I’m chatting with mermen at night and hiding from harassing noblemen during the day, she was tempted to reply but kept the words behind her teeth and answered with a brief shrug. “I’m fine, Laylam. I’d think you have a lot more to concern yourself with than your sister’s mood.” Three of his nine children had been sick with a cold the past few days, and Brida had tended to the healthy children while Norinn treated the sick ones. It had been left to Laylam to finish drying the last of their harvested seaweed, load it, and transport it to the big trading market in Galagan.
She’d left Norinn an hour ago, long enough to change clothes and bolt a cup of hot tea. The gloaming had passed. Half the village was dark, villagers finding their beds for the night. Brida didn’t hold much hope that her seagoing companion still awaited her, but she intended to visit their meeting place anyway. The little time they spent together each evening had become the highlight of her life, a magic all its own beyond the fact she was visiting one of the fabled merfolk.
Her shoulders sagged when she reached the ledge and found the waters that lapped at its base empty. No silvery fluke or skin dappled by moonlight. No firefly eyes or a webbed hand raised in greeting.
“Ahtin?” she called softly. The wind caught her question, tossing it into the surf.
She’d figured out the spoken equivalent of his whistled name after more failed hand gestures and fleeting drawings dug into the sand with a stick. “Fast fish” wasn’t quite right, but Brida had been close in her initial translation.
The sand drawings had done much to further their communication. She’d learned the merchild was not his daughter, but his niece, child of a sister mermaid. When the merman held out his hand for the stick, she’d passed it to him, watching as he arched his torso and tail for balance before sketching out a sleek fish with a nose that elongated into the shape of a spear or spike.
When he finished, he tapped the stick against the drawing, then tapped his chest with one finger and whistled his name.
He’d drawn an ahtin, a big, sleek, deep-water fish highly prized by fishermen, not for its meat but for the challenge of catching it. Fast and aggressive, the ahtin fought every attempt at being hooked or netted, its ferociousness legendary. More than a few fishermen had died in the attempt, impaled on the spike.
It seemed an odd name to give the merman, Brida thought. He had been anything but aggressive toward her. The name seemed more fitting for someone like Ospodine. Still, he’d managed to fight off and escape something with big teeth and a bigger appetite, saving himself and his niece, even if it had been a near death for them both.
“Ahtin,” she’d told him when he gave her an inquiring look. “Your name is Ahtin.”
“Ahtin,” he’d repeated before nodding his approval. “Ahtin and Brida.”
The pairing of their two names sent a frisson of warmth through her body, startling her. “Oh, Brida,” she silently admonished herself. “Don’t be a nitwit. It’s simply two names and someone learning how to say them.”
She hadn’t echoed his words, turning her attention instead to drawing more pictographs in the sand so she and Ahtin could exchange their meanings in both spoken word and whistle. He learned her language much faster than she learned his, his fascination for this new speech reflected in the avid spark that lit his eyes and the way his gaze settled on her mouth and stayed as she spoke. It might have been disconcerting were it not for the softness of his expression, as if what she said wasn’t nearly as enchanting as the way she said it.
“Vanity,” that inner voice, with its relentless criticism, cautioned her. “Just your vanity.”
This evening she’d promised herself not to read into Ahtin’s expressions those emotions experienced by humans. He wasn’t human, and his people remained a mystery to her. She’d witnessed some of their behavior when they gathered in the hope of rescuing Ahtin and the merchild Brida now called Samath, after the spirit of beaches. They displayed fear and affection, anger and worry, just like humans did, but much of that emotion had manifested audibly. The nuances of facial expression might be very different in merfolk than in humans. Though it was impossible to misinterpret the wide smile Ahtin wore every time he saw her.
No merman greeted her now with his welcoming smile, and the sea lapped solitary against the rock ledge as if to mock her. Brida climbed to the flat top anyway and peered out at the waves. Vague hints of dorsal fins rose and fell in the surf, darting one way and then the other under the dull light of stars and a fading moon. Hunting, she thought. The toothy predators that made night fishing so dangerous were out in numbers now, patrolling the waters for the unwary. Brida was suddenly glad Ahtin hadn’t come, or if he had, that he chose not to stay.
The sharp whistle that was her name in the mer language proved that assumption wrong. Brida turned toward the sound coming from her left where the tidal pools in which she’d first found Ahtin were now submerged by the tide. Beyond them, a stretch of beach unfurled past the salt grass to the place where a curving ladder of rock hugged the shoreline. The black eye of a sea cave stared back at her, and in the glass-thin water kissing the entrance, a pale figure beckoned.
Brida’s spirit sang with a silent joy at the sight of Ahtin waving to her, but she hesitated to join him. Ixada cave was a haunted place, a doorway to the world of the dead, or so the old stories went. Every child born and raised in Ancilar had challenged their playmates to enter the caves, including Brida. She’d only been brave enough to linger at the entrance and peer inside, at which point Laylam had leapt out of the shadows with a roar and nearly made her wet herself with terror. She’d raced home crying, unsympathetic to her brother’s plight when he earned a hard swat from their father and a night without supper for scaring his sister.
Childhood was long behind her, but her wariness of the cave remained, as it did with even the most skeptical villagers. Fishermen told of hearing strange whispering from its depths during moonless nights and especially on the Day of Spirits when the year also died. Some even reported seeing vaporous shapes floating out of the blackness to fade into the waves, singing wordless songs in wailing voices.
Ahtin whistled her name a second time. Whatever spirits sheltered in Ixada Cave, they didn’t seem interested in revealing themselves to him. Brida inhaled and exhaled a long breath, glanced behind her at the dark silhouette of Castle Banat atop its bluff and the empty shoreline below it before climbing down the ledge to join the merman. There were worse things than ghosts.
Obludas.
The thought halted her for a moment before she resumed her trek, ears tuned to any melancholy dirges that might suddenly rise up from the Gray. She stepped over mounds of seaweed and skirted the corpses of jellyfish with their long tentacles stretched like venomous ribbons across the sand.
Ahtin swam parallel to the shore, powerful shoulders flexing in tandem with the rise and fall of his back and tail through the water. He paused when she did, near the cave’s black maw. He gestured to the opening with a thrust of his chin. “Go inside, Brida. I want to show you.”
She trusted him. Mostly. Had he wished to hurt her, the chances to do so had been many and varied since they first crossed paths. Brida didn’t believe he’d lead her to an otherworldly trap where some monstrous thing waited to wrest her soul from her body and plunge it into nightmarish oblivion. But Ixada Cave…
So dark, with its untold mysteries and stories of the haunted dead.
“I have no light,” she told him. “I won’t be able to see anything in there.” Things like once-dry expanses flooded with the incoming tide and the gods only knew what strange creatures that swam within it. Merfolk were almost commonplace compared to the horrors she imagined lurked in the concealing darkness.
Ahtin drew nearer, the splash of his fluke sounding close enough to touch. “Safe, Brida,” he crooned to her. “You are safe with me.”
In that moment, she understood what the sailors meant when they spoke of sirens’ song. She set a foot down in the direction of the cave where some of her worst childhood fears waited.
“Wait.” Ahtin shook his head. “Not that way. This way.”
Puzzled, Brida followed him on the shore as he swam around the edge of the bluff. Her skirts dragged in the surf as she waded knee-deep through water growing colder with each passing autumnal day. She clutched the satchel she’d brought with her, its contents clinking and together. Nothing inside was of much monetary value, certainly not like the pearl he’d given her, but she didn’t want to drop them and lose them to the Gray before Ahtin saw them.
