It was an offering of peace in the form of a gift.

“When?” I sat down onto the stool, looking up at him.

“We leave tomorrow.”

“You’re going with them?”

“I am.” He paused, looking at the ground. “I’d like you to come, too.”

I pulled my hands back from the flame. “Me?”

He tried to smile, but the corners of his mouth betrayed him, turning down just enough for me to notice. “That’s right.”

“But why?”

“I will need you if I’m going to help repair this. We all will.”

My fingers tangled into each other in my lap, beneath the table. “What does Bekan say?”

Jorrund studied me, his eyes running over my face, but he didn’t answer. Bekan had barely acknowledged my existencein the weeks since his daughter died. Jorrund asked me to cast the stones for the girl, but the Spinners had given a different answer than the one they wanted. Bekan’s only child was taken to the afterlife and there she’d wait for her father until he took his last breath.

Almost the moment I’d spoken the words, I’d felt it. The fracturing of the ground beneath me. In Bekan’s eyes, I was no longer just a Truthtongue. Now, I was a bringer of death. And the ally I’d once had in the Svell chieftain seemed to have turned his back on me.

“What if it can’t be repaired?” I measured my words carefully. Jorrund used the runes the way a healer used remedies, trying one after the other until he got the result he wanted. But the Spinners were more slippery than that. They were shrewd and cunning.

He stood, going to the drying branches of heather hanging from the rafters and inspecting the tiny pink petals nestled in the dark green leaves. He lifted a hand, pinching the tip of a stem from the branch. I watched him twirl it between two fingers before he held it out to me.

I took it, spinning it in the morning light coming through the window.

“This may be the very reason Eydis brought you here, Tova.”

I tucked the bloom into the end of my dark braid. “How do you know it was your god who brought me?”

He looked surprised by the words. I never questioned Jorrund because I didn’t want to give him cause to questionme. But the world we’d carefully built together was coming apart. I could see it, and I knew he could, too. “Some god spared you and it wasn’t Naðr. If the god of the Kyrr favored you, you never would have been in that boat.”

I could barely remember it, but Jorrund had told me the story many times. My own people had tried to sacrifice me to their god when I was no more than six years old. He’d found me washed up on shore, a failed ritual sacrifice, but the only thing I could still pull from my memory of that day was the whiteness of the fog. The cry of the wind and Jorrund’s long fingers wrapped around my arms as he pulled me from the hull.

“Maybe it wasn’t the gods at all. Maybe it was the Spinners.”

He looked amused, as if what I’d said was a joke between us. But Jorrund rarely answered my questions about the day he found me on the beach, his words always twisting into something other than an explanation.

“You were huddled in a pile of nodding avens and lupine, your lips blue,” he said softly, the memory playing in his eyes.

I remembered that, too. The sound of water sloshing against the boat. The sharp scent of sour blooms and the serpent’s head carved into the prow. And the cold. The cold was the only thing I remembered clearly.

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