A Wilderness of Glass Read online

  I’m chatting with mermen at night and hiding from harassing noblemen during the day, she was tempted to reply but kept the words behind her teeth and answered with a brief shrug. “I’m fine, Laylam. I’d think you have a lot more to concern yourself with than your sister’s mood.” Three of his nine children had been sick with a cold the past few days, and Brida had tended to the healthy children while Norinn treated the sick ones. It had been left to Laylam to finish drying the last of their harvested seaweed, load it, and transport it to the big trading market in Galagan.

  She’d left Norinn an hour ago, long enough to change clothes and bolt a cup of hot tea. The gloaming had passed. Half the village was dark, villagers finding their beds for the night. Brida didn’t hold much hope that her seagoing companion still awaited her, but she intended to visit their meeting place anyway. The little time they spent together each evening had become the highlight of her life, a magic all its own beyond the fact she was visiting one of the fabled merfolk.

  Her shoulders sagged when she reached the ledge and found the waters that lapped at its base empty. No silvery fluke or skin dappled by moonlight. No firefly eyes or a webbed hand raised in greeting.

  “Ahtin?” she called softly. The wind caught her question, tossing it into the surf.

  She’d figured out the spoken equivalent of his whistled name after more failed hand gestures and fleeting drawings dug into the sand with a stick. “Fast fish” wasn’t quite right, but Brida had been close in her initial translation.

  The sand drawings had done much to further their communication. She’d learned the merchild was not his daughter, but his niece, child of a sister mermaid. When the merman held out his hand for the stick, she’d passed it to him, watching as he arched his torso and tail for balance before sketching out a sleek fish with a nose that elongated into the shape of a spear or spike.

  When he finished, he tapped the stick against the drawing, then tapped his chest with one finger and whistled his name.

  He’d drawn an ahtin, a big, sleek, deep-water fish highly prized by fishermen, not for its meat but for the challenge of catching it. Fast and aggressive, the ahtin fought every attempt at being hooked or netted, its ferociousness legendary. More than a few fishermen had died in the attempt, impaled on the spike.

  It seemed an odd name to give the merman, Brida thought. He had been anything but aggressive toward her. The name seemed more fitting for someone like Ospodine. Still, he’d managed to fight off and escape something with big teeth and a bigger appetite, saving himself and his niece, even if it had been a near death for them both.

  “Ahtin,” she’d told him when he gave her an inquiring look. “Your name is Ahtin.”

  “Ahtin,” he’d repeated before nodding his approval. “Ahtin and Brida.”

  The pairing of their two names sent a frisson of warmth through her body, startling her. “Oh, Brida,” she silently admonished herself. “Don’t be a nitwit. It’s simply two names and someone learning how to say them.”

  She hadn’t echoed his words, turning her attention instead to drawing more pictographs in the sand so she and Ahtin could exchange their meanings in both spoken word and whistle. He learned her language much faster than she learned his, his fascination for this new speech reflected in the avid spark that lit his eyes and the way his gaze settled on her mouth and stayed as she spoke. It might have been disconcerting were it not for the softness of his expression, as if what she said wasn’t nearly as enchanting as the way she said it.

  “Vanity,” that inner voice, with its relentless criticism, cautioned her. “Just your vanity.”

  This evening she’d promised herself not to read into Ahtin’s expressions those emotions experienced by humans. He wasn’t human, and his people remained a mystery to her. She’d witnessed some of their behavior when they gathered in the hope of rescuing Ahtin and the merchild Brida now called Samath, after the spirit of beaches. They displayed fear and affection, anger and worry, just like humans did, but much of that emotion had manifested audibly. The nuances of facial expression might be very different in merfolk than in humans. Though it was impossible to misinterpret the wide smile Ahtin wore every time he saw her.

  No merman greeted her now with his welcoming smile, and the sea lapped solitary against the rock ledge as if to mock her. Brida climbed to the flat top anyway and peered out at the waves. Vague hints of dorsal fins rose and fell in the surf, darting one way and then the other under the dull light of stars and a fading moon. Hunting, she thought. The toothy predators that made night fishing so dangerous were out in numbers now, patrolling the waters for the unwary. Brida was suddenly glad Ahtin hadn’t come, or if he had, that he chose not to stay.

