On the day she was to wed, the sea screamed itself hoarse, driving its rage into the shoulders of the island. The sky was more electricity than air, each lungful heavy with its orphan wails of salt and spite, warning that the advancing waves were a threat to the castle walls.
She was wailed awake by their grief and walked barefoot to the shore. She felt the sand shift as she approached, surrounding her, removing her from the shadowy world of the castle and its inhabitants. Her focus narrowed as she folded her hand over her eyes and searched for his signal.
He was coming. He would meet her in their place.
So she stumbled toward the jetty, through the waves that lapped at her ankles, the foam clinging to her skirts. She felt chilled fingers of raindrops press into her cheeks but she did not shudder.
Once she reached the edge of the jetty, she found all the right places to grip the rocks, wet and slick with moss. She climbed surely along its spine until her toes touched the muddy surface of a tiny island, a jewel in a knotted chain of damp boulders and seaweed. There a bare-limbed and snarled remnant of a tree reached skyward in the midst of a stone-lined circle. Its curled branches were soft and greening where they drifted over the spray but her fingers met with the solid body of its trunk. Her palms pressed against the bark, smoothed by salt and wind.
She closed her eyes and hummed a tune she knew by heart and before the last note fluttered from the cage of her throat she could feel the rasp of his hands on hers.
She opened her eyes to be drawn into his, glassy-green and glowing brightly against the hard gray of the sea and the wind.
As he spoke the rage of the sky and the sea seemed to drift away. “Today, you are to be wed.”
“If my wish had been granted, it would be to you,” She replied as she had every day since her engagement had been announced.
He put on the same face he had for seven and a quarter months, a frown that seemed to split his narrow and exquisite features in two. "A great price would have to be paid," he shook his head and reached to stroke her cheek with his rough hand, tipping her chin to look into her face.
Her heart knocked awake, her eyelids fluttered, she'd been saying the same thing for months but this was the first time he'd replied with any inclination toward making a deal.
"I have a dowry, of course. My father —" she gestured awkwardly toward the castle that loomed on the cliff above them. "He is a king among our people.”
He responded with a tart smile, the little lines at the edges of his eyes crinkling into beams of sunlight escaping the clouds. He ran his cold fingers over her throat and gripped her by the shoulders pulling her into a rough embrace. “I am not a prince of half-measures, my dear.”
Her voice fumbled in her throat as she felt her body react to the press of his. “Of course, my lord. I would — I am prepared to give you all which I possess.”
He released her to fall against the tree in a swoon. As her faculties returned to her she watched him pace before a wall of waves, his long fingers moving through his beard as the distant focus in his eyes moved closer and closer. Then it fell upon her, lit her up like a candle. She felt her spine straighten, her face burn with his attention.
“Yes,” He finally said. “Yes, it shall be you. It has always been you” But he did not come to her, he did not hold her, he continued his pacing. “If you wish to be my bride you must do three things.”
She held herself as she shivered against the tree and breathed the word, “Anything.”
“If you are so dissatisfied with the machinations of those on the shore, call the rage of the sea into your heart and carry it into the castle. Once there, you will negotiate with your father, you must convince him to call off your engagement willingly. Once it has been spoken, I will call the sea forth. Then you will return here and we will be one.”
She thought of the castle – the spreading shade of its walls, the chill that pulsed through it like lifeblood. A gloomy population of servants and courtiers shoveled coal into its grates and filled its cavernous dance halls with conversation and perspiration, yet it was never warm or cozy. It was forever icy & shrill, its parapets howling with the winds that came off the sea.
How could she allow that dreadful place to continue to be the cause of her unhappiness? After a lifetime of thorns she deserved to feel the bloom of the rose. She could almost feel the silk of the petals against the tip of her fingers, the prickling rasp of his face against the soft skin of her throat, her heart near bursting with love.
He was waiting for her response and he would have it.
Her father yawned loudly from his throne. His long arms shot out in an awkward stretch that upset the longsword leaning against the golden chair, sending it clattering to the stone floor below.
His servant bowed to her before stooping to retrieve the weapon, only to lean it again in its precarious position at her father’s right hand.
“You are awake my dear,” Her father addressed her in a dreary voice, his dark eyes vacant as they fluttered over her.
She had a feeling he was not but smiled and gave him a polite nod, leaning into a curtsy as she approached the head of the room. Before them, all the room was silent aside from the floor that rasped against the grit of sand that clung to her bare feet as she moved.
She felt the sea swell within her as she lifted the damp edges of her skirt to climb to her own seat. If her father noticed, he did not say. He wore a shadow of a smile over his thin lips as he titled his head toward her and asked after her betrothed.
She flushed for a moment, her animal heart startling before she realized he was speaking of the terrestrial prince that he’d arranged for her to wed. She had not seen him yet and she said as much.
He was disinterested anyway. With shaking hands he lifted the sword that sat at his side and turned it over his lap, the edge of the blade singing against the armrest as it glanced.
The man at his side did not even flinch at the unpleasant noise, his long nose turned out toward the room currently empty of the usual courtiers.
