“I’m not the one who needs convincing of that, Ziga.”
“Has she dreamed of drowning?”
He wove his needle through the mesh, fingers flying as he looped twine and tied knots. “If she has, she isn’t telling me.”
“What about you?”
“Just the one I told you about, of trawling dead villagers from the bottom.”
She chewed on her lower lip, thinking. Sea lore was rich with stories of creatures foul and fantastic that lived in its depths. Some were real, others the conjurings of sailors tipping from the spirits barrel too often. Zigana knew dozens of the stories by heart but none ever described anything like she’d seen during her scrying of the waves. “Do you know any of the old stories that tell of a monster that mimics voices and twists dreams?”
Odon paused in his needlework for a moment, gaze blank as he looked inward to memory. “Only sirens” he said after a moment. “And none of the stories tell of them controlling dreams.” He smirked at the net in his hand. “That, and I suspect sirens are just seals. Sometimes a man spends a little too long on a ship.”
“That was no siren I saw.”
Their gazes met. “I believe you, Ziga,” he said.
His faith in her water-sight reassured her in one way and terrified her in another. Odon wasn’t a man inclined to fancy, despite his own weaker talent for reading the water. That he didn’t question the truth of the images she saw made them that much more real and more frightening.
“I really wish it had been Trezka waiting for him,” she said.
“So do I, girl,” he replied. “So do I.”
* * *
She wokein the small hours again that night, not to the eldritch resonance rising from the surf but to loud whinnies coming from the barn. She threw back the blankets and bolted down the stairs. A quick glance into her parents’ bedroom showed them still sleeping, despite the terrible racket. An odd thing, as Odon was a light sleeper, and even without the horses making enough noise to wake the dead, Zigana hadn’t been quiet as she pounded down the treads to the first floor. She snatched a candle nub off the table, coaxed a flame onto its wick from the remains of the evening’s fire and raced out of the house.
The night was cold, damp and smelled of grave dirt as she shot barefoot across their tiny garden to the barn. A pitchfork hung just outside the doors, and she grabbed it before lifting the bar and throwing them open. The candle’s anemic flame lit no more than a hand’s space in front of her but it was enough to see Gitta kicking hard at her stall door as if to bust it open and break free. Her eyes rolled and she trumpeted when she caught sight of Zigana. Voreg echoed her as did the two ponies they kept for light transport.
Zigana couched the pitchfork under one arm and raised the candle high with her other hand. Unlike the outside air, the stables smelled of hay, horse, and manure. Pungent but living. Gitta continued to pound at her stall door as her mistress checked the barn’s ground level before creeping up the ladder to do the same for the loft. Heart fluttering in her chest, she padded across the straw-covered floor and checked behind and between the bales stored there.
Nothing. No horse thief or intruder. No one to leap out at her and make her scream while she did her best to impale them without setting the barn on fire. When she returned to the first level, Gitta was alternating between smashing her hooves against the wood and tearing at it with her teeth. And Odon, who normally woke to the skitter of a mouse on the roof, was nowhere in sight.
Zigana gawked at the mare. Gitta, as placid and patient as the day was long, had gone berserk. Frustrated that the stall door held closed despite her efforts, she turned and put her backside to it. Hindquarters flex as she kicked back with both hooves. Wood splintered, and the top hinge tore free of its post.
“Gitta!”
The mare halted long enough in her destruction of the stall to meet Zigana’s wide-eyed stare and toss her head. She neighed loudly as if to berate her mistress for keeping her trapped. A second back kick to the door and the upper rail snapped off like a brittle fingernail, but the latch held.
Eyes adjusted to the darkness, Zigana blew out the candle and set the pitchfork aside so she could climb the boards separating Gitta’s stall from the one they used to store tack and feed sacks. She leaned over the top board, bare toes curled on the wood for purchase. “Gitta, love,” she crooned. “What’s wrong?”
The mare quieted for a moment, sides heaving as she half turned to thrust her nose into Gitta’s chest, nearly knocking her off the stall divider. Hot horse breath drafted over Zigana’s shoulders and neck. Gitta’s eyes rolled white and fiery in the gloom, and Zigana swore she heard the mare’s thoughts.
Let me out. LET ME OUT!
Horse and woman stared at each for long moments before Zigana exhaled a gusty breath of her own. “All right,” she said aloud. “But only if I can ride you out.”
The mare whuffled her agreement, shifting restlessly from hoof to hoof while her rider retrieved a bridle from a peg and opened the broken stall door to reach her. Gitta willingly lowered her head for the bridle, knocking Zigana’s shoulder with her nose when her human was too slow in adjusting the browband and throat lash.
“Stop it,” Zigana snapped. “I’ll never get this on if you keep shoving me about.”
Voreg whinnied a distress call to her dam as Gitta followed her mistress out of the barn. The mare whinnied back, a different sound from the ones she made in the stall. Reassuring instead of enraged.
Without a trace to climb, Gitta was too tall to mount from the ground, and Zigana led her to the mounting block near the fence line. Seated bareback, with her shift tucked between her legs and her feet filthy from the barn, she flicked the reins and clicked her tongue, letting the horse decide where to go.
Gitta immediately slipped into a fast trot toward the beach. “I was afraid of that,” Zigana said to herself but didn’t try to turn the mare back. She didn’t think she could anyway. Had she not let the horse out of the stall, Gitta would have torn the barn down to get out. Of that, Zigana had no doubt.
The Gray stretched dark and endless beyond the shore. The sea no longer retreated from the beach as it did at daylight. Waves, strangely green-tinged, lapped hard at the land, their peaks and valleys no more than shifting shadows as they tumbled along the shore, heaved back, only to surge forward once more in an endless dance. Gitta crested the dunes and slid down the other side. She trotted across the sand, stopping only until she stood in the water to her fetlocks.
