Alanie had never seen a kraken, but her people spoke of them often. The kraken were out beyond the breakwaters of Serenity Bay, the hungry children of Moriabe. They writhed in the depths and sometimes rose to the surface to hunt A kraken’s tentacles could encircle a sailing ship and crack its spine. Kraken snapped masts like kindling, and swallowed sailors whole.

None but the most foolhardy and desperate hunted kraken. But sometimes, it was said, a captain might return from the open ocean with the prize of one of Moriabe’s children, his ship wallowing low in the waters as he tied to the Prince’s Pier, his fortune assured thanks to the bloody mountain of flesh piled in his hold.

Alanie sold oysters in Greyling Square, and she had seen hopeful ships set sail on hunts, but she had never seen one return with a kraken in its hold — and most ships never returned at all.

Alanie sold oysters and accepted whatever prices High Street cooks offered when they came down from the mansions that ringed the white cliffs of the bay. After her father died, Alanie prayed to Moriabe that she might find and sell enough oysters so that she and her mother would not be forced from their home on Middle Street, and each day she returned home with too little for her efforts.

Alanie often lingered in Greyling Square until darkness fell and then stumbled home by the light of the stars. And while she lingered, she listened to the talk of the other fishmongers as they compared their business days and their netted catch, and sometimes they would speculate on what it might be like to return to port with a hold overflowing with kraken spoils.

“I saw Greyling when he caught his prize, so long ago,” old Bericha said, as she plucked out the last of her flankfish and beheaded it for Tradi Maurch’s cook.

“The prince threw a fete. Maidens tossed rose petals at his feet as he went up the cliffs to the prince’s manor on the point. And behind him, his sailors came, too. Urn after urn, full to the neck with reddest blood and greyest poisons and blackest inks.”

The ink went to lovers’ notes, a syrup-sweet filigree to the protestations of devotion that suitors spilled on vellum. The blood went to wealthy bedrooms and was mixed with wine, an aphrodisiac said to besot lovers for days. And, of course, the poison also had its place. Wrung from the kraken’s tentacles, the grey viscous poison was slipped via servant entrances to the betrayed — the ones who had been foolish enough to believe the sweet calligraphy of love, and yielded to the madness of trust. Kraken poison found its way into Calagari wine and Rake Point mead and flankfish stuffing, and former lovers thrashed and collapsed, frothing blood and spittle, praying for forgiveness as they gave up their lives.

Ink and blood and poison, tender meat, powdered tentacles — all found ready markets in the High Street mansions where they ringed the bay atop white marbled cliffs and kept sharp eye over the prince’s commerce.

The fishmongers gossiped and wished, and packed up their water carts and dragged them sloshing from the deepening shadows of Greyling Square, with copper bits in their pockets and visions of untold wealth in their tired dreams.

Alanie had never seen a kraken, but her mother spoke of them often. Sinolise spoke bitterly of the creatures that had taken the Sparrow and her crew. She spoke of Alanie’s father, whom Alanie remembered as a giant of a man, black-bearded and laughing.

Alanie’s mother said the kraken were always hungry, spawned from a cold trysting between Moriabe and Stormface, an object lesson that lovemaking in anger resulted in terrible things.

Sinolise said the kraken were always hungry, and it wasn’t just a man’s body they sought to consume, but his mind.

A man could lose his head hunting kraken, mad for the profit that might result. He forgot wife and child, love and life. Kraken muddled a man’s thoughts until he dreamed of becoming another Orin Greyling, a legend who might be spoken of for generations. It happened all the time. A man lost his wits in pursuit of kraken, and when he did, it was his family who suffered. It was his family who were forced to flee to pastures far beyond the city. It was his wife who was forced to find a new man who would accept a pauper woman and daughter into his home.

The kraken stole not only sailors’ lives, but also the lives of all those people who had been foolish enough to believe in them.

Alanie had never seen a kraken, but her father had spoken of them often.

“I saw them, Alanie. With my own eyes, close as touching, just beneath our Sparrow’s beam.”

