Several of the trawlers paused in their tasks to sketch a ward in front of themselves. Zigana glanced at Odon who rolled his eyes and tossed a crab up to a hovering gull.
“I didn’t hear anything,” one woman said. “But I dreamed. Gold coins floating in the water like trails of seaweed.” She sighed. “All I had to do was swim through them and gather their treasure in my skirts.”
“Wish I could have dreamed that myself,” another woman replied.
The dreamer shook her head, her face pale and set. “No you don’t. The coins dragged me down. Even when I tried to dump them out of my skirt, they stuck. I drowned.”
A noticeable shudder rippled through the small group. Drownings happened. They lived by the sea, and even the best swimmers succumbed sometimes. Still, the acknowledgement of that reality didn’t lessen the horror of it.
Silence reigned then as the trawlers sorted and sieved or checked the harnesses on their horses. One man finally spoke, thrusting his chin toward Odon. “How about you, Odon? Dreams of gold or the voice of your wife whispering sweet nothings in your ear?”
Odon snorted. “Unless you want to count Frishi’s snores as sweet nothings, I didn’t hear a thing,” he lied. “Slept like a babe.” The laughter his remark inspired lightened the mood on the beach, and they soon mounted again to lead the horses back into the water.
Zigana paused before climbing the trace to the saddle when Odon drew near, his features somber. “Do you believe them?” he asked
She shrugged, recalling the oily touch of tainted water on her palms and the memory of a softly sung dirge in the small hours of the night. “That it’s just a dream? I want to.”
“So do I.” He patted Gitta’s muscled shoulder. “Come on then. The day is wasting.”
They finished the day’s trawl by mid afternoon and packed up to return home with their catch. Zigana helped her father hitch Voreg to his cart before doing the same with Gitta. She followed the line of his arm as he pointed toward the bluff and the formidable castle perched atop, overlooking the Gray. A caravan of wagons wheeled slowly up the road toward the barbican, people, no bigger than fireflies from that distance, walking beside them.
“Looks like the castle has occupants again,” Odon said. “I didn’t think the old lord would ever return.” He glanced at the sea and again at the bluff. “Strange doings in Ancilar these days.”
Zigana’s heart fluttered in her chest. For a moment, she forgot her unease at the feel of the sea or the memory of an unearthly song crooned in an inhuman voice. Had her sister returned to Ancilar? Left the court of Pricid and its king, Sangur the Lame, to return to her birthplace?
“Don’t raise your hopes too high, Ziga.” Odon gazed at her with pitying eyes. “Even if it is Jolen up there instead of her father…”
“There’s no guarantee she’ll seek me out.” The words hurt to say them, even after these many years and the sensible assumption that a woman of high birth like Jolen would turn a blind gaze on the bastard half sister raised as a fisherman’s daughter. Still, Zigana hoped it was Jolen and that she might remember a shared childhood of days playing in the surf and chasing fireflies across the fields at twilight.
Odon picked up the length of rein tied at one end to Voreg’s hame and perched on his cart’s side edge. “Your mother will be itching to know who’s moving in.” He clucked and snapped the rein, and the mare began her trek home.
“She’ll be quick to find out and tell us,” Zigana called after him as she mimicked his actions and set Gitta on the path to follow. She watched the castle road and its travelers until the cart trundled behind a wall of salt grass, and she lost sight of them.
The pungent odor of livestock and manure replaced the briny scent of the sea as they pulled into the barnyard and unhitched the horses from the carts. Odon unloaded their nets and catch while Zigana unharnessed both Gitta and Voreg and led them to their stalls for a good brushing. When she finished, she fed and watered both mares and left the barn.
She met her mother at their cottage door, recently returned from a trip to the castle hill. Frishi’s eyes were bright with curiosity and her mouth turned down in a frustrated frown. “Well, that was a waste of my time,” she snapped and marched inside where she whipped an apron off the hook by the dry sink and tied it around her waist.
Zigana padded after her, knowing she’d regret asking the question but compelled to do so anyway out of sympathy. “What’s wrong, Mama?”
Frishi handed her a bucket before crouching at the hearth to start a fire. “They’re all as close-mouthed as clams up there. No one admitting who’s moving in. The house has been empty for years, ever since Jolen married that inland lord.” She dug for a piece of charcloth from the box set near the hearth and busied herself with building up the coals. “They can’t keep it secret for long,” she said, as if vowing to suss out the mystery of the castle’s new occupants no matter what it took. She gestured to the pitcher Zigana held. “I’ll need that filled to the brim and make it quick. Your da will be ready to chew on the table if I don’t get this soup ready soon enough.”
Zigana left the cottage for the well, passing Odon on the way as he built his own fire outside under a large cauldron in preparation of boiling their catch, with some to keep and the rest to sell.
“What did she say?” he called out.
Zigana shook her head. “She’s put out. No one is telling her who’s moving in.”
Odon laughed and sorted through the pile of shrimp on the table beside him. “They will. No one keeps anything from your mother for very long.”
That was true. Frishi had a reputation for being an unapologetic gossip, but the same villagers who complained of her nosiness went to her first for any news, and Zigana predicted by the time she finished pumping water into her bucket there would be a crowd of Frishi’s friends crammed into their tiny parlor hoping to hear any information she managed to glean from her foray to the castle.
She straightened from bending at the pump and shielded her eyes from the sun with her hand as she gazed at the castle perched on the bluff. Castle Banat had sat unoccupied for seven years now. Once called Castle Nemes, Lord Boda had changed its name after his wife had died in childbirth. Castle Noble or Castle Sorrow, whatever name it took, Zigana had been drawn to it all her life. Her sister Jolen was born there, and she and Zigana had often raced through its labyrinthine corridors together as children: the lord’s legitimate daughter and his bastard one.
Had he returned to oversee his abandoned demesne, drawn inexorably back to the Gray as everyone who ever lived within the sound of her surf was? Or did someone else come to Castle Banat, some visitor with a wish to enjoy the flat beaches and placid shallows that stretched below the bluff? Had Jolen returned?
The thought made Zigana’s heart flutter. Her half sister lived and moved in a world so different from her own. Zigana’s brush with aristocratic life was limited to the hazy memories of childhood when Jolen had been given permission by her father and her nurses to play with Zigana in the surf or the kitchen gardens that took up one side of the castle bailey. She had no concept of court life where rumor had reached even this far that Jolen was renowned as one of the jewels in the Pricidian court. Or had been at least—until the rebellion. Rumor had also spread to Ancilar of her disgrace and that of her husband.
“Ziga! Where’s my water?”
