“I don’t understand,” Mena said, emotion rising in her voice.
The man looked at her, something mocking in his eyes. “You are not the only one with a story. What happened here was mine and his.” He thrust his chin scornfully toward the depths. “It is an old debt, settled now.”
“Are you my father’s enemy?”
“No.”
“Then you are his subject! I order you not to leave me here!”
“Your father is dead, and I take orders no more.” He flung the loose coils of rope into her boat. “Princess, I don’t know what your father intended by sending you out here, but the world is not what it once was. Make your way as best you can; I will do the same.”
After that he spoke no more. He turned his back to her and unfurled his sail. It snapped full and his boat carved away, cutting a diagonal line up the face of an oncoming wave. Mena watched him slip over the edge and out of sight, feeling his words like a slap across the face. She realized that she had naпvely believed that the workings of the world revolved around her and her family. Never before had she acknowledged that somebody else’s life might alter hers. How foolish. That was exactly what was happening! Had not Hanish Mein’s actions changed her life? And her guardian and his killer had stories too, lives too, fates too. She realized that the world was a dance of a million fates. In this dance she was but a single soul. This, at least, was how she would come to remember the event and its effect on her.
As it happened she stared after the killer at each rise, watching him fade into the distance. Eventually, he was beyond her view. She was alone, nothing around her save the featureless sky and moving liquid mountains that at that moment made up the entirety of the world. And it stayed that way for five more days, until she first spotted the island that was to become her home, her destiny.
“There,” Vandi said, stepping back to examine the fully costumed priestess, “you are the goddess once more. May she be praised and find us humble!”
The attendants who had dressed her echoed this in mumbles. They drew back from her reverently. This moment always seemed strange to Mena. These young women had themselves transformed her. They had put each portion of her costume onto her near-naked body, and yet once they finished their work they went weak with fear over what they had created. She walked between them behind Vandi, toward the cymbals and chimes that announced the ceremony. Vumuans were a strange people, she thought. But still, she had always liked them and felt some amount of comfort with them. She had since she had first laid eyes on them.
Her arrival on the island had been a rough one. She might easily have died; the fact that she lived and the way that she emerged from the sea became the basis of all that followed. Alone in the boat with scant provision left her, she had watched the island draw nearer for two full days. The seas were calmer now, but around the island ran a barrier reef constructed in such a way that the ocean tossed a fury of waves over it. From the heights of these as she approached, Mena thought she might be able to ride the froth all the way into the calm water beyond the breakers. But it was not to be so easy. The boat snagged on the bottom. She lost her hold on the tiller and hurtled forward, smashing her shoulder against the decking. The pain of it was immense, complete, almost enough to block out the tumult around her. She rolled onto her back, wedged herself in as best she could, and stared up as waves poured over the boat. She felt the hull catch and grind across the reef until the boat turned sideways and rolled. For a moment she was suspended in the boiling water, her mouth full of the stuff, breathing it and choking on it at the same time. The mast must have snapped, allowing the boat to roll around. But it did not stop when it got upright. Instead, it rolled over again and again, over and over until the world made no sense at all.
She was sucked from the boat, flipped and tumbled and wrenched about by the soft muscle of the water. Her face pressed against the coral once, her arms and legs many times. She clasped something in her hand, an object that caught and twisted and wrenched her arm about. She thought it was a part of the boat and would not let it go. It was a vain hope, but she felt if she held on to a board or pole or whatever it was, she might make it through this. She changed her mind when whatever she held yanked her arm from the socket at that shoulder.
She must have gone unconscious. She was not sure, but at some point she just awoke, gasping in the calm. She sucked air furiously, all of her focused on the frantic need to inhale. Only after she had done so for a while did she realize there was sand beneath her feet. The water around her was warm and peaceful. The waves broke not far away at all, but she had gotten past them and could make out individual trees on the shore. Even more, she saw the smoke of a fire and the thatched roofs of huts and a boat moving along the shoreline. She remembered the searing pain of her shoulder, but the arm was home again and the dull throb in the joint hardly registered.
As she began to wade forward she noticed that her left arm dragged an object behind it, an awkward weight in the water. Her hand was clenched around a leather rope. Actually, this rope knotted around her wrist, enough so that her hand was bluish and swollen. Lifting it, she pulled the guardian’s long sword to the surface. The rope around her wrist was the sling used to carry it over one’s back. It was the sword that she had clung to, not a piece of the boat at all. She might have been holding the sword for a while, but it was the knotted cords that assured it stayed with her, as if the weapon itself feared the depths and had refused to let her go.
So she came to the island armed with a warrior’s sword, a girl of twelve, newly orphaned and cut off from every person she had ever known in her life. What was left of her clothing clung to her in tatters. Her hair was knotted and wild. The villagers who gathered on the shore and watched her walk toward them had never seen her likes before. It seemed she had crossed the ocean without a boat to transport her. When she opened her mouth, a foreign tongue escaped her. None of them could make sense of it. Thus a myth was born.
By the time she arrived at Ruinat a tale beyond her wildest imagining preceded her, one that she understood only later. It seemed her timing was fortuitous and unusual enough that it could be explained only with a strange blend of logic and faith. The villagers had begun whispering. Did not Vaharinda say that Maeben in human form had pale blue eyes, just like this girl? Did he not call her hair thin and wispy? And was her skin not the color of light sand? Fine, so the girl was darker than that, slightly, but overall the effect was convincing. They needed a new Maeben. They had for some time, but the priests had been unable to find a suitable girl. Usually one was born among them. In this instance the goddess had given herself to them in an even truer form. Her arrival was not perfect in its symbology, but some things were ignored, others embellished, still other details fabricated. She would eventually learn to favor her legend over the story she knew to be the truth. She welcomed the power it gave her, the right to wrath, the status as a misfortunate child of the gods, ill suited to the joys others took for granted but necessary to the maintenance of life. Special.
Nine years later, as she stepped onto the platform above the throng of worshippers below, there was little doubt that that was just what she was. They stared up at her. There she was, lit by torchlight in the enclosed chamber. She paced the platform in feathered glory, dyed fifty different colors, with massive talons curving from her fingers. The eyes that stared at them from behind the hook of her beak mask were farseeing and intense. Spikes thrust up into the air from the crown of her head, a mad, jagged chaos of a headdress. She was a nightmare of beauty and menace living right there above them, a being part raptor, part human, part divine. She knew without question that she could sweep down on them and inflict upon all of them a terrible vengeance if she wished. She had the capacity for violence within her, residing beside her heart.