Lisa L Hannett - [BCS312 S01]

by Deep in the Drift, Spinning (html)

  Focus, she’d snapped, shaking him senseless there on the strand, focus godsdammit, knowing too late that she should have, when crushing that stupid bird, distilling and decanting its juice just for him; she was the one who’d needed focus!

  If only she’d kept her head when spinning that drift, Bear wouldn’t have lost his. If only she’d thought less of their far-traveling future together, more on happiness here at home, he’d have drunk himself into her life for good instead of out of it altogether. If only she’d wrung into that bottle all the love he needed, all the love she could give, instead of thinking of all she could take...

  Hindsight, she’d thought, spiriting Bear back to his boat. Weeping over the wreck she’d wrought, the ruin she’d made of that once-lively rover. Too late, she’d thought, setting her lover’s body on the thwarts, wrapping his limp hands around the oars, setting him silently adrift. Lesson and limits learned.

  So.

  Come back, she’d hollered, sixteen years and a month ago later, as Shale trudged away, over the dunes. Please come back. This time holding nothing but hope that her daughter would hear her, that she’d change her mind and come back. That she’d unfix her fantasies from Lundey Isle and its barnacled nesting caves. That she’d leave their skiff moored where it was, right here in their sheltered cove, where she was no harpy but always Winni’s own little girl. Safe and loved and whole.

  Fix me, Mither.

  I can’t risk it, Winnifletch had said. The drift’s spin was too erratic, too unpredictable, too turbulent to hitch on Shale’s impossible dreams. It would only smash them like paperbark boats on Gutterson’s Reef, leaving everything—and everyone—broken.

  I love you too much, Winni wanted to tell her. So I can’t.

  The day Shale left, Winnifletch had started mixing what should’ve been the biggest, most potent sevenday broth she’d ever brewed. Hands and heart adding ingredients on their own, fate finding all the right fixings. Bitters to bind and herbs to heal. Jaegers and phalaropes crushed for harbourmen, grackles and ganders squashed for villagers, songbirds squeezed for smart and silly maids alike. Every last remnant of those folks’ feathered questions she’d wrung out, conserved, and dropped into the draught.

  A bold combination, she had imagined, for a bold lass. A stew to snuff doubts, to soothe and to succor, to sew up a split self.

  A month later, the batch is more bog than brew but still gurgling, its steam slicking the shack’s soot-stained wall. “Just about ready,” Winni says for the thirty-oddth time, but still the pot’s waterline rises. Still the stew goes unsupped. Another flank of driftwood goes on the fire. Another swirl of the spoon. “It’s only missing one thing.”

  Jinx crrrrks atop her shelf. Busy nitting and natting under her wings, she plucks a flurry of black down, offers no further comment. Winni admires the deft dartings of her head. The sleek scrapings of her beak. The blue bristlings of her proud breast. So efficient, so assured in her movements. So secure in her existence.

  “What else can I do?” Winni asks, staring into the pot, stirring, stirring. All those brittle bones. All those everyday woes, those trivial worries. All those folks she’s helped, all those times. Try, Mither. Just try. But then there’s forever the one—”I don’t want to hurt her, you know?”—the one she got so horribly wrong.

  “If she only understood—”

  Jinx’s talons scritch against timber as she edges away to preen in peace.

  “If I’d only told her—”

  Scritch, scritch.

  Stir, stir.

  Outside, the tempest takes a breath. In the lull between howls, Winnifletch hears a familiar crunching on the path leading up to her door. The tread is heavy and irregular, a cautious scuffling. Like the tides, it draws close then recedes, rolls forth again only to stumble away. Her pulse two-stepping, Winni raps her long wooden spoon against the pot’s rim. Clears it of sinew and scum. Holds her breath. The spoon raps again, its stem and scoop already clean, and again. Eyes down, she watches the grain fade as it dries. She won’t peer through the window. She won’t turn around. Only waits for the door to open behind her. For Shale to come in, drop her satchel and slicker on the water-stained floor. To toe off her boots, slide them under her narrow bed. No forgiveness begged and none offered. No change of heart or mind, not yet.

  If only, Winnifletch thinks, afraid she’ll never be able to spin the drift in Shale’s direction, never rein it or her in, never rebuild her girl’s outsides to match what’s trapped in her deepest core. Afraid it’s too late to for this spoiled sevenday spell of sorrow. Too late for her to fix anything. Too late to try again.

  “Knock knock,” the wrong voice gruffs as the wrong person blunders in with the wind. The door whips free of his whiskey-slick grip, slams into shelves full-rattling with jars. Parchments whisk off tables and nightstands, garlands jangle, flames gutter in hurricane lamps. Startled, Jinx swoops through the chaos. With a flap and a flutter, she lands on Winni’s shoulder, claws gouging. On the stove, the pot belches—and with a chortled curse, Wilke Maggaw does likewise.

