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Sigrid swallowed hard. “And you’ll be needing my blood to pay the Witch, I suppose?”
Tommy’s eyebrows arched like bows springing to fire. “I think not. The mess would be more trouble than it’s worth.”
“Then why did you take me, if not to kill me? I’m told that’s what pirates do. And besides, you must be the worst kind of pirate if you attacked the Ajan barges.”
The captain smiled and leaned into Sigrid’s face, her expression almost, but not quite, motherly. “We don’t really hold with tradition. We heard there was a monster-girl living on the barges. You’ll learn to trust one kind of rumor and laugh at the other when you live at sea—this was the kind you listen to. When the Stars speak, you listen. Look around; we like monsters here. It’s not easy to crew a ship with only women—girls don’t exactly study to be sailors these days. When we hear of some ghastly beast, we snap her up as soon as we can.”
“So, all of that, the fire and the raid, was for me?”
“Certainly not! We stole plenty of other things—just no other girls. You’re part of our crew now—you’ve been pressed into naval service, my little powdermonkey.”
Sigrid leaned over the rail and stared at the water running past the red hull swift as otters fleeing a hungry shark. She contemplated the loss of her family—which she did not feel greatly—and her new place as a monster among monsters. Though some of the sailors had appeared human, she began now to suspect that none of them truly were. And at that moment, Tommy leaned over the bar alongside her.
Tomomo’s reflection in the water was that of a woman’s body, but it was crowned, not with Tomomo’s smirking face, but with that of a bright-eyed fox, its fire-shaded fur buffeted by the wind.
SNOW LOOKED UP AT SIGRID’S WIDE FACE CAREFULLY as a deer nosing a blackberry bramble.
“I was born in Ajanabh, you know,” she said softly.
Sigrid nodded, but it was not precisely a confirmation that she had known. “Then you are blessed as a spring babe—though I’m told it’s no more than a shadow of the city it was. All cities are shades of what they were these days; even Muireann was once a metropolis, with towers of ice and silver and queens who sat on tuffets of whale fur drinking Ajan orchid-wine from cups of seal bone. It was the capital of the North, a thousand years past. Now it is a village, an outpost on the hostile sea. Only the Stars recall.”
The afternoon had grown fat and red-faced and the first thin wisps of twilight were waiting behind its jowls. Sigrid and Snow worked in unison now, like fiddlers plying their bows.
“Clearly you joined the Sigrids,” Snow remarked, keeping her eyes fixed on her friend’s prodigious elbows, “or it would be a great coincidence indeed that you are named Sigrid yourself.”
“Clearly.”
“Yet”—and here Snow blushed, flushing her colorless face with pink—“you don’t swear by Saint Sigrid, you swear by the Stars. I think it must have been a very strange road for you, from there to here.”
Sigrid’s smile crept away from her face like a cat through a door left ajar. She shut her eyes and for a moment Snow thought the hulking creature would cry. “I am not worthy to swear by her name,” she croaked, her voice like a hundred frogs lost in mourning. “I’ve failed too often, and too profoundly. I was supposed to accomplish a thing—the only thing, I once thought, I was ever meant to accomplish. I abandoned that when the wolves led me astray and into the City of Light. And there I dropped a second destiny from my hands as though it burned me. And now I’ve no destiny left at all, only these nets to tie off like umbilical cords.” Sigrid wiped her nose and shook her head like a horse discouraging flies. “So I lapse. I lapse into the faith
I happily held when I was young and I swear by the Stars, for I have yet to do much to offend them. Surely there is some Ajan god you whisper to in the dark?”
“I don’t really remember—my parents died before they could give me a god of my own. I have heard that the Ajans worship the Stars now, since the city died and all the monks left with their complicated new religions. But they also say that the Ajans eat caterpillar pies and fly on wings of horsehair and rose petals. I’ve stopped believing what everyone else says of my home. Anyway, I never heard of a saint being born on the barges.”
