Page 3 of Night Tide


Font Size:

Frishi’s shrill command broke through her musings, and she lugged the full bucket back to the cottage. True to form, it seemed as if half the village’s women had wedged themselves into the parlor, batting questions back and forth between them as they conjectured over who was moving into the castle. She plunked the bucket on the table and fled outside to help Odon package cooked shrimp for the villagers who stopped by to buy enough for their evening supper.

“Coward,” he said with a grin.

“Prudent,” she replied as she counted coin and passed two packages of shrimp to one of the few women not squeezed into Frishi’s parlor. “And I don’t see you in there answering questions.”

“A lone man in a house packed to the rafters with women is either dead or begging to die. I’m neither.”

“As the gods will it,” a customer chimed in, nodding his head sagely and with an expression that told of sheer terror at the thought of being trapped in the scenario Odon described.

Next to him, his wife snorted her disdain and bashed his elbow with hers. “Don’t think you’re safe even if it’s just one woman in the house, you old cark.” She took the package Zigana handed her and pushed her hapless spouse down the road.

“I thank the gods every night that I married Frishi and not Klotild,” Odon said and wiped his brow in obvious relief.

Zigana watched the couple as they disappeared into an alleyway off the main path, Klotild haranguing her spouse the entire way. “I thank them too,” she said.

Her gratitude didn’t spring from the same reason Odon’s did. Frishi had been heavy with Lord Boda’s child when Odon married her. He was a good husband to Frishi and treated Zigana as his own. Boda might have sired her, but Odon was her father in every way save blood.

They even shared the gift of water-sight, though Odon’s could be traced back to his mother while no one knew from whom Zigana had inherited hers. She knew nothing of Boda or his family except what Jolen had told her, and that had been precious little and told from the perspective of a young child. Frishi, unlike her usual verbose nature, was singularly tight-lipped about Lord Boda, even when Zigana had grown to womanhood and questioned her about their relationship.

The water-sight had been a fortuitous gift, one that made Zigana’s illegitimacy a thing of little import by comparison. She was accepted in the community and valued for her gift, just as Odon was. Bastards weren’t usually so fortunate.

Supper that evening consisted of soup and Frishi’s unending speculations over who was moving into the castle. They ranged from the mayor of the neighboring village of Nodaski to King Sangur the Lame himself. Odon sopped his bread in his soup and ate in silence as he usually did. Zigana made one valiant effort to steer her mother’s train of thought away from the castle. “Did you hear anything strange last night, Mama?”

Frishi’s raised eyebrows assured Zigana she hadn’t. “I don’t think so. Strange as in how?” She glanced at Odon who stared into his bowl as if divining the future from the swirl of the broth.

“Singing? Humming? The sound of a woman’s voice talking?” Zigana flinched at hearing herself say the last. Frishi’s short huff of laughter confirmed how ridiculous it sounded.

“A woman singing or talking to herself? In the middle of the night?” She snorted. “Did you filch the wine before you went to bed last night?”

Odon interrupted. “Solyom’s been telling folks he heard Trezka calling to him from the sea, and Zigana and I both heard singing from that way in the small hours.”

Frishi shuddered. “Trezka is dead,” she said, stating the obvious and widely known. “Maybe she’s haunting Solyom.”

Zigana sighed, and Odon went back to divining his soup.

Her mother brightened. “Maybe there was a late-night party at the castle! A welcoming celebration for the tenants. Solyom might have heard that.”

Zigana rose and took her empty bowl to the give it a quick dip and rinse in the wash bucket. She loved her mother, but Frishi, once latched onto an idea, pursued it with singular purpose to the exclusion of all else. Until she discovered who had moved into Castle Banat, every supposition regarding anything in the village would lead back there, even eerie dirges resonating from the Gray in the middle of the night.

As she readied for bed that evening, she peered out the sliver of window in her attic room. The view faced the bluff and the blacker silhouette of the castle cast against a moonlit sky. The golden glow of light filled a solitary window in one of the upper stories. The shadow of a figure suddenly blocked some of the light, and she wondered who looked out at the night tide and if they saw something there that didn’t belong.

She left the window to crawl into bed. The sheets were chilly on her skin, and Zigana huddled under the blankets, shivering. It was late summer, and while the days were balmy, the nights had grown decidedly colder. She slipped into sleep, lulled by the far-off rhythm of the surf and something else. Ancient, inhuman and beckoning.

She dreamed. Sunlit days and Jolen running ahead of her on the beach, beautiful as a sea sprite and just as elusive. She turned and waved to Zigana, long blonde hair snapping in the wind like strips of a tattered flag.

“Come catch me, Ziga!” she called out before sprinting away, laughing. Zigana raced to catch up, her joy of the chase turning to panic as Jolen plunged into the sea, falling under the crush of tall waves that pounded her into the sea floor.

Zigana screamed, the scream of a panicked child instead of a woman. “Jolen! Jolen!”

But only the Gray replied, as the Gray always did, in an endless tumble of waves.

* * *

They foundSolyom’s good luck charm on the beach the following day but no Solyom. Odon’s cousin Elek spotted the charm first and sent one of his son’s back to Solyom’s house. The boy reported back as the trawlers readied their nets and cast jaundiced gazes on the surf as they waited for Odon and Zigana to give their yea or nay to that day’s trawling.

He barreled through the salt grass, kicking up sand as he plowed over the dunes toward his father. “Empty house,” he said between gasps. “And the front door is half open.”

Another shrimper pointed to a spot in the shallowest of the surf, where the water trickled over the sand. “There! The tide’s caught something.”