He told her how the Sparrow had wallowed, half drowned, leaking between her boards as Moriabe and Wanem clashed in a lovers’ battle and the Sparrow was trapped in the heart of the tempest.

“Half of Moriabe was down in our hold. Every time a wave crested, I was sure poor Sparrow would founder and we’d all be dragged down.

“For two days and two nights, we fought that storm. We bailed and bailed. We lost Tomo and Relkin to Moriabe’s and Wanem’s fury. We fought Moriabe’s waves, and we battled Wanem’s torrents, and none of us believed that we could survive. Waves taller than our masts, Alanie! Winds yanking us about like a toy on a string. It was all I could do to keep the Sparrow’s prow to the rise of Moriabe’s next embrace. Every time we climbed a wave, I was sure it would be our last . . .”

He trailed off, and then abruptly smiled.

“When dawn came, we were so exhausted and waterlogged and broken down that at first we thought we had drowned and gone to the distant shore, but instead of the warm song of the Rising Lands, it was the sun, giving us all her warmth.

“The waves steamed mist, and the sky was bluer than the shell of a bluestem clam, and Moriabe was as still and calm and loving as a cat nursing kittens, and our only company was a pair of dolphins bearing Tomo back to us. It was as if Moriabe herself had decided old Relkin was enough sacrifice, so she gave us back our skinny cabin boy.

“We thought we were blessed that day, Alanie. We bailed water from our hold, and every time we dumped a bucket into the sea, we thanked Moriabe for making peace with Stormface. She was so still and calm in that moment, just sunshine and wavelets, all the way to the horizon. Bitty little wavelets, gleaming like mirrors . . .

“That’s when we saw them. Just below our hold. Huge, Alanie, so big . . . I’ve seen a black whale breach and knock a frigate aside like a toy, and a black is nothing to the kraken. A snack, perhaps. The kraken are so large, you can’t fit them in your eye. You cannot see the whole of them, not when you’re close. Nothing holds a candle to the size of them, except maybe bluebacks, and no one dares hunt them.

“We stood there, staring. Me and all the rest of the men, jam-jawed, every one of us. All of us looking down into the water, and not a one of us making a sound as they passed and passed and passed. It was something extraordinary, seeing Moriabe’s children. Huge long tentacles trailing behind them, down there in the water. Dozens of them, and any one of them might have dragged our mortal Sparrow down without a second thought. They are greater than we, by far.”

He paused. “Everyone talks of kraken, but no one knows the truth. That prize Orin Greyling brought home in his hold? The one they say was as big as his ship?” Her father shook his head. “It was but a babe, Alanie. Nothing but a tiny little babe.”

Alanie’s father had seen the kraken, and he never forgot its awe. And when he was near poverty, ruined by poor trade, and with hundreds upon hundreds of useless black-whale oil casks turning rancid in his warehouse, he remembered how the kraken surfaced after Wanem and Moriabe fought in a tempest and then made amends, and he would hunt.

Armored with his own desperation, armed with poisoned harpoons and the lore of Greyling’s triumph, Alanie’s father sailed the Sparrow into the teeth of a building storm, his crew a band of hopeless souls who anticipated nothing but debtors’ labor in the marble quarries of the white cliffs if they failed in their mission — a ragged band of gamblers, betting on a future that was already beyond their reach.

Alanie had never seen a kraken, but they spoke to her often.

In her dreams the kraken spoke to her, and when they did, they called her by name.

Alanie. Alanie.

In the darkness of her new father’s chink-stone manor, wrapped in quilts before his hearth, listening to her mother and the man she had chosen for shelter as they rustled and groaned in the man’s bedroom, Alanie stared into the flickering fires as the kraken called to her.

The kraken sang of ocean currents and cities beneath the waves. They sang of shipwrecks and gold and the lost wines of ancients. They sang of urns of olives and whale oil, the marbled statuary of Melna and Calib, a carpet of treasures spread across the seafloor, woven with the bones of sailors.

