Seaborn 01 - Saltwater Witch

by Chris Howard

  His class was usually one of the most exciting, but when we arrived that morning, Matrothy was just leaving, her face red and sweaty as if she had been yelling, and Mr. Henderson sat hunched in his chair looking sullen.

  Matrothy—the fun-killing loon—had tried to get him fired a hundred times. It never worked. She was a department director, and had little influence over the school side of St. Clement’s. I think it only made her look stupid.

  But if there was one person the director hated most after me it was Michael Henderson, and like me, there seemed to be no clear reason for her hatred.

  Henderson didn’t appear to be in any mood to talk, but I had to ask him about breathing underwater—the questions were piling up in my head. He gave me short, complicated, scientific answers and motioned me to my desk.

  Disappointed.

  I hadn’t heard the voice in my head for a while, and it didn’t occur to me until ten o’clock that maybe it only worked with math. So, I closed my science book softly, rested my hand on it, and bent close to my desk, trying to hide what I was about to say from everyone else.

  “Seven-hundred and fifteen,” I whispered, and hoped no one could hear the words. “Times four-hundred and five?”

  Almost immediately, the man’s voice in my head answered. Was that seven-hundred and fifty? Or fifteen?

  Underneath my hair, my skin went all prickly. A jolt of electricity ripped through me. My arm swung away, out of my control, throwing the book from my desk. It flew into the aisle and slammed on the floor.

  No one noticed because at that moment there was an announcement over the PA, a well-timed distraction from what I was doing, even though no one bothered to listen to it. Then the bell rang for morning break and there was so much noise and disruption, I retrieved my book without a glance from anyone around me.

  “What was that about?” Nicole shoved me when we gathered in a corner of the playground.

  “What?” I dragged out the word, played dim.

  Nicole put one hand on her hip and said in a mock outraged voice, “Doing division in your head, stupid! Where did you learn that?”

  Jill shrugged, nodded in acceptance. “I know who to get homework help from.”

  “The answers just...came to me.” I wanted to say I heard the answers in my head, but wouldn’t be able to explain how they got there, and, well, that sounded insane.

  “You’ve changed since the lake.” Nicole jabbed a finger at me, accusing. “Something’s different about you.”

  Jill put her hand to her chin, backing up to study me. “We both heard what you said right before class. About escaping from Clement’s.”

  I shook my head. “I meant...”

  “Nothing wrong with wanting to get out of this place,” Nicole started, glaring up at the walls and windowpanes of the school wing, ending in a whisper, “You have a better reason than most.”

  An angry blast of heat inside me. “What does that mean?”

  Nicole just stared at me, but I could see her brain working fast and far away. Then she stated it like a fact: “I plan on leaving before they kick me out at eighteen.”

  Jill waved a hand, apparently at empty air. “You don’t have any money, no family, nowhere to go.”

  “Matrothy picks on you more than anyone, but she only does it because she knows you can’t get away from her.”

  “What if I show her that I can?”

  Nicole was shocked.

  Jill looked at Nicole and then back at me, leaning closer and dropping her voice. “What did you do to her? I mean really? Why does she hate you so much?”

  Jill had been dumped at Clement’s at seven years old, and probably assumed that whatever I’d done to Matrothy must have happened before that.

  “Nothing.”

  “It’s your mother,” said Nicole with a wave that vaguely indicated the hall—where she’d overheard Matrothy.

  Jill nodded. “Yeah, tell us about that.”

  “Matrothy said your mother’s a murderer.”

  I could feel my brows curling into a knot. “She’s not.”

  Jill looked doubtful. “How do you know?”

  Nicole tilted her head toward the school. “I heard what the hag said about your mother killing her best friend, stabbing her in the back.”

  “We both did.”

  I ground my teeth, releasing them to say, “It’s not true.”

  Both of them stepped back from me, and there was a tense silence between us for a minute.

  Jill shrugged. “Do what you want, Kass. I just don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  Nicole looked thoughtfully at me. “And you never cry.”

