The Alpha's Tidebound Luna

Chapter 3: The Counting

Orsa was still awake when I went past the cook fire that night, sitting with her back against a barrel and her stick across her knees.

"Go to bed, girl."

"I'm checking the boats."

"At this hour? The boats don't mind."

"They might."

"They've sat there for three years. They'll keep." She looked at me a moment longer than I liked, and then she shrugged and turned her face to the embers. She never pushed. I took the path through the reeds toward the water.

I had been coming out here at every slack water since the first winter. It was the one hour the marsh went truly still, and stillness was what I could not manage anywhere else. In the camp there was always someone coughing, someone arguing, someone crying quietly so as not to be heard crying. Out here there was only me and the water and whatever I had left to say to it.

The marsh at night is not silent. Reeds scrape against each other like dry hands. Something small splashed in the shallows and was still. Far out, the Grey Channel breathed in and out at the edge of hearing, and a few stars showed in the gaps between clouds. I walked until the camp's firelight was a smudge behind me, then sat on an overturned crate at the end of the old landing and watched the tide climb to the top of its reach and stop.

Slack water. The sea holds its breath, and everything else holds it too.

I never mean to remember. But slack water is when the pieces come, in no order, sharp as broken glass.

The siren came first. A long flat note from the top of the Tidewall, the one the Vale keepers sounded when the sea gates were under strain. We had heard it in drills, always by daylight, always followed by a long boring silence. That night it did not stop.

Then my father's boots on the stairs, and his voice, the voice of a man who never shouted and was shouting. "Wren! Get your brother and go up. Don't stop for anything. Don't stop for me."

Then water in the kitchen. It was not rising the way water should. It came in as though it had a plan, over the doorstep and across the flagstones, black and so icy it made my teeth ache.

Another piece, from somewhere else. The harbor bell ringing wrong, tipped over by the water instead of rung by a hand. The taste of salt in my mouth before I understood what was happening. Dagny Pike's lantern bobbing along the lane, tiny and stubborn, and then not there.

And Tamsin's hand in mine. Small and damp, a nine year old's hand with a scab on the thumb. He had been holding one shoe against his chest. "I lost the other one," he said, as if that were the problem. "Wren, I lost the other one."

"I know. I've got you."

I did not have him. A wave came up the lane and lifted the world, and his fingers slid out of mine one at a time, and I felt each one go. The roar that followed was not like thunder. It was like some enormous animal breathing out.

I opened my eyes. My nails had left small crescents in my palms. The tide had turned.

"One tide," said a small voice.

It did not come from the water, exactly, and it did not come from the air. It came from the place behind my ears where the sea sits when I am near it, and it was very clear. I held my breath.

"Two tides. Three tides."

I have never told anyone. Not Orsa, not Marin. The first time was the winter after the Drowning, a thin high voice with a wobble in it that managed three numbers before it broke into crying. I had run to the water's edge and shouted my brother's name until I was hoarse. Nothing answered. The next night it came again. Since then I had learned to sit still and let it come, because calling back never worked, and because I was afraid of what people would say. A tide reader who hears voices in the water is only a short step from a woman people stop leaving alone with children.

Some nights I answered anyway. I said his name. I said I was here, right here, and that he should keep counting. The water never changed. All the same I went on saying it, the way you talk to a sick person who may or may not hear.

I kept a bit of tarred string in my pocket. Each time the count went further than it ever had before, I tied a knot. By now the cord had eleven.

"Four tides," the voice said. "Five. Six."

It was not the voice I remembered, and that was what made my skin tighten. The wobble had gone out of it. The words came slow and even, one after another, like a boy counting something that mattered, with his chin set. Deeper, too, only a little. As if whoever it was had grown.

"Eleven tides. Twelve tides."

I waited for thirteen. For almost three years the count had always ended in tears, a short broken sound I could never bear to hear. Tonight there was nothing. The water dropped a finger's width down the landing posts. A gull complained somewhere in the reeds and went quiet. I sat there until the water had dropped far enough to leave the landing posts streaming, waiting for a thirteenth number that did not come.

I knew what a sensible person would say. Grief makes noises. Orsa lost her husband and heard him humming in the next room for a year. She told me so herself, and laughed about it, and then did not laugh. People hear what they need to hear. I had told myself exactly that, eleven times, once for every knot.

But a memory does not grow up. The Tamsin in my head was nine years old and always would be. He still held one shoe against his chest. Nothing in my own mind knew how to count to twelve in a voice I had never heard him use.

I took the cord from my pocket and tied the twelfth knot. My fingers were not steady.

If it was a memory, it was learning. If it was the sea, then the sea had never done this before. And if it was neither of those things, then somewhere out there something was counting, and it had been counting a very long time, and I did not know who else in the world could hear.