The kraken called to Alanie when she was asleep and stalked her when she was awake. They sang to her as she walked the pastures learning the trade of shepherd from her stepbrother, Elbe. They whispered to her when she scrambled down the cliffs to the beach where she hid from her new family and hunted for oysters. They chuckled predatory in her mind when she straightened from scrubbing shells and caught her stepfather standing too close, his gaze lingering too long on her body.

Every night as the embers of the kitchen fire turned to ash and glow, the kraken came calling.

Alanie, Alanie.

Alanie had never seen a kraken, but she remembered the first time she heard their song.

She’d stood at the end of Prince’s Pier, a tiny girl alone on the longest finger that poked into the bay, looking out across calm waters to the froth of the breaks and the channel where her father would return. Around her, sailors loaded bales of wool brought into the city from the pastureland. The great storm rains had soaked the bales, and the sailors and stevedores cursed the weight of the wool, while owners and captains argued over the merits of drying the wool or shipping it immediately.

All across the pier’s oiled planks, water beaded and steamed as the sun rose and warmed the white cliffs that ringed Serenity Bay, and it was then that Alanie heard the singing. She heard the snap of timbers and felt the prick of barbed steel in her skin and tasted blood in her mouth.

Alanie stood at the tip of the pier, bathed in sunlight, trembling, listening to the delighted singing of the kraken as they fed.

That night she told her mother that Father was dead and would not be returning, and her mother beat her for the news. Her mother beat her for cursing a sailor beyond the breaks, and beat her for telling lies, and beat her for her lack of faith; and Alanie fled her home for the streets, and all the time Alanie heard the kraken singing as they ran their tentacles through the shattered Sparrow and ferreted out the last drowned bodies of her father’s crew.

When Alanie returned home, she found Sinolise sitting in the shadows, a single candle flickering on her mother’s face, turning her bones to hard, sharp angles. The woman did not look up at Alanie’s return, and Alanie saw that her mother was afraid.

Her mother — who had seemed so important and authoritative as she ran her Middle Street household and its servants — was now adrift. A bit of storm wood tossed into an ocean of uncertainty.

With a surge of fear, Alanie realized that her mother was weak. Sinolise was not a woman who supported herself as the fishmongers in Greyling Square. She was a woman who wanted others to care for her. She’d chosen a man with a ship to his name on the assumption that her marriage would bring her servants and a house farther up the white cliffs, far away from the fish guts among which she’d been raised. Sinolise had chosen a man of the sea in order to abandon it, and more foolish she to have thought that way.

Alanie went to bed, knowing that she was lost in an ocean greater than any her father had ever navigated. She wondered how she was meant to sail its currents and shallows with no knowledge or skill of her own.

A week later news came of the Sparrow wreckage, and Alanie found her mother down on her knees in the kitchen, burning her father’s clothing in the fire. Alanie saw her mother’s hatred and fear — that Alanie had known of her father’s death before it could be known.

A month after that, without money to pay them, their two servants were gone, and not long beyond, just before Summerturn, Alanie’s mother announced that they would be living in the country.

Alanie would have a new father — a stepfather — a man who was a widower, and who had lands and sheep.

Eliam was a man who didn’t mind a woman who brought with her the child of another man, and came without means to his doorstep.

Alanie had never seen the kraken, but she remembered the first time they spoke her name.

The man who was meant to replace her father called himself Eliam. His wealth was known, his generosity as well. He was tall and strong, his beard was brown, and he kept his hair in a long braid. He was as powerful as her father, but different in the eyes in a way Alanie couldn’t name.

Eliam smiled as Alanie’s mother presented her. He touched Alanie’s hand and exclaimed over her and complimented her dress and tresses.

“Why, you’re nearly a woman,” he said.

“You look the age of my son, Elbe,” he said.

“Such a lovely daughter,” he said.

Sinolise took Eliam’s attention as a compliment, but Alanie turned rigid with fear, for she heard the kraken whispering.