Unobserved, she felt the gray of the room crowded on all sides as she undulated with the colors of the deep. Winds swept through the waves within her and pulled at the defenses of her body, further weakening her resolve to wait for some sort of sign, some sort of slight, to trigger her release, her surrender.
“My love…” The words escaped the tumult of her being, rattling about in the well of her throat.
“What is it my dear?” Her father asked, wearily passing the sword onto his servant who had drawn to his side. The man was no younger than him but handled the weapon smoothly, leaning it once again at the side of his golden throne.
She dared to say it: “I do not wish to marry the match you’ve made father.”
He flinched at her words but the expression quickly shifted off his face, the old landscape of indifference re-emerging. “Fair enough,” He said to her before turning to his servant. “You’ll send him on his way then?”
The inquisition in his servant’s eyes bothered her for only a moment before he too nodded and excused himself from the room.
It was as easy as that?
She straightened in her chair as her father hummed vacantly, staring off into the gray depths of the empty hall.
She made a small noise, shifting her sandy feet against a seam in the floor.
He reacted with a quick, tightly-wound smile, before nodding back toward the emptiness, his eyes focused again on that unseen distance.
She sighed in the realization that she’d find no trigger here, no cruelty. No reason to sacrifice this place for the other aside from the coldness, the bitter lack that lived among the shadows and stones.
And it was her duty to keep up the nothingness. She planned the summer balls, she ordered in the winter supplies, she consulted with the fields in the spring, & danced the floors of storerooms before they were filled in the fall. Nothing would happen without her exacting, her inspiration, her becoming a warmth to counterpart the chill that it was made of. Can this be all there is to my life?
The blade clattered again as her father’s arm brushed the hilt of the sword. He looked for his servant but he had not come back yet. His eyes fluttered on her for a moment but he said nothing and went back to his staring, leaving the weapon strewn next to this throne.
The indifference prickled in her, tore at her throat, a noose made of bramblevine. She swallowed but it made no difference. She was going to be sick.
And she was. The sea flowed out of her and into the throne room. Her father barely blinked as the torrent rushed over him.
She was swimming, she floated, she was weightless. The release had been exquisite & in it her body embraced the emptiness that flooded in to replace the sea she’d held.
A window had been kicked open at the far end of the hall and she cascaded out, the current pressing her up against a tower wall for a moment before she was swept onto the landing above the castle gate.
As she steadied herself she watched the weeping windows of the gatehouse blink open like two great eyes as the sea fell out of them and back into the waves that licked at the cliff-face below.
In the emptiness she now carried within her she felt regret echo through as she watched the remnants of her life carried out of the open windows & into the sea — washtubs and teapots, kegs of wine and beer, her abandoned embroidery project the green letters distorted by the waves: “This too shall pass.”
The sea swallowed all of her and voracious still, she watched as it ate at the sides of the castle itself — taking a tower, a pumphouse. She drew back and lept onto the bare back of a little hillside that flanked the castle wall.
Carefully, she found her way through slouching valleys of water and death until she found the edge of the jetty, half drowned in a swirl of waves as she approached.
She would make it to the island, to the green tree with the solid heart, & she would meet him. She would finally be with her love.
Her sure feet carried her over the slick rocks of the jetty until they met with the squelch of the island. She reached out her hand and pressed her fingers into the smooth bark of the tree.
The King’s servant pressed his hands into his coat. Why was it he who always had to bear the bad news? Heavier than the wall of water he’d spend his morning running from, the fate of the Princess dragged in his step as he approached the throne room.
The King’s hair was wet, black and gray and pressed into his temples like a helmet. His dark eyes were fixed on the back of the empty hall. The windows had been opened in an attempt to expedite the drying of the stone room. The slickness of the seawater cooked in the gentle wind that rushed in from the cliffs that cradled what was left of the castle.
“What say you?” The King asked without turning his head to address him.
“Well sir,” The servant licked his lips nervously as he waited for the words to slip into place inside him. “The southern wall has been breached. We have lost several outbuildings and a tower.”
The King made an indignant noise that rattled in his throat. “Has the ground been swept away?”
Before he dared answer, the servant’s eyes went afield, chasing the gaze of the King who was watching salt crystalize over the floor. The cold gray shone with luster, new as the sun that poured over the stones, a fresh magic emerging from the strangeness.
The King’s servant shook his head and described the great salt cliff that rose in the place of the tower. “...Like a lighthouse when the sun glints over the top of it.”
“And of my daughter?” The King pressed on as anyone would.
The King’s servant felt a weight heavier than his saturated clothes, the sun and wind were slowly working their magic on him as well.
“She was found on the jetty, I’m afraid.”
“And she is dead?”
“She is unresponsive, sir.”
“She will die?”
“One cannot say just yet.”
“Ah,” The King’s focus shifted for a moment, his smile like a spring on his lips as their eyes met. But then he lowered his head back to the hall and the empty floor, littered with jewels of sunlight and salt. “I suppose we should call in the courtiers then. I am in need of a daughter.”
“Of course sir,” The King’s servant bowed and went on his way.
Zana Eliot (she/her) is a writer and musician based in Portland, Oregon. She writes contemporary horror and paranormal romance in long and short forms. She enjoys hiking, live music, eating from food trucks, and having weird conversations.
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