The Witch Sea

by Sarah Diemer

Copyright 2012 Sarah Diemer

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved

Edited by Jennifer Diemer

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I knew what she was. When she came up the path, feet quiet, deliberate, I knew it from the way she moved, the webbing between her bare toes, how she faltered when she reached the lighthouse landing, like she had never seen things like stairs before. I knew, and I said nothing, because we were all, in our own way, monsters.

"Nor," she said, sticking out her hand as if she expected me to shake it.

"That's what he named you?" I asked, arms folded before me.

"Yes," she said.

I did not touch her.

She had come by boat. She had to. They could not touch the saltwater. He wouldn't let them, and they obeyed him.

If they touched the water, if they slipped or tripped or dared, the spray made them scream, mouths wide, tongues distended. A wave made them crumple, skin sagging and bloated, until their flesh fell apart, obliterated by the blue, leaving a clean, new creature beneath: sometimes a seal, wet coat slick, brown eyes still human. Sometimes a walrus, growing until the human body burst apart, revealing tusk and tooth. Sometimes it was a small, silver fish that flopped helplessly until it reached the water—or did not, lying, rotting, in the sunshine.

She wasn't human, Nor. But neither was I.

"They call you a witch," she said, smiling, moving facial muscles into toothy grin, like a silent growl. "Are the stories true? Do you keep the fish from the bay so that the people starve? Do you dance in the moonlight? Did you sell your soul?"

"I am not what you think I am," I said, and let her into my house, with her wet brown eyes and hands she kept clasped in front of her. If I had shut the door, if I had kept her out, she would have remained on my island, anyway. He had sent her. We both knew he had sent her. And he was dauntless.

"They call you Meriel," she said then, sitting down at the table stiffly. "Is that your name?"

"It is."

"You hate us."

"I do not."

"You hate me?"

A seal's eyes are innocent, contain no malice, no human anger or rage, and though she showed a human shape now, she was still seal. Her eyes were limpid, round, deep when she looked up at me, hands on the table, widespread. They were webbed, too, her fingers, but only a little. He was getting better.

"I do not hate you," I told her. It was not a lie.

"He hopes that you will reconsider his offer, you know. He is not a bad man. He never was a bad man."

"No," I said, and it was so tired.

"I will come again tomorrow," she said, and she stood, too sudden, jerky. "I hope that you will reconsider, too, Meriel." Her voice was warm and soft, skin smooth, brown, beautiful.

She held out her hand again as she departed. I did not take it.

I watched her as she walked away and down the dirt path. Her hips swung gently from side to side, the thin skirt lying along her curves.

He had tried everything else, and this was a last resort; I knew that. Again, he would fail. She would fail.

But I thought of her that night, hand over my own breast, listening to the crash of the waves against the rock outside my window, watching the faint flash of silver upon the ceiling, reflection of my finely woven net of spells that kept the fish out of the bay.

In the morning, I checked the line, standing on the shore, hands extended, feeling the push and pull of the tide and waves as I crawled over every inch of the silver net with my head and heart, testing it and pulling it and mending it where mends were needed, shaping the magic in long strands, crisscrossed—always crisscrossed.

The bright sunshine reflected off of the water, blinding me, and I did not see her approach in the little boat, did not see her get out and climb the path to me. I squinted, blinked, and suddenly, she was there, as if by magic. I rose from my work, and I went to meet her, bright spots along my vision outlining her in a riot of color.

"Good morning, Meriel," she said, and she curtsied. Her movements were more certain than the day before, nearly graceful. It did not take some of them long to get used to the land, to how their new limbs and muscles worked. She seemed almost human now.

"Good morning, Nor," I told her.

"He wishes me to ask you to change your mind, Meriel. He has said that he will double his offer, if only you will cease."

"I will not," I said, and it was laughable, the formalities: how prettily he'd dressed her up this morning; the doubling or tripling of his offer of gold, of house and land and a hundred thousand things he hoped might tempt me. They did not. They would not. I wondered when he would tire of this.

The sea was patient. He was patient. But patience could wear thin.

"Oh," was what she said, and it was obvious that she was disappointed, confused, that she had thought today would be the day when I would smile, nod, give in to his demands. She opened her mouth and shut it, so like a fish. Beneath it all, they were always like fish.

"Go back," I said, not unkindly. "Tell him 'never.'"

"He will not accept that, you know." She lowered her chin, looked over her shoulder, stepped closer. She smelled of salt. "He will send me back every day, Meriel."

"As you will," I said.

She left.

~*~

I was born on Bound Island. My mother pushed me out, and--that same night--had to tend to the nets. Back then, it was roughly every seven days that breaks would occur, that the magic would have to be woven back into the silver strands. Now it was every day.

Nothing living could slip through the nets and enter the bay. Not intact. If it slipped through, it would…change. And it would become his--Galo's.

So I tended the nets.

Once, twice, a million times, I asked my mother to tell me the story of Galo. I remember her familiar movements as she banked the fire, drew me close, traced a protective circle in the dirt about our forms.

She always whispered it.

Long ago, before man or woman or stories, there was the sea. It crashed and roared and boiled, churning life into being. At the center of the sea swam Galo. He was larger than the island, larger than the bay, with four limbs that turned into tentacles that turned into hoofed legs, and a long, equine nose with teeth as long as oars and sharp as stars. He had been in the sea from the beginning, rising from the muck and mud at the bottom of the world, fully formed. He was the oldest sea god and the most powerful. Storms came from him; whirlpools followed his finned hooves. His heart was black, and he knew only chaos, and everything in the sea feared him mightily.

Land came then. And some things from the sea ventured upon it, exchanging their fins for legs, their gills for lungs. Man came into the world, and the sea was forsaken. The men forgot their origins, forgot their fathers who had crept from the salt, and they shook their fists at the water. They built boats and crossed the seas and believed they had conquered the waves.