Do you know how we hunt blueback, Alanie? That whale is greatest and most powerful, but we together are stronger. We do not hunt the blueback — we hunt the blueback’s young, for the blueback must forget herself, then.

We hunt and poke at the children of old blueback, and of course she must defend. Parents must save their little ones, and so the great ones forget themselves and dive deep, chasing us away, and then we seize a great mother and we hold her to us, and we twine our tentacles in seafloor corals, and we hold her fast.

All our kinfamily come, and we hold that mother to us, and we nip at her flesh, and the salt water turns misty black with the blood of her great heart, and at last she tires and sips of Moriabe, and then we have her to us.

And later, if we like, we snack on her children, too. Once we’ve drowned the mother, the children are no match.

That is how we hunt the blueback. We trick the mother and seize her and drag her down.

We are the children of Moriabe, and the blueback, though she swims in Moriabe’s embrace, she is not one with the sea. We breathe the waters, but old blueback must needs breathe the air above, and if we hold blueback tight enough, she may thrash and twist and beg, but in time, the great one breathes of our mother, and once a creature has sipped of Moriabe, that one is ours.

See how your mother sips and drowns?

She is gone, and you are vulnerable.

Above or below the waves, it is the same.

The hunt is the same.

The kraken whispered to her, and Alanie saw it was true. Her mother fluttering to impress the man, using words to tend and flatter, while the man’s eyes lingered only on Alanie. Eliam was no husband and no father, Alanie realized. He was a wolf who tended lambs.

Alanie bolted for her room and slammed her door, and plastered her body against its planks, and wished that her father was not dead in the embrace of Moriabe, and that the kraken did not speak true, and that she had not tasted her father’s own blood in her own mouth as he died.

Alanie sobbed and wished for impossible things while the kraken whispered that her father was no salvation. His Sparrow lay beneath the waves, and they themselves nested within its hold.

Alanie’s mother pounded on the door and begged to be allowed in, and Alanie heard her apologizing to the man who would devour her.

“This isn’t like her,” Alanie’s mother said, again and again. “Alanie is a good girl. She will listen to you. I will make her listen.”

Terror of abandonment made her mother’s voice rise and crack as she sought to assuage her future husband, and Alanie heard her mother’s words and Eliam’s indulgent chuckle, and knew that her mother was lost. Sinolise would sacrifice anything for this new man. Eliam was meant to preserve Sinolise from fish guts and sea, and she would do anything to serve him.

The kraken chuckled and rolled lazily in the deeps of Moriabe.

The young blueback is the sweetest to consume. No gristle at all. They drown easy once the mother’s gone. We wrap our tentacles around them and drag them down, whenever we like.

Alanie had never seen a kraken, and yet she swam among them.

She tumbled in the fast black flows of Moriabe’s currents and nested in tangled writhing piles of kin beneath the ancient shells of massacred cathedral crabs. Alanie felt the grit of sand on her skin as she buried herself up to her eyes for ambush, and she tasted blood in her mouth when the kraken fed.

Sometimes the kraken songs were so loud that they drowned Alanie’s ears with their feeding joy. When Sinolise instructed Alanie as to which belongings they would take to their new home, Alanie could only stare at her mother’s lips and guess at the woman’s words, for kraken voices crashed and foamed inside her skull like surf off the breaks.

At other times the kraken voices were only whispers, as when they pursued narwhal pods beyond the icy northern horizons, their voices faint as fingers on Alanie’s coverlet. But more and more the kraken were with her, sometimes close and sometimes far, tidal in their company, but never gone entirely.

When Alanie rode the cart to her new home, kraken rode with her, amused at the wheeled conveyance piled precarious with her and her mother’s belongings, and when the kraken saw the chinkstone and thatching of Eliam’s hall, with its storm-shutter windows and heavy wooden door, they murmured to themselves as to how it might be pried open for the food within.

But they were most impressed when they spied Eliam’s sheep in his lush green fields — they marveled at prey that waited so contentedly to be slaughtered.

