A Wilderness of Glass - Grace Draven Page 0,18
the flute at her, enraged. It landed in the sand, and she left it where it lay, far too busy with keeping an eye on the red-faced Ospodine and her hand on the scissors. With her heart in her throat, she backed away from him.
“Where did you learn to play that tune?” he shouted at her, advancing on her with long strides.
“I didn’t ‘learn’ it! I only heard it long ago and repeated it!” Her shout carried alongside his over the dunes.
“Oy!” a voice called out, making them both turn. “What are you going on about down there?”
Brida almost burst into relieved tears at the sight of two of the village elders watching from the top of one of the dunes. She used the distraction to dart around Ospodine and run for the safety of their company.
He didn’t follow, taking the opposite path to retrieve his horse and vault into the saddle before galloping back toward the castle. Brida watched him go, her heartbeat still banging inside her skull like a war drum. She and the elders watched as his figure soon diminished, becoming nothing more than a fast moving speck that disappeared behind a hillock of sand before reappearing at the bottom of the castle road.
“Trouble, that one,” one of the two elders said as he squinted into the distance. “He’s been roaming about the village, asking odd questions.” His aging gaze drifted to Brida. “A few of those questions about you, Brida.”
“What were you two arguing about?” the second elder asked. “We could hear you playing and then you both shouting afterwards.”
Brida shuddered. “He’s obsessed with a few notes I played at the castle during her ladyship’s name day celebration. They mean nothing to me.” That wasn’t quite true. “But they’re important to him for reasons he’s chosen not to share.”
“He didn’t hurt you, did he?” The second elder’s face bunched into a thunderous frown. “Laylam will want his head on a plate, nobleman or not, if he did.”
She groaned inwardly. The last thing she needed was her brother’s already overprotective instincts to flare into a bonfire. He’d try to nail her feet to the floor of her own house in a misguided attempt to keep her safe. “He didn’t touch me. Just grew angry when I played what he requested, but it seems I played poorly.”
Thank the gods she hadn’t brought her bone flute. After discovering Ospodine had wandered uninvited through her house, Brida had taken the flute to Laylam’s where Norinn had stashed it and Brida’s earnings in a locked box stored beneath the kitchen floor.
The thought reminded her of her forgotten second-best flute, still in the sand where Ospodine had thrown it. She asked the elders to wait for her while she retrieved the instrument. She bent to pick up the flute and froze at the faintest sound purling toward her from the incoming tide.
A deeper whistle, drawn out in the middle, dropping off at the end, and clear as the twilight sky above her. Brida turned her head slowly, half afraid she’d see nothing except the disappointment of unacknowledged hope. A sliver of silvery tail ending in a fluke gently splashed water in her direction, and she caught a glint of twin blue-green fireflies that floated among the waves. Eye-shine in a handsome, unhuman face framed in garlands of floating seaweed hair.
Still half bent toward the flute, Brida breathed out a soft exclamation. “You.”
As if he heard her, the merman edged a hand above the wave peaks in greeting. His glowing eyes shifted to the two men waiting at the dunes, their attention turned toward the castle road. Brida placed a finger to her lips in what she hoped was a universal signal for silence. He nodded and half submerged until only the crown of his head remained visible, nothing more than a ubiquitous knot of floating kelp to anyone else who might be watching the water.
Brida snatched up the flute and made her way to the elders. She wanted so badly to return to the merman, but to insist on staying alone on the beach after her confrontation with Ospodine would invite the elders’ unwelcome scrutiny and a litany of questions.
“We planned to walk toward the bluff, Brida,” the younger of the two men said. “You’re welcome to join us. We’ll see you home afterwards.”
Astran was a jovial man, one of the more reasonable men on the village council, and Brida had always liked him. He’d been the one to call out when