found that she could not work with her back to him. Despite the fact that he had no eyes, the sensation of being watched overpowered her. She couldn’t help looking to be sure he hadn’t come to life and edged nearer. When she couldn’t trust that he hadn’t, she went over and scratched a line on the floor in front of him. Even that corroboration failed to satisfy her in the end, and so she moved around the stone table and worked on the other side. It was inconvenient, because the cavern wall jutted out there, forcing her to hunch over her work as she beheaded and sliced and gutted each corpse. It put the mats on the wrong side, beyond her reach, and instead of placing each cleaned fillet in the basket, she had to let them pile up and then walk all the way around the stone to lay them in there.
Being able to see him didn’t improve her situation, either. Her attention kept flicking to him, as if he were moving in her periphery; but it wasn’t movement. It was more, she thought, as if he were singing to her, whispering at a level she couldn’t hear but feel.
And all at once she stopped and set down the knife and stared. She knew well the sensation she had just described. It had been absent in the boathouse, but it was back now. Only the call no longer came from across the sea.
It came from across the room.
By the time Gousier and his fool assistants arrived, she was ready to bolt. Her uncle took in the coral figure as if he’d seen it there every day of his life. Obviously someone had told him about it. He looked it up and down once—he towered over it—and then turned his attention directly to the business of the day.
She had cleaned perhaps two-thirds of the fish she should have prepared, and he saw that immediately. She anticipated a beating, and for a moment as he scowled she knew it was coming. But then he looked at her, and the scowl spread into a knowing smile and a narrow-eyed glance that said, Go ahead, enjoy your final act of defiance. The Coral Man loomed behind him in the shadows, and the two of them combined was more than she could stand. She put down the knives and turned, knocking one of the fools aside as she marched and then ran out of the cave. She heard her uncle’s savage laugh, heard him say, “She’s nervous before the event,” and heard the fools join in the laughter, but for all she reacted they might have been discussing someone else.
On any other day if she had walked out on him, Gousier would have dragged her back by the hair, cursed her, slapped her, whipped her. None of that was necessary now.
She washed and warmed her hands, then hurried away from the cavern before her uncle and his fools emerged. “Don’t provoke him,” Soter had said. For her that meant being elsewhere, and she went to her beach.
The tide was in, and the inlet lay open to the sea. She sat on the spit of sand, knees drawn up, the salty breeze ruffling her hair. Despite her impending escape, she felt as if a huge weight were tied to her. She could barely contemplate stripping off the bloody clothes and going for a swim for fear that the weight would pull her down and drown her.
It wasn’t Gousier. She wouldn’t miss him, nor the fish guts and the cold cavern to which he consigned her, any more than she would miss the marriage he’d arranged. She would miss Dymphana terribly, though. Her aunt would grieve when she’d gone, and weep for the girl who hadn’t even said good-bye. She didn’t dare, because Dymphana would stop her, even if such betrayal condemned her to marry an imbecile. However much her aunt loved her, she must follow Gousier’s way, having long ago succumbed to his governance.
This is what it was like for my mother before me, she thought. Who I hurt and whether I care—those are my choices.
The rest of her burden the Coral Man provided. She knew that effigy would call her back to Bouyan, plague her with its siren song, and in that moment she made a leap of intuition: It had come from the sea, the same as the dragons. Like her they’d heard its call. That was how a dragon had brought