  The sharp whistle that was her name in the mer language proved that assumption wrong. Brida turned toward the sound coming from her left where the tidal pools in which she’d first found Ahtin were now submerged by the tide. Beyond them, a stretch of beach unfurled past the salt grass to the place where a curving ladder of rock hugged the shoreline. The black eye of a sea cave stared back at her, and in the glass-thin water kissing the entrance, a pale figure beckoned.

  Brida’s spirit sang with a silent joy at the sight of Ahtin waving to her, but she hesitated to join him. Ixada cave was a haunted place, a doorway to the world of the dead, or so the old stories went. Every child born and raised in Ancilar had challenged their playmates to enter the caves, including Brida. She’d only been brave enough to linger at the entrance and peer inside, at which point Laylam had leapt out of the shadows with a roar and nearly made her wet herself with terror. She’d raced home crying, unsympathetic to her brother’s plight when he earned a hard swat from their father and a night without supper for scaring his sister.

  Childhood was long behind her, but her wariness of the cave remained, as it did with even the most skeptical villagers. Fishermen told of hearing strange whispering from its depths during moonless nights and especially on the Day of Spirits when the year also died. Some even reported seeing vaporous shapes floating out of the blackness to fade into the waves, singing wordless songs in wailing voices.

  Ahtin whistled her name a second time. Whatever spirits sheltered in Ixada Cave, they didn’t seem interested in revealing themselves to him. Brida inhaled and exhaled a long breath, glanced behind her at the dark silhouette of Castle Banat atop its bluff and the empty shoreline below it before climbing down the ledge to join the merman. There were worse things than ghosts.

  Obludas.

  The thought halted her for a moment before she resumed her trek, ears tuned to any melancholy dirges that might suddenly rise up from the Gray. She stepped over mounds of seaweed and skirted the corpses of jellyfish with their long tentacles stretched like venomous ribbons across the sand.

  Ahtin swam parallel to the shore, powerful shoulders flexing in tandem with the rise and fall of his back and tail through the water. He paused when she did, near the cave’s black maw. He gestured to the opening with a thrust of his chin. “Go inside, Brida. I want to show you.”

  She trusted him. Mostly. Had he wished to hurt her, the chances to do so had been many and varied since they first crossed paths. Brida didn’t believe he’d lead her to an otherworldly trap where some monstrous thing waited to wrest her soul from her body and plunge it into nightmarish oblivion. But Ixada Cave…

  So dark, with its untold mysteries and stories of the haunted dead.

  “I have no light,” she told him. “I won’t be able to see anything in there.” Things like once-dry expanses flooded with the incoming tide and the gods only knew what strange creatures that swam within it. Merfolk were almost commonplace compared to the horrors she imagined lurked in the concealing darkness.

  Ahtin drew nearer, the splash of his fluke sounding close enough to touch. “Safe, Brida,” he crooned to her. “You are safe with me.”

  In that moment, she understood what the sailors meant when they spoke of sirens’ song. She set a foot down in the direction of the ca
ve where some of her worst childhood fears waited.

  “Wait.” Ahtin shook his head. “Not that way. This way.”

  Puzzled, Brida followed him on the shore as he swam around the edge of the bluff. Her skirts dragged in the surf as she waded knee-deep through water growing colder with each passing autumnal day. She clutched the satchel she’d brought with her, its contents clinking and together. Nothing inside was of much monetary value, certainly not like the pearl he’d given her, but she didn’t want to drop them and lose them to the Gray before Ahtin saw them.

  She squeaked at the sight of a sharp fin slicing the water toward her. In an instant, Ahtin disappeared from her view, leaving only a temporary wake behind him that marked a path aimed directly at the fin which also dove beneath the waves. A frothing of water boiled up from the spot before dissipating. Frozen in place, Brida stared, unbreathing, until a crown of seaweed hair emerged, and Ahtin’s glowing eyes stared back at her.

