Chapter Thirty The Pact
Chapter Thirty
The Pact
Kensa’s spine collapsed from beneath her.
She sprawled over the Weaver. Her chest was as malleable as an over-ripe apple.
A burrowing sensation sent pain through her tissue and bone and sinew, as though a slim finger was pulling a pip from her core, wrenching it free with one long nail.
The Pact’s splintering was a physical sensation.
She screamed and another cry mixed in with hers, lower, gravelled, belonging to the Bucka.
Ignoring her sister’s voice and the hands which reached for her, Kensa turned to him.
He, too, was on his knees, breathing erratically as though he had suddenly remembered how to.
Jet-black feathers, a cormorant’s feathers, began to push from his skin, coating him as thickly as fish scales.
Through them, Kensa could see a window to his face, the blue veins rising in his body and his eyes, those bright eyes burning wild colours.
‘Yes,’ was all he said and Kensa saw he was crying.
She was too, though for another reason divorced from his relief.
‘Thank … ’
He trailed off, words fading to a seabird’s croak as the trees around them began to part and subside.
Wings pushed from his arms, half-eel, half-cormorant, and he surged up with a graceless movement.
In the coming fire-glow, which took the moon from the sky, Kensa saw him fly or fall or sail or soar down the hillside.
The Pact was broken. He was dying.
‘I failed,’ said Kensa, slumping onto her backside, arms limp and blood-stained beside her, palms stuck with grit. ‘It’s done.’ Far below them, the sea began to rage. No bindings held it in place and Kensa could hear its unravelling. ‘Portscatho is going to be washed away.’
At last, Kensa raised her gaze to meet her sister’s, whose face was pressed close to hers. ‘We cannot let it,’ said Elowen.
‘Come on,’ urged Jack, grabbing at Kensa’s elbow.
It was him, only him, who reached through her guilt and brought her to her senses.
An impulse had the wise woman, if she was still that, grab the bone-handled knife from the hag’s back. It seemed duller now and lighter in her hand. Only a simple tool, nothing special, its power gone.
Around them, the fire had grown to a monstrous size: a red-winged shape curving up the landscape, hot enough to hurt even at this distance.
It was closing in and to stay was to die, to stay was to be burned alive.
The Weaver’s body was abandoned with Isolde’s, as Kensa limped her way out.
The sea cracked and whirled as though it were a beast bucking its bridle.
Elowen’s hand was tight in her father’s, as Mr Skewes hopped down the low path, to where the village waited at the mercy of the waves.
It would be dawn soon and the sky was weak with it, losing colour at the horizon.
Portscatho’s residents were no longer in their homes.
Their faces were drawn and solemn. Did they feel it too?
Yes. The answer came to Kensa as soon as she asked it, as though given by the land itself, boundless with no Pact to hold it.
Those who lived beside the sea could feel its pull, their bodies knowing no circadian rhythm, only high and low and middling tide.
As she met the harbour, Kensa saw every single villager staring at the waves, which rose and rose and rose and never seemed to fall, spearing up in high foaming spikes.
Kensa approached them, hearing her mother’s call and trusting Mr Skewes to keep her safe.
From the bubbling sea came Merrin, her body dressed in glittering salt. ‘I will eat no more bloated corpses after a ship’s wrecking,’ she said, her shrill voice carrying to Kensa. ‘Instead, I will eat fresh and I will start with you.’
At the uncresting shoreline, the creatures who had survived in its depths – sickly, hungry, vengeful – began to emerge.
Those old stories, on harpies and selkies and horse-fish, proved true.
From the sea came a hundred sloping beasts, each one having been driven from the land by man.
Even the kraken came, its thick tentacles rooting to the sand.
Now, at last, their time to take back their home had come.
Merrin led them, breaking into a sprint, which was met with a pistol shot.
Pushing through the villagers came Pious, came Mr Skewes, came Branok and even Derwa, hefting whatever weapons could be found, and they were not alone.
A few miners and fishermen took up arms, though the rest stayed back or fled or watched with mounting horror.
And there was Jack, wielding a heavy metal hook, stealing a glance from her.
In his brief nod was a promise she couldn’t decipher.
The asrai’s walk slowed as she neared Kensa, spiked teeth flashing.
Her sinister attention spied the curate and there she found her new target.
Oh, she was strong and beautiful and terrible and Kensa was tired and spent and frail.
Elowen fared little better. Neither could intervene.
It was the end and the two sisters waited on the sand to meet it.
Elowen closed her fingers around Kensa’s.
‘We can finish this,’ said the younger woman resolutely.
‘I knew what would happen the day we found the Morgawr on the beach, for she told me, the Morgawr told me what to do,’ Elowen continued sagely.
‘I stand before our wise woman and I carry the Sight of the first.’ She reached out with her free hand.
‘Where is the bone-handled knife, the same one as formed the Pact?’
Kensa shook her head numbly. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I have dreamed of this moment over and over, never knowing what it meant,’ said Elowen.
‘In the vision, you are a child, barely able to walk, or a young woman as you are now. Sometimes, I see you as Isolde was, old and white-haired, while I am forever unchanging, always this age, at this place.’ Her fair hair was burned off at one side and her body scraped and cut.
‘We will renew the Pact. You and I. Together.’
