She changed out of her clothes into her oldest frock, tucked her flute back into its customary cabinet, and hid her money purse beneath a floorboard under her bed. Afterwards, she made herself a pot of tea. She stood at her window as she drank the entire pot, watching as the storm swept in, first on a wind that bowed trees, then the lightning that flared across the sky, followed by thunder loud enough to rattle the windows. The sky finally opened, dumping a solid wall of rain onto Ancilar. Even from this distance, Brida heard the roar of the surf as it beat against the shore.
The buckets she’d placed on the floor under the roof leak in her bedroom and the parlor filled up fast. She exchanged them for empty ones and tossed the contents of the first out her back door. Rain blew into the kitchen before she managed to close the door against the wet, and she spent the next several minutes mopping up her floor.
The storm’s fury lasted beyond dawn, finally lessening to a drizzle by mid morning. Sleepy, damp, and grumpy, Brida groaned at the sound of wagon wheels rolling up to her door. She opened it and leaned against the jamb to pull on her muddy boots.
“I thought you’d be ready by now,” her brother said, a frown creasing lines in his brow. “We’re hours past when I planned to pick you up.”
Brida climbed into the driver’s seat beside him. “Don’t start. I’ve been up all night playing for his lordship’s fancy guests and all morning battling roof leaks.” She reached behind her to pet the head of his favorite dog where it sat behind them in the wagon. Laylam had raised Moot since she was pup, and while the dog practically worshipped Laylam, she often visited Brida for treats, affection and a quiet place to sleep before the fire.
Laylam twitched the reins. “Walk on,” he instructed the horse, and the animal pulled the cart through Ancilar toward the beach, joining an ever-growing line of other carts and wagons as villagers emerged from their houses to harvest the Gray’s bounty.
“I’ll fix the roof for you after we harvest,” Laylam said around the pipe stem held between his teeth.
Brida eyed him, concerned. “You don’t have time for it, and I made enough last night to hire someone in Ancilar to do it.”
His perpetual frown deepened. “You’re my sister. We help each other. I would have patched it sooner if you’d told me it had gotten that bad.”
“You do enough already. I can handle this. You have family to care for.” She refused to acknowledge what they both knew. She feared the label of burdensome widowed relative more than a leaky roof.
Laylam’s frown turned into a full-fledged glare. “You are family, Brida, and if you aren’t careful, you’ll choke on all that stupid pride. I’ll come by later. You can feed me supper if it makes you feel better. Norinn won’t mind.”
Brida didn’t pursue the argument any further. While she might suffer from too much pride, Laylam could put a mule to shame with his stubbornness. They completed the journey to the beach in silence, at least until they got their first look at the storm’s aftermath. Laylam halted the wagon, rose from his seat and gave a celebratory whoop that startled his horse, set Moot to barking, and was echoed by the other villagers who rolled up on either side of him.
For as far as the eye could see, a carpet of seaweed in variegated shades of green to black covered the sand calf-deep, and spilled over the clusters of rocky outcroppings that tumbled from the meadows of salt grass to the foaming surf. More of it swayed in the shallow surf, so thick one could stand on it.
“Thank the gods,” Brida breathed in a reverent voice. The first heavy storm had delivered a plenitude. If fate and deities remained generous, they’d have more then one good seaweed harvest like this one.
The shallows still churned in places, and gulls swarmed the sand, feasting on dead fish that had been thrown onto the land by an angry tide. That tide had pulled far back now, leaving scatterings of shells in its wake. Children who had accompanied their parents to the shore raced back and forth, gathering up cockles, conches, wings, and drill tips before tossing them back into the water in a game to see who threw the farthest.
Brida climbed down from the driver seat after her brother to join the other villagers gathered in a group to divvy up sections of the beach. Each family was assigned a spot to harvest, that lot marked by a stone set at the allotment’s edge.
Once they were assigned their allotments, the siblings met at the back of their wagon where Brida unloaded a sickle and pair of baskets with straps sewn to them. Moot abandoned them on arrival. She leapt off the wagon and raced away, barking with excitement as she plunged into the knot of children gathered by the water’s edge.
The wind still howled off the Gray, whipping Brida’s skirts around her legs and nearly tearing the baskets out of her hands. She had to shout in order for Laylam to hear her.
“I’m off to the tidal pools!” She pointed to her allotment. Rock formations edged parts of the beach had been carved out by the sea’s endless wash. The tidal pools nestled in their shelters were too hard for the horses to navigate with the cage-like rakes dragging behind them, so the seaweed piled there was cut and gathered by hand. Laylam nodded and waved her away as he unloaded his rake from the wagon and unhooked the horse from its traces.
Moot left the children to join Brida, bounding ahead only to double back and run circles around her, snapping at the fluttering hem of Brida’s skirts. The dog’s ears suddenly swiveled forward, and she stopped, nose raised in the air as she sniffed something more interesting than salt, seaweed, and dead fish. A curious whine escaped her mouth before she bolted for the tidal pools where Brida planned to harvest.
Brida followed at a leisurely pace, trekking over hillocks of kelp. She’d be salt-caked and sand-encrusted by the end of the day and reeking of seaweed, but for now she enjoyed the hike and the hints of sunlight breaking through the cloud cover.
She was the only one on this section of beach. The rest of the harvesters had dispersed into the shallows behind her or toward the bigger pools that lay in the opposite direction where the cups of the bluffs were deeper and trapped more of the seaweed.
Moot had mostly disappeared behind a tall shard of rock, only the last third of her tail peeking out to reveal her whereabouts. The hound’s tail suddenly drooped before she backed away, teeth bared at whatever lay hidden behind the rock’s shelter.
Brida slowed her approach, gripping the sickle a little harder as Moot growled low in her throat. Sometimes the Gray coughed up predators that swam too close to the shore during the storms and were slung onto the beaches where they gasped their last breaths. Alarm swirled through Brida’s belly. What if it was anobluda? One of those foul abominations that usually lurked in the black deep?
Anobludahad terrorized Ancilar during the long summer before Zigana Imre had dispatched it with the help of her mare Gitta and Lord Frantisek. Even now, with that thing crushed to bone splinters under Gitta’s massive hooves, people still feared falling asleep, feared dreaming in case another such creature lured a grieving, unwary villager into the water to feast on them.
What had the dog found?
She peeked around the line of stone. Moot pressed against her leg, preventing Brida from getting any closer. Brida’s heart surged into her throat at the sight before her.
Like the beach and shallows, the tidal pools were choked with seaweed. The stuff draped over the rocks and spilled across the sand, dotted with tiny sand crabs that skittered across the lacy leaves before burrowing under them to reach the water in the pools. Entangled within a net of the weed, a man and a child sprawled. Bright blood streaked the man’s bare torso and the arm stretched across the child in a protective clasp. The pair looked asleep, their features slack, eyes closed. From her vantage point, Brida couldn’t tell if they breathed.
Seeing two gravely injured people sprawled in the sand should have stunned her speechless for only a moment before she’d start screaming for help. But inthismoment she remained silent, her shock making her doubt her own eyes.
Where there should have been hips, and legs, and feet, the two possessed tails, sleek and muscular that ended in flukes similar to those of dolphins. Their skin shimmered in the sun like the inside of an abalone shell bleached by the sun—striations of blue, indigo, silvery gray, and cascading green. Their hair was nearly indistinguishable from the leafy varieties of seaweed spilled around them, neither blond, brunet, or ginger, but multiple shades of pearlescent green and purple.
