Storm Bride

Storm Bride

Copyright © 2014 by J.S. Bangs.

First Edition: December 2014

Second Edition: December 2015

Cover:
Deranged Doctor Design

Map:
Robert Altbauer

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. You may find a summary of the license and a link to the full license here:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

Chapter 1

Uya

T
hree orcas raised their heads
above the green surf at the foot of Six Pine Rock. Uya crouched behind a drift log so her mother couldn’t see her and scold her, and she watched them. One of them carried something on its nose, a sea lion carcass or a fish, and the orcas’ fins flashed as they pushed it toward the foot of the stone, with its crown of ferns and evergreens. A surge of seawater hid them from her view, and when it subsided, Uya saw their prize clinging to the rough spire like a ragged piece of kelp.

It was not a sea lion. It was a woman.

She must be dead
, Uya thought. The orcas splashed for a moment at the foot of the stone then dove back into the deeper water. The foam surged over the rock.

Then the woman moved.

Uya stood up straight and shaded her eyes to be sure that she saw right. The woman wrapped her arms around the stone to keep from slipping back into the water, then she raised her hand and groped for a higher hold.

“Uya!” shouted Uya’s mother from a short distance up the beach. “What are you doing? You’re supposed to be gathering mussels.”

“The orcas brought a woman to Six Pine Rock!” Uya said.

Her mother guffawed. “Get back to the mussels.”

Aunt Mariku pointed across the water, to the narrow spire of stone that the woman clung to, and called to Uya’s mother
,
“Oire, I think I see something.”

Uya’s mother looked at the base of the stone, then gasped and breathed an oath. “Oarsa help her.” Then she ran down the pebbled beach and called to the men.

Uya scrambled around the rock and ran after.
She
had seen the woman first, and it would be fair for her to be the first to tell. But she couldn’t match her mother’s stride, and by the time she reached the men at the canoes, they had already pushed two of them into the surf and were paddling furiously against the waves toward Six Pine Rock.

“I saw her first!” she shouted to Grandfather Asa as soon as she caught her breath. “It was me.”

Asa put his gnarled hand on her head. “So Oire said. You did well.” But his eyes were watching the brown-clad woman clinging to the rock and the canoes spearing through the waves toward her.

The lead canoe was past the breakers, halfway to the spire, its red-and-black painted head charging through the waves. A small crowd surrounded Uya on the shore, and everyone watched the canoe nose into the foamy surf around the rock’s feet. The men beat their oars wildly at the water and pushed off stones as they tried to keep the canoe upright.

They were soon alongside the rock where the woman waited. Someone from the boat stretched out his hand. The woman seemed to shudder and turn away. Uya could see the lips of the people in the canoe moving, mouths wide open to shout, but she could only hear the roar of the ocean and the shrieks of gulls. A swell washed over the woman on the rock and shoved the canoe aside. With a flurry of oar strokes, the men brought their craft back, and the hand was proffered again. The woman shifted, then like a crow picking up a minnow, one of the men snatched her off the rock and tumbled with her into the bottom of the canoe.

Grandmother Nei and all the aunts and uncles of the
enna
crowded together when the canoe’s prow ground against the black stones of the shore, but Uya slithered past the adults and rested her chin on the lip of the canoe. The woman in the bottom looked to be dead. Her skin was white as a trout’s belly, tinted with chilly blue from the cold. A woven cloak had once covered her, though it was now little more than briny rags. Her hands were bloody from scratches, one of her fingernails had torn away, and blood trickled down her face from a cut across her forehead. But most of all Uya marked her hair: orange as a robin’s breast, beautiful and strange, matted with salt and seaweed.

With a grunt, two men lifted the woman out of the bottom of the canoe. Only then did Uya realize how
tall
the woman was. Curiosity seized her, and Uya reached out and touched the woman’s face.

The woman gasped. She opened her eyes, and Uya cried out and stepped back.

The woman’s eyes were large and beautiful, as blue as a jay’s feather, but her pupils were white with cataracts and twitched sightlessly. The woman’s lips moved without sound. Then she passed into the arms of the men waiting outside the canoe and out of Uya’s sight. They carried her swiftly up the beach, where they laid her next to the fire and swaddled her in linen blankets. Women moved forward, bearing pots and poultices. Uya tried to follow to see that extraordinary face again, but she was elbowed wordlessly aside.

