into Gousier’s esquif, but not her. She had to swim off to look for him. I think she was still planning to tease him: She would creep up on his boat just to scare him. That was her intention.
“In the morning we couldn’t find her anywhere. The family looked all over. It hadn’t been so long since we’d thought her drowned, so we weren’t quite given over to panic this time. She wasn’t in the cavern. She wasn’t at Tenikemac. We had no idea where she’d got to, so it was late in the day before your grandfather thought to go looking for her in the direction of Omelune. He found her on the beach. Somewhere between here and there, not all that far from home. She was sitting, just sitting, cold and wet and rocking back and forth, with that poor dead boy’s head cradled in her lap. He’d drowned trying to match her. You see what happened—her willfulness undid her in the end.”
“He died?” Leodora couldn’t understand this turn of events. She had already jumped to the end of the tale, where her mother ran away with the boy from Omelune, and this development ruined that story.
“He died, yes, and afterward nothing was good for your mother on the island. Omelune blamed her for his death. When they saw her, when they realized who she was, the women accused her of being a water witch, a lorelei. A love-struck girl wasn’t enough for them. She tried to drown herself, tried to swim to the ends of the ocean and let the gods take her soul; but your grandfather had some sense of this. He was watching her close now, and he went after her, brought her back, locked her in the boathouse with only her grief for a companion, and wouldn’t let her out until he was satisfied she’d got the idea of drowning herself out of her head. Even I couldn’t see her or talk to her that whole time. He let nobody near her. And then, while she was locked up, a terrible storm struck the island. Nets and boats were tossed around and torn apart. Your uncle’s esquif was smashed up on some rocks, and that’s the hole what’s still in its side. Weejar and Tenikemac both suffered, but not like Omelune. That poor cursed village was stamped flat, and so many people died that you couldn’t have made a village out of what was left. The survivors blamed your mother for it all. They knew already she was some sort of ocean spirit. Now she was worse: Leandra the Red-Haired Witch, the Soul-Drinker. Either they couldn’t see her misery or they didn’t believe it. Weejar took in some of the survivors—of course, Tenikemac so typically refused to be a haven for those who’d sold fish on Ningle. The Omelune opinion of your mother, though, spread everywhere. Weejar traded with Tenikemac the same as now. Pretty soon your mother had nowhere to go at all. The whole island had set itself against her.”
“Why didn’t Grandfather…do something?”
“What could he do? We were already viewed as no better than a necessary evil by Tenikemac. It’s a role we’ve long accepted, because we make a good living by filling that niche. The taint of the spans was bad enough, and her jeopardizing their men worse, but now we harbored something cursed.
“When Leandra insisted on accompanying your grandfather and Gousier onto Ningle, the two of them agreed it was a very good idea. She was seventeen. She was a beauty. She ought to have been married. And it was clear that she could never find a suitable husband here. I think they hoped she would catch someone’s eye up there.
“A few times she went up, and I’m sure she must have been learning all she could of the place. Laying her plans. She said nothing to me or anyone. One morning she went up with the men and never came down again. Vanished right out from under their noses. That was the last time anyone in the family ever laid eyes on her.”
“She ran away.”
“That she did, and alone, too. No one thought she could get far, but they had always underestimated her distance. Gousier went looking for her up and down the span and found nothing, not a trace. She’d taken a full purse from the family coffers—we had as much then as now. No one begrudged her that; she would have been given more as a dowry