Beneath Ceaseless Skies #92 Read online

  Most of the town was dark. Watching-As-The-Owl, I saw that even with the downpour, it was still ruined. Blackened beams stabbed at the sky, supporting webs of charred timber. I glanced down toward the smithy. The roof was dark; there were a few tiny flames struggling on the outside, but the storm had quenched the worst of it.

  I gathered my belongings and climbed down the side of the building. From the back porch, I jumped onto the stable roof, which wasn’t burned at all. My horse whinnied—he hated the scent of the fire and the uncomfortable force of the storm, but he was unharmed.

  I put my hood up, but it did no good. The wind was a wild thing, intent on badgering me in whatever way it could. It slapped my face with the coins in my hair, flung water into my ears and even up my nose. Without Watching-As-The-Owl, I wouldn’t have been able to see my way to the smithy.

  I carried a bar for prying the lids off of coffins, and I used it to crack the door off of the smithy. Rain poured in through the roof in places, where the fire had burned through before the storm.

  “The three blonde children are coming with me, back to the sea,” I said. “Anyone who tries to stop them will also go into the sea.”

  The selkie children were bound with their hands behind their backs. They looked sickly amidst all the iron. Izhmir didn’t smile, but when she looked at me, her grey eyes were silver with hope.

  One of the young men who was supposed to be guarding the prisoners cut them free. Browan’s wife looked as if she might try to throw the seal pelt in the fire, but the parish keeper hissed at her, and she grudgingly handed it to Izhmir. When the other children had their pelts, I shepherded them down to the water, and I told them the truth.

  Two of them shed their clothes, tugged their skins on, and disappeared into the maelstrom. Izhmir watched them first, and then she tore off her human clothes. I was shivering under the sky’s onslaught, but she tied her pelt around her waist as if it was only a spring breeze and the rain was the heat of the sun.

  “I want to see your book,” she said.

  I wondered if selkies age the same as we do. Was she older than she seemed? I thought on it for a moment, and then I reached in my jacket. If she ruined the book, I could make another. I knew it well. And I would deserve it, after my volume had caused the slavery and destruction of so many of her people.

  She picked through the pages from the back of the book to the front, using her index finger instead of her thumb the way a human would. Her hands still moved as if she had webbing instead of scars.

  The storm shrieked around us while she perused the book. I realized I didn’t even know if she could read, or if she was amazed by the pictures, or if she could even see in the darkness. The few flashes of lightning couldn’t be enough.

  Suddenly, she recited from the book, her voice clear and sharp as a ship’s bell. “...and if they find their pelt, they will return to the sea. Because of this weakness, selkies avoid humans when possible. They will not attack unless directly provoked, such as by sealers with harpoons. It is best to remain uninvolved.”

  She turned to stare at me, and we studied each other’s faces in the blue darkness. The hollows around her eyes were black, her mouth expressionless. My own mouth fought me, trying to cry instead of speak.

  I managed to say, “I’m sorry.”

  Izhmir dropped the book in the sand. She draped the pelt over her head like a hood, and her body seemed to flow upward even as the pelt lowered toward the ground. By the time her round belly hit the sand beside the book, she was a seal. An orphaned seal, because of me. She dove into the surf.

  I clumsily mounted my poor wet horse. I had one chance to escape the wrath of Keyward, and it was in the arms of this equally furious storm.

  For hours, the horse and I trudged back the way we came, inland, away from the force of the gale. Finally, I spied a fallen tree near the road. It had blown over in another storm, long ago, and we sheltered behind the giant fan of its gnarled roots.

  When I unrolled the old sailcloth I used as a tent, I saw Izhmir crouched against the edge of the roots, her head tipped back and her mouth open. Rain beaded on her lips and splashed directly onto her eyes, but she didn’t blink it away.

  She had followed me through miles of shrieking wind and stinging rain. I was crippled by the cold as much as my wounds. If it was revenge she sought, she could have it.

  “I thought you went into the water,” I said. With the webs cut from her fingers and her hair over her ears, only another Bane could recognize she wasn’t human.

  “I did. Then I came back out.”

  She crawled over and peered at the wounds on my thighs. They glared up, like two wet red eyes. My body accused me of poor judgment. The wounds said I should have floated out of Keyward on a bed of lilies, not stayed to defend children who weren’t mine, weren’t even human.

  One of those children turned her large, pale eyes up to me.

  “Why did you go into the smithy.” It wasn’t a question, the way she said it. That was fitting, because what I had to say wasn’t an answer.

  “It’s been a long time since I stopped floating above everything. I’d forgotten what it’s like to swim along with everyone else, to feel currents instead of merely watching them.”

  “You find pearls only when you sink,” Izhmir offered.

  I fingered my line of prizes where it poked against my wet skin, jewelry created of blood and bone. How many times had I passed the opportunity to add something more beautiful to my memories?

  “Yes,” I said. “I could do with more of those.”

  Copyright © 2012 Cory Skerry

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  Cory Skerry lives in the Northwest U.S. in a spooky old house that he doesn’t like to admit is haunted. When he’s not inventing new genres in which to write novels or drawing guerrilla comics, he goes exploring with his sweet, goofy pit bulls. In 2010, he played class clown at Viable Paradise. For more about him and his work, visit plunderpuss.net.

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  COVER ART

  “Remember,” by Zsófia Tuska

  Zsófia Tuska is a Hungarian graphic designer and art student, specializing in concept arts, photomanipulations, and advertisements. Her favorite themes are the legends, mythology (especially the Celtic and Norse mythology), and fantasy/science fiction. She is freelancer but is interesting in work in a studio or ad agency. View more of her artwork at DeviantArt.com.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1046

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Copyright © 2012 Firkin Press

  This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy and share the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.