  “Safe, Brida,” he repeated and propelled himself through the surf until he floated alongside her.

  “What was that?” She hated how her voice warbled, but it was hard to speak normally when her heart was still stuck in her throat.

  “A hunter. It hunts something else now.”

  That short answer was less than comforting, and she slogged faster toward the patch of beach revealed on the other side of the bluff and a smaller entrance she assumed led into the cave. Here, the land rose more sharply, keeping the high tide at bay.

  Brida looked down at her companion. “How will you go in?” She supposed he could pull himself along the sand, using the power of his arms and tail, but what a struggle that would be, even with him healed of his injuries.

  He gestured toward the second entrance. “You go there. I will meet you from the other side.” Before she could protest, he dove once more into the deeper waves, fluke giving a single flick before sliding under the waves.

  A sliver of moonlight illuminated a patch of sand just inside the low entrance. Brida bent to enter, straightening with a gasp upon discovering a large interior space of soaring height with tidal pools closest to her and the pounding of the surf against a tumbled barrier of rock on the other side where the wider entrance faced the more level shore.

  The darkness prevented her from seeing much more than the outline of curved walls and roof and the hint of reflection on the pools’ surfaces. A loud splash echoed in the chamber. She tensed as verdant light spread across the cave floor, brightening the waters of a large pool surrounded on three sides by rubble, with the fourth side narrowed down to a channel where the surf spilled into the pool as a waterfall. Some of the rubble looked as if it lay in and around the water with purpose, creating an imprecise spoke pattern with the lit pool at its center.

  Water lapped at the rubble shore. Brida could see all the way to the rocky bottom and track the tiny fish that darted back and forth, startled by the sudden luminescence and the addition of a much bigger occupant to their sanctuary.

  Ahtin slowly revealed himself with a flex of his tail, rising above the surface until he faced her, seawater streaming down his face and torso. His hair cascaded over his broad shoulders, wrapping around his arms. In the soft light, his eyes had lost their nocturnal shine, and his double pupils shone dark within their pale irises.

  Her sodden skirt slapped in rhythm with her steps as Brida picked her way across one of the spokes toward him. His mouth curved into a smile to match hers. “Your water magic?” she asked.

  “One enchantment.” He traced an evanescent pattern on the pool’s surface with one fingertip. “There are many others.”

  Brida envied him the skill of water sorcery. Any sorcery for that matter. There were human mages, though they weren’t common, nor had she ever met one herself. She’d heard all the Kai, the last of the Elder races not yet vanished, possessed magic that they wielded at will, but like the merfolk, they weren’t human. “Do you know many enchantments?”

  He shook his head. “No. The aps do, but they only teach all they know to the female who will become the ap after them.”

  It had taken several rounds of whistle and word exchanges as well as numerous drawings in the sand for Brida to understand the nature of an ap, and she still wasn’t certain she had the right of it.

  The merfolk were a loose confederation of several extended family units, each ruled by a matriarch they called an ap. At least that’s what the noise Ahtin made to signify the matriarch’s title sounded like to Brida. The ap’s descendents stayed with her family, the mermen leaving only temporarily to mate with merwomen of other families. In that, Ahtin told her, the merfolk were more like the great whales than the dolphins.

  Merfolk lived long lives, the aps even longer than the others, sustained by sea magic whose origin had long ago been lost to memory but was passed down from matriarch to oldest living daughter who carried on the heritage generation after generation.

  With Ahtin’s sorcerous light chasing away some of the darkness, the cave no longer seemed as sinister. Brida found the largest rock closest to the pool’s edge and sat down. Ahtin glided toward her, a study in grace and power as he cleaved the water.

  “I have gifts for you.” She shrugged off the satchel she’d looped over her shoulder and across her chest, settling it in her lap.

  Ahtin swam up next to her, so close his arm laid a wet path across the side of her skirt where he rested it on the rock shoreline. Avid curiosity glittered in his eyes as he stared at the bag, though he said nothing and waited patiently for her to reveal its contents to him.