The kraken watched and listened as Alanie was taken into her new father’s household, but they recoiled and flooded Alanie’s sight with black-ink flight at the sight of Eliam’s son.

Elbe was a boy of Alanie’s age, and yet his eyes were those of a Graybane warrior’s, returned from shoreline slaughter, and they seemed to laugh and mock her when he called her sister. A ghost of a boy, haunting the dark silences of his father’s hall. Elbe’s ancient knowing eyes clung to Alanie as he shadowed her through the echoes and stone of Eliam’s manor.

Bluebacks beget bluebacks. Eels beget eels, the kraken murmured. Beware.

Room after room, hall after hall, Elbe stalked behind her as Alanie explored the kitchens and libraries and examined her spare clean room, where no lock barred her door. Always Elbe’s knowing eyes followed her.

At last Alanie paused in Eliam’s great hall and stood staring up at hunted trophies upon the walls. Byre elk with barbed ivory antlers, and snarling grey wolves, and the heads of mountain apes arranged by tribe and mounted in studied lines. Snow-lion pelts sprawled across granite flagstones, three times Alanie’s length, and their white lush furs smothered her footsteps as she walked from kill to kill.

“In winter, he goes to the edge of the Scarp,” Elbe murmured in Alanie’s ear, standing so close that she flinched and drew away. “He hunts with bow and knife,” Elbe said. “He likes the chase. The look of a heart draining in the snow. I’ve seen him stand and watch a stag bleed out for hours.”

Alanie shrank further from the ghostly boy, but Elbe ignored her retreat and instead pointed to the dead and told their tales.

Eliam ranged forests where wind pines towered and forged through waist-deep snows where none but snow lions laired. He followed blood-spattered trails, relentless, undaunted by the worst of Wanem’s ice-blind storms and careless of the Scarp’s avalanches. Eliam ran his prey until at last it collapsed exhausted in the drifts, ribs heaving with its last living breaths, finally willing to give up life and flight, in favor of rest and death.

“He likes surrender in his toys,” Elbe said. “He wants their welcome when his knife finally cuts them true. He likes to see them lift their throats to him. In the end, they all lift their throats and make his cutting easy. They’re like your mother that way. So very desperate to please.”

Alanie blanched at his words and turned to flee, but Elbe seized her arm and yanked her close. His lips pressed to her ear. “Make no sound,” he whispered. “Make not a sound. Listen to me while you still can. Listen like a rabbit, for surely you are prey. Do you not hear their trysting? Listen silent, sister, listen close. Already my father consumes your mother. If we slip to his chamber door, we’ll hear her as she groans. But she is not the prey he most desires. I’ve seen his eyes on you, Alanie. You are the one he desires to hunt.”

The boy drew away, and to Alanie’s surprise, she saw pity in his eyes. Pity of what was to come. And the sight of his grieving eyes frightened Alanie more than any of his words.

“We’re not so different, you and I,” Elbe whispered. “We see the monsters others deny. We know what comes knocking at our chamber door. Run now, sister. Run and never look back.”

“But my mother —”

“— is weak and wants to feel his teeth.”

He pulled her to the manor door. “Don’t make me earn a bloody back for nothing. Run, Alanie. Run for the ocean and follow the cliffs to the bay. Find a ship and sail, and remember that my father has never failed to catch his prey.”

Still Alanie hesitated, but the kraken whispered in her ear.

A young blueback is easy to catch once its mother has sipped of Moriabe. So soft in our beaks. So easy to drag deep. Drown the parent first, then dine on the child. Sea or land, the hunt is the same. The hunt is always the same. First the parent, then the child.

Alanie fled.