Forgotten, too, Galo slept at the bottom of the world. One day, he awoke and saw how much had changed, saw how man defiled his mother, the sea, saw how there was no reverence in man's heart for the ocean that had given him life. Galo's own black heart grew even blacker, and he thought and he thought, and he formed a plan.

He changed from his equine form, shed his fins and his sharp teeth, and he crawled upon the land, now a man. He shaped a town from mud, and he turned back to the waters and lifted his new arms. Out of the ocean crept all manner of creatures: the whales and the fish and the octopus and the shark, and they shed their animal forms and become people, too.

"We will make a great army," Galo said to them, "and we will punish the humans for their sacrilege. We will destroy them on land, we will devour them upon the sea, and man will cease to be. The ocean will reign again."

The sea people, as one, gave a great shout and said, "We will obey you, Galo, for you are mighty and strong." And more creatures began to emerge from the sea, and more and more, until the beach teemed with people who had shark eyes and whale hearts, dripping hair and tusks for teeth.

But then the march of animals stopped abruptly. For, at the mouth of the bay, upon our own Bound Island--though it was not known as such back then--stepped a witch. Your grandmother, Meriel, for whom you are named. She drew down a star, and from its shimmering bulk, she fashioned something so large, so ludicrous, it stretched across the entire mouth of the bay, both ways.

She said, "While those of my bloodline live, Galo, you will never get your creatures. I curse you to remain in the town you have built, trapped and unable to summon the sea to your aid."

And, because he was small, a man, and no longer mighty, the curse stuck to Galo like a barnacle.

I sometimes wondered at the audacity of Grandmother. The oldest god of the sea took the form of a mortal man, and she wove a net and curse so tightly that he was spellbound by it. Did she ever fear retribution? Did she ever look through the curtains of the tiny cottage at night and watch the people come to the edge of the water, all along the beach of the bay? Did she watch them stand, silent, looking out to the sea they could no longer touch, would never touch again, as long as the curse remained? Galo was cruel. While he must remain in the town he had fashioned, he demanded that all of his creations did, too.

The people stood beneath the stars along the shore and looked out to the sea, mourning its loss. And they cursed my grandmother.

And my mother.

And now me.

I used to think this was bigger than all of us. My mother told me the story of Galo and of my grandmother and how we must remain, for all time, upon the island. We were the axis of the world, she said, as she dusted my nose with flour or tossed me into the air. We were important.

My mother told me, too, of how she'd seduced my father to the island. How I would also have to seduce a man in order to keep our bloodline alive. If our bloodline died out, the curse would break. And the world would end.

She'd said it all so matter-of-factly, hands upon the washboard, drawing the tea towels over the ridges again and again, scrubbing the stains out. I watched her hands go up and down, and I felt a remorse like fire rake through my stomach, my heart. I would not seduce a man, and there was no simple way to tell my mother this truth. So I never did.

But I was so lonely.

My mother had left me the island, a legacy, and a stone. The first two were burdens; the last was my saving grace in those hard days following her death. It was a plain stone, the size of my palm, and clear. When I stared within it, it showed me what I wished to see. Not fantasies but facts, as they happened--real, true life.

I watched the townsfolk and Galo in the stone's depths. If they ever suspected an outsider saw them, observed them, they made no gestures to indicate it. They moved within the stone like little pictures, stories, lives I could see but never touch.

Sometimes, when I was little, I stole away my mother's stone, and I peered into it and asked it for friends. It showed me the inhabitants of the bay town, then, too, showed me the women with hair like tentacles, the men with shark eyes and sharp teeth, and I wondered why it presented me with visions so contrary to my request.

But over time, over the years, I understood. The sea people did become my friends. In a way. They were all I knew.

~*~

When Nor left me for the second time, I dusted my hands against my apron pockets and climbed up and into the lighthouse. The shack along the lighthouse proper, where a lighthouse tender should have lived, had long since disintegrated, crumbling to the ground like any manmade thing left too long near the unforgiving kiss of the sea. I had to live in the lighthouse itself now, a solid stone structure that towered up towards the heavens and wouldn't disintegrate for as long as I was alive. That's all that mattered.

I tugged up the corner of my mattress and took out my comforting stone, shaped like a tiny pillow, and the weight of it filled my palm, my heart, with a sense of peace. I pressed its worn curves to my hand and closed my eyes, cleared my mind.

"Show me Galo," I whispered to it.

At first, dark shadows spun over the stone, but then it focused, cleared, as if black waters had parted.

Galo had never been a handsome man, not even when I was little, when I stole the stone and started back in fright at his visage. He sat at a small table now and had his head in his hands. His long, tangled hair--white as foam--curled around his ears and down and over his back and chest.

Sometimes, lately, I pitied him.

There was no sound to accompany these pictures, so when his cottage door opened, when Nor entered to stand behind Galo, I gaped. Almost tenderly, she stepped forward and touched his shoulder with one fin-long hand.

He shrugged her off quickly, said something pointed. She drew away from him, mouth downturned, and left the room.

I put the stone away.

That night, I gathered my cloak about me, my grandmother's cloak, much patched and mended, and wandered out of the lighthouse into the star-soaked night. I went down to my own small shore and stood up on the trunk of a tree that the last storm had washed onto my island. I shielded my eyes against the grinning moon and watched the procession of the townspeople.

They came from their houses, from their shacks. Sometimes, when my mother told me the story of how Galo had made the town, forming it from mud, she smirked behind her hand, said, "He didn't know what a town was made of, so he shaped the houses based on glimpses he'd seen from the water. He didn't know how houses worked, what walls and windows were, so the sea people were left with cold floors and doors that would never open."

But I'd seen the insides of those houses, knew that this part of my mother's story wasn't quite right. Perhaps the townsfolk had gotten what they needed from other towns, trading fish or stories for chairs and bowls.

