Page 4 of Night Tide


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Zigana watched from her place by Gitta as the woman picked a soggy scrap of white fabric off the sand. A nightshirt by the look of it, with a tattered hem and worn sleeves.

“Is it Solyom’s do you think?” Odon asked, quiet enough for only Zigana to hear.

She shrugged, a sick feeling blossoming in her belly. “I hope not.” She dreaded reading the water today. Last night’s dream had left its mark. She awakened in darkness tinged a verdant green and her pillow soaked with tears. The image of Jolen drowning was so strong, she had to tell herself several times it was nothing more than a dream. They had both survived childhood, and her sister was a titled, married woman now.

Still, the horrifying image of the tide rising to crash down on her sister refused to recede, and Zigana abandoned her bed for the window. Even from the second story, her view of the beach was hidden by the barrier of salt grass. Only the bluff rose in the darkness, and that darkness shimmered a pale emerald. Unnatural and out of place, as if called up from the cold deep by forbidden magic. She didn’t hear a voice singing or speaking, but when she placed her hand on the window pane, the glass vibrated beneath her hand in a consistent three-beat rhythm, as if a heart pulsed somewhere in the waves, coaxing her to leave her room, her house, just for the chance to hear it better.

“Come play with me, Ziga.”

Jolen’s voice, child-like and pleading, echoed in her mind, so full of yearning that Zigana whimpered. She yanked her hand from the window, and the voice disappeared abruptly, along with the need to race down the stairs, throw open the door and run for the beach.

She did creep down the stairs but only to check that Odon and Frishi still slept safely in their bed. She spent the remainder of the night in Odon’s chair, wrapped in a blanket, ears straining to hear any hint of the haunting dirge so that she might bar the door and sketch a protection ward at its threshold with some of the precious salt Frishi kept locked in her spice chest.

The sight of that nightshirt, dripping with saltwater and caked in sand, sent a shard of ice down her spine, and she leaned against Gitta’s solid shoulder for warmth and solace. The charm was Solyom’s. Of that, there was no doubt. The nightshirt could be anyone’s, but she knew—knew down to her gut—it too belonged to Solyom.

She left Gitta’s side and waded ankle-deep into the surf where she crouched and let the water flow across her fingers. Odon joined her, his own hands plunged to the elbows in seawater and wet sand.

Zigana closed her eyes and waited to “see.” The peculiar and unpleasant sensation that tainted the water yesterday practically fouled it today, and her gorge rose. Brief flashes of images skittered across her mind’s eye. Solyom naked on the beach, crying out his wife’s name as he entered the surf. A sing-song hum rose above the tide’s steady rumble; the funeral dirge she and Odon had first heard when the beach had glowed with greenish light. A spindly shadow, the size of a horse but thin as a cluster of rake handles skittered toward the old man, traversing the top of the waves like a spider climbing along strands of a web. She gasped and shook.

Odon’s hand on her arm brought her out of the nightmare image. They knelt on a daylit shore with the horses behind them and screaming gulls above them. Like any other day, only this one was different, and Zigana recoiled at the revelation of Solyom’s ghastly fate.

“Ziga, what did you see?” Odon’s easy voice calmed her, his sun-cured face a fine sight after what the waters had just revealed. “Ziga,” he repeated.

“Solyom walking into the surf. Something was out there, luring him with its song or the mimicry of Trezka’s voice. You?”

He shook his head. “Just the dirge and no images. But the water feels worse than yesterday and the hum sounded as if I listened underwater.”

His answer didn’t surprise her. For all that both she and Odon possessed the same gift, hers had always been stronger than his. She gazed at him and swallowed the hard knot in her throat before she could speak. “It ate him, Papa.”

He paled at her words. “Do you feel its presence now?”

She shook her head. “Only traces. I think it retreats to the deep with the sunrise. It’s a night hunter.”

“And it’s hunting us. Did you dream last night?”

She nodded. “Of when Jolen and I were children. She was calling me to come play with her in the surf, and then she drowned. I couldn’t save her.”

He patted her shoulder at her obvious anguish. “I dreamed too. I was trawling with Voreg, only we didn’t net shrimp. We kept dragging in dead villagers with milky eyes and fish and crabs spilling out of their mouths.”

Gods. His dream was far more grotesque than hers. She glanced at the group of shrimpers who stood nearby, swapping conjecture over who the nightshirt belonged to and if Solyom had finally gone mad over the death of his wife and willingly surrendered his life to the Gray.

“What do you want to tell them?” she asked Odon.

Part of her wanted to warn everyone to stay away from the beach at any hour, not just nighttime when it was especially dangerous. The sea, that mercurial entity that provided life-giving sustenance and dealt death with equal generosity, had been a constant in her life since she was born, and she had grown up understanding the balance of its mercy and its cruelty. Now though, a predator of unusual cunning and strange abilities had tipped that balance, and she was terrified.

Odon helped her stand. “We tell them we trawl. If something ate Solyom, it isn’t here now, so it won’t eat us or the horses. And families need food, so unless you think that thing is out there right now waiting to take a bite out of Gitta, we trawl.”

He was right of course. While she and Odon could sell or barter some of their surplus to buy things such as new nets or tack for the horses, other villagers depended on their entire catch to feed themselves. Odon often donated some of his more generous catches, and sometimes even that wasn’t enough to feed everyone in a family with numerous children.

She returned to Gitta and set to tightening her baskets and setting up her nets while Odon signaled to the other shrimpers it was safe to trawl. The mare, usually still as garden statuary while she waited for her mistress to prepare everything for the shrimping, tossed her head and blew hard from her nose. She even stamped her front hooves, burying them deep in the sand. Voreg mimicked her dam, her mane sending up a cloud of sand gnats as she shook her head.

Zigana frowned. This was odd and yet unsurprising after what the waters showed her. The horses sensed the wrongness of the Gray as well. “They’re restless,” she told Odon on his return. “They know something is off.”

He braced a foot on the left trace and swung into the wooden saddle. Voreg snorted but held still. “Aye they do, but they’re still willing to go in. That tells me it’s safe.”

Odon was a cautious man, and she trusted his judgment. When he guided Voreg into the surf, she followed without question until the horses were chest-high in the water, dragging the nets behind them. This time she kept her legs submerged as far as she could in the water, senses straining to catch any hint of the sea spider’s return. Seawater lapped against her knees, leaving behind traces of imagery—the play of sunlight just below the surface, the flicker of fast-moving fish as they swam between Gitta’s legs and tickled the underside of her belly. The drag of the net made its own raspy music in a burbling chorus of shifting tide as it scooped up the shrimp buried on the sea floor.

These were normal things, everyday things the Gray showed her each time she trawled. No mournful dirge that promised peace but delivered violent death. Zigana slowly relaxed in the saddle, turning her eyes to the horizon where the line of the sea turned dark and held its mysteries close.