Breakable Things, page 7
“She saved you for love and only for love?” said Maja, voice soft.
“Yes.”
“Guilty,” chuckled the guilt-boy again, so close now, its eyes bright moons.
“I am sorry,” said Maja. Over the cliff of the guilt-boy’s broad shoulder, he saw the queensman palm her mouth, despair in her expression, and Henrik thought, just for a moment, to say something to smooth it away. “Genuinely, I had hoped it would not come to this.”
“I understand.” Henrik said and shut his eyes.
The widows wore white when they came for him, silks dragging over the cobbled streets, the laces ribbed with dirt and soot. Ingrid alone wore black, her face without expression as she kneeled down, taking his jaw in her hands. Henrik reached a hand, trembling, only to have Ingrid shake her head, an infinitesimal motion.
“You should rest.”
“I told them nothing.”
“We know,” said the widows in chorus, their eyes black under the brim of their fascinators. For all the austerity of their attire, their millinery was extravagant: pearls and bone, coral cast in silver, gleaming fish scales, smalti and pebbles more vibrant than any gem Henrik had seen. He shivered under their scrutiny. “You are as worthy as she claimed.”
It hurt. All of it. Where the guilt-boy had savaged him, where Maja had flayed the skin from his chest, pinned them to ribs with gleaming wasp stings. Ingrid trailed a hand down his sternum, her fingers rouged by their passage. The widows watched as Henrik pushed himself up on an elbow, back cold from whatever filth was trickling down the gutter.
“I’m done with this. If the queensmen find me again, I’m not going to survive another questioning. I can’t help you.” He spat teeth between each sentence.
This time, it was Ingrid who spoke. “Two more nurseries, you owe us.”
“I don’t owe you any—”
“Two more nurseries, two more shipwrecks,” she said, gently. “Otherwise, our marriage is forfeit and one of the others will take you for husband, and you’ll join your brothers at the bottom of the sea.”
They had not been cruel. The widows, that night when Henrik Svensson thought to ask his wife what she was, had only walked him to the bottom of the sea. There, light pouring from their hair, they’d shown him what had become of the other sailors, the other husbands: their foreheads struck open, throats gouged apart by their half-breed children, all eyes, all transparent radiance, their spines glowing gold.
“Please.”
“Two more shipwrecks,” said Ingrid and she held him as he wept, the rain in tangles, heavy as hair, as kelp, as a ship drowned by a hundred pale, perfect hands.
how selkies are made
Ursilla Balfour, the only daughter of the laird of Stronsay—or at least the only daughter he would acknowledge—was many things, but mostly she was true: a woman who held little as holy as a word given, a heart offered. For this, she was loved. For her beauty, she was wanted. And yet despite both these traits, she was her father’s despair for Ursilla of Stronsay, freckled and fair, would not marry for fortune.
“For the last time,” said her father. “Marry and double our fortunes.”
Like her, he was beautiful, a bear of a man, hirsute and imposing, so tall he had to stoop to enter the hovels of his constituents. Despite his age, there was no frost yet in his beard or his hair, both of which were lush, the red of the light through autumn’s last leaves.
Ursula sneered in answer. “If that bothers you so much, you take a husband then.”
Her father sighed. Five years ago, he might have spluttered at her insolence, or looked askance at Ursilla’s coarseness but he knew better than to do so. Ursilla would not be bent or moved and though she vexed him, he had no desire to see her broken. Like Stronsay itself, like his long-gone wife, she was an elemental thing, one to be admired and accommodated.
“Why won't you marry?” demanded her father. “It’s not as if I have asked you to marry an old widower, one barely able to remember his name. You have your pick of the sons of the isles.”
“Because I don’t. Because I like being free.” said Ursilla, attention returned to her cooking. “And that is that. I will now, sit. We’re having breakfast.”