The people came now, trails of people, men and women, walking graceless and graceful in turns down to the edge of the sea in the harbor, a curved beach as smiling as the moon.

They gathered in a long line, one after the other, all turned toward me, but not really me. They were looking out to the sea, the ocean that could not embrace them, the water close but closed off to them.

They stood on the sand of the beach, and they did not move. They did not speak. The splash of the waves was nearly silent upon my little beach, and I watched the sea people, as I did every night. And they watched me.

The moon shifted overhead slowly.

I grew tired as sentinel and stepped down from the tree trunk. I went back inside, shut and locked the door as I had done a hundred times before, a thousand times, and I put myself to bed while the sea people stood along the shoreline and stared, unmoving, at an untouchable sea.

~*~

I saw her before she stepped upon my sands this time. It was morning. Again, I checked the nets, mended the breaks, spun the magic to replace the strings that were too faded, did it all from the edge of the water, eyes closed, hands held out. Her little coracle bumped upon the edge of the beach, and I paused, opened my eyes, turned to take in her small shape as she dragged the boat up onto land. She moved like a girl now, truly, all hints of animal gone.

"Hello," said Nor, coming to greet me, smiling shyly, fingers held out. Today, I took her hand, felt the smooth skin brush against my calloused palm. She held on a bit too long, and then she dropped my hand awkwardly.

Still not human enough.

"Today…" she began, but I shook my head.

"No," I told her, as I would always tell her.

She nodded, still smiling, as if she'd expected my answer. "Is it all right if I eat with you? I brought lunch.”

I opened my mouth, sighed, nodded.

We shared a quiche with bits of seaweed sprinkled throughout. I wrinkled my nose from time to time but ate my portion without saying anything, staring down at my hands and the small china plate, not up and across at my visitor, who ate her quiche with a knife and fork and had folded her napkin upon her lap.

"Are you ever lonely?" she asked. I didn’t answer.

"You're brave," she said. "I would be very lonely."

I shook my head. I was lonely, and I wasn't brave.

She leaned back in her chair, took in the roundness of the lighthouse, the scrubbed cupboards, the neatly made husk bed opposite the table. She got up, ran her fingers along the wood and stone, circled the room as I watched her with hooded eyes, nervous. Would her touch leave a lingering of her perfume? Her scent was not unpleasant, but it was distinct, different, and I was unaccustomed to different things.

"You live here all alone," she said.

I nodded.

"Did you grow up alone?"

I sighed. "I grew up with my mother. She died when I was fifteen."

"Was that hard?" She sat across from me with her wide, brown eyes, and I knew it was a genuine question. She was curious.

I cleared my throat. "In some ways, it was hard. In others, no."

This seemed to satisfy her, for she stood and gathered her things in her small, plain basket, brushing her fingers over mine when she reached to take my plate. I shuddered, but she seemed not to notice, and she smiled at me when I rose.

"It was lovely to talk to you. You are not a bad witch. I have decided that."

I was too stunned to reply until after she had left, the old door closing fast behind her.

"Thank you," I said.

~*~

"Show me Nor," I whispered to the stone, pressing my hands together. First, the stone showed me a muddy, distorted image. And then there she was.

She was laughing, throwing back her head and laughing at something a tall, thin man had said. He was bent down almost double at the waist to whisper a word in her tiny, shell-shaped ear.

She was surrounded by people, and they all stood in Galo's house, the largest house in the town. There were rich tapestries draped over the walls and thick carpets upon the floor. I thought of my own humble furnishings—old and colorless—and drew my lips together.

He came striding down the staircase now. He was dressed in loose pants and a dirty white shirt. His hair rose around his head like a writhing creature. He said something to Nor. She sighed and shook her head, did not look the least bit afraid. I wondered if I would be afraid, confronted by that angry old god with teeth sharper than those of the shark men. He said something else, and the sea people backed away from Nor, but she simply shook her head again, folded her arms.

Galo turned and stood along the far wall, looking through a window. I could see the view through that window, knew it looked out upon the bay, and, past that, to my own island.

I covered the stone with my hands and put it away.

I drew water from the magicked well and washed my face in it. It was so cold, I shuddered, put my hands upon the well rim, stood for a long moment, letting the waves of chill pass through and away from me. The salt breeze was blowing from the north today, and my mother had often foretold omens by the wind's direction. North was ill tidings, always ill tidings, she'd whispered to me so many times, spinning a circle about herself as if it could protect her.

Nor came a second time that day, so my mother might have been right.

"I brought you dinner," she explained, not even greeting me but brushing past. I stood on the hillock before the shore, staring at her, open-mouthed. "Do you like biscuits?” she said. “I brought you biscuits and a good, fish gravy."

"My answer is still no," I told her, following after her, pressing my hands together to keep my fingers from shaking. "I will not ever answer his demands otherwise.'"

"I did not ask you to, did I?" She glanced up from setting my table, and her eyes were flashing, and her wide smile turned her lips up at the corners, almost teasing.

"Why else would you have come?"

"To keep you company," she replied, and spread a bright red-and-white checked cloth over the table. It hid the cracks and the smooth-scrubbed surface, made the room look almost cheerful.

"Come, sup with me," she said then.

I did.

~*~

That night, when I walked out to the shore, to my tree trunk, to my vigil, my thoughts chased after themselves in my head, and I almost tripped, climbing up the bark to stand at my usual, well-worn crook.

The dinner had been very good.

I shielded my eyes against the almost new moon, even though it shed too little light to truly obscure my vision. I watched the processional of sea people making its way down to the shore. They stood, one beside the other, all the way around the bay, and they raised up their faces to the scent of the surf and the stars, and they trained their eyes to the deep blue waters, and they did not move, did not speak, did nothing but stare with a longing I could almost understand.

