Storm Bride Read online

  Storm Bride

  Copyright © 2014 by J.S. Bangs.

  First Edition: December 2014

  Second Edition: December 2015

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  Cover: Deranged Doctor Design

  Map: Robert Altbauer

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. You may find a summary of the license and a link to the full license here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  Chapter 1

  Uya

  Three orcas raised their heads above the green surf at the foot of Six Pine Rock. Uya crouched behind a drift log so her mother couldn’t see her and scold her, and she watched them. One of them carried something on its nose, a sea lion carcass or a fish, and the orcas’ fins flashed as they pushed it toward the foot of the stone, with its crown of ferns and evergreens. A surge of seawater hid them from her view, and when it subsided, Uya saw their prize clinging to the rough spire like a ragged piece of kelp.

  It was not a sea lion. It was a woman.

  She must be dead, Uya thought. The orcas splashed for a moment at the foot of the stone then dove back into the deeper water. The foam surged over the rock.

  Then the woman moved.

  Uya stood up straight and shaded her eyes to be sure that she saw right. The woman wrapped her arms around the stone to keep from slipping back into the water, then she raised her hand and groped for a higher hold.

  “Uya!” shouted Uya’s mother from a short distance up the beach. “What are you doing? You’re supposed to be gathering mussels.”

  “The orcas brought a woman to Six Pine Rock!” Uya said.

  Her mother guffawed. “Get back to the mussels.”

  Aunt Mariku pointed across the water, to the narrow spire of stone that the woman clung to, and called to Uya’s mother, “Oire, I think I see something.”

  Uya’s mother looked at the base of the stone, then gasped and breathed an oath. “Oarsa help her.” Then she ran down the pebbled beach and called to the men.

  Uya scrambled around the rock and ran after. She had seen the woman first, and it would be fair for her to be the first to tell. But she couldn’t match her mother’s stride, and by the time she reached the men at the canoes, they had already pushed two of them into the surf and were paddling furiously against the waves toward Six Pine Rock.

  “I saw her first!” she shouted to Grandfather Asa as soon as she caught her breath. “It was me.”

  Asa put his gnarled hand on her head. “So Oire said. You did well.” But his eyes were watching the brown-clad woman clinging to the rock and the canoes spearing through the waves toward her.

  The lead canoe was past the breakers, halfway to the spire, its red-and-black painted head charging through the waves. A small crowd surrounded Uya on the shore, and everyone watched the canoe nose into the foamy surf around the rock’s feet. The men beat their oars wildly at the water and pushed off stones as they tried to keep the canoe upright.

  They were soon alongside the rock where the woman waited. Someone from the boat stretched out his hand. The woman seemed to shudder and turn away. Uya could see the lips of the people in the canoe moving, mouths wide open to shout, but she could only hear the roar of the ocean and the shrieks of gulls. A swell washed over the woman on the rock and shoved the canoe aside. With a flurry of oar strokes, the men brought their craft back, and the hand was proffered again. The woman shifted, then like a crow picking up a minnow, one of the men snatched her off the rock and tumbled with her into the bottom of the canoe.

  Grandmother Nei and all the aunts and uncles of the enna crowded together when the canoe’s prow ground against the black stones of the shore, but Uya slithered past the adults and rested her chin on the lip of the canoe. The woman in the bottom looked to be dead. Her skin was white as a trout’s belly, tinted with chilly blue from the cold. A woven cloak had once covered her, though it was now little more than briny rags. Her hands were bloody from scratches, one of her fingernails had torn away, and blood trickled down her face from a cut across her forehead. But most of all Uya marked her hair: orange as a robin’s breast, beautiful and strange, matted with salt and seaweed.

  With a grunt, two men lifted the woman out of the bottom of the canoe. Only then did Uya realize how tall the woman was. Curiosity seized her, and Uya reached out and touched the woman’s face.

  The woman gasped. She opened her eyes, and Uya cried out and stepped back.

  The woman’s eyes were large and beautiful, as blue as a jay’s feather, but her pupils were white with cataracts and twitched sightlessly. The woman’s lips moved without sound. Then she passed into the arms of the men waiting outside the canoe and out of Uya’s sight. They carried her swiftly up the beach, where they laid her next to the fire and swaddled her in linen blankets. Women moved forward, bearing pots and poultices. Uya tried to follow to see that extraordinary face again, but she was elbowed wordlessly aside.

  Finally she gave up and retreated to the driftwood log on the high tide line. Her enna cared for the stranger until dark.

  The enna lit two fires that night—the larger one around which most of them ate, and a smaller one where the strange woman lay on a pallet of blankets, cared for by the Eldest, Nei, and a rotating group of aunts. Uya quickly ate her fill of steamed clams and salty half-dried seaweed then slipped away from the larger fire to where her mother was tending the stranger. Her mother gave her only a moment’s glance as she walked up.

  “See if any of the rugei traders lost someone at sea.” Nei’s voice was as gravelly as the high tide line.

  “Have any trading ships from the rugei come down the coast recently?” Uya’s mother asked.