  My rage slipped off its leash. “What the hell does that have to do with it?” I shouted. Other girls nearby looked over at us.

  Nicole folded her arms. “I don’t want you to leave because they’ll move someone I don’t like next to me in the hall, probably that hippie girl who’s always moaning.”

  “Who?”

  Nicole turned to Jill. “What’s her name?”

  “She’s just down from you.” Jill jutted her chin at me. “Charity, Cherish? It’s something like that.”

  “Her name’s Charisma,” I said flatly, embarrassed to say that I’d always envied the girl because she could cry easily.

  The return bell rang and we joined the crowd going back to class.

  At lunch, I picked at my food tray and read the homework chapters from The Odyssey.

  I sat by myself, back to the wall, at the end of a deserted table in the far corner of the cafeteria. Jill and Nicole came in late, spent lunch stuffing food into their mouths, silently throwing scowls, widened eyes and questioning stares at each other as if carrying on a conversation without words, unusual for both of them.

  I was still annoyed with them for bringing up Matrothy’s lies about my mother.

  My mother was Ampharete.

  I ignored them, and after finishing their turkey sandwiches, Monday’s entree, Jill and Nicole ran off excitedly without telling me where they were going.

  Good riddance.

  I shoved my tray aside and opened up The Odyssey, stuck my face into it, flipping through the story to a random page. I started reading silently, and then to drown out the noise of the cafeteria, I read in a low whisper.

  “These things sang the bard, but Odysseus drew his sea-purple mantle over his head and covered his face, for he was ashamed to let the Phaiakians see the tears running down his face. And every time—”

  You read beautifully. I love this part, said the man with the unusual accent.

  “What!”

  The book flipped out of my fingers and skimmed over the tabletop. I looked around. It was the voice again, the same voice. The man with a strange thick accent had spoken, and it sounded as if he’d been standing right behind me.

  I had heard nothing from the multiplying and dividing voice for hours, and I’d told myself that it must only work for math. Admittedly, I had been afraid to call it for anything else. Afraid that it might answer. Now it was commenting on my selection of passages from The Odyssey.

  I straightened on the cafeteria bench and pulled my book back from the other side of the table. There was no one near me, but it was as if the voice had been right in my ear.

  The hair prickled on my neck. My elbow banged on the tabletop as I spun halfway around on the bench, looking suspiciously at the kitchen doorway as if the speaker had tiptoed up behind me, spoken in my ear and then vanished.

  “Who...Who are you?” I whispered.

  Praxinos, said the voice. I am Praxinos, King of the Seaborn. Well...I was king and Wreath-wearer...oh...it must be over two thousand years ago. I have lost track.

  The voice was definitely in my head.

  I pulled in a long breath, held it for a few seconds, and then released it. I picked up the book, flipped it over, dropped it on the table, and bent over the table, rubbing my eyes.

  “Great,” I said, disappointed.

  What is
wrong?

  “Oh, you know, Matrothy, teachers, doctors, and pretty much everyone else already think I’m a freak. Now, I hear a voice in my head of a two thousand year old king. That can’t be worse, can it? Where are you from? Wait. Let me guess. Atlantis?”

  Don’t be silly. My great great grandfather was a child when the Telkhines destroyed what you call Atlantis. And you do know it’s called Santorini?

  “Oh...Of course. And I am not being ‘seely.’” I mimicked his pronunciation. “The day before yesterday I fought off a lake witch, some angry lady with sharp teeth. I learned at the same time that—not only can I not drown—I can breathe underwater, which, according to my science teacher Mr. Henderson, is impossible with—his exact words—our current mammalian breathing apparatus.” My voice built up into a furious whisper. “I also learned that sound can hurt someone...but only underwater. I yelled back at the witch and she felt pain. I saw it in her eyes. Yesterday, I cried a single tear and who shows up? Just who you’d expect! One of the irritable descendents of a sea god. Today, I’m chatting with royalty...In my head. What’s going to happen next? Do I get to fly off on the back of a dragon? Are there magic flutes? Mice that talk?”