This was the first night I found Nor among them.

I looked for her, but I was too far for faces. I felt Galo's presence at the center of the line, felt it because of his tie to my family and me. And there, beside him, was Nor. I don't know how I knew her—not by sight—but I knew her, and she stood just as still and silent as her brothers and sisters, which surprised me, and I didn't really know why. I supposed I had expected her to be different from the others, for she was already different to me than all the others.

I dreaded the new moon. Tomorrow.

I did not sleep. I tossed and I turned, and--once or twice--I rose to peek out of my curtained window. The threadbare cloth did little to block the light during the day, or even during the night, if the moon was bright, but it made me feel secure in the fact that--no matter what--the lighthouse was shielded from the nighttime gazes of the sea people. I didn't know what I was afraid of, why my skin chilled when they made their nightly line and watched the ocean.

My mother's stories were loud in my head tonight, though, and I remembered how she said they waited and watched for weakness, waiting to destroy me so that they could set themselves free.

I was exhausted by morning.

"You do not look well," said Nor when she arrived, when she dragged her coracle up on the shore, met me at the edge of the grass and the sand. I sat, tiredly, my head in my hands, and when she bent down beside me, I did not move away from her, though she sat much too close, the warmth of her body hot against my leg.

When I made no reply, she handed me an apple, sun-ripened and hard, and a piece of thick, crumbly bread.

"Breakfast," she said, and did not look at me but, rather, back the way she had come, toward the town. I ate in silence.

With her hands clasped in her lap, her hair disheveled and tossed in whichever direction the wind teased it, she looked calm and content, though wild. I envied the townspeople sometimes, and I felt shame for that envy. She was prisoner to an old, forgotten god, kept from her home, probably never to see it again, and yet…the way she sat, poised, calm, clear like a full moon night, she seemed much happier than me, the witch who contained them all, the jailer with the magic key.

I could not finish my breakfast, dropped the half-eaten piece of bread to the ground as I rose. An angry gull swooped in, audacious enough to land beside Nor, and scooped crumbs down its gullet before either of us could protest. It took off with great sweeps of white wings and flew out to sea.

"They are despicable, vermin," I spat out, recognizing from some far, removed place that my mother had spoken the very same words in the very same voice.

"He was only hungry," said Nor, upturning her eyes to me, face drawn.

She left without asking the question.

~*~

Even though the moon was new, I could sense where it hung in the sky, suspended and ponderous, out of reach and dark to us. I shivered within my cloak, drew it closer about myself, as if I could bind safety to me with its worn, patched fabric. It smelled of seaweed and salt, fish and sweat, and it smelled like my grandmother and my mother, and I suppose that, now, it smelled of me. There was nothing to differentiate my scent from that of my mother's or my grandmother's, and that--for some reason--filled my heart with alarm. I was already nervous from the moon's dark ascension in the sky, and when I climbed the tree trunk, waiting for the procession, my heart beat a rhythm that the waves could not drown.

The moon affected my powers but never so strongly as on the new and full nights. On the full moon, I was drunk from the energies. The shining net, suspended underwater, glowed so brightly that the entire bay shone from it. But on the new…

No living creature got past the nets. Save for on a new moon night.

Nor had come on the last new moon.

I rubbed my eyes tiredly, remembered the night, a month past, clear as glass, as if it were only a moment ago. I slept badly on the nights leading up to the new moon, tossing and turning as I thought about how best to keep my lineage's oath, how best to thwart Galo's plans. But the more I thought, the more I worried, and the more I worried, the worse I slept. And then, the night came, and I was exhausted and nervous and shaky and absolutely terrified that I would be the disappointment of my family, a line of women who had sacrificed their lives to a curse.

I didn't want to be a disappointment. So I did my best. But sometimes my best fell short. Like last month.

It had been such a cold, black night. A storm had kicked up during the afternoon, and when I came out to keep my vigil, the rain lanced down slantwise, and I could not see, save for the breaking waves. A slowly creeping mist hung suspended over the water.

The seal bolted through the net. I know that much but not how. She might have gotten spooked in the water. Maybe a shark chased her. But, however she did it, she came through, sliced through the silver strands of the net, and I crumpled when she did, for the net was tied to me like all other parts of the island. I cried out from the pain, hand over my heart, falling to my knees in the roar and rush of the gale. I could feel her, that seal, darting through the bay toward the shore, and I knew that Galo called to her. I did my best, in that biting rain, to repair the break, and I mourned the fact that yet another sea creature had lost its freedom.

My mother had told me that Galo called to the sea always and that all of its creatures wanted nothing more than to please him and answer his call. That's why it was so important to be vigilant, to never falter, to repair the nets whenever there was the mere whisper of a break. Every new creature that rose from the seas to be transformed by Galo was another nail in the coffin of humanity--a fact my mother had told me day in and day out. What she didn't say, but what was understood, was that every creature that got through the net was our responsibility, our failing.

Now another new moon had come. I had never let a creature through before, had never wavered enough to truly fail, until Nor. It had been a great failing. Galo was using her to get to me. I knew it. I scrubbed at my face, tried to peer through the mist.

Sometimes, I dreamed of what Galo must have been like before he assumed his human shape. The stories my mother had told me to frighten me were always fresh in my mind, dripping with dark water, clouding the bright days. I rubbed at my eyes again and climbed the tree trunk. My skin rose in gooseflesh, and I was chilled, strung taut like a bow and twice as tight.

Galo called to the sea creatures. He always called to the sea creatures. I glanced uneasily over my shoulder at the night, listened to the ever-present shush of waves on the side of the island that looked out to the sea. They battered the rocks there, the waves, the rocks that held up my lighthouse.