Again, her father sighed but he sat himself at their table, the bench groaning beneath his weight. Their manor was not large. It sat on a shrug of land above the local village, and close enough to the graveyard that Ursilla saw its church grim on occasion, usually outside the door to the kitchen, scratching to be let in for sausages. Before Ursilla’s mother fled to Ireland with a younger man, the manor had swam with music and softness. She had loved tapestries and needlework, furs and rugs bought at enormous cost from the distant East. She took all of it when she left.
Now, the manor was stone and the smell of Ursilla’s restless cooking.
“If you marry, my daughter, you will have again the things your mother enjoyed,” said her father as Ursilla set down a fan of tattie scones, a stack of oatcakes, squares of spiced sausages; the mushrooms she had sizzled in the lard coating the pans, and the tomatoes she had fried in the same.
Ursilla brought over baked beans, black pudding, a jug of milk before she answered, finally settling on the opposite bench. “I did not enjoy them. She did.”
“You could have a cook to prepare your breakfasts for you.”
“We could have one now,” Ursilla observed. “But you like my cooking better than anyone else’s.”
Her father scowled and ladled the beans into his bowl. “You could have dresses.”
“I have them now.”
“Better ones. Ones with no signs of mending.”
Ursilla shrugged. “This might be a compelling reason if my needlework wasn’t as perfect as it is.”
“Marry then to give me grandchildren.”
“You hate infants. You’ve told me such.”
“Fine,” growled her father. “Do it because I said so.”
To which Ursilla responded with a baying laugh, and her father gave up then on any further argument, the two sinking into a communal silence as they ate. The food was as good as it always was, and perhaps it might have even been too fine. Halfway through his second helping of beans, Ursilla’s father, who ate and drank with no thought about his health, pressed a palm to his chest and mewled a small, confused noise. Before Ursilla could answer, he collapsed onto his breakfast, dead before his head touched the grease of his plate.
He arrived as the funeral ended and Ursilla’s heart gladdened at the sight of him. The man was handsome, rangy as a wolf, and deeply tanned from work in the fields, his hair the dark of a moonless sea. He was dressed simply, to the consternation of the gathered mourners, his white shirt untucked, his black boots stippled with mud. But Ursilla did not care.
“Duncan,” Ursilla breathed his name the way another woman might have offered thanks to the saints.
At the sound of her voice, Duncan opened his arms to receive her. Ursilla ran to him, no longer afraid who saw, her stride gaining momentum until she could catapult herself into his embrace, crashing into him, holding him fast. For seven years, she loved him in careful and faithful secret. Now, they were free.
“Duncan, you’ve come,” whispered Ursilla, drinking in his scent. He smelled of salt and musk, warm leather and sunlight. “I waited. I worried you would not be here.”
“Are you that impatient to announce our engagement?” he teased, raising her chin so their eyes could meet.
Had Ursilla’s mother not left, she might have taught her to be wary of men like Duncan, but she was gone and Ursilla’s father knew nothing at all of raising daughters much less saving them from themselves. Nonetheless, Ursilla felt a spasm of ill-ease. Her father was newly dead, his corpse barely cooled. Shouldn’t Duncan offer her condolences? Shouldn’t he ask to shoulder her grief for her?
She studied his face, its beautiful hollows. Then, he smiled and all thought sieved away like so much sand. He was here and he loved her and they would be together until the sea washed their bones from the shores of Stronsay. Her father was dead but her future waited. Ursilla twinned her fingers with him, suddenly shy, her love made enormous by his closeness, too large now to keep in her ribs so she let some of it free in a glittering laugh.
“Yes,” she said. “I am impatient for our life to begin. I am impatient to be laird and lad.”
Ursilla laughed again, pleased with her own cleverness.
But Duncan frowned.
“You would be laird and not I?” he said.
“Yes.”
Duncan smiled again but the expression was different from its predecessors: thinner, less kind. He stroked his long fingers over her red hair, kissed her upon her crown, less a lover in that moment than a master with his anxious hound.
“As long as you promise you won’t treat me the way your father did.”
“Never,” vowed Ursilla. “You’ll be as much laird as I am. We will be equals. In all things, at all times. Until the sea takes us.”