  I have never spoken with mice, said Praxinos as if this were something to consider. But sea-dragons are some of the most beautiful creatures in the ocean. Dangerous as a dark sea vent, but beautiful. They are enormous. I rode one once when I was young.

  “Right. I’ll run off to Scotland to look for the Loch Ness monster because a voice in my head told me to.”

  I will bet it is pretty this time of year.

  “And just what time of year do you think—!” I started angrily but stopped myself. “So, you gave me the answers to the division problems.”

  I could not resist. I love mathematics. Always have.

  “Kassandra?”

  “What!” The shout burst from me, and then I looked up at Jill and Nicole. In a friendlier tone, I said, “I mean, what?”

  They both stared at me with the same worried expressions, mouths open. They had just caught me talking to myself, and not just a few whispered words—who doesn’t do that?—but one side of an entire conversation.

  Nicole wore a clear I-need-to-look-up-‘psychotic’-in-the-dictionary look. Jill gave me a frown, then shrugged off her worry—just like Jill—and spoke excitedly, moving on to something more urgent.

  “We just went to talk to Mrs. Lindsey, who’s in charge of school records. You’ve seen her. Older, not very organized, gray hair, friendly. She knows everything about everybody here. I know her really well. And guess what?”

  I leaned forward. My fingers played nervously with the pages of The Odyssey. They sat down and Jill lowered her voice, glancing around suspiciously.

  “Matrothy took the job and came to work at the preschool dorms little over fourteen years ago, on October 4th.”

  I strangled a gasp. “October 4th is when they...delivered me. I was a little over a year old.”

  Jill Nodded. “Matrothy started work at 8:00 in the morning and you arrived at 8:05, right into her arms.”

  All three of us shuddered. Jill continued. “You and Matrothy showed up on the same day. That’s about all Mrs. Lindsey would tell me about you. Matrothy received you and you were her first...child.”

  As I stared at the fake wood grain on the cafeteria table, Nicole whispered my exact thoughts: “Did Matrothy know your mother?”

  Jill glanced at Nicole, and both of them nodded. That’s exactly what they were thinking. Jill leaned closer. “Everyone knows she hates you...but...it’s like revenge. It’s scary. Like Matrothy came to work here just to torture you.”

  Chapter 7 - Gregor Remembers

  Time passed for Gregor Porthmeus, but every detail of his last moments above the waves—almost a decade and half before—had been sewn deep into his memory. Permanent. He wept and replayed them, beginning with his hands on the wheel of his fishing boat, trying to steer it away from death, always ending as a captive, always losing Kassandra.

  For years he replayed the memories while he clawed with bleeding fingers at the walls of his prison.

  “Betrayed,” he whispered, his voice hard, echoing off damp stone.

  He closed his eyes and watched the frames roll by like a movie in his head, unable to imagine differences in the progression of events.

  He felt the driving rain against his face; the thin air hit him in cutting gusts. Towering waves crowded angrily around his fishing boat, jagged and foam-streaked, a pack of wolves that had finally cornered their victim after a long chase.

  He turned the boat’s bow toward the coast of Maine.

  The hull shuddered under the control of something that belonged to the sea, something that knew more about it than he did, and he knew quite a bit. He knew without looking at a map, without clear skies, that he was eleven miles out from the Isles of Shoals, which stood about seven from Portsmouth Harbor. Although he couldn’t see it through the storm, he knew Boon Island Light was a few miles off to port, and in his bones, he felt the sloping floor of the Jeffreys ninety fathoms under him.

  Gregor Porthmeus had fished in New England waters since...

  He couldn’t remember. It must have been a long time because everything, the color of the surge, his sense of the soundings, the way the currents and tides thrummed in his bones, it all seemed so familiar, as if he’d grown up in these waters, learning to swim before he could walk.

  History hurt.