What if…what if Galo ever called up a monster? What if Galo called up something so gargantuan, so sinister, that no amount of magic could combat it, no net keep it out? What if the lighthouse, a massive structure, was dwarfed by its great bulk? What if it blocked out the stars—

I started so violently that I almost fell off of the tree when a loud splash sounded ahead of me in the mist. Fish often leapt up; sometimes dolphins came nosing around the bay, but my imagination traced dark grooves back to my worries and fears, and the hair upon my neck stood up. I felt myself quake.

I had been alone for so long that I never thought about what it was to be with someone, that reassurance of companionship that I would have, in that moment, given my heart for.

I heard it again.

This time, soft, small splashes came across the water, sounding eerie in the misty stillness. Oars. A boat. Someone had come from the town, at night, on a boat. This had never happened before.

The sea people, all of them, since the curse began, came together at night, along the beach. All night. Every night. It had never changed, was as dependable as the seasons spinning on or the moon waxing and waning. I climbed down from the tree, filled with dread. My mother had taught me that changes were never good. I had always believed her.

The coracle was shadowed in the wake of the mist, and when it edged up and onto my shore, I stared. Nor, small and sleek, leapt out of the boat, careful to keep her feet from the lapping waves, and dragged her small craft up further onto the sands.

"Hello," she said, quietly, staring up at me, eyes unblinking. "Good evening."

"What…" I said, and licked my lips, cleared my throat. I carefully folded my arms over my chest. "What are you doing here?"

She shrugged her shoulders, and, in the darkness, I could not see her expression. "I have been here a month now."

I watched her.

"Don’t you ever want this to stop?" she whispered.

I was surprised by the question. I knew that there was no good answer to give her. Yes, I wanted it to stop. Every day, I wanted it to stop. I wanted it to be over. Sometimes I thought about what it might have been like if I'd been born to another mother, if I had not been raised on an island to nurse a curse that was not my own. Sometimes I watched the seagulls and felt a welling of desire in me so fierce that it burned like a fire, a tongue of flame that licked my skin and spoke a single, sibilant word in my ear, over and over and over again: freedom.

Nor had not moved but simply gazed at me, hands clasped and folded before her, standing on the sands of my small, lonely beach.

"What are you doing to me?" I asked her. My voice cracked.

"Nothing," she said. I believed her.

I felt paralyzed. Should I invite her in? It was so cold, so wet out here in the dark and the mist. She had come all this way, and she hadn't said why, but there she stood, on my shore, small mouth closed, wide eyes searching mine. I stepped aside, held out one hand, pointing to my lighthouse.

"Come," I told her, and I ushered us both inside.

The night held a strange quality as she hung up her cloak over my cloak upon the peg, drawing out the chair she usually sat in, taking off her wet gloves. There was no fire in the grate because I had already banked it, but I set about asking it to wake up with a few bits of sea grass and a liberal push of magic.

"Do you use magic for everything?" she asked me, voice soft in the quiet of the lighthouse. I nodded, didn't look at her.

"I use it often." I fed the fire a handful of twigs.

"You keep the nets together." It was not a question.

"Yes."

"Why?"

I sat down upon the ground, turning a stick over and over in my hands. I didn't know how to answer her question, felt broken as I tried to think of an answer. I didn't know why I kept up the curse that had been my grandmother's business, why I had listened to my mother's stories and believed them. But I had listened to them. I had believed them, that we were the last wall of goodness between a monster and the annihilation of the human race.

Sometimes, when I saw Galo in my stone, I laughed, put my hand over my mouth, held back a sob. He looked old, worn, tired--as far removed from a monster as a butterfly.

I could not express to Nor these crumpled feelings of rage and despair and pain. They ate up my heart from the inside, greedy jaws devouring all those things that made me myself, Meriel, and spitting out replications of my mother, my grandmother, instead.

So I sat on the floor, and I twisted the stick in my fingers, and I said not a word.

I heard a scrape of wood against wood and looked up just as Nor rose from her chair, as she sank down on the floor beside me.

She was too close. She smelled of salt and soft things. She reached across the small divide between us and took my hand, touched my rough skin with her new, smooth fingers, held my palm in her own as she drew it close, into her lap.

I stared, unable to move. She held my hand tight and close. Her face was hidden by a wave of long, brown hair that swept down and in front of her eyes, concealing her from me. She was so small, so fragile. The fire crackled far, far away as I took in the seal girl's slight form, the arch of her round shoulder under the cheap gray cloth.

"I have decided," she said, words so low, I could almost not hear them, "that we are both prisoners."

"I'm not a—" I began but stopped myself, bowed my head. I did want to lie.

"Don't you ever wish…" she whispered, and she looked up, glanced at me quickly, wildly, and I saw the tears tracing down her cheeks, leaving a groove of silver upon her skin. "Don't you ever wish that it was all over? That things were the way they might have been…if this had never happened?"

I did.

I closed my hand in her lap to form a fist. She dropped her fingers away from me, and I drew back my limb, cradled it close to my chest as if it had been poisoned. I could not look at her. If I looked at her, I would lose my nerve, and I could not lose my nerve.

"You're trying to get me to say yes to him. It won't work."

"That's not—"

"You're all alike," I said, surprised at the words tumbling out of my mouth. My mouth, my mother's words. "Deceitful. Treacherous. You're all alike, and I will not yield to you."

A small part of myself, a lost, lone part, cried out from the dark within me as she rose.

"What part of you thinks this is right?" she asked me then, and I could hear the tears in her voice but dared not look up at her. "What part of you, Meriel?"

I pointed toward the door, terrified that, if I spoke, I would speak the truth.

The door crashed against the frame when she slammed it behind her. I waited until enough time had passed, until I felt certain her coracle had entered the cold and empty bay. Then, when I knew she had gone, I whispered it into the air, because I could not keep it inside of me any longer.

"No part of me," I told Nor’s ghost, and I sat, hollow, beside the dying fire.

