#celestial music

The whales had somehow kept pace with the invaders’ ships, and there were more of them than Marysa knew were in the pod that lived near her village. Somehow, the group had gone from eight adult whales to over thirty. They kept pace with the long ship, which surged on the steady strokes of twenty oars, each manned by two fierce-faced invaders.

Next to Marysa, the blacksmith’s wife cradled a crust of bread in her hands. She was looking at it with the big, mournful eyes that wondered when her next meal would be. The woman’s eyes kept flickering between Marysa’s face and that chunk of bread in pitying indecision, though she said nothing. The boy on Marysa’s other side had swallowed the last of his meal long ago, and curled into her side with the slow, easy breaths of deep sleep.

When she could take the weight of the blacksmith’s wife’s pity no longer, Marysa sighed, turned, and shook her head at the blacksmith’s wife. With a flick of her gaze between the crust, no more than two mouthfuls left, and Marysa’s knowing expression, the fair-haired woman smiled guiltily and took one more bite of her bread.

The guilt would do her no good, but it was nice to know that someone had compassion for Marysa. The rest of the captive villagers had avoided her gaze, a difficult thing to do in the close quarters of the ship, and most of the invaders ignored her the way they did the other prisoners, as if they were all blades of grass, unworthy of notice even as they trampled upon them. There were a few fellow prisoners, though, whose eyes darted in her direction with a mix of curiosity and raw understanding that made Marysa’s skin itch.

It was too much, that constant interchange of scrutiny and studied oblivion to her existence. One was oil and one was water, one clinging and slimy on her skin, the other washing away any dignity she had left. The strange mixture flowed over her until she felt she might drown in it.

Her father would have told her to stop being dramatic, that she had called this upon herself when she spoke up and painted a target on her back. He would have said it with pride shining in his amber-brown eyes.

But this was his fault, too. Somehow, being Aryn Blársverð’s daughter meant something to these people. They knew her father, or knew of him. They treated that black sword with reverence born of fearful familiarity. If his name was not hers, if his amber eyes did not live on in her face, then she might not have been taken.

Or she could have been attacked and left for dead.

This was doing Marysa no good. She was proud to be her father’s daughter, and blaming him for her own stupidity and the cruelty of other men would not change her circumstances. Her mother, despite her otherwise quiet and gentle, never stood for Marysa blaming someone else for her own problems, or for problems that were out of her control. That was one of the few things her parents had in common: their practicality. Marysa needed some of that now.

The sea still splashed about like water sloshing over the side of a bucket, except this was all inside out. The wooden bucket of the ship had saltwater splashing around it. But the sky had turned that menacing dark that came before a thorough storm, and the wind still battered Marysa, pulling her hair free from its tired braid and whipping her cheeks and eyes with it.

In the dark, a tall figure rose from the back of the boat and danced his way down the center of the boat, balancing on the board like a cat along a fence. The boat see-sawed on the waves like child’s toy in the bath, and this man was tall and broad in the sturdy manner of a tree, but his feet were light and nimble as he made his way to the bow of the boat. He passed Marysa as he went, his murky shadow in the dim light sliding over her.

She went still as he approached, watching him carefully. The blacksmith’s wife’s figure next to her went taut, too. The boy slept on, drooling on Marysa’s coat sleeve, and she wondered how a shepherd’s son could sleep through a storm as a prisoner on an invader ship.

The man rested his hands on the sides of the boat, leaning into the bow beneath a scrollwork dragon that charged forward through the waves. He was close enough that the edge of his cloak grazed Marysa’s bare toes, which she could see but not feel. The cold salt air and cruel wind had numbed them, and she knew she needed to warm them soon, but she did not want to shift and wake the shepherd’s son.

A soft thud startled her, one that she felt more than saw in the shadows. Something grazed the side of her foot, and rolled toward her. It must have fallen from the invader, dropped from his pocket or slipped from his hand. Marysa edged her foot forward, finding the object to be flat and round. It yielded beneath her foot. Not a weapon, then. Marysa ignored the sharp disappointment at that realization, but risked edging the thing closer to her under her foot. Her eyes stayed fixed on the invader, who seemed impossibly tall from her place on the floor of the longboat, while his stayed fixed on that rocking horizon that promised a brutal storm.

Her heel came to the base of her seat, the item beneath it. With steady slowness, Marysa reached for it and slipped it from under her foot. Only then did she glance down to find a disk of flat bread in her hand.

Hunger flared to life in her belly, irresistible in the face of something that might sate it, if only for a moment. Marysa must have made a small desperate sound, a soft groan or low gasp of dismay, for the invader turned his head, tilted it down, and faced her. It was the steady-eyed invader from the inn, the one who had questioned the leader. His eyes were still steady, even as they glinted in the low light, and he looked relaxed. His face was broad and angular, with a prominent nose that leaned slightly to the right. He was handsome, she could admit, though something in his masculine features looked worn beyond the exposure of weather. His knowing eyes moved silently from Marysa’s face to the bread she clutched, then back again. He smiled softly.

Marysa’s heart jumped. That was the smile of a friend, one who saw suffering and meant to ease it. It was also the smile of a cat bringing a mouse to the doorstep, and knows he will have a taste of cream later. That was what made her heart jump, Marysa told herself. Not the way the smile transformed his face from handsome stranger to a conspiring friend, one that could draw her in with thoughtful gifts and gentle words only to ruin her later.

No, he was an invader. She was only afraid, and that fear caused her heart to race.

The invader said nothing. He did not move. He did not raise a hand to strike her, or to take back his little round bread. He merely watched her, as if a storm was not imminent, as if the boat beneath his feet were solid rock, as if time did not exist.