  He hunched forward, squinting against the anticipated pain in his skull, the punishment for trying to remember. Anytime he tried to pull up a memory from before, a dull thudding ache fired into the base of his neck and punched its way to his scalp. It was as if his life, his childhood, all his recollections and dreams, had been sealed away from his own prying mind, and someone had shoved him into the world with a canned set of conditions and values and memories.

  He only remembered the present, and not much more. The dream of his final moments above the waves rolled on, and he couldn’t escape it.

  A long shriek pierced the storm. “Porthmeus!”

  He swung around, a startled look on his face. One of them—a woman—screamed his last name, but far away, obscured by the wind, thundering waves, and the choppy roar of the fishing boat’s engines.

  Porthmeus. Gregor pushed it around in his mind, frowning. It always sounded like a peculiar word when he was more than half a mile from land.

  Gregor Porthmeus...Porthmeus. It was like fiddling with a defective puzzle piece, nagging him because he knew it wouldn’t fit—and there was something else, something sharp and painful in the name.

  He didn’t want to try to remember why.

  Gregor pried one tight hand from the wheel and swung his body loose toward the stern, whipping around like a flag in a gale. His boots skated on the wet deck. He braced his legs to get a better look at everything he owned—or had picked up in the last hour—sliding past him.

  “Kassandra!” he screamed her name over the roaring wind.

  Then crouched down and, one handed, grabbed a thick soft bundle. He pulled it in, and then let it go.

  Empty blankets. Not hers.

  He had lost the child in the nets and blankets rolling under his feet.

  And then the world tilted as the human-shaped things pursuing him pulled his boat under. The stern slid into the water. The engines choked and died, and the wheel flew from Gregor’s hand. The hull flipped vertical, bow jutting into the sky, launching him over the waves like a stone from a catapult.

  He smacked his head on the canopy’s edge on his way into the storm, cartwheeling through the air, clipping a wave cap, hitting the Atlantic in the center of a deep-drawn trough between crests.

  He surfaced, wiping the water and blood from his eyes. His head was pounding. A sharp-peaked roll of Atlantic approached and Gregor went under, surfacing on the other side, letting the foam cascade over his shoulders. Seawater filled his ears, but he heard the storm’s rage through
it. He spit bitterly, looking for the girl up the dark canyon walls of water.

  His heart jumping a beat, he kicked toward a white bundle of cloth twirling up the slope of water, half submerged. The thick wrap of fabric kept the girl face-up and afloat.

  “Kassand—” He choked on seawater.

  As if in answer, the baby woke and let out a cry—not a cry of fear or longing for her mother, but a playful peal of noise, tearing through the roar of the storm.

  The surge lifted Gregor and the baby—just out of reach—up the face of the wave. He sucked in a breath, glanced over his shoulder, and raced the Atlantic for the child.

  The wall of water caved in over his head, scattering what was left of the debris from his boat. He broke through, into the air, and flipped the hair from his eyes. Panic twisting his features, he spun, nothing to see but gray mountains of water to the sky, nothing to hear but the steady roar of the waves and wind.

  The girl was gone.

  Fail and die.

  The icy water’s temperature against his skin hadn’t sunk in, but his muscles trembled and pulled in spasms, as if aware that stillness meant death. He kicked and dragged his body through the surge, circling over and over.

  Lost...and found, a puppet in the middle of an argument among puppeteers. Someone had ordered him into the storm to retrieve the baby. He knew exactly what they wanted, just didn’t know who wanted it, or why. He’d carried the orders out, but they had been so different.

  Retrieve the child. She is called Kassandra.

  The voice had given him coordinates for a tiny rock nearly twenty miles offshore where no rock had ever been mapped.

  And he didn’t need to flip through his charts to know there was empty sea there before the orders came to him.

  Let no one see you. Do not fail. Fail and die. Drive the child from your home harbor to the strand south of Little Boar’s Head.

  He replayed the final weird part of the instructions and watched the roiling surface of the ocean close in on him.