“You promise.”
“I swear.”
And anyone who was anyone who lived on the island knew Ursilla Balfour, laird of Stronsay, to be, above all things, true. Her word given was a word that would be kept. And thus, Duncan smiled, reassured by her fervour.
“I love you,” said Ursilla.
“I love you too,” said Duncan and if he seemed reserved, well, it was a funeral, after all. There would be time later for sweet nothings, panted into each other’s skin; languid afternoons in which to discuss the way they mattered to one another; time later to think about living when they were done burying the dead.
After all, they were now free.
Ursilla and Duncan married three weeks after her father’s death. It was a simple, sparsely attended affair. Most of the guests were blood relatives of the groom, a jovial cadre of farmers and fishermen, butchers and laundresses, enchanted by Duncan’s fairy tale fortune. Ursula’s contribution to the wedding party consisted of the folklorist who taught her to read, her old nursemaid, the manor’s former staff, and a small dog whose ancient gaze belied its adorable face. Had Ursilla her parents still, one of them might have drawn attention to the manner in which Duncan led his conversations, how he spoke as if all this, from the manor to the village to the cold blue of the sky above, was meant to be his, and how no one there showed Ursilla the respect owed to her as a woman much less Stronsay’s laird.
But she did not.
The sky blushed scarlet as the day emptied into night, a red as brilliant as blood save for the thin lace of gold that the horizon wore like a crown. Still, the celebrations continued. Duncan’s enthusiasm for holding court seemed to grow while Ursilla’s dwindled, and by the time the first stars woke, Ursilla was done with the party, done with her guests, done with her husband and his posturing.
“Beloved,” said Ursilla, catching his right hand in her own. “Do you not think it is time to go home? To kiss in our bed, to lie together as husband and wife?”
Duncan, gilded by the firelight, more handsome than he’d ever been, rasped his knuckles over her pale cheek. When he smiled, it wasn’t with any love.
“But we’ve done it all already. In every position, in all the secret places of the manor. With you pressed to the wall of an alley, your skirt hiked up, my fingers in your mouth. I’m bored of it. Aren’t you?”
Those words would have been galling enough had they been spoken in private, but spoken here, amid their guests, and loud enough that they rang over the music, they seemed unspeakably cruel. Ursilla blanched at them, the colour fled from her face.
“Why would you say such things?”
He shrugged. “Because they are true.”
A miserable silence took Ursilla in its teeth. She drew away from her husband, aghast. Too late she realised what she had done. She was married to him now, sworn to him. There would be no recourse now. Another woman might have thought to divorce him, or the use of a sharp knife as he slept, or poison in his tea, or contracting a man to do what she could not. Unfortunately, Ursilla had promised she would not leave him and that she would see no harm done to him. There’d been rumours that the Balfour blood carried a gleam of the fae and never had that scrap of gossip rung truer. Despite everything, despite her heart laying shattered on the grass, Ursilla could not even put thought into the notion of breaking her word.
“You’re a bastard,” she told him grimly.
“Be that as it may,” said Duncan. “I am also your husband.”
His laughter chased her as she stormed away from the wedding party. To the dark, towards the shore, into the sea where something as old as love waited.
“A Balfour comes,” said a man’s deep voice when Ursilla was ankle-deep in the frigid waters. “I haven’t seen one of yours in six hundred years.”
“Who are you?” demanded Ursilla, tensing, hand darting to the knife she wore at her hip.
“Who are you?” echoed the man, teasingly.
Ursilla straightened, expression imperious. “I am Ursilla Balfour, laird of Stronsay, and I will not be frightened by a stranger.”
“But you will be insulted by your husband?”
She scowled. “My will had nothing to do with that. If it did, he would have said nothing.”
The man, still unseen, his voice seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere, laughed, and Ursilla found she liked how the coppery sound echoed along the beach. In her mind’s eye, she built an image of her companion: a man as tall as her father but broader still along the shoulders, with a powerful chest, a generous stomach, a smile that lit his face like a star.
