The dragon took her around the point again and back to her inlet. She rode proud and straight the whole way, despite a trembling in her limbs she couldn’t control even though there was no one to see her now.
“You meant to do this to me, didn’t you, clever little dragon?” she asked as they arrived. “You tricked me.”
The creature didn’t acknowledge that it had heard her.
“I think I’ll call you Meersh, how would you like that?”
The sea dragon drew up beside the opening to the inlet and paddled in place. It looked back at her expectantly. The tide had begun to ebb, and the dragon could not swim into the inlet any longer. It seemed to know this.
Everything that had just happened, she thought, had to have happened exactly when and as it did.
She slid off and swam to the submerged shelf of rock. The dragon hesitated, watching her. “Go on, Meersh,” she said. “Go back to the story you came from. You’ve done your work. There can’t be any marriage with Koombrun after this. I’d have to leave the island now even if I didn’t want to.”
The dragon extended its neck. Its puckered mouth whuffled in her face as though in reply, spraying her with gentle tears. Then it swung away and dove from sight. The sea immediately erased even the ripples of its going. She looked out across the water for a long time. The dragon did not resurface.
Finally, Leodora swam back to her clothes. She wrung the blood out of them and put them on. Then, with one last look across the inlet to the unbroken sea, she started up the beach to her garret. The only proof that she hadn’t imagined her voyage was the red chafing inside her thighs from the dragon’s skin. She knew, however, that Agmeon would provide all the proof necessary for everyone else.
She spent the rest of the afternoon out of sight in the boathouse.
At dinner she gauged Gousier’s mood before appearing, but he was ebullient and carefree. He didn’t know yet. “What a perfect day this was. Business was never better,” he said, adding, “I could have sold twice the fish I had”—which was as close as he came to upbraiding Leodora for what he perceived as her dereliction that morning. He rambled on about the stall, a wealthy family throwing a party who had taken every shellfish he had. He used the idea of a family to lead in to his delight with the village and how exciting it was going to be when they were united with Tenikemac in a “great big family.” Obviously, he hadn’t visited before coming to dinner, and with luck he wouldn’t have reason to before tomorrow. One more day was all she needed.
While her uncle ate and grunted and babbled this way and that, Leodora experienced once again the recognition that she was doing something for the last time. With a focused inner quiet, she gazed around the room, burning each detail in her mind—the horizontal lines of the reeds that composed the walls; the rough plankings underfoot; the blue-dyed, frayed mat by the door; the fish oil lamps with their curlicue handles of carved bone. And beside her, Dymphana. She saw her aunt detailed in guilt: brittle, thinning hair shot through everywhere with strands of gray; a face wrecked and ravaged time and again by a useless sagacity she wasn’t allowed to express against Gousier’s pigheaded presumptions and temper. She was tied to him forever and had no idea that Leodora might not be. It was their lot; escape was unimaginable—and wasn’t that implicit even in the way Dymphana told her of her mother? Leandra, who escaped to nothing. To doom. It had been a cautionary tale as much as anything else. Gousier imposed the limits, and the women must do the best they could within those limits. Defiance destroyed you.
Eventually Dymphana sensed her stare. While Gousier babbled, their gazes met, and for a heartbeat Leodora thought her aunt must see her plans as if painted upon her face the way wedding blessings would have been this time tomorrow. But Dymphana read something else in the look, smiled a worried, empathetic smile, and then pretended again to be attentive to Gousier’s chatter.
Later the two women carried the wooden bowls and utensils down to the water’s edge to rinse them. The moons were up and bright. The sea was calm. To the north the bridge spans glittered distantly their bejeweled solicitation. Emotion