Finally she gave up and retreated to the driftwood log on the high tide line. Her
enna
cared for the stranger until dark.

The
enna
lit two fires that night—the larger one around which most of them ate, and a smaller one where the strange woman lay on a pallet of blankets, cared for by the Eldest, Nei, and a rotating group of aunts. Uya quickly ate her fill of steamed clams and salty half-dried seaweed then slipped away from the larger fire to where her mother was tending the stranger. Her mother gave her only a moment’s glance as she walked up.

“See if any of the
rugei
traders lost someone at sea.” Nei’s voice was as gravelly as the high tide line.

“Have any trading ships from the
rugei
come down the coast recently?” Uya’s mother asked.

“No. Maybe Deika will have heard something at Suroei.”

“And if not?”

Nei shrugged. “Oarsa blesses those who entertain strangers. If we don’t find the vessel that lost her in a few days, we’ll have to bring her with us when we return to Prasa. We could be caring for her for a long time after that—we only see their ships on our coast every few summers.”

Uya crept around the perimeter of the fire, approaching closer. The woman turned her head suddenly, and Uya drew a breath and froze. She hadn’t supposed that the woman was awake.

For a moment she remained perfectly still, then she decided that if the woman hadn’t been angry this morning, she was unlikely to be angry now. So she crawled forward until she could see the strange pale skin and blue eyes in the mellow firelight. The woman was very young, almost as young as Uya, with smooth skin and bright hair. “What is your name?”

The woman made no response. She cocked her ear toward Uya’s voice, but her eyes darted aimlessly from the sky to Uya’s face, and she remained as mute as a stone.

“Why were you with the orcas?” Uya continued. “Did you know they would leave you on Six Pine Rock? How far did they carry you?”

“Uya,” her mother called out, “don’t bother the swift woman.”

“I want to know her name,” Uya said.

“She cannot understand you. She doesn’t speak our language.”

“What if she’s not a swift woman?”

“Of course she’s a swift woman. Only the swift people have hair that color. Now leave her alone until Deika comes back.”

So that was why Nei had mentioned Uya’s father. Deika could speak to the woman in the trade tongue, which the women did not know. Now Uya, too, was anxious for her father to return from Suroei. She had heard that the
rugei
, the swift people, grew old very quickly, so she studied the woman’s face intently to see if she could perceive her skin growing wrinkled or her hair turning white.

“Mama,” she said after a moment, “she’s not getting any older. Are you
sure
she’s a swift woman?”

Oire laughed. “The
rugei
don’t get old
that
quickly, silly. It will take her fifty years to get old, which for swift people and little girls seems like a long time, even if it’s not so long for us.”

The woman remained still under her blankets, her head cocked as she listened to Uya and her mother speak. The
enna
was going back to Prasa in a few days, and the woman would probably still be young then, which meant that Uya could befriend her.

She took the woman’s hand and touched it to her own chest. “Uya.”

The woman started for a moment at Uya’s touch then smiled. “Uya,” she repeated.

Uya put her finger on the woman’s lips. “And what is your name?”

The woman said something like
Salde
, but the latter half of that name was an unpronounceable twist of the tongue. Uya shook her head. The woman said the name again, slowly.

Uya imitated it as best she could: “
Saotse
.”

The stranger sighed and waited for a moment, then she repeated, “Saotse.”

“Oh good, Saotse,” Uya said. “Since I was the one who saw you in the water and who learned your name, we will be sisters. And we will love each other until we are very old—well, at least until you are very old—since that is what sisters do.”

The woman blinked. Uya took this as a sign of comprehension, for language was no barrier between sisters brought together by the Powers of the sea.

Uya’s mother put a hand on Uya’s mouth. “Speak carefully,” she said. “The Powers hear all things. The swift woman should return to her people as soon as we find them.”

“You speak carefully, too, Oire,” Nei said from the other side of the fire. She looked ghastly and uncanny through the dance of flames. “Oarsa doesn’t send orcas bearing a woman to our beach every day. Let the Powers work as they will.”