~*~

That had been too close. I needed to strengthen my resolve, my spells, my promise to my mother.

I had no choice. I must do a Calling.

The amount of energy necessary to do a Calling, the amount of magic I would need to spin, was gargantuan. To attempt such a thing on the day after the new moon was lunacy. But I couldn't think about that. I had no choice. I must.

I gathered bits of dried sea grass from the edge of the beach the next morning, and I waited for Nor to come. But she did not. I sat along the beginning of the sand, and I twisted the grasses together nervously and waited. I was disappointed when she did not appear. Which was mad, a mad reaction, and I knew that. When the sea grasses had been braided together, when I rose and made my way back to the lighthouse, I felt relief and pain wash over me.

It was good that she had not come. And, despite myself, I was sad that she hadn't.

I built up the fire, laying my braided grasses in a special pattern in the flames. When all was ready, I drew a circle about myself with chanted words and gestures, and I sat in its center.

"Grandmother," I spoke into the cool calm of the lighthouse. "Come to me."

She came.

I had spoken to my grandmother once before. My own mother had done a Calling when I was small, for the nets had broken nearly beyond her ability to repair, and she needed counsel. What I remembered from that exchange, from my first sight of the woman who was the cause of all of this, was that she was smaller than I had imagined she would be. Shouldn't she have been tall, huge, a wall of power? But, no, she was stooped, and her eyes were rheumy, even in death.

She came now, and she had not changed from the vision of my memory. She stood leaning on the ghost of a cane. I could see through her, see the crackling flames behind her. She cast about, took in the state of the lighthouse, likely wondered why I was performing the spell here, rather than within the now-ruined cottage, and she shook her head.

"Why have you summoned me, girl?"

"I needed advice," I replied guardedly, and I realized as I spoke those words that I did not want advice from my grandmother. What could I tell her? That my resolve was weakening, that the curse was weakening, because of a beautiful girl?

That was it, wasn't it? When I closed my eyes, I saw Nor's face. When I dreamed, I dreamed of her, and when she had not come that morning, I felt a small part of myself shriveling up, growing small…dying.

My grandmother watched me work my jaw with an impassive face. "Well? Spit it out, girly," she said at last, though not unkindly. I folded my hands in my lap and stared down at my fingers.

"A seal got through the net."

"It's bound to happen." She shrugged wearily, closing her eyes. "Did you kill it?"

"Kill it?" I choked out. I shook my head, eyes gaping. "No…" I couldn't fathom such a thing. With a pang, I realized I could not fathom my existence without Nor.

"That's what you must do, when they enter the bay. Better to die, make a meal for you, then serve Galo, trapped forevermore. That's not an existence we would wish on our worst enemies." She spoke to me as she'd spoken to my mother: imperious, as if a child sat before her, not a grown woman with her own mind.

I watched my grandmother for a long moment, and I found I could feel nothing but disgust for her. "Be gone," I whispered, and when she opened her mouth, outraged, she vanished. She'd been about to scold me, surely. Call me weak-hearted, just as she'd called my mother. I remembered that now.

I put my head in my hands and breathed steadily for several long moments. I was so tired.

A knock at the door.

I sat, frozen, fear moving through my blood like ice.

Again, there it was—a knock at the door.

I rose, mouth open. I didn't know what to do.

Knock, knock, knock.

I opened the door.

She stood there, eyes wide and brown and beautiful, staring up at me as if she had never left. Her mouth was set in a firm, hard line, and she did not smile like before.

"He made me come," she said simply, "to ask the question. Will you take his offer, Meriel?"

I stared past her to the meadow, to the beach, to her little coracle on the sand. I took her by the wrist and drew her inside.

We stared at one another for a long moment, and I knew I was much too close to her, breathing in the salt of her, the warmth of her. She leaned against the door and looked up at me through thick lashes, pressing her fingers against the wood my grandmother had lashed together to form a gateway through which I could never escape.

"You," I said, and licked my lips, closed my eyes. "You're making me want you. With magic."

She sighed, then, breathed out, and I looked at her. Her own eyes shone; there were tears there. I watched them fall.

"I am not bewitching you. How could I bewitch a witch?" she whispered back. "Maybe this has nothing to do with magic, Meriel."

"You're magic," I told her, and when the words had left my mouth, I knew how true they were, how deeply true. She was magic to me, the sort of spell I could never make, could never understand.

She stepped forward. It was tentative, uncertain, when she put her hands up through the space between us, drew them around my neck as if I might be easily broken and she did not wish to break me. She leaned against me, and tilting on her tiptoes, she pressed her mouth to mine.

Her lips were salty, her tongue hot and smooth and soft, and I realized my hands were upon her waist long after I had placed them there. Heat rushed through me, and I felt my toes upturn, and then I stepped forward, pressing her to me, wrapping my arms around her so tightly that her breath rushed out, and she laughed a little against my mouth, a laugh of delight, deep and soft. I loosed my arms, gentle, then, and I pressed my lips against hers, my tongue against hers, and our teeth clicked. I was graceless, desperate, and when I shoved her against the bulk of the door, picked up her leg, put my hand beneath her bottom, I heard a sound like a whine, a sad, pathetic thing that gusted from my own lungs. I was starved, and she knew it, and she loved it, for her lips raked my skin, and her tongue trailed down my neck, and her hands were suddenly sharp as her nails scratched down my back when I pressed her harder against the wood, fumbling with my fingers, uncertain how to revere something so lovely.

"Here," she said, and she took my hand, closed her fingers around mine, and guided my palm up and along her thigh where her skin was hot and soft and wet. I closed my eyes, and I stopped. Every thing that I was strained against the pause, crying out, screaming and roaring within me. She stopped, too, and I heard our breath between us, sharp and short and hard.

"What is it?" she whispered, haltingly, but she knew. I knew.