“That’s because she wasn’t a saint when she left Ajanabh. It was much later that heaven touched her head. It is rarely the places that birth us that see our true worth. Nor even,” Sigrid added with half a smile, “the places that adopt us. But you may whisper to Saint Sigrid if you like, when you are alone and the Stars are not speaking. She will not mind.”
She cupped the girl’s white head in her large, callused hand. “I had just gotten to Tomomo, had I not?”
“Yes,” Snow breathed. “Go on.”
SIGRID WAS CERTAINLY SURPRISED TO SEE TOMOMO with a snout and ears sporting tufts of cream-yellow fur. Yet she seemed to be a pleasant enough beast, and her graceful hands rested on the rail like carefully arranged flowers. In fact, when Sigrid looked up from the water, the captain appeared just the same as she had—her hair was bound as neatly and her lips, grinning merrily, were just as thin and chapped as before, as any seafarer’s lips would be. Only the water showed the fox head.
“So I, too, am a monster. Of course, I am almost never discovered, prettiest of all possible barge girls—only the sea’s reflection shows this face. I have a natural disguise. Whereas you”—and here Tomomo eyed young Sigrid’s chest meaningfully—“must make your own. Yet, like yours, my mother could never bear to look at me. She would not let her eyes meet mine, even when I was a baby; she said she could see an unholy thing moving behind the iris, something watching her which was not her daughter. They like to tell us we are unholy, Sigrid. It makes them feel as though we cannot harm them, for surely they are as holy as we are dirty and foul. But, of course, we can. Let me tell you how I first came to know that I was a monster…”
MY MOTHER WAS PARTICULARLY DUTIFUL WHEN IT came to the binding of my feet, though by the time of my birth, the custom was as antique and unfashionable as stone tools in our country. I believe she thought that if she could confine me to a litter for the remainder of my flower-strewn days, I would not be able to cause much mischief.
Every night I loosened the wrappings and crept from my bed to splash naked in the garden mud. I am sure she knew—after all, my hair was always damp and grass-scented in the morning—but she said nothing, swaddling my toes in raw silk with reproachful glances at my dirt-caked heels.
One year, when I was no more than ten or so, the fortune-teller Majo returned to the capital. This was a great event; though she would not have been received in polite society, her wares were greatly desired by all the ladies of rank. Love potions, spells for a safe childbirth or charms for a male child, talismans for luck and wealth, even incantations to change the weather from drought to rains. Her cart was a thing of wonder, shaped like a tiny, moveable house draped with purple and red cloths, green under-curtains and clanking silver chains, leather charms hanging like fringe from the miniature eaves, crane feathers and cat fur and unguents in clay pots issuing from its dark door. All this Majo carried on her back from town to town—though the shriveled, bony frame of the old Witch seemed hardly equal to the task. When she stopped, stilts unfolded from the bottom of the contraption, and Majo would release the straps that bound it to her to ply her trade.
After dusk, my mother and many other ladies with perfumed wigs and lacquered lips gathered in the pavilion like birds alighting on a fountain, squeaking in delight and waiting breathlessly for the telltale rattle of Majo’s cart. I was brought in my litter, resting on rose-colored pillows with my strangled feet propped up so that the blood would drain away from them.
Soon enough it came, singing its dilapidated song of pebbles underfoot and magic practical as cooking. The women pressed around, pushing their coins into Majo’s hazel-twig hands and pocketing their charms, their wishes, their scraps of paper to be placed beneath the pillow, their drafts to be swallowed at the next new moon.
Somehow, through the crush of rustling robes and greedy hands, Majo caught my eye with her beady black one. She had only one—the other had been lost somewhere along her travels, some said by a fight with a tiger, some said by a battle with a sorcerer; some even claimed to have scratched it out themselves when a spell had gone awry. The remaining eye clamped on me like a hand, and Majo’s spittle-strung lips parted into a smug little grin.
“What is your daughter’s name?” she croaked to my mother, without needing to ask which of the powdered ladies she was.