  “Get on in here,” Winni says, sharp as a sturgeon’s snout. As he wrestles with the door, she peers around Wilke’s cable-knit bulk, taking in the bare path behind him, the wide coast and frothing sea, the smudge of Lundey Isle in the distance.

  “That’s some hollow-blown gale,” Wilke says, lifting a longneck to his gob. Lipping for last drops. From the fumes reeking off him, Winnifletch guesses he drained those dregs more than once, hours ago. “Reeled these feet of mine right off course for a while,” he says, “right off course, those winds almost wobbling us anyway and anywhere but down here to Spinster’s Cove.”

  “Hm.” Winni squints out into the gloaming, looking far and near. No glint of firelight in the Lundey’s dark caves. No hint of warmth for the harpies nesting there. No torches bobbing up the evening blue strand, guiding young wanderers home.

  “Could’ve waited until tomorrow,” she says, shouldering him in and the door shut. “I’m going nowhere.”

  “Ah, bluster.” To stifle hiccups, Wilke jams a fist against his chapped mouth. From a boiled leather sack slung low on his belt, he manhandles a limp-necked puffin. Holds the dead thing out like a tussie-mussie. “Netted this beaut just for you, lass. Can’t let it go to waste.”

  Winni suppresses a sneer. As if he’s doing her a favor, showing up like this, week after week, year after year, bag and guts a-swill with spoiled juice. As if the slop from any old corpse could heal his reef-raw skin. As if he’s never learned a thing from her, not a single thing, to help himself. As if she doesn’t have her own spells to squeeze. Her own baits to bottle. Her own perfect birds to break and remake.

  The puffin was barely a fledgling, fragile as happiness in her hand. It won’t be good for much. “Sit,” she says.

  “These legs will hold, Winnifletch. Better view from up here, anyhow, watching you work and such.” The red spidering on Wilke’s nose and cheeks disappears, his face suddenly a single shade of fluster. “Always were a handsome woman, Win...”

  “An ounce’ll do you for now,” she says, vise squealing, skeleton snapping, her own jelly jar collecting the creature’s small drippings. “Sip it slow and careful, right? If you want it to last.”

  Old Wilke keeps talking as though she hasn’t. Typical harbourman: tongue-tied ’til a dram or ten slippens his knots. “Never could get my head around that Bear Ingersen’s treating you so poor,” he says. “A woman with your talents.”

  A pause as Winni’s head whips up, vision blurring. “What’s that now?”

  “Leaving you holding the bassinet like that,” Wilke goes on, “taking no care for his own pretty bairn.” Frowning, he swigs at his dry flask. “Saw her up the strand, just now,” he says, quick-changing subjects the way only delusionals and drunks can. “Your Shale. Keeping odd company, you ask me, strutting around in this weather with those hideous half-feathered lasses.”

  “Oh,” Winnifletch whispers. “Was she all righ
t?”

  “What an age we’re living in, lass. Birds for best friends, Bear for a father.” Wilke turns and spits. “Some Bear. Hound, more like, siring pups at every port, boasting about it between pints. Always, some sweetheart swallows the bilge water he’s pumping. Guess you’ve heard about his latest doings with Abe Mews’s sweet Gertie? Bold-faced knocking on her boathouse window while the Stagg b’ys is away. Leaving his pawprints all over the place.”

  Stupid girl, Winni thinks, numb from tongue to toes. So stupid. But how?

  “Hoodwinked, she was. Same as the rest.” Swaying now, Wilke sweeps his rough hand around, taking in the workbench and stove, the iron pot and its month-long moldering, the basket of broken bones on the table. “What a cruel trick, shaming you girls into solitude.” He staggers forward and swipes the puffin juice from Winni’s cold fingers. “Playing you like that, then playing brain-dead. As if this beak-and-brinkle brew of yours has ever done more than wet a man’s whistle.”

  He lifts the jar with a chuckle, glugs it dry, then coughs himself even redder, words slupping from his whiskey-thick gob. “As if it’s actual magic.”

  The puffin lies in the sink, untouched, deflated. Good for nothing even before that fool Wilke wrecked it—too gaudy, those tiny fluffers, more show than substance—but she’ll save its meat for their supper. As ever.

  Must get lonely out here, he’d said. Bear first. Then Wilke Maggaw. A soul must get hungry for company...

  Winni grimaces. Still on her shoulder, Jinx stretches her neck and rawks. A long, low, chastising cackle.

  Stupid, so stupid.

