With a grunt and a heave, she hauled nets up with a thrust of her hand, and fish were strung on smoking lines with clicks of her tongue and snaps of her fingers, flying into place as she felt her magic ebbing and rebuilding.
With a catch like this, her parents ought to be able to get ahead. Get some breathing room. They could finish repairing the smokehouse, no more patch jobs. They could put on the new roof.
If that slimy Fox didn’t raise the rates again.
As she was waltzing the strings of fish back towards her parents’ store and the smokehouse behind it, she felt eyes on her.
The fish flew above her head, in long, neat lines like the tails of an elaborate kite. When she turned, they swirled around her like a silver storm, wet bodies now instantly frozen in the freezing air. Icy drops of water, frozen to glassy eyes and fins, caught the light and sent bursts of rainbow light onto the snow below.
She saw him, a Bear, had to be, by the size of him, in a hooded cloak, staring up at her handiwork with his mouth open. Jocasta swallowed a laugh and settled for a smile as a thought filtered through the daily tangle of tasks and worries that made up her mind.
He looks like an overgrown boy seeing a silk balloon for the first time. Maybe there are no mages in his part of the world.
And then he moved his head and looked right at her.
Her heart stilled. The fish swooped and half fell before she summoned her focus to keep them up.
Scarred eye. Silvery beard. One long plait over his shoulder, woven through with leather threads, ending in a metal disk. A metal disk that was too small to see the details on, but if she had to guess, she would bet the day’s takings that it bore the royal crest of Caledon.
Girion the Great, the fierce shifter king, was standing outside her parents’ shop.
She hurried past to the smokehouse, not sure if she had just committed an unthinkable crime by not bowing or acknowledging her king, not that she felt particularly connected to the king or anything but survival out here on the edge of the Wylding Sea.
Maybe he’ll be gone by the time I’m done in the smokehouse...
“Here, Papa. I’ll clean them.”
“No, no. You should go in and get warm. Your mother made roasted squash stew. It’s thick and hearty as woolen socks, and twice as warm. Go and get the bowl she left by the till, Jo.”
“All right.” Jocasta kissed her father’s temple and flexed her frozen fingers. “Papa... I think the King is outside. King Girion.”
Her father rose slowly from his place by the long metal table where they cleaned the fish. “Girion the Great?Here?”
“A massive Bear, with white and silver hair, and eyes that are bluer than the sky, and one with a long scar,” Jocasta hissed, dragging her finger over her eyelid and down to her cheek.
“Well, if it is him, I ought to come out and give him a piece of my mind. Every time that blasted Mr. Nemo raises the rates, he says it’s ‘with the King’s blessing.’ Ha! Fat, white bottom growing rich off our labor.”
“Father, don’t. Don’t do that. I’ll talk to him if he even bothers to come into the shop,” Jocasta soothed and guided her father to his seat, arms around his shoulders.
HE BOTHERED.
He was there when she unlocked the back door of the shop and entered from the smokehouse side, waiting outside the front door, his bulk completely blocking the small window.
Jocasta smoothed her cloak and sniffed the sleeve. Salty. Briny. Maybe faintly fishy. She patted her thick, naturally wiry, curly hair where it sat bound at the nape of her neck. She had no elegant clothes, no jewels to put in her hair.
Well. Let him see us how we are. How the rates are turning us from prosperous to poor. How my family has been the cautionary tale. Others will follow if they lose their sons or their workers leave for the warmer parts. We hardly ever have a day with a warm breeze now...
“Greetings.” Jocasta hastened to the door and bowed when she opened it.
She’d thought a king would travel with an army of servants and at least a small company of guards.
But if this man was Girion the Great, he simply grunted in response and strode in.
He filled half the shop, looking at everything as he turned in small circles.
“S-sire?” Jocasta risked calling him out by title, hoping that the stranger would laugh and tell a tale of how he was often mistaken for the sovereign.
The big Bear gasped, jerked his shoulders, and his thick hood fell to his shoulders. “I was hoping to avoid notice,” he growled.