  “No. Maybe Deika will have heard something at Suroei.”

  “And if not?”

  Nei shrugged. “Oarsa blesses those who entertain strangers. If we don’t find the vessel that lost her in a few days, we’ll have to bring her with us when we return to Prasa. We could be caring for her for a long time after that—we only see their ships on our coast every few summers.”

  Uya crept around the perimeter of the fire, approaching closer. The woman turned her head suddenly, and Uya drew a breath and froze. She hadn’t supposed that the woman was awake.

  For a moment she remained perfectly still, then she decided that if the woman hadn’t been angry this morning, she was unlikely to be angry now. So she crawled forward until she could see the strange pale skin and blue eyes in the mellow firelight. The woman was very young, almost as young as Uya, with smooth skin and bright hair. “What is your name?”

  The woman made no response. She cocked her ear toward Uya’s voice, but her eyes darted aimlessly from the sky to Uya’s face, and she remained as mute as a stone.

  “Why were you with the orcas?” Uya continued. “Did you know they would leave you on Six Pine Rock? How far did they carry you?”

  “Uya,” her mother called out, “don’t bother the swift woman.”

  “I want to know her name,” Uya said.

  “S
he cannot understand you. She doesn’t speak our language.”

  “What if she’s not a swift woman?”

  “Of course she’s a swift woman. Only the swift people have hair that color. Now leave her alone until Deika comes back.”

  So that was why Nei had mentioned Uya’s father. Deika could speak to the woman in the trade tongue, which the women did not know. Now Uya, too, was anxious for her father to return from Suroei. She had heard that the rugei, the swift people, grew old very quickly, so she studied the woman’s face intently to see if she could perceive her skin growing wrinkled or her hair turning white.

  “Mama,” she said after a moment, “she’s not getting any older. Are you sure she’s a swift woman?”

  Oire laughed. “The rugei don’t get old that quickly, silly. It will take her fifty years to get old, which for swift people and little girls seems like a long time, even if it’s not so long for us.”

  The woman remained still under her blankets, her head cocked as she listened to Uya and her mother speak. The enna was going back to Prasa in a few days, and the woman would probably still be young then, which meant that Uya could befriend her.

  She took the woman’s hand and touched it to her own chest. “Uya.”

  The woman started for a moment at Uya’s touch then smiled. “Uya,” she repeated.

  Uya put her finger on the woman’s lips. “And what is your name?”

  The woman said something like Salde, but the latter half of that name was an unpronounceable twist of the tongue. Uya shook her head. The woman said the name again, slowly.

  Uya imitated it as best she could: “Saotse.”

  The stranger sighed and waited for a moment, then she repeated, “Saotse.”

  “Oh good, Saotse,” Uya said. “Since I was the one who saw you in the water and who learned your name, we will be sisters. And we will love each other until we are very old—well, at least until you are very old—since that is what sisters do.”

  The woman blinked. Uya took this as a sign of comprehension, for language was no barrier between sisters brought together by the Powers of the sea.

  Uya’s mother put a hand on Uya’s mouth. “Speak carefully,” she said. “The Powers hear all things. The swift woman should return to her people as soon as we find them.”

  “You speak carefully, too, Oire,” Nei said from the other side of the fire. She looked ghastly and uncanny through the dance of flames. “Oarsa doesn’t send orcas bearing a woman to our beach every day. Let the Powers work as they will.”

  Chapter 2

  Saotse

  The Power Chaoare spoke in the wind that rustled the tops of the trees, and Saotse listened but comprehended nothing. A flight of starlings answered the wind, voices chattering on the gusts that carried them away, while a crow complained from the shelter of the gently creaking pine. The whispers moved across the tops of the trees as the Power passed by, away from the city, up toward the mountains, out of Saotse’s hearing. Saotse felt the air still in Chaoare’s wake like a fire growing cold in the night. She cocked her head to the west, listening for the ripple of Chaoare’s return, but heard nothing.

  She didn’t call out. She had worn her voice hoarse with entreaties to the Powers in the last fifty years. She had soaked her shirt with tears. She had never been answered.

  Her toes tickled the tips of the grass then found the hard-packed clay of the path. She walked quickly, sweeping a pinecone and a flat stone from her path with quick swipes of her walking stick, until she came to the place where the clay under her feet turned into smooth stones tumbling toward the sound of water. The smell of saltwater grew strong with the warm, murky stench of the swampy shoreline and bruised kelp, and the damselflies buzzed over the lapping of waves on the stone.

  Saotse stepped quickly, her feet finding the shape of every stone in turn, until the muttering of women’s voices rose above the rhythm of the waves. The whisper and crackle of reeds being cut wove into their words, and the slurp of mud over bare feet provided the cadence of conversation. Saotse felt the slab of the quartz cleft that meant the path would soon end, and her steps slowed. The stone paving underfoot gave way to clay, then to mud, and Saotse emerged through a curtain of reeds to where the women worked in ankle-deep water.