She fled across green fields and rolling hills, sobbing with fear and running still. When she reached the sea, Alanie bore north, following the rise and fall of white marbled shores. The sun sank toward the ocean as Alanie ran. Shadows lengthened and fields reddened. Moriabe wrapped the sun in her quilt, turning day to night, and still Alanie ran. She plunged through black pine forests and scrambled up and down ragged cliffs, and still she ran, her breath burning in her lungs and her legs turning weak. Her guts knotted, and still she ran. When she broke through the last of the forest and saw the burning lanterns of Serenity Bay and the white cliffs of the town luminous under the moon, she fell to her knees with relief.

In the end, it was for naught.

Eliam caught her on the Prince’s Pier begging for work or berth or pity as the morning sun broke above the white cliffs. He seized her wrists in one strong hand and dragged her away from the docks, joking with the sailors and warehouse owners that children were always headstrong. He tossed her over the back of his horse as easily as tossing a sack of oats, and when still Alanie fought, he struck her face until her lips broke and bled.

When they arrived home, Alanie’s mother stood at the manor door, wringing her hands with concern. But when Alanie fled to her, Sinolise struck her for a defiant child and returned her to Eliam’s waiting hand. The boy Elbe watched with his ancient warrior’s eyes as Eliam led Alanie into the manor, and said nothing at all.

Later, Elbe stripped his clothes to show Alanie what his father had wrought on his skin, and she traced the wounds of his bloody battles with her fingertips. The boy’s flesh hung from his ribs in tatters and the coral knots of his spine showed through the shredded meat of his back.

But by then, Alanie hardly cared, for her own back was bloody as well.

Alanie had never seen a kraken, but they called out to her often. When Eliam whipped her bloody, the kraken thrashed and disappeared in clouds of blackest ink, calling for her to flee as well. When Eliam pinned Alanie in the kitchens and fumbled at her skirts, they lashed out with poisonous tentacles and snapped sharp beaks and called for her to fight.

And Alanie did flee, and she did fight. She fought until she was exhausted. She fled once and once and once again, and each time Eliam dragged her back, and finally she fled no more.

Eliam hunted too well, and his belt bit too deep.

The kraken recoiled at being hunted down. They lashed out at the monster that pinned them, and each time they shrieked that they had warned her about the beast who stalked her.

We told you, they said. We told you how the hunt was done.

Moriabe’s children were not creatures to be preyed upon. They reviled the monster who ran them down, and they were with Alanie less and less. They went distant hunting for narwhal pods or else sank deep in Moriabe’s blind trenches. The kraken nested in the wreckage of the sailing ships they’d broken and slept beneath shifting seafloor sands, and when Alanie called for them, they sang, We are of the sea, and you are of the shore. We are Moriabe’s children. No one hunts our kind.

My father hunted you, Alanie retorted, but the kraken only laughed.

It was we who hunted him, they sang, and their voices were faint and fading.

Alanie had never seen a kraken, and she heard their voices not at all. So silent were they that Alanie began to wonder if she had been simply mad, fooling herself into believing that Moriabe’s children had spoken to her in the wake of the storm that had reshaped her life. She called to the kraken and she cursed them and she cajoled, but nothing moved them, if indeed they had ever been moved at all. Alanie was alone.

Alone she learned to bar her bedroom door with cedar chests, and alone she took the whippings for her new defiance. Alone she learned to ghost the halls, as silent and careful as a rabbit, alert for the wolf that stalked her. Alone she learned to survive as best she could. Her eyes became sunken and ancient, and she became watchful and fearful, but she survived.

And still she remembered the kraken and how they’d called to her. And no matter how much she hated herself for seeking their voices, still she tried.

Alanie, Alanie.

She remembered the first time she’d heard their song, and so she waited, implacably patient, hoping to find them once again, waiting for one of the great storms that brought the kraken to the surface. Waiting for Moriabe and Stormface to clash in a lovers’ quarrel, just as they had when her father had seen the kraken in his own time.

Alanie waited and survived, and at last a night came when Wanem lashed the manor’s shutters with wind and rain, and Moriabe’s waves rose high. That night Alanie dreamed of kraken in the deeps, and in the morning she ran across the rain-drenched fields to the cliffs, to look out across the blue calm waters of Moriabe’s quilt as it shimmered with golden sunshine.