"I can't do this," I told her, and I gritted my teeth, satisfied to feel pain thunder up and through my skull, bringing a red clarity.

Still, I did not move my hand.

"Why can't you?" she asked, panting against me. She moved her body, brought her hips down upon my fingers, brushed her lips against my jaw. "There is no law against this. This does not break the curse. Everything you do remains safe, Meriel. This will not damn you."

And then, she whispered, "Please."

When I closed my eyes, I saw my grandmother's disapproving face; my mother's weak, bitter one; the sad line of sea creatures stretched along the shore; the way that Galo held his head in his hands every afternoon and remained still, for hours, in despair. When I closed my eyes, I saw my long, lonely years of monotony, the times that I fell asleep listening to the roar of the sea and the wind and wishing for… I didn't even know what I wished for sometimes. Other times, I did know, and there was a drumming of blood within me that called for something I could never attain. Freedom.

I closed my eyes, and when I did, this all flashed by in an instant. And when I opened them again, there she was, in front of me, in my arms, bare skin against my hand, eyes wide and beautiful and wild and not the least bit human. She was a monster, I was a monster, and when I bent my head and kissed her again, tasting the salt of an ocean that was prison and home to us both, I forgot everything else but that kiss, but Nor.

It didn't matter. Nothing mattered, and when we found the bed, when I pressed down on top of her and in her and for her, our blood rushed with the same pull of tide and shore, and when she cried out, I cried out. The wind that roared and whipped the sea up into a frenzy carried our voices away into the great nothingness of blue.

I changed.

I became something that did not yet have a name. I felt, for the first time, the only time, that I was important.

At dark, she said my name, kissed my neck, bowed beneath me.

I did not know what love felt like, had never known. I wondered if I knew it now.

~*~

She left my bed that night. I woke with the shifting of the thin mattress, watched her in the dark as she gathered up her underthings, her skirt, her blouse, and put them on slowly. She left the cottage without looking back at me, and I followed her.

Nor went down to the edge of the sea, her small form bright beneath the tiniest fragment of moon that hung in the sky, suspended. She straightened herself at the shore, stood tall and unbending. I watched the mass of sea people on the bay's edge, watched as she looked to them, as they looked to her, as the only sound that roared about us was the sing of water and wind and the howling of an approaching storm.

I walked across the meadow, drawing on my nightgown, shivering in the cold. I stood beside Nor.

"Why do you do this?" I asked her. For my entire life, and long before, the sea people had stood facing the ocean in silence all night, every night.

Nor said, "Because we must."

She stared at the water and offered me no more words.

"But why must you, Nor?" I asked her, and I reached out and touched her arm.

"Because we miss it," she whispered so quietly.

Together, we stared at the ocean, and I felt myself unraveling.

"Then you should go back. Step into the water and—”

“I won’t abandon him.” Her eyes flashed. “I came here of my own choosing, as did we all. To help him. To stand with him. To save him, if we can.”

“To save him…” I repeated her words, marveled at the weight of them. “I thought he forced you—”

“No. We chose this. As you, Meriel, have also chosen.” Her voice trembled, and she lowered her gaze to the shifting sand at our feet.

“I have never thought of it as a choice, Nor. I don't know why I do…what I do," I said then, gulping down air, squeezing my eyes shut against the pain before me and within me.

"We all do what we feel we must," she said gently.

In the dark, she moved her hand until it was in mine, curling her fingers about my own.

~*~

"It's been three days," she said when she kissed me. "I can feel him. He's calling me back."

"Don't go," I whispered, swallowed. "Please don't go."

"I cannot ignore his summons." She traced her fingers along my collarbones, down my ribs, over my hips. I shivered and moved closer to her, pillowing my head over her heart.

"When will you return?" I asked her, curling my fingers about her waist, feeling her pulse beat beneath my skin.

"Soon," she said, and she kissed my eyes, my nose, my mouth, my heart.

Nor rose, dressed, left the cottage. I lay on the mattress, crippled, unable to breathe. When she left, I felt myself leaving, felt some piece of me remove itself and launch out upon the waters.

I had not tended the nets for three days. I remembered that—no, I was well aware of that—and I raked my fingers through my hair, put on a clean shift, climbed out of bed.

The nets had at least twenty small breaks, but none large enough to permit an animal to pass through. I stared at the sea for a very long time. I called up the magic, but I was frustrated as I began to slowly make the repairs. Angry. I did not want to do this thing, this chore. I hated it; I hated it passionately, deeply, and I broke away from the energies, felt them ricochet about and finally lodge into a small boulder at the edge of the water.

Disgusted, I turned away and stalked back indoors.

"Show me Nor," I whispered to my stone. I knelt beside the bed, and I waited.

She was in Galo's house, and she sat beside him. He lay on the thick carpet before the empty fireplace. I stared in horror.

The old man wept, wept piteously, burying his face in her lap as she stroked his hair and stared ahead, eyes empty, blank, though she wept, too.

I threw the stone away from me, heard it breaking as it hit the lighthouse wall, shattering into tiny pieces that could never be magicked back together. I breathed out and put my face in my hands, and I felt my body shaking.

"I don't know what to do," I wailed, and the words sounded broken. They were taken up by the wind that whistled through the open door, carried out and away from me, over the open sea. "I don't know what to do," I whispered then, and I kept the words close. They whirled about me as I stood, as I hugged myself, as I paced the floor of the lighthouse over and over and over again, feeling the familiar wood beneath my bare feet, feeling the grooves I knew by heart beneath my toes and then my knees, when I knelt down again beside my bed, pressed my fingers to the sheets, to the threadbare blanket that had covered us both, Nor and me.

If I left.

If I left…

If I…left.

I would never see Nor again.

Galo would shatter the curse, would call up his sea army, would destroy the world.

I would break my mother's heart. My grandmother's heart. I would destroy the world.