  “Spells and spirits don’t mix,” she says, hands trembling as she wipes down the vise. That’s why the juice was weak tonight. That’s why there was no change in Wilke’s complexion, though he’d swilled every last drop. That’s why the chafe hadn’t uncracked from his cheeks. The old oaf was too drunk to absorb it. Too soused to see what she’d done, what she’s always done, for him. For all of them.

  “Actual magic.” She shakes her head. “As if there’s any other kind.”

  All those years ago, her spell had worked, in an unexpected way. It hadn’t hurt him, thank the stars, but it had done what she’d asked of it. Not as she’d wanted, of course, but even so. Though Bear hadn’t stayed here with her, something kept drawing him back to Barradoon, again and again. His life was full of riches now, wasn’t it? And in his own hound-dog way, he’d found bliss.

  Actual magic.

  Hopping from foot to foot, Jinx knocks her skull against Winni’s. Focus. Think of eagles, kites, jackdaws. Petrels and pelicans. Robins, sparrows, geese. Proud migrators, fierce hunters—great wedges of birds that travel so far, so free, but only for so long and no longer. Mermaids of the sky, that’s what Shale is, what she’ll be. Sailing off into the blue each season, living, loving, then rewinging her course right back to where it, and she, began.

  The right bird will bring Shale home.

  The right brew will send her off again, broken, rebuilt.

  Will it work?

  Will it fix me?

  A pause only Winnifletch notices, a twinge in her guts that says her instincts are good.

  Risk it.

  Faster than second-guesses, she snatches a fishing net off the floor, whips it around her shoulders, and traps Jinx in its tangles. Think of falcon oil, fast-fixing the future. Think of eagle sap, true as north-star navigation, unerring in cast and course. “I’m sorry,” she manages, breath short and chest cramping as she slams the bundle onto the workbench, securing her grip as it wriggles. “I’m so sorry.”

  Think of this crow.

  Think of Shale.

  Together.

  “Call her back,” Winnifletch cries, shunting Jinx into the vise, twisting. One, two, three turns, sharp and sure and so sorry so sorry so sorry. “She’ll listen if you call.”

  My poor sisters, Mither.

  This time the juice is good. It has to be. The flow is fast, the glass soon brimming. Hard to see through her tears, but she feels its strength as it trickles through her, the potency of Jinx’s lifeblood. Bruise-black as the plumage Shale loved so much, dark but translucent, still as a moonlit night. A potion of perfect clarity.

  Will it work?

  Winnifletch is certain.

  It’s safe, she tells herself. This drift will spin the right way. Our way. Here. Home.

  When the crow is dry, she lifts the body and cradles it close. Bear was never broken. I’ve hurt nobody. She presses a cheek against Jinx’s cooling breast. Kisses her silent beak. Lays her quietly on the rickety stool. Except my girls.

  “It’s good,” she says, putting the juice on the workbench. Gently sliding the glass away from the edge. While she waits—she won’t make Old Wilke’s mistake; she’ll not guzzle this pressing before its magic has settled; like a good stout, it needs to rest before drinking—she turns to the stove. Strains the bones from the stock, sixteen years and thirty-odd days too long in the stewing, then deposits them one by one on the table. Back and forth between cooktop and board, she collects and carries, splashes and spills. Eyeing the crow-glass. Sifting time for the right moment. Stirring for rifts to repair.

  She lines up the longest shafts, fanning some into powerful curves, and pictures wings springing from Shale’s arms, fitting and fletching her span. Think of sinew and song and sleek silhouettes, she tells herself, think Sparrow and Starling and Soars o’er Stars.

  Hours pass as she puzzles the pieces together. Night winds hush into dawn. The sea shushes up to the shack’s pilings, sighs slowly back. Soft light spills over the windowsill, yellow and rose, gilding the harpy’s new frame.

  Sore and sorry, Winnifletch finally gathers the glass. Jinx’s juice. Shale’s summoning. With eyes closed, she casts her mind over the water. Think of the Lundey. Outside a murrelet cries, its keer-keer clear and cold. Think of Henny.

  “Come back,” she says before sipping, slowly, steadily, the only spell she’s ever swallowed herself. Think of Leda and Crows-at-the-Sun. The afterbrew burns, bitter and brutal. It whirls the churn in her belly, threatens to bring up everything she’s ever kept down.

  Actual magic.

  “Come back,” Winnifletch whispers, deep in the drift, spinning. Limbs shaking, she fumbles for a chair, pulls it over to the door, close as she can without blocking it, and sits. Dizzy, she leans forward. Listens for footsteps, for Shale’s sweet singing. Gulls wail as they wing overhead, away.

  “Come back, my girl, and fly.”

  © Copyright 2020 Lisa L. Hannett