“His name was Farren, and he was well into his third decade of life when he came to our family’s door looking for a bride.

  I think he and my father had met in the village and come to some agreement previously, but I never found out the full story of their acquaintance. My husband didn’t ever speak much to me, nor offered any explanations for his private affairs, as he called them.

  He was a tradesman, a man led by the scent of coin wherever it should choose to take him. He hadn’t fared well after the Parting, for I believe he’d been in the business of pirate goods, so when the newly appointed Sun’s privateers ascended in rank, he and his slimy worm of a partner were left stranded in a trading world depleted of its currency. And so he eventually found residence in Renlym, my province of origin, and decided a settled life would help in his latest ambition to become an established, well-trusted advisor to the struggling local farmers.

  He came to our home one day, uninvited, and made his proposal. My parents readily accepted, but didn’t offer him the benefit of the choice. Only one of their offspring was in the marriage market, they said, and it was the one who could not lift a water bucket over her head.

  As you know, the Sun currently takes half of all profits or wares acquired, grown or produced, under the light of day. Aside from that, there’s the annual tithe and holiday levies, which must always be paid in coin rather than goods. Difficult as it may be to comprehend, however, his foot on free people's throats today is a mercy compared to what we endured in those initial years.

  We lived in extreme deprivation, despite being surrounded by food. Without the king’s facilitating trade and employing those with land grants, we quickly found that we had no one to sell our wares to. My parents were simple folk with very limited knowledge of commerce, and we lived far out in the countryside where a majority of the population lived off the farmland, too, growing the same type of essential, modest crops we’d been selling directly to the crown for generations. Wheat, barley, onions, garlic, carrots, turnips, we could not get a good bartering price for any of it. The market was oversaturated, as all our neighbors became direct competitors.

  I think it would not have been such a crisis, if not for the added monthly payments we had to make to the Sun to live and work in his land. Simply put, he was trying to smother us into compliance.

  To this day, I can’t be sure if my family ever succumbed to his pressures. I never saw any of them again, after my wedding to Farren. Oh, I suspect my father kept in contact with him for assistance regarding the farm’s finances, but contact with me was ended the moment I stepped foot off the land.”

  Shortly after the incident with the Sun, they found a nice clearance in a dense copse of birch trees not too far from the road to make camp for the night. Mantis put Teela on the task of collecting firewood and sent Leroh out looking for insects for his sister’s little sparrow who, surprisingly, still lived, ensconced in its ugly nest hanging at the girl’s waist.

  “I really should help. We’ll need a lot of kindling to last us through the night,” Yilenn insisted yet again, taking a step away from Mantis to follow Teela into the woods.

  “Sit down. Don’t be so polite.”

  “I can help.”

  “With those feet?” Mantis gestured down to her ridiculous shoes with a hand and tried in vain to contain an amused smile. “Just sit. Let them do something useful.”

  “Ah, well.” She sighed. “It is easier for them to move around, I suppose.”

  She came to sit beside Mantis atop her spread cloak, where she’d positioned herself in her now usual spot outside Teela’s tent’s flap and busied herself with the rhythmic sharpening of her knife. When the siren approached her, Mantis moved over to the cloak’s edge to make room for her large cloud of skirts.

  Yilenn sat down with a rustle of fabric and extended her legs straight in front of herself, her mad footwear poking out from underneath the voluminous hem of her dress. “I can walk just fine, you know,” she said.

  “Can you?”

  “It isn’t particularly pleasant, but yes. I have been doing it my whole life.”

  “I thought sirens swam,” Mantis smirked and kept her eyes lowered to her task. She knew that remark would annoy her.

  “I don’t have to swim that often, actually. I am lucky.”

  At that, Mantis turned to assess her expression. She had not expected that response, and wasn’t sure if it had been a jest, but Yilenn’s face held no humor. She was watching Mantis’s hands as they worked on the blade.

  It was a well-crafted dagger of fine steel with a carved horn hilt and an embossed black leather scabbard. For a long time, it had been the only weapon she’d carried, aside from her old hatchet for chopping wood, and she admittedly only ever used it for mundane tasks such as carving game meat. Years before, decades before, she’d taken the quality dagger from a target’s dead body and burned him afterward, stripped of his soul, knowledge, and valuables.

  That memory had the power to instantly darken her mood.

  “Do you not like to swim, then?” Mantis brought herself back to the conversation.

  “Hm. I’ve never considered that, really. I suppose I do enjoy the freedom of movement, and the hidden life beneath the surface. But it’s the implications of swimming that I find…difficult. There is always some horrible thing I must do, when I’m in the water. Though, like I said, I’m lucky. Most of the time, I’m in a pretty dress and bipedal.”

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  “So you’re always posted at the Okedam docks?”

  “Yes. My father is a member of the Sea clergy, as was his father before him, and that comes with certain privileges for all of us in the family. First, my mother had the position, and now I’ve got it. My younger sister will take it from me when I reach breeding age, though.”

  “Your mother and sister are sirens, too? I thought it was rare.”

  “It is, but the traits are more likely to manifest in the offspring of other sirens.”

  “Like some diseases,” Mantis concluded with a sad smile and returned to her sharpening.

  Yilenn gave a breathy chuckle and nodded small. “Yes, exactly like that.”

  They sat in silence for a while with Teela’s and Leroh’s steps as they circled the area, busy at their assigned tasks, crunching audibly in the background. All God servants possessed at least a basis of enhanced abilities, such as strength, excellent sight and hearing, so Mantis knew Yilenn was as aware as she was of Teela's whispering. The girl was speaking to her bird as she searched for firewood, telling it of her day as one would a friend or loved one. It was sad, and private. Mantis resolved to continue talking to try to afford her some solitude.