  “Get yourself to the shore,” Oire was saying, perhaps four strides away. “Any woman as round as you should be lying in a hammock—”

  “Lying in a hammock in the lodge!” Uya shouted, from a pace farther to the right. “Eating honey cakes and getting fat! Hiding from the sun! Sucking the fat off the fish skins! If you tell me this one more time—”

  “Because I’m your mother, and this is how—”

  “Oh, to hear Nei tell it, you were twice as incorrigible as me when you bore your first.”

  “So you want me to call Nei here? If you won’t listen to your mother, maybe you’ll listen to your Eldest.”

  “Bah.” Three footsteps splashed through the muddy shallows, and Uya’s hand touched Saotse’s forearm. “Saotse, sister, why are you here?”

  Saotse clutched Uya’s hand: soft, smooth, nimble. Youthful. Her own fingers were skinny and knobby and ached with age. For a moment her voice escaped her, then she said, “Rada sent me, but I got lost. I’m sorry. I heard something. There was a wind…”

  “Oh!” Saotse could hear Uya’s smile. “Did Chaoare pass by?”

  Uya was so happy, so blithe and cheerful in her exploitation of Saotse’s curse, that Saotse could almost bring herself to forgive her. Almost. If she weren’t also a model of youth, perhaps. “Yes. She passed by.”

  “A good omen, then, for the baby.” Uya laughed and squeezed Saotse’s hand. “Chaoare, bless my child! Oh, Saotse, can you tell me what Oarsa says, too?”

  Even hearing Uya ask the question, Saotse could not keep herself from opening up a little, just enough to hear the voices of the shore Powers, the grandchildren of Oarsa, who rose from the waters and hummed in the currents that reached to the depths of the sea, sublime and incomprehensible—but no. Oarsa had fallen silent decades ago, and all her cries had not roused him. But all Saotse said was, “No. But Rada wants you back at the lodge.”

  “Where you belong!” Oire added. “Not out pretending to gather reeds like a girl.”

  “Yes, mother,” Uya said. “Shall I lead you back to the lodge, Saotse?”

  I can get back by myself, just as I came by myself. If it had been Oire or her insufferable sisters or any of the thoughtless men, Saotse would have voiced the thought. But alas, it was Uya, still young and beautiful Uya, and as bitter as Saotse was, she still felt the duty to spare her little sister from her hatred. It was not Uya’s fault that Saotse dwelt among the long-lived slow people. It was not Uya who had called Saotse from the piny fjord where the mountains met the sea, had her carried on the backs of whales, and then abandoned her. She could still spare some patience for Uya.

  So she let the young woman take her hand and lead her back through the reeds to where the path turned to clay and then smooth stone. They took the right fork where the cleft stone was, up a brief incline that made Uya huff and clutch at Saotse’s hand. She muttered something about having to walk these terrible paths with her enormous belly blocking the view of her feet. Then she asked, “Did Rada say what he wanted?”

  “No.”

  Uya made a groan of annoyance. Saotse guessed that Rada was simply inventing excuses to see Uya and the child once more before the caravans left. If Uya had any sense, she would have listened to her mother’s advice and stayed in the lodge, if not for the sake of the baby, for the sake of her anxious husband. Saotse had neither husband nor child, and she could understand as much.

  Then the sound of many voices reached them, mingled with the murmuring of cedars, the nickering of horses, and the creak of harnesses. Saotse clasped Uya’s hand tighter. The area in front of the lodge had become a warren of crate
s, bales, and wagons that crowded under the lodge’s eaves, as happened every spring when the first caravan prepared to leave. Uya touched Saotse’s elbow and guided her among the half-packed wagons, nudging her to the side when she almost knocked her ankle against a wheel. The mess was an annoyance, but Saotse endured it in expectation of the day when the caravans would return and the barter with merchants would begin. Nei needed her for the barter, depending on her keen ear to know when the other traders had truly reached their final price. Until then, she was at the mercy of the caravan’s chaos.

  Men’s voices volleyed orders out of the lodge and back and forth across the yard. A pair of boys sprinted past them, singing caravan songs. Uya scolded them with an inarticulate yowl then tugged Saotse across the threshold into the lodge. The packed dirt of the courtyard gave way to foot-worn wood and a closed, warm, and musty smell. Saotse shivered in relief.

  “Uya!” Rada shouted as soon as they crossed the threshold.

  Uya dropped Saotse’s hand. From here Saotse could find her own way to the wooden bench that sat near the door, so long as none of the men had moved it. Two cautious paces from the open doorway, she found the bench and let herself slide onto its planks.

  “—Morning,” Rada said.

  Uya gasped. “So soon?”

  “The scouts came back an hour ago. The high roads are clear of snow, all the way to Azatsi’s Fingers. Asa’s already got half of the carts loaded—he wanted to leave a week ago—and even if the Guza outposts weren’t manned, he figures that they’ll be ready by the time we get there.”

  The Guza outposts were unmanned? That had never happened before. A tremor of worry passed through Saotse’s stomach.

  “But why?” Uya pressed. “By the time you get back—”

  “I know. I’ll see the child then. It’ll be barely born. I won’t have missed much.”

  Uya sighed. “Well, if you must. But I have something for you.”