Wouldn't I?

I spread my fingers over the sheets, counted them as I had when I was a child. One, two, three, four, five… I swallowed and pressed them harder against the mattress, so hard I felt it creak beneath me as I stood up, as I drew my hands together, as if in prayer.

But I wasn't sorry, and I wouldn't pretend I was.

I turned, and I left the lighthouse, standing uncertain at the edge of the beach.

"First, he'll set fire to the world, burn the crops, bring diseases," my mother had said, and I heard her voice in the wind now, the damnation, all the stories she'd spun for me when I was little, the nightmares I had had each night feeding off of her words. "He will laugh as man dies. He has no pity."

I had seen him weep.

"They are monsters," she'd told me over and over and over again, making me repeat it until my tongue was tired.

Wasn't I a monster, too?

I rubbed my shoulders, and then I took a step forward. I felt the magic settle about me as I pulled and pulled.

And then, before me, there was Nor's coracle, summoned by my spell, bobbing empty up and down at the edge of the water.

I stood in the sand. I felt the tide come up and touch my bare feet, felt it run over my skin, so cold. I let out my breath in a hiss.

I closed my eyes, balled my hands into fists, and I stumbled into the boat, feeling my feet leave land for the first time…in my life.

I took the oar and clumsily pushed off from the shore, even as I began to hear the breaking behind me. I heard the scream of stone against stone, and I did not look back, but I saw the tall shadow of the lighthouse in the water as it began to sway, back and forth, back and forth, and it was falling apart, crumbling. The roar surrounded me as I paddled, and the storm that had hovered hit at last as I felt the spell shatter, as the lighthouse fell down, as the net began to unravel.

I paddled as the rain hit, paddled hard when the swells began to grow, tossing the coracle back and forth, filling it with water and emptying it in the same heartbeat. I gritted my teeth, and I pushed against the sea as the last wisps of the net unwound themselves, as I felt the net vanish. The roar of the wind and the howl of the sea surrounded me, and I wept in the salt water, in the rainwater, my tears mingling with all of the water, water everywhere.

Somehow, eventually, I reached the shore. The sea people were gathered there, and they stared at me with open mouths as my boat pitched itself upon the sand. I fell as I climbed out, felt the solidity of sand and land beneath my hands and let out a great wail that was lost in the bellow of the people as they raised their heads to the sky, to the great, gathered storm clouds, and threw up a cheer that dwarfed the music of the storm.

And then, Nor.

She ran down the shore, her eyes wide, wild, and she helped me rise, her hands soft against my skin. Always so soft. Tears streaked down her long nose, and when she kissed me, she tasted of their salt. Galo appeared behind her. He was skeletal, a shadow, and he stared at me with haunted eyes.

One by one, the sea people began to walk into the water.

Galo brushed past me, limping, and when he entered the sea, as the white foam dripped over his legs, he let loose a cry of pain. But then he sank below the water, was consumed by the water, and was gone, but I saw something large and dark moving through the bay, just below the surface.

I couldn’t breathe.

But then I looked at Nor, and she took my hand, and she kissed it. She stood with me for a long moment, but it was not long enough, would never be long enough.

She mouthed two words before she turned and embraced the water with her brothers and sisters—people who had never belonged here; people I had watched in my stone, watched mourning the sea night after night; people who were not people—now going home.

What Nor said was, “Thank you.”

FIN 

Other works by this author:

* The Dark Wife – The YA, lesbian retelling of the Greek myth of Persephone and Hades.

* Sugar Moon – The witch girl, Elise, sells magic, charms and dreams out the back door of her brightly painted wagon. One night, at the fabled Moon Market, she meets a stranger and falls in love with her. But dark creatures are after Elise…

* Far – Once, Mana stole back souls for a living. As a Runner, it was her job to snatch the dead out of After and spare them from a dubious future provided by a machine known as the “Recycler.” Through magic and will, she joined the stolen souls back to their dead bodies and brought them back to “life” as Reanima. Mana was the best Runner in the nameless city…And then she met Far.

* The Witch Sea -- The witch Meriel has spent her entire life in the lighthouse on tiny Bound Island. Upon the distant shore prowls an ancient sea god kept captive by a generations-old spell, a spell that Meriel alone must protect. Meriel's life has been lonely and unchanging--until the arrival of Nor. Nor's shape is that of a woman, but her heart belongs to the sea. Even though Nor is also held captive by Meriel's spell, she shows kindness to the isolated witch. Nor sparks a passion within Meriel, defying every law that binds them both.

* Hallow’s Eve: A Halloween Fairy Tale

* Once Upon a Hallow’s Eve: A Halloween Fairy Tale

As Elora Bishop:

* Cage the Darlings -- An exiled thief falls in love with a blackbird girl in this original lesbian fairy tale.

* One Solstice Night – As the Winter Solstice approaches, a not-so-great witch is attracted to an outcast shapeshifter. Will the Wolf of Winter devour the town of Benevolence, or can love save the day?

These—and more!—available now on Amazon.com, BN.com and Smashwords.com. Just search for “Sarah Diemer” or “Elora Bishop.”

*

About the Author:

Sarah Diemer writes about courageous young ladies who love other ladies, makes jewelry out of words and wire and loves her wife more than anything, ever. She randomly sparkles. 

You can find out about her novels, novellas and short stories, take a peek at the jewelry she makes out of old fairy tales and generally see several sparkly and interesting things at her site, http://www.oceanid.org, or the blog she shares with her wife at, http://www.muserising.com  She also writes magical lesbian love stories under the pen name “Elora Bishop”—you can find out more here: http://elorabishop.wordpress.com

Connect with the author at:

http://twitter.com/sarahdiemer

Facebook search:  Sarah Diemer, Indie Author

Table of Contents

The Witch Sea

Midpoint