  She held up a wooden eating spoon, turning it one way, then the other before demonstrating its use. When she passed it to him, he took it as if it were a fragile piece of pottery. Brida watched, mesmerized as his fingers caressed the utensil, stroking the oval and handle in long sweeps. He then brought the oval to his mouth, pressing it down on his lower lip before sneaking a taste with the tip of his tongue. Brida forgot to breathe.

  “Spoon,” she said in a hoarse voice.

  Both lips curved around the oval’s edge in a kiss. “Spoon,” he echoed, double eyelids closed as if in deep thought. He opened his eyes, heavy gaze settling on her where she sat frozen on her rock seat. “I like the spoon.”

  Siren’s voice, siren’s stare. The sea’s seduction wasn’t confined only to mermaids.

  “I can keep it?”

  Caught in that unwavering regard, Brida didn’t comprehend the question at first. “Keep it?”

  A knowing, closed-lip smile curved Ahtin’s mouth. “The spoon.”

  Later, when she lay alone in her bed, contemplating the mysteries of life in the plastered divets of her ceiling, Brida thanked the gods for the cave’s frigid air, otherwise she might have incinerated on the spot from embarrassment.

  “Yes!” she practically shouted, flinching when her exclamation ricocheted back to her from the walls and roof. She bent her head, tempted to dive directly into the satchel and hide the heat scorching her face. Her fingers fumbled with the next item, almost dropping it in the pool. She thrust it at Ahtin who reared back to avoid being struck in the face.

  Commonplace like the spoon, the comb Brida held out to him was a plain affair, carved from a splinter remnant of a shipwreck washed ashore when she was still a child. She’d done the work herself, a practice piece given to her by her father whose skilled hands would have turned it into a work of art. Brida had used it on her hair until she married, when Talmai presented her with a brush and comb set as a wedding present.

  Ahtin reached for it, his expression puzzled when she suddenly pulled it out of reach. “A comb. Watch.” She undid the bottom third of her plait and used the comb to tease out the small tangles created by the salt water drying there.

  The same keen focus he displayed with the spoon sharpened even more with the comb. Brida wondered if her own expression had mirrored his when the priceless pearl had rolled across her table. These things had no real value in her world, but he held them as if they were t
reasures like the pearl. Unique, precious, remarkable.

  His inspection of the comb was less sensuous in nature than it had been with the spoon, for which Brida was glad, until he curled a hand around her loosened plait. She sat still as the stone beneath her while he twined her hair through his fingers.

  “Not like us,” Ahtin said, his smile telling her the observation wasn’t a criticism. He used the comb as she had, running it gently through the loose strands.

  “No,” she agreed. “Not like you.”

  Did merfolk comb out their hair in some way? The ones who’d gathered to rescue their kinsmen had left theirs unbound with bits of shell woven in for ornamentation. As he’d done with her, she reached out to snare one of Ahtin’s locks.

  Slippery-smooth, the strands were thicker and wider than her own with a texture that made her think of a candle’s surface. Water beaded on the filaments instead of soaking into them like human hair.

  So intent with her inspection of his hair, Brida didn’t notice Ahtin had moved until he was right in front of her, at eye level, his arms braced on either side of her, chest pressed to her bent knees. She gave a faint squeak and dropped the lock of hair, startled by his sudden closeness.

  The myriad shades of pale pink, lavender, blue, and green that pulsed just under his skin deepened along his throat and across his cheekbones. Ahtin tilted his head as if considering a most unusual shell laying on the sand. He gave her the comb. “Use here,” he said, fingers parting the curtain of hair that hid a portion of his face.

  A steady clicking, much like a feline purr, rose in his throat as she carefully ran the comb from his scalp to the tips of his hair, and his eyes closed in quiet ecstasy. Brida glanced around him to see his fluke gently fronding the water in tandem rhythm to his clicks.

  This close to him, she warmed under the heat his body radiated. She was chilled to the bone herself, holding back shivers with an effort, even as she dreaded having to leave soon and end this extraordinary interlude with her merman.