Chapter Two The Morgawr’s Gift #2
‘Goodness, never,’ said Mr Aldridge nervously. ‘You know the baronet doesn’t abide by such talk. We should burn it.’
‘It seems a shame to waste it, the fat alone would be worth a fair bit.’
‘I would not consider that were I you,’ Isolde cautioned the men. ‘This is a sacred creature. She will go as she came – with the tide to claim her.’
Kensa did not move. ‘Where is—’
‘Elowen!’ Mr Skewes had a reedy voice. By the time Kensa heard it, her step-father was upon her. Until he saw his daughter, who he sank down beside, bunching and un-bunching his hands. ‘What did you do to her?’
Kensa didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything.
Although he was a stringy man, Mr Skewes held authority in the village. As the Coast Guard, he had the local magistrate’s ear. Worse still, he had Derwa’s bed. Where was her mother? There standing beside the witch, their mouths tight and quick-moving.
Mr Skewes snatched at Kensa’s elbow and shook her roughly. ‘I asked you—’
‘Pa?’ Elowen croaked, sparing her older sister. Her voice was gently lilting. It was a relief to hear it, despite everything.
Kensa longed to touch her. Mr Skewes never gave her the chance.
‘Where does it hurt? Show me and we’ll make it right, pet,’ he said.
A coldness sank through Kensa’s boots. Here came the tide, inching the villagers up the shore.
Now that Elowen was awake, there was no need to tarry – especially when there were pilchards left to salt.
One by one, Portscatho’s residents began to leave, having taken their fill and spied the first sea monster to grace the Towan for centuries.
If it was an omen, no one knew what for.
Elowen was carried to the nearest sand dune by her parents, legs too weak yet to support her. Kensa went to follow, then hesitated.
Derwa and Mr Skewes cradled their daughter and spoke to her in soothing patterns. When was the last time anyone had spoken to Kensa like that?
She could not remember.
The next wave rose high enough to meet her knees.
She welcomed it.
The wise woman began to lift her tools from the sand and slid them into a long cloth strip sewn with endless pockets.
Her fingers halted over one particular gap and she grinned, straightened her spine, a bony pillar against the rising gale.
She reached for Kensa, who found herself reaching back, if only to touch and be touched.
Isolde held her thumb to the centre of Kensa’s empty palm.
‘You lost my knife.’ It was not a question.
‘I did,’ Kensa whispered, suddenly afraid.
The witch grunted. She appraised the girl as she had done the monster, as though seeking something of value to cut off and keep.
Her hand, tarred with the creature’s fluids, came to rest upon Kensa’s cheeks, hair, sternum.
Its smell: blood and sweetness, gorse-like.
There was a question in her eyes and, without speaking, without knowing, Kensa answered it.
‘You’ll do,’ said Isolde.
She took Kensa’s wrist and pulled her along the beach, the sea taking their prints as soon as they’d left them. There, she continued her low conversation with Derwa that Kensa could not hear. Mr Skewes ignored her. Elowen did not, the sisters’ eyes meeting for a single, wary second.
Derwa shook out her scale-strewn skirts. ‘Surely there’s another better suited to the task? Kensa does not have the temperament.’
‘Your eldest found the Morgawr,’ countered the wise woman, showing her stained teeth. ‘It is she who has been chosen.’
Isolde glanced out to where the horizon blurred with rain, as though waiting for it to answer her. Kensa understood little and saw even less. Dawn was coming in muted colours, the sun hidden behind a rising cloud bank. Her mother approached, apprehensive.
‘When you are ready,’ said Isolde to Kensa, ‘you’ll return the missing blade to me and come with it, to do as I do, learn as I learn, heal as I heal.’
Again, the waves reached higher, a low rumbling. ‘I’ll be a wise woman?’
Derwa released a strained sound from her throat, nails digging into Kensa’s shoulder.
‘Many will call you thus.’ Quiet, as the wind died. Isolde lost the humoured crease to her lips. ‘You will see what is unseen, speak with the sea and draw swords with those who seek to replace the Old Gods.’
A rip in the current began to pull the sea monster back to whence it had come, unlacing their shoes, combing the thin hairs on their legs.
Kensa considered the witch, blood on her hands, mouth melded with spell-work and strangeness tangled in her hair.
Kensa had grown up with tales about healers delivering babies, blessing ships and packing charms against the hardest frosts.
Figures who held their community together, who were turned to and confided in and necessary.
These were not words she could ascribe to herself.
Isolde asked, ‘Could you do this?’
Elowen was leaning on her father’s arm. Silent, watchful.
Kensa met her sister’s stare again for the briefest moment.
What she took now, she took from another.
Kensa had not been the first to find the sea monster.
That had been Elowen’s discovery. Here was the moment to confess, to hand over a fate which was not her own.
And yet, Kensa’s tongue remained as still as the Morgawr’s, uncut and lost in the sea’s rising swell.
Better to be a wise woman than a smuggler’s daughter.
Needed by the village, not scorned and ostracised. Wanted, for once.
A small nod left her. ‘Yes.’
‘To be as I am is to be lonely,’ warned Isolde. ‘Unmarried, childless, relied on, lusted after and yet never truly wanted. Do you understand?’
Kensa spoke as a child spoke, with honesty and an insight she had not yet grown into. ‘I am always first,’ she explained, ‘and to be first is to be alone.’
When at last Elowen had the strength, Mr Skewes and Derwa accompanied her back to village. Kensa followed behind, leaving the wise woman on the beach, her body turned seaward, as though in discussion with it.
At home, as morning began to root itself, Kensa lay on the straw pallet in the kitchen.
It was one she shared with Elowen, in their mother’s cob-walled cottage halfway down Portscatho.
Despite their long night, sleep did not come.
Pale, bluish light slid across them. Kensa lay facing the wall.
Her sister’s warm breath tickled the nape of her neck.
‘Will you tell?’ Kensa asked her.
A pause and the gentlest exhalation. ‘No.’
Kensa did not ask why. It was enough to know she would keep silent.
The younger girl wished to be liked, always.
Elowen would have given her last crust to make another happy, even as she starved.
On the boards above them, their mother and Mr Skewes spoke in low voices and panted questions.
No one else would ever know who had really found the Morgawr that morning.
This was Kensa’s final thought as she fell into slumber, full in the knowledge that her secret was as safe as a stolen crust inside her own belly.
One Elowen would have given her, had she only asked.