“Then how could you keep this from me?” he blurted, tears springing fresh and rolling down his great face. “For years I waited for the change to co

me on me again, so that I could be a bear again, and return to the ice, return to you. All along you’ve been here and said nothing? You are cold, cold and cruel, Ulla.”

Sigrid passed a hand over her eyes. “Do not call me that. It is not my name, not anymore. This is my name; this is my face. I am not her, I am Saint Sigrid of the Ways, however you may wish it were otherwise. I set out to find you—but it was truly for this I became human. This ship, coursing towards the beast that swallowed my goddess. This was my Quest, not you. When I saw you it only recalled to me all I had failed to do. If I had gone to you then, and tended a tavern with you all those years, perhaps you would have been happy, but it would have put a lie to all my training, all my life since the Skin-Peddler traded my flesh. It would have been the end to my story, and so it would have seemed that I had done all I did only for a husband. It was not the end I wanted. I am not your goal, Eyvind. I am an arrow shot towards Sigrid, and I must find my mark. The wolf led me astray, don’t you see? The wolf led me off the path that wound to you, and into a place of whose jeweled mysteries I could not begin to tell you the first part. I am no longer Ulla—how could I dwell with Eyvind?”

The tavern-keeper’s body seemed to dwindle, as if all the blood had run out of him. He put his head in his hands, his fingers in his thinning hair.

“My life has gone so far wrong I can’t see the right for miles around. The Marsh King said I would be a man until a virgin was devoured, the sea turned to gold, and saints went west on the wings of henless birds. I believed the old stork—I thought it’d be a few years, no more. It went so fast; one day I was old and fat and the sea was still gray. I told a boy the story once; it seems like ages ago. I thought it would help, to tell someone. That it might hurry things along. But I couldn’t tell, not one day did I even think on it, that my love was there, swilling beer in a dark corner. You should have told me, Sigrid.” He took a deep, hitching breath. “If you are not my goal, what is?”

“I’m sorry, Eyvind. I truly am. None of this is how I meant it to be. I wanted to greet my captain young and beautiful; I wanted to be her savior. Now I can barely limp towards her on a leaking ship and hope I have the strength to throw myself in the path of the sea-creature.”

In the corner of the hold, Snow wept silently, her tears wetting the wood of the softly rocking ship.

The silence between Sigrid and Eyvind was thick and dark as eel flesh for days upon nights. Snow hated the sound of it, echo of it in her ears. She was relieved as an ox without its yoke when Grog upended the last of her rum barrel into her blue mouth, belched forcefully, and bellowed.

“Shell off the port side!”

So it was—Snow could not breathe for her terror as the shell grew in size, black and green and blue and slick as a beetle’s body, black and green and blue as the sea careening off of its dome. Its beady, baleful eyes crested the water, blinking their translucent eyelids in the dim sunlight. Grog put on a face of boredom, but beneath the brine, the pale girl could see her tail trembling. Sigrid’s face was contorted in fear and ecstasy, and she was gripping Eyvind’s hand with all her strength, whether trying to keep him at her side or anchor herself to the ship, Snow could not tell.

“Grog,” Sigrid called out, her voice high and strong, “sail in! Into the mouth!”

The Magyr bolted upright in her tub, her violet tail thrashing. “Are you out of your mind, woman? I’ve gone this far, but knives or no, that’s daft as an empty mug!”

“It’s all right!” Sigrid laughed, throwing her head back, her hair streaming like a young girl’s. “Hand in hand they’ll come whistling home, the maiden, the bear, and the girl in gray!”

Snow patted the Magyr’s shoulder, which glowed deep turquoise with fear. “I’ll do it, Grog. It really will be all right. Probably. Anyway, the song says it will, and songs are usually right.” She wrapped her slim fingers like candlewax around the wheel, and Grog lay back in her tub, her ample chest heaving.

“Fanatics!” she muttered, shaking her tattered green head.

The Echeneis’s mouth yawned open, and the sea rushed in, past the forest of ivory baleen, the tiny ship buoyed on its crest like a toy boat.

The Witch’s Kiss disappeared into shadow, like a lantern snuffed out.

In the Garden

“DON’T STOP!” THE BOY GASPED, HIS BREATH COMING QUICK AND fast as a galloping colt. The girl frowned, creases forming in the inky expanse of her eyelids like constellations. Her glance flitted into the chamber, resting on the sleeping form of Dinarzad, whose hands moved fitfully over the bronze keys.

“If I am caught here—”

“I will protect you! I am as brave as any Sigrid! Do you think I can’t?”

The girl paused tactfully. “I think that’s very brave. But you do not really understand. Have you forgotten that you used to be afraid of me?”

The boy felt his cheeks burn. “Only a little,” he mumbled, picking at stray pebbles on the windowsill, trying to imagine that they were Lo Shen pieces. The night was black as saddle oil all around, and only their eyes gleamed.

“She is fast asleep,” the boy cajoled, leaning across the window’s threshold, close to the girl, until he could smell her wildness, the scent of tree and stone which clung to her. “Tell me the end.”

WHEN THE SHADOW AND SPUME CLEARED FROM THE eyes of the four creatures on board the little ship, the world had changed around them.

This is to say, they had passed into a new world. The belly of the sea-monster was vast, so vast that they could only see the flank which was near to them, ribs curving upward, taller than cathedrals—the other was lost in mist, and the ceiling arched high above them, like a starless sky. The stomach fluid of the beast made an inland sea, its waves green and brown, noxious and steaming. The schooner drifted through the oily waters, pushing aside flotsam with its prow. The smell was of rotting fish and kelp, and skeletons of unnamable things, things that had never seen the sun on the surface of the ocean, floated by as Snow stared over the edge at the hellish soup.

Sigrid did not lean over the rail to gawk at the accumulated trash of a life spent roaming the sea. She had taken the wheel and now looked straight ahead, eyes hawk-wide, at the wreckage laid out before them.

It was a city of skeleton ships, each bobbing in its own rhythm on the bile sea. Some were gray and crumbling with age, bones still gripping the wheel, skulls rolling back and forth over the decks in hypnotic repetition. Others were not so old at all; their paint was still bright in patches, and the figures slumped over the crows’ nests and bowsprits were swollen and putrid, swarmed over with flies. The schooner passed without a sound through this necropolis, her crew agape. Eyvind finally covered his eyes when he could witness no more dead.

But Sigrid had fixed her eye on a ship, not far distant. Among all these ghost ships, one still had its lanterns lit, and the orange light spilled out over the brackish water, fire dancing on the slick of the monster’s gluttony.

And voices could be heard—cheerful and raucous, shouts of glee and mirth. Snow’s heart pounded within her. With aching slowness they drew closer to the mystery ship, and she dared to hope that it would be red, red as old dreams. But when they finally came within full sight of the galleon—for a galleon it was, and as beautiful a ship as had ever been built by hand or bough—it was not red, but white.

Tags: Catherynne M. Valente Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net