from the meadows of salt grass to the foaming surf. More of it swayed in the shallow surf, so thick one could stand on it.
“Thank the gods,” Brida breathed in a reverent voice. The first heavy storm had delivered a plenitude. If fate and deities remained generous, they’d have more then one good seaweed harvest like this one.
The shallows still churned in places, and gulls swarmed the sand, feasting on dead fish that had been thrown onto the land by an angry tide. That tide had pulled far back now, leaving scatterings of shells in its wake. Children who had accompanied their parents to the shore raced back and forth, gathering up cockles, conches, wings, and drill tips before tossing them back into the water in a game to see who threw the farthest.
Brida climbed down from the driver seat after her brother to join the other villagers gathered in a group to divvy up sections of the beach. Each family was assigned a spot to harvest, that lot marked by a stone set at the allotment’s edge.
Once they were assigned their allotments, the siblings met at the back of their wagon where Brida unloaded a sickle and pair of baskets with straps sewn to them. Moot abandoned them on arrival. She leapt off the wagon and raced away, barking with excitement as she plunged into the knot of children gathered by the water’s edge.
The wind still howled off the Gray, whipping Brida’s skirts around her legs and nearly tearing the baskets out of her hands. She had to shout in order for Laylam to hear her.
“I’m off to the tidal pools!” She pointed to her allotment. Rock formations edged parts of the beach had been carved out by the sea’s endless wash. The tidal pools nestled in their shelters were too hard for the horses to navigate with the cage-like rakes dragging behind them, so the seaweed piled there was cut and gathered by hand. Laylam nodded and waved her away as he unloaded his rake from the wagon and unhooked the horse from its traces.
Moot left the children to join Brida, bounding ahead only to double back and run circles around her, snapping at the fluttering hem of Brida’s skirts. The dog’s ears suddenly swiveled forward, and she stopped, nose raised in the air as she sniffed something more interesting than salt, seaweed, and dead fish. A curious whine escaped her mouth before she bolted for the tidal pools where Brida planned to harvest.
Brida followed at a leisurely pace, trekking over hillocks of kelp. She’d be salt-caked and sand-encrusted by the end of the day and reeking of seaweed, but for now she enjoyed the hike and the hints of sunlight breaking through the cloud cover.
She was the only one on this section of beach. The rest of the harvesters had dispersed into the shallows behind her or toward the bigger pools that lay in the opposite direction where the cups of the bluffs were deeper and trapped more of the seaweed.
Moot had mostly disappeared behind a tall shard of rock, only the last third of her tail peeking out to reveal her whereabouts. The hound’s tail suddenly drooped before she backed away, teeth bared at whatever lay hidden behind the rock’s shelter.
Brida slowed her approach, gripping the sickle a little harder as Moot growled low in her throat. Sometimes the Gray coughed up predators that swam too close to the shore during the storms and were slung onto the beaches where they gasped their last breaths. Alarm swirled through Brida’s belly. What if it was an obluda? One of those foul abominations that usually lurked in the black deep?
An obluda had terrorized Ancilar during the long summer before Zigana Imre had dispatched it with the help of her mare Gitta and Lord Frantisek. Even now, with that thing crushed to bone splinters under Gitta’s massive hooves, people still feared falling asleep, feared dreaming in case another such creature lured a grieving, unwary villager into the water to feast on them.
What had the dog found?
She peeked around the line of stone. Moot pressed against her leg, preventing Brida from getting any closer. Brida’s heart surged into her throat at the sight before her.
Like the beach and shallows, the tidal pools were choked with seaweed. The stuff draped over the rocks and spilled across the sand, dotted with tiny sand crabs that skittered across the lacy leaves before burrowing under them to reach the water in the pools. Entangled