“But he isn’t nearly as strong,” she argued.
Andras chuckled and grinned at Zigana. “Your horse has found a champion.”
Zigana dismounted and patted Gitta’s neck. “She is stronger than those high-spirited horses you keep stabled at the castle.”
“True,” he agreed, that weighty gaze resting on her face. “And she’s unique. A child of earth at home in the sea.”
His words sent invisible sparks over her skin. They were innocent enough, a compliment to Gitta, yet Zigana sensed he spoke of more than the mare. The heat of a blush crawled up her neck and she bent to Tunde. “Why don’t you look for a few shells to bring home for your mother?” Tunde liked the idea and immediately set off to scour the beach for treasure.
Her blush was gone when she motioned for Andras to walk with her a little ways back from Tunde. “My father and I feel you should know about this since you are now the residing lord at Banat.”
A thin frown line appeared between his eyebrows. “Go on.”
“He’s meeting with the village council now. They’ll likely request an audience with you later to give you the same information. We’ve a monster prowling these waters at night, and it’s already killed one of our own.”
She described the events of the past three days. Solyom’s death, her own experience with the creature and Gitta’s reaction to it.
“No one knows what it is,” she said, “but I think the noise it makes births nightmares and despair. A terrible sorrow that sends people willingly to their deaths. Those grieving over a loss of a loved one are even more vulnerable. The thing doesn’t even have to try hard then.”
“I’ve never seen one myself, but the deep water ship captains call such a creature an obluda,” Andras said with a scowl.
Zigana stopped in her tracks to gape at him. “You know what this thing is?”
He halted as well and shook his head. “I’m not a sailor, but my brother was. He was first mate aboard one of the great ships that sail the black waters where the ocean has no floor and the leviathans sleep.” He stared over her shoulder at the Gray. “My brother said there were things that crawled on the tops of the waves, like you described. Big heads and skeletal bodies, like deformed men starved of food, with fish faces.”
“And teeth,” she added.
“A great number of them,” he agreed.
“How do we kill it?”
He lifted his hands in a questioning gesture. “I wish I could tell you. What little knowledge I have of them came from my brother.”
Zigana tapped her lip with a finger, thinking. “Maybe a net to capture it. We could drag it ashore. It might be like any other fish and not survive away from the water long.” Or they could beat the obluda to death. The violence of it made her cringe inside until she remembered the thing’s furious wailing and the maw full of teeth, the fleeting images of Solyom ripped apart in the surf by a thrashing of claws and bony hands. And if Gitta hated it, that was good enough for her to lose any sympathy for it.
Andras whistled to Tunde and waved her back to them. “We have to return home. Tell your council to come to me once they’ve concluded their meeting with the village. I’ll help if I can.”
She bowed. “Thank you, my lord.”
He cocked his head to the side, his mouth curving upward on one side. “You will consider calling me Andras in the future, and I will call you Ziga? We’re family now.”
The offer, made in the spirit of generosity by a man blind to her bastardy, shocked her. Zigana almost said yes. Almost. She shook her head, regretting her words before she even spoke them. “No, my lord,” she said. “We are not.”
There were barriers to maintain, and not just those of birth and class. Even more so now when she felt drawn to a man so forbidden to her, she might well have set her sights on the king himself.
A mask fell over his face at her rejection of his overture, the same one he wore when they first met. He bowed stiffly, and his voice was indifferent instead of warm. “As you wish, Mistress Imre.”
Tunde’s return halted any further conversation in that vein. “What is it, Papa?”
He patted her head. “It’s time to go. Your nurse is probably worried. Your mother as well.”
She pouted. “Do we have to?”
“Yes.”
She huffed out a dramatic sigh before giving Zigana a wide grin. “It was fun, Ziga! Can we do it again another day?”
Zigana glanced at Andras who looked past her to the sea’s horizon. “If your parents agree to it, then yes.”
