Kushiel's Dart

roaring like fury into the winds, shaking his fist. "I do, you old bastard! And if you want your precious Black Boar to rule in Alba, you'll let me go!"
    There was laughter, then, and the face of the waters reared up three times the height of our mid-mast, dwarfing Rousse's defiance. A vast, watery face, laughing like thunder, until I clapped my hands over my drowning ears.
    "THAT IS NOT YOUR DREAM, SEAFARER! WHAT TOLL WILL YOU PAY?"
    "Name your price!" Quintilus Rousse howled his answer, hands clinging like iron to the straining wheel. The ship plunged into a trough; he held its course, hurling defiance into the winds. "Just name it, you old bastard! I'll pay what it takes!"
    The ship climbed up the crest of a wave, toward the vast maw, dark and infinite, that had opened in the sky. Open, laughing like thunder, to swallow us forevermore.
    This is the end, I thought, closing my eyes.
    And felt the absence of Joscelin's sheltering body.
    "A song!" I knew the voice; it was Joscelin's, strident and urgent with hope. His hand grabbed at my shoulder, hauling me erect, even as the ship teetered atop the pitch of a wave. "Such as you have never heard, my lord of the Straits, sung upon the waters!" he shouted at the wave-wrought face that loomed over us. "A song!"
    "What song?" I asked Joscelin desperately, the ship pitching. The rain whipped his hair, dull and sodden, his hands anchoring me. We might have been the last two mortals left alive, for all that I could see. "Joscelin! What song?"
    He answered, shouting; I saw it, though I could not hear. The wind ripped his answer away, rendered it soundless. But we had been together through all that humans might endure, through blizzard and storm, and all that the elements might hurl at us. We did not need to speak aloud. I saw his lips form the words.
    Gunter's steading.
    And because there was nothing else to do, except die, I sang, then, a song of Gunter's steading: a hearth-song, one of those the women had taught me, Hedwig and the others, a song of waiting, and longing, of a handsome thane dying young, in a welter of blood and sorrow, of reaping and sowing and harvest, of old age come early, and weaving by the fireside, while the snows of winter pile deep at the door.
    I am not Thelesis de Mornay, at whose voice all present fall silent, listening. But I have a gift for language, that Delaunay taught to me. These songs I had committed to memory, scrawled by burnt twig next to the hearth-fire, never recorded by men. They were the homely songs of Skaldi women, to which no scholar ever paid heed. And I sang them, then, though the wind tore the words from my lips, for the Master of the Straits, whose face moved over the waters, impossibly vast and terrible.
    And he listened, and the waters grew calm, the awesome features sinking back into the rippling waves.
    No one, ever, had brought these songs to the sea before.
    I kept singing, while the seas grew tranquil, and the waves lapped at the sides of the ship, and Joscelin's hand was beneath my arm, keeping me upright while my voice grew ragged. Those sailors quailing beneath the onslaught stirred, creeping onto deck. I sang, hoarsely, of children born and fir trees giving forth new growth, until Quintilius Rousse roused himself with a shake.
    "Do you accept our toll?" he cried.
    The waves themselves shuddered, a face forming on their surface, benign and complacent, yet vast, so vast. Its mouth could have swallowed our ship whole.
    "YESSSSS . . ." came the reply, whispered and dreadful. "YOU MAY PASS."
    And it was gone.
    The withdrawal of resistance came like a blow, the restoration of calm, water dissipating into mere waves, rippled by a western breeze. The skies cleared; it was not even dusk. I drew in a great breath, my throat rasping.
    "Is it done?" I asked Quintilius Rousse hoarsely, trusting to Joscelin to keep me upright.
    "It is done," he confirmed, his blue eyes darting left and right, scarce trusting to the evidence they saw. He looked at me then with something like fear. "Did Delaunay teach you that, then, to soothe Elder Brother's craving?"
    I laughed at that, my voice cracking with exhaustion and hysteria. "No," I whispered, leaning on Joscelin's vambraced arm. "Those are the songs of Skaldi women, whose husbands and brothers may yet slaughter us all."
    And with that, I collapsed.
    When I awoke, I was lying in a dark cabin, enmeshed in a hammock as if in a hempen cradle, swaying. A single lamp lit the darkness, its