Alanie scrambled down rocky trails to the beaches far below and picked her way across the kelp-draped stones to the water’s edge. She waded out amongst crystal tide pools, stepping barefoot past anemones and bluestem clams. She hiked her skirt as Moriabe’s waters rushed and foamed about her knees, and she closed her eyes and listened, straining for the taste of blood in her mouth and the rising strain of kraken song.

She listened for her name.

Alanie. Alanie.

If she listened close, she imagined she could hear them still, their voices tumbling in the surf. If she listened close, she could imagine great vast creatures swimming in the depths of Moriabe. She could imagine that Eliam did not squeeze her wrists until they bruised and pretend that Sinolise never turned away from a daughter pressed against a kitchen block. Alanie could imagine and pretend, and listen for the sound of kraken, and hours could pass. The sun could climb in the sky, and gulls could wheel and bank and hunt, and dolphins could cut the far blue waters, but if kraken called her name, their voices were drowned in foam and surf.

When Alanie at last opened her eyes, the rising tide had soaked her to the waist, and Elbe squatted on the shore, his knowing eyes upon her.

By reflex Alanie searched the cliffs, afraid he had been followed, but she spied no sign of Eliam.

“I thought you might keep walking,” Elbe said.

Alanie waded back to shore and spread her skirts to dry. “I was listening to the ocean.”

“My mother said the same. And then one day she walked out into the heart of Moriabe. She walked out into the waters, and when it became too deep to walk, she swam. And then she kept on swimming. Father was in a rage at that. Nothing escapes him on land, but she was in the sea. He called to her and shouted. I watched him waving his arms and raging, but he was too much the coward to swim after her into the deep ocean. He stood on the shore and screamed and screamed like Wanem, and she kept swimming. And then she stopped, and Moriabe took her. In the end, it was easy. She ducked her head and sipped of Moriabe, and it was done. And I was alone with him.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“And tell you the one true escape?” Elbe laughed. “If you go swimming, sister, then there is only me. There aren’t enough cedar chests to block a door that he wants open. What wouldn’t you do to keep from hearing that man’s knock? What wouldn’t you do to keep his attentions focused elsewhere?”

“But you told me to run, when we first met.”

“I hoped . . .” He shook his head. “I liked your eyes. You did not look like someone hunted, then. I knew your mother wouldn’t save you, but I thought, perhaps . . .” He shrugged. “I was a fool. My father never fails to catch his prize.”

They were quiet for a while. At last Alanie asked, “Why do you not go swimming, too?”

“I tried once. Soon after. I couldn’t breathe the water the way she did. I’m a coward, I think. I swam back to shore. He whipped me for it. He was terrified that he would lose his heir. He keeps a boat close now, to row after me in case I try to follow her.”

He was quiet awhile and then said, “I know that everyone says that the great storms are caused by Moriabe’s and Stormface’s love quarrels. But I think they’re wrong.”

“Oh?”

“I think Stormface is like my father.”

“And what is Moriabe, then, if Wanem is such a creature?”

“Moriabe . . .” Elbe fell quiet for a long time. “I think that when the great storms rise, she is fighting to defend her children. Moriabe isn’t like our mothers at all. She is something else. Stronger. Fearless. And when Stormface comes to her door as my father does to ours, she battles him and fights him, and she forces him to flee.” He nodded out at the blue waters. “And then, when she turns calm like this, it’s because her children are safe again. Moriabe defends her children — that’s what I think.”

Above them on the cliffs, Eliam called out, and Elbe flinched. Alanie looked up at the man who stalked her nights, and her skin crawled. She thought of Elbe’s mother, swimming out in the deeps, and wondered at parents who would do anything to save a child.

Eliam called out again, and Sinolise appeared as well, demanding that they return.

Alanie reached for her brother’s hand. “Come with me,” she said. “We’ll swim together. We don’t have to be afraid.” And though Elbe looked at her with terrified eyes, he followed where she led.

