Page 1 of 'Til All the Seas Run Dry

PROLOGUE

Orkney, 1117

The ocean felt almost thick as she swam in playful circles in the frigid, blue-green water. A school of shimmering, silver fish swarmed past her, and she pressed down powerfully with her fins, slicing through the swarm like a knife, her mouth open, teeth glinting. She swallowed a fish whole before turning sharply and darting through the school a second time.

She let them pass then, her belly full, and her attention turned back to the daggers of sunlight that pierced through the dappled surface of the water. She swam in and out of the beams, lazily making her way up and up before breaking through the veil between sea and sky. Her nostrils flared as she inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with air. Just as she made to dive back to the depths again, something caught her eye on the nearby shore. The surf beat against the beach as she bobbed like a cork on the wild waves and saw… a man.

Since the beginning of humans, her father had seen sailors and voyagers slip and sink through the icy water into the depths, the remnants of their bones falling to the wilderness of the ocean floor. Throughout her life, she’d watched enough of those bones turn to soft, shifting sand. It was the way of the world, her father told her. Mortal men died, their lives here and gone in a blink.

“Not like you, my treasure,” he would say, as they watched the bones fall.

Sometimes, he would swim with her up to the surface, where the light punched through the water, bracketing the fat hulls of ships that sailed upon it. They would watch, eyes barely above the surface, from a distance, while battles raged and men hurled those ships together, their bodies, their weapons, their lives.

And she would cling to her father, breathless, as they watched men fall from the ships and sink beneath. To the dark, velvety depths that waited for them below, past the fish that would pick them clean on the way.

“Igi badbadani u kunib,” her father would say.Put sleep in his open eyes.

An old saying. An ancient lullaby, sung to children by tired grown-ups, when the world was big and words were pressed into clay with sharp tools.

What would he say to her now, as she watched the unmoving man on the beach? “Igi badbadani u kunib?”

Perhaps.

She and her father had watched the battle raging earlier, the sea boiling between the warships as men screamed and yelled, as they fell into the water. As some of them jumped. Her heart had been in her throat.

“Men love war,” her father had said.

What was there to love about it?

This man lay on his back on the sand. His clothes were torn, and she smelled blood on the wind. The tide was coming in and would soon overtake him. The seabirds circled him, but they had not yet begun to feast. Perhaps he still lived. Before her mind was even made up, she began to swim, darting quickly under the waves and slicing through the water, until the shallow depth forced her to crawl on her belly.

Only then did she reach through herself. Arms stretching from where flippers had been, feet and long, thick legs in place of a tail. Dark, wild, wavy hair clung to her breasts, ochre brown and freckled. Her sealskin, the skin that was home, draped heavily across her back as she crawled on hands and knees from the surf and onto the deserted sand.

The sea birds looked at her, nervous. They knew what she was. They knewwhoshe was. The sea god had a thousand daughters, but he knew them all by name, and so, too, did the birds.

She crawled closer, until she could smell the sharp sweat that clung to his clothes beneath the salt water. She had never seen a man this close before. Not a living man, anyway. He was big and broad, with shoulders that seemed to be sculpted from the living rock itself. Long hair, the color of dry sea grass and shot through with just as much light, tangled behind his head, which faced away from her.

His tunic was off, but tucked into the waistband of his trews, stained dark with blood and saltwater. His torso was a ravaged plane of battered skin and wounds. She reached out, her bronze fingers touching his cheek and turning his face toward her. He groaned.

She skittered backwards, ready to race back to the surf, but he was quiet again. She looked down at the rocky sand beneath her knees, seeing his blood seeping in fine tendrils out to the ocean, as if trying to return to the womb of everything.

She had never tried to save a man before. She had never felt like it was her place. She and her family were meant to be spectators, an ancient and eternal audience to the play put on by mortal men in their constant pursuit of more and better.

But something about this man spoke to her, and she found that she didn’t want him to die. She didn’t want the gulls to pick him down to nothing or to drag him to the water and allow him to sink to the bottom, for his bones to return to shifting, drifting sand.

She crept near again, examining his wounds more closely. A deep stab in his side had caused immense blood loss but likely missed all of his vital organs. His shoulder was clearly dislocated. More stab wounds marred his chest, and she saw another under his ribs. She shook her head. His lung was likely punctured. He might be too far gone to save.

But she wanted to try.

She made a needle out of a sea urchin spine and pulled several of her own long, black hairs for thread. She cleaned his wounds with sea water before she began to carefully close them with quick fingers. Her mother had taught her how to sew and mend, how to make nets. That’s how her father had first seen her mother, sitting by the water and making nets for the fishermen in the village.

The man groaned occasionally as she worked, but he did not wake. When all his wounds had been stitched, she sat back and waited. The sun fell to the horizon slowly before slipping beneath it. The stars appeared. She had never spent so long looking at them before. But as she sat next to this man, she looked up and felt almost dizzy from the sight of the millions of stars, so many that it seemed as if she would tumble headlong into the inky depths around them if she weren’t careful.

He shivered next to her. She shivered too, cold for the first time. It was unpleasant. She was never cold in her sealskin. But without it, she took the form of a human. She’d only done so a handful of times, having been cautioned by both her mother and father that she was far safer within the confines of her sealskin.

His teeth chattered. He was a mortal man. She was immortal, even in this form, but that did not mean that she could not be uncomfortable. The sealskin would keep her warm. It would keep both of them warm.

She hesitated. “Do not let go of your skin, my love, for any reason,” her mother had cautioned her many times. “And above all, do not give your skin toanyone.”