The boat swung around, directionless, pitching side to side. It leaned over and slurped in a gush of the sea and then righted and spun again. Mena had to throw herself to the deck to avoid being hit by the yardarm. The sailcloth thrashed about like a frantic animal, but it did not catch the air the way it had a moment ago. Mena had no idea what to do with it. She stared up at the snarling life in the fabric, paralyzed. Then she felt something she had not in days-the impact of the boat against something solid. This snapped her upright.
The other boat was beside hers, gunwale to gunwale, each smacking against the other as if each wished a fight. The attacking sailor leaped from his boat and landed sure-footed inside hers. He took her in with a quick glance, but came no nearer. He held a rope, with which he bound the vessels together, with enough slack between them that they could float apart. He was out of sight for a moment, then rose back into view, fumbling in the guardian’s shoulder bag. What did he want? What did he want with her? What would he do to her? She could not possibly imagine, but the specifics hardly mattered. Whatever the answer was, it would be a horror. At first she did not realize that her hands had found a weapon, and yet they had. She clenched her guardian’s long sword in both her hands. She tugged at it and just managed to pull it from its stowed place. But it was too heavy to actually lift. She could not even get it unsheathed, though the scabbard point dragged a jagged line across the boards. She had never felt so powerless.
How strange, then, that the man turned his back to her. He tugged at the rope for some time, and then leaped from the gunwale back into his boat. The two crafts crashed together again. The man reached out a quick hand and tugged loose the knot that attached his boat to hers. He seemed to have no interest in her whatsoever.
“What are you doing?” Mena shouted.
The soldier paused and looked at her, holding the two boats together with a single wrap around the cleat beside his foot. He clearly had wished to avoid speaking to her, but, once questioned, he could not fail to answer. “I wish you no harm, Princess,” he said, shouting back to be heard over the wind and water. “What happened here was between this man and myself. I have no quarrel with you.”
“You know who I am?”
The man nodded.
“Why did you kill this man? What are you going to do with me?”
“He and I had a-a dispute. With you I have no wish to do anything.”
They rose up over a wave and all was chaos for a moment. When she could see the man’s face again Mena spoke. “You will leave me here to die?”
The man shook his head. “You won’t die. You are in a current that drags you east. It runs through Vumu as if through a sieve. Even if you raise no sail but just float, you will sight land in a few days’ time. You will find land again. And people. What passes between you and them is for you to decide.”
“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.