“Einar! Koma brott!” The leader shouted from the back of the boat.

The steady invader spun on his heel and stalked down the middle of the boat, shouting something in that rolling language to his leader. Marysa waited, heart pounding, for the leader to come to her, take the bread, and punish her again. But he and the tall invader with the grace of a cat were in conversation, shouting over the wind and waves to be heard, pointing at the storm. For the moment, they were not interested in her.

Seizing the only opportunity she might have to eat, Marysa wolfed down the piece of bread, not minding how it stuck in her throat like sawdust. She was too grateful to have something in her throat at all to complain. When she finished, the bread sat heavy and hollow in her stomach, as if she had dropped a pebble into an echoing cave. Still, it was food, and it would have to be enough.

The waves continued their relentless battering, and the storm hit with all the wrathful force it could muster. Marysa had thought the winds alone were overwhelming, but this storm was like something out of a fairy tale, where a prince is tossed overboard only to be rescued by a beautiful sea siren. Her mother would have loved this storm, the way the ship was tossed about effortlessly between peaks and swells of unfathomable blue and foamy white. Marysa, however, was terrified. Her white-knuckle grip on the side of the boat did little to soothe that heart-stopping fear, but she was not willing to give it up.

The shepherd’s son was finally awake and clutching as tightly to Marysa as she did the boat, his eyes wide and face pale in terror. His name was Coryn, which Marysa had learned when the blacksmith’s wife had shouted it to wake him. The invaders lit metal lanterns when the rain started, the little orange glow enclosed in wavy, clear glass that distorted the light as it emerged. But it was light enough to see the vague figures around her in the boat, and it was enough light for the invaders to see their leader’s face as he shouted orders, which their swooping oars and busy hands rushed to obey.

Marysa was amazed that, the invaders had kept the boat afloat thus far, as rough as the sea was in this storm. But they were still sailing into the heart of the storm, and its bluster had yet to relent. It was too dark to see far beyond the edges of the boat, and waves taller than the boat’s mast began to take the invaders by surprise. They would rush to steer away from the rising wave with their oars, the sail already rolled up and tied out of the way, as the invaders who were free to walk the boat would brace for impact and lean against the tug of the sea. Marysa caught flashes of their determined expressions in the dim glow of the lanterns and the flickering brightness of lightning overhead. Not at all like the expression she, Coryn, and the other captives were wearing. The invaders were calm, as if they had seen seas like this before and conquered them, and were sure they would do it again.

Behind the force of her awe at the storm’s fierceness, Marysa dimly realized that they would not have a ship like this if they were not prepared for challenging seas and great journeys. They moved with casual efficiency, even if their tasks were completed with the urgency of the knowledge that the task might mean the difference between life and death. They were practiced, prepared, and calm; even the leader’s bellowing voice over the noise of the storm had the same tone of practiced, casual command her father had used when he led the village’s celebratory boar hunt at the beginning of spring.

Who were these people?

But she knew the answer already. They were people like her father. Maybe her father had once been one of them, and that was how they knew his sword. For him to be a legend among such hardened, cruel people, though… her father must have had to do some very cruel things.

It should have been a surprise, that thought. Marysa’s father had always had gentle sternness in his eyes, and a careful way about him, but when he trained Marysa with a blade, there was always something raw in the way he moved. It was that same careful ease that the invaders expressed in every movement, with that same underlying urgency. She had always known, somehow, that her father was capable of violence. But at imagining her father moving among these people, trading passing orders on their tongues with her village’s blood on their hands and the same braids swinging over his shoulders, a shudder crawled down her spine and loosened her hold on the side of the ship.

At the same instant, a wave hit the boat broadside, gushing over the deck and back into the sea. It left Marysa’s clutching hands empty as it hurled her into the thrashing water. It happened so quickly that she had no time to cry out, and by the time she did, it was swallowed by the black water surrounding her. All sound ceased, and in the blink of an eye the world went achingly silent.

Marysa’s open mouth and panicked lungs let in a gulp of salty water. It burned in her chest, in her nose, in her throat. She could not focus on that, though; she had to find the surface so she could breathe air again. Fighting panic, her legs surged in the swimming motion her mother had taught her when she was young, in case she went too far on the beach or fell into the water. When her mind caught up to her legs, her arms followed, and she strained against the current, which felt impossibly strong. What progress she made might not have been in the right direction. The wave had flipped her head over heels when it took her under, and she could not be sure which way was up. She hoped she was swimming upward. Her ears popped, and she was coughing the water, with nothing but water to take back in.

It was a vicious cycle, struggling against blackness for some way out. All Marysa could think was that she had to get out, out, out.

Her arms were tiring, and her legs were giving out. The pain in her chest gave way to blurry numbness, and she knew that was not a good sign. In one desperate launch forward, her head turned and she caught sight of a flash of lightning illuminating the water on her right through the loose strands of hair that had tangled in front of her eyes.

She was swimming sideways.

A burst of despair washed over her, and Marysa went limp. All that effort, and she had been going the wrong way. She fought the despair. She could not give up. She would not give up like her mother had.

Like her father had.

She struggled to swim again, but her strokes were weaker. Marysa was honestly surprised it had taken so long. Still, she fought the sensation, turning her body toward the surface.

Another flash of purple-white lightning brightened the fathomless darkness around her, but this time, it silhouetted a huge black shape that moved steadily toward her.

Garbled sounds and a stream of bubbles left Marysa’s mouth in the water, as panic overtook her. She could not die like this. She had survived her parents’ deaths, she had survived capture by invaders, she would not be eaten by some sea monster. Blindly, she struck out with her right fist, but it moved impossibly slow in the water, and the behemoth came alongside her in the dark.