away with her. I’ve missed it so long, it’s like something I dreamed of once that never really happened.
“It didn’t take me long to learn my limits. Your grandmother straightened me out about who I was and what was expected of me. Your mother, though, wasn’t about to be straightened out. She challenged everything.
“She used to swim out past your lagoon, where she weren’t supposed to—over the rocks and into the deep. One morning she vanished altogether out there. She was missing so long that your grandparents feared she’d drowned. Gousier went out in his esquif, paddling all over, looking everywhere. Even some of Tenikemac came out to hunt for her in sympathy. They’d lost swimmers of their own to the hidden currents and undertows—some was never seen again. And it was no balm to your grandparents’ spirits to have their standoffish neighbors come and console them over their loss. That was like the final proof that she was gone.
“It fell dark. Everyone had returned from the sea. Your grandmother was wailing now. They’d all given up. And in walked your mother. She came in stark naked and exhausted, and not a bit ashamed of her deed or her body. Proud, if barely able to stand on her own feet. Worse, in the eyes of Tenikemac especially, she claimed she’d ridden home on the back of a sea dragon. No one gave her much credence. They thought she was saying it to stir them up more. She didn’t mean to be evil. She didn’t do it to hurt them. She did it to tear down a limit. It was like she had to beat the gods of the ocean themselves. She would have been, I think, just as happy if they had destroyed her for the challenge. It would have meant something had happened, she’d gotten the gods’ attention at last.”
“Did her parents punish her? What did they do?”
“Oh, they forbade her to swim, but you know they never enforced it. They were happy that she wasn’t dead. It’s difficult to be angry when you’re so elated. And then she collapsed right there in front of them, so mostly they were too busy nursing her well to threaten her much. Her task was gutting fish, same as you. There was no worse punishment they could have inflicted on her, and none that would have done anyone any good. Couldn’t keep her from cleaning the fish unless someone else did it, and when you’re all covered in blood and guts, well, who’s going to forbid you to wash? They don’t want the stink of you like that, either.”
“So she went back to swimming?” Leodora rather liked the idea that her mother had bested them all.
“Yes, she did, child. In the end, though, that willfulness of hers boxed her in. No islander would have her. The family was even more cut off from Tenikemac then. It’s only in the past few years Gousier has opened them up a tiny bit again, at least some of the men. The women are harder. If there had been a chance for Leandra before with them, there wasn’t one after that night. Their own men had been out hunting for her, and if she’d drowned, they’d have all mourned her and made sacrifices to the sea in her name, but she weren’t drowned nor even in peril, and after that the women shunned her and made their men shun her. If she’d ever gotten into real trouble after that, they would have lifted nary a finger to help, an’ probably would have hoped the gods destroyed her.”
It was clear from the look her aunt gave her that she was supposed to take instruction from her mother’s folly. She said nothing, and Dymphana seemed to regard this as acquiescence.
“Leandra had already given up on that village anyway. I don’t know exactly when she began to look elsewhere on the island.
“The Weejar people were on the far side of Ningle as they are now, isolated by the legs of that span, and half a day’s walking around the beach unless you can find the paths, what I could never do. But back then there was a third group lived down around the southern tip a good three hours away—”
“The Omelunes,” guessed Leodora.
“That’s right. You’re so clever, you got there ahead of me. The Omelunes were a fishing village, the same as Tenikemac, only they didn’t have the skill with dragons. They used boats. Some of their people also