  “So when do sirens reach breeding age?”

  “Whenever the beauty of youth starts to fade and our reproductive potential becomes more valuable than our abilities as sirens.”

  “And when is that?”

  “I don’t know.” Yilenn smiled a little, but there was impassivity in her deep gaze. “My sister Eethie would certainly like a conclusive answer to that, too, but our master judges us individually as he sees fit. We were sure, upon my twenty-fifth birthday, that it would be my time soon, but maybe I’m still too gorgeous.” Mantis peeked at her from the corner of her eye and raised an eyebrow questioningly. Yilenn grinned and gestured widely at herself with a wave of her slender hands. That pulled a breathy chuckle out of Mantis, and the siren followed with a musical laugh of her own. “Poor Eethie is still working the Nell, at twenty-two. It is a horrid duty. I just know she can’t wait for me to start wrinkling, the bitch.”

  Again, Mantis could not help laughing at her words. It was a disconcerting and unusual reaction for her, but a pleasant one nonetheless. The siren had a way of speaking that lured her in, forcing her to lock her attention solely upon the woman in an all-consuming focus of all the senses. The forest around them, the sights and sounds and smells that Mantis would have ordinarily had a distant awareness of seemed to fall silent when Yilenn spoke. It was her charm, Mantis understood, but she could not break out of it. She did not try.

  “How old are you?” the siren asked, her words ever softly accented and lovely. “You look about my age, I reckon.”

  Mantis smiled. “I do look it, don’t I? No, I’m much older than you, mermaid.”

  “How much older can you be? You look young.” She was intrigued, frowning as if she did not believe her.

  “Well, I better look young! I wasn’t twenty when I stopped aging. That was thirty years ago.”

  “What?” Teela asked. She’d returned and Mantis had not even noticed!

  “You don’t age?” Yilenn was perplexed, examining her from head to toe with her beautiful blue eyes.

  “You are fifty years old?” This from Teela, who’d dropped a pile of logs and twigs a few paces away and stood wide-eyed, staring at Mantis. When had she come back? And how much of their conversation had she overheard? The little snoop had not announced herself.

  “Who’s fifty years old?” Leroh asked with some concern as he arrived at their campsite with a leaf-full of crushed insect paste.

  “I’m forty-nine.” She was suddenly aggravated.

  It felt like an invasion of her privacy that they’d discovered that piece of personal information without her consent. She hadn’t intended to share it with the siren, either, but it was as though she became a different person when Yilenn dragged her into her charms. Mantis would find herself giggling like a child and babbling on about things she had no desire to discuss, getting lost in conversation and forgetting all about the world around her.

  She needed to regain control over herself.

  “God servants don’t age?” Teela asked, fascinated. Her eyes were as wide as they could go and she’d started chewing on her lower lip.

  “We age. Everyone ages.” Yilenn replied. She was still surveying Mantis with almost offensive scrutiny. “I’ve never heard of a God who granted such traits. How is that even possible? Who do you serve?”

  “No one knows.” To add to her rising anger, Leroh dared to answer the question directed at Mantis. “At least, no one in Pirn knows, to my knowledge, that is—”

  “What?” Teela was like a dog on a scent. “Your God is not known? Why?”

  “Enough!” Mantis said. The situation had spun completely out of her grasp and reached a very uncomfortable area of conversation for her. She’d put an end to it. “I will not hear another question tonight. Teela, decide who’s sleeping where.”

  The girl just stared, startled and with her mouth hanging slightly open. She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  “You have the tent. Will you share it?”

  “I—uh…Yes. Yes, of course.”

  “Who with?”

  “My brother.”

  “So be it.” Mantis motioned with a hand for Leroh to make his bed freely, and the boy rushed to enter the tent and get out of sight from Yilenn and her. He seemed more afraid of Mantis than he’d been, she noticed. It was the thing with the sailor, most likely.

  They ate the remaining food from Teela’s provisions and the smoked meat from their earlier traveling, and tried to preserve their water supplies. They’d refilled the water bags and acquired an additional one from the stables, but there was no certainty of a nearby natural water source, so they had to keep their drinking conservative.

  A steady Wind had developed and brought with it a heavy cover of clouds toward the end of the day, so no stars decorated the night sky, and the Moon didn’t provide them with her gentle light. Only the fire’s dancing flames illuminated the sorry sight of their camp as each person found his or her assigned sleeping spot and settled down for the night.

  Yilenn took what had been Leroh’s place atop Mantis’s heavy woolen blanket a few paces away from where she herself had lain down to sleep at the tent’s entrance. The siren’s long, glossy hair was the color of a freshly plucked berry. She’d arranged the masses of bright red to flow freely behind her head as she slept on her side with her hands pillowing her face, and the waves of light from the nearby fire gave those smooth tresses the appearance of a peaceful carmine tide.

  Mantis fell asleep to the sound of rustling branches and leaves from the nearby trees, and the image of those restful ripples of soft, sweet hair.

  That night, she dreamt as she had not in a long time, and in her dreams, those waters were red with the blood of her slain targets.

  Mantis rejoiced in the thrill of a successful hunt, and hungered achingly for more prey. Her heart pounded at a steady beat that resonated in her ears and silenced all other sounds, blocking out any distractions to her stalk. Monsters were out there, at large in their world, awaiting her visit as they harmed freely and spread their venom. Her mouth filled up with saliva and Mantis felt the focus of her eyes becoming sharper as her pupils dilated. She starved.

  When she awoke with the first rays of Sunlight, all thoughts of tranquil, soothing crimson waters had been squandered by the desperate bloodthirst of her Goddess.