“You remind me of your grandmother.”
“You know of her?” said Ursilla.
“Knew of her? I knew her.” said the man. “We were friends, for a time. Before she decided it was inappropriate for a married woman to be seen with a thing like me.”
Ursilla could hear the man’s grin.
“You know how gossip spreads.”
She did indeed. All of the fathers whose sons she had spurned sent her polite letters congratulating her on her charity, wishing her well, the message knotted through their courtesies as anything: they knew who she was to marry and they were embarrassed for her, and thankful too that their sons hadn’t taken an idiot to wed.
“I do.”
“But she came back, when she was old, and we were friends again then. Nothing more, for all that others might have claimed.” He paused. “Your grandmother was a comely woman, you know?”
Ursilla nodded. She had been told this many times, had seen proof of the resemblance too in the portrait that hung above the fireplace in her father’s study. She and her grandmother possessed the same shade of red in their hair, the same smirk, and the same wealth of cleavage, though the last Ursilla often kept bound for ease of movement.
“As am I.”
The man laughed again. “You have her spirit.”
He emerged then from around a boulder, almost exactly as Ursilla had pictured. He was somehow taller than her father, who was, before this, the tallest man she had ever known. His hair was black and long and dripped with sea water, and what Ursilla could see of his eyes under his fringe were as chips of polished obsidian. A sealskin cape draped over his gleaming frame, its worn clasp the chewed-on tooth of a megalodon.
“Ah,” said Ursilla. “You’re a selkie.”
There was an accusation in the careful pronouncement of his nature that did not go unnoticed by the selkie, who grinned under her wary scrutiny.
“In the flesh as it were.”
“Your kind drown women.” Ursilla brandished her knife, hoping the iron would cow him.
“Hearsay,” said the selkie. “Lies told by angry husbands. What we do is give neglected wives respite from their cold marriage beds.”
“You eat people.”
The smile he bared was a carnivore’s grin.
“Only if they ask us nicely.”
Ursilla snorted. She knew what he meant.
“What do you want from me?” she said.
The selkie spread his hands. Ursilla saw thick webbing between each of his fingers, which in turn were callused but graceful. This made sense. Seals were limber creatures, for all of their roundness.
“Whatever that you desire.”
“I have everything I want,” said Ursilla, cold as the sea. “And no desire for bargaining with the fae. I know your stories. I know not to trust your kind.”
“Really?” said the selkie. “When it is your kind who steal the skins from our women, your kind who force your girls into unwanted marriages.”
Ursilla hesitated. She had heard those stories too: an uncle of hers purportedly married a sealmaid. He was found drowned three years ago, a half-moon of flesh torn from his side, his intestines frothing out in a stinking bouquet, their slicked-grey under the dawn-light not unlike the colour of the ribbons his wife had worn in her hair.
“Let us agree then to distrust one another.”
“Fair enough,” said the selkie. “But I trusted your grandmother, loved her even—”
Ursilla must have made a face for the selkie laughed.
“—not like that, I promise. Either way, for love of her, I will tell you this: if ever you have need for me, weep seven tears into the sea for me, and I shall come to you.”
“Why seven?”
“Why not?” echoed the selkie before he was gone.
Seven years passed before Ursilla called upon the selkie.
“I knew you couldn’t stay away.”
Ursilla smiled grimly through her tears. Her youth had wasted away in those seven years, whittled by her husband’s infidelities, by seven years of him feeding their fortune into whore-houses and the gambling rings, seven years of sleeping alone in a small bed in the shadowed attic, while Duncan caroused and shipwrecked the Balfour name.
“It is neither love nor lust for you that brings me here, but grief.” Ursilla knuckled at her eyes. The wind tore at her hair, loosening her mane from its braids. Had Ursilla asked, the selkie would have told her the truth of things: that she was more beautiful now than she’d been seven years ago. “For love of my grandmother, help me.”