Below their feet was shingle and shell. Further along lay a cold shape covered in feathers. It was the Bucka, who had met his demise at last. Water streamed around him, washing him slowly from their gaze and into the waiting ocean.
I’d wish him back, she thought, if only so he could see what he’d done.
‘He is gone,’ said Kensa. ‘He cannot be bound to the Sea again.’
‘But I can,’ said Elowen. ‘I was never meant to live, not like this. I was kept alive by a wise woman’s will and a cruel man’s promise. It is your will now that shall give me new purpose.’
Kensa shook her head, horrified, while a mounting dread threatened to buckle her knees.
One large wave began to rise higher than the rest, holding its breath and waiting to crash.
It was taller than several houses put together.
When it came down, the whole village would be lost. Kensa could feel the Land eager to push back beneath her boots, each pebble shard and scallop fragment vibrating with the effort to do so.
It had no direction, neither the sea nor the land, both ripped from their moorings.
If the sisters were successful, Elowen would become a monster, the way the Bucka had been a monster. Forever undying, trapped within the creeks and bays and waterways that hemmed their home.
‘I can’t lose you,’ said Kensa.
‘You won’t.’ Elowen’s features were luminous as the sun, and, as though remembering it was due, the dawn burst from its holding. ‘We can make this Pact our own.’
The last one was made in hate and fear, whereas this would be Kensa’s as much as it was Elowen’s. And it would be formed in love, as the sea is loved on the first hot day in spring.
‘Do it now,’ said Elowen. ‘Let me guide you.’
Kensa withdrew her knife.
In the sunrise, the sky had fallen to bronzed light to match the burning hills above Portscatho.
The ground was loose with heat and ash, the air tasting coarse on the tongue.
Around them, men heaved, their backs bent and scythes cutting through the dangers which met them from the shoreline.
At times failing, at times falling, as bone and flesh met shell and pincer.
Jack’s shape was there, then gone, lost in the frenzy.
It was the same as on harvest day, with honed metal sending whispers through golden stems, while women bundled sheaths behind them.
Now, all the women held was hope and chain and anchor, any tool as could be used to defend their homes.
In Kensa’s mind, she no longer stood on the sand beside her sister.
Instead, she stood in wheat, holding the land’s spirit, to begin the Crying of the Neck.
At one blink, the sisters were in a field, at another, in the sea.
Reality flexed and roiled, dancing between two points as a swallow between two stars.
The ever-crying storm was raging, the sea transformed into a wicked beast, talons and claws growing in might.
Within seconds it would be ready and strong enough to wash the village away: the sisters could not wait.
At the field’s centre, in the last field, was Elowen. ‘Will you help me?’
Kensa was at once young and old, fair and weathered. ‘Won’t it hurt?’
‘Yes,’ said Elowen, whose features were smiling though mournful.
Around them stood the villagers, on the harbour, in the fields, the two places existing as one.
Kensa’s brazen hair caught in the rising wind and she pushed the blade down as she had seen Isolde do once, into her own wrist and along the vein.
Elowen held her arm out too, the mark repeated, blood falling down their skin to meet at their clasped hands.
It was not enough.
Old Sal had been the one to tell them both about the spirit who lay in the harvest at reaping.
Kensa felt it now. A power that was maid and mother and crone combined, the sugar in the bees and their honey, the strength in the ivy and the gold in the wheat.
Around them, the hooks and scythes, the creatures and bloodshed, paused to listen.
‘Crying the Neck is a tradition,’ said Elowen, ‘the land’s spirit waits in the last field for reaping and must be bundled into one fistful, a neck, to be slit.’
Slowly, she bent Kensa’s fingers around the standing wheat. The bone-handled knife was heavy in Kensa’s grasp.
‘I can’t,’ Kensa said. ‘I can’t,’ again, ‘I can’t.’
‘What ’ave ’ee?’ came the cries from the men, new tongue and old tongue singing together. ‘Pandr’eus genes?’
Next the reply, sung loudly in the rising light: ‘A neck, a neck, a neck!’
The sun was risen now, had always been rising, to thread the sisters’ binding around them.
Neither one was fully grown, their bodies teetering towards womanhood and too young for their burdens.
Elowen’s hair was fine and liquid. It brushed as brine over Kensa’s hands as she took her place behind her sister.
It was time, and time had waited for this.
For the reaping and her sister’s throat, open.
Kensa’s own blade pressed through fair skin and spilled a new sea around them.
Saltwater ran down Elowen’s front, her dress, Kensa’s hand, as the Pact thickened their blood.
Land and Sea came to meet them. It pushed into the cut in Kensa’s arm, filling the line at Elowen’s throat as blood spilled, as water spilled from her open neck.
Her eyes – already blue – did not change: they’d already been so bright, uncanny in their vibrancy.
Kensa should have known from the start what she would become, simply by looking into those eyes.
Elowen gave one last look to her sister and turned from the shore, a shore again, no golden wheat to ground them.
She walked towards the waves, to place her heart into the ocean, where no one – be they woman or man or wiser than that – could ever find it.
No sooner did the swell hit her ankles than she began to change.
Elowen’s hair rose around her as though she already lay underwater.
Limpets crawled from the sand to merge with her body, leaving their shells to serrate her collar, her spine, her hips.
And when she vanished, it was in a shimmering cloud, as only the finest salt can give.
As quickly as they had risen, the storms died, the waves receded and the wise woman, and every one after, had no sway over them.