The waters rushed around Alanie’s ankles as she strode into the ocean. It swirled about her knees and clutched at her thighs and tangled her skirts. From high on the cliffs, Eliam shouted for their return, and Alanie’s mother begged for their obedience in her high frightened voice, but they were far away, and the waves were loud, drowning out demands.

A wave came crashing in, frothing up around Alanie’s ribs, and she gasped at the chill of soaking clothes. She kicked free of skirts and blouse, and pulled Elbe deeper into the waters. He seemed to struggle for a moment between the pull of her hand and his father’s voice, and then he, too, was tugging off his clothes, and the ocean rose to their chests, and they pressed on, and Alanie thought she heard Elbe laughing as if suddenly free.

The next wave lifted Alanie’s feet from the stones, and then she was swimming, letting Elbe’s hand go so she could stroke hard through the surf. She dived through an oncoming wave and surfaced on the far side, shaking her head to clear water from her eyes. Elbe surfaced beside her, swimming hard, and then they were swimming together, matching each other stroke for stroke, swimming with all their will.

Behind them, Eliam galloped down the path to the shore. His threats and demands echoed across the waters, but the ocean spread between them, blue and wide, and he stood powerless on the shore.

Alanie swam and Elbe kept pace, and then the ocean’s current caught them, and they were swept away from shore. Moriabe cupped them in her currents and carried them fast away from where Eliam dragged his boat into the surf.

Alanie turned on her back, resting and treading water and staring up at blue sky as the current carried them. Beside her, Elbe was smiling. His eyes seemed almost young. The white cliffs of shore were distant now, but when Alanie checked Eliam’s progress, she found to her surprise that he gained upon them.

“He’s quick,” Alanie said, trying not to despair.

“He was born to hunt.”

Eliam used his great strength to advantage as he leaned into his oars, and his boat fairly shot across the waves.

“I don’t have the will to drown myself,” Elbe said quietly.

“You won’t have to,” Alanie said, wanting to believe it was true. “Just swim with me. All we have to do is swim.”

She tugged his shoulder and kicked off again, and Elbe cursed and followed. Stroke after stroke, they swam through blue glittering waters, rising and falling on Moriabe’s waves. Panting and paddling still. Kicking, always kicking deeper into the blue, until at last their strength gave out and there was nothing left to do but float.

The two of them bobbed on Moriabe’s quilt, flotsam specks on the open ocean. Alanie’s limbs felt loose and sinuous in the waters, limp and used. She didn’t resent the exhaustion, but wished she could have swum deeper. She wondered if she had done enough. She wondered if Moriabe truly cared for anything at all. She wondered if kraken were close or far. She wondered if she had ever heard their voices.

Eliam closed the distance, straining at his oars. On the waves, he looked small. Not the monster that Alanie had known on land, but only a tiny man in a tiny little boat, far out upon a wide, deep ocean, a man who thought he was a hunter.

Alanie narrowed her eyes as she stared at him, and then she lay back and spread her arms wide to float on Moriabe’s quilt, and she called to the kraken. Alanie imagined them in the deeps, lying in tangled piles of kin. She imagined them swimming sinuous through the dark shadow waters, and she called to them.

Do you know how I hunt the blueback? I seize his child, and he forgets himself. Come and see what I’ve baited forth. Come and see how I have learned to hunt.

Alanie could hear Eliam’s cursing as he drew nearer, and Elbe had begun to sob with fear, but Alanie cared only for the deeps.

Again and again she called out to the kraken.

The hunt is the same on sea or shore. The hunt is always the same. I have listened; I have learned. Come and see what follows me.

Again and again she called, and down in the deeps great shadow creatures stirred and shifted. Alanie felt the currents change, and she redoubled her calls, and Moriabe’s children slid from beneath ocean sands and eased from night-black trenches.

The hunt is the same on sea or shore, Alanie sang. A great blueback has forgotten himself in the chase to save his child. Come and hunt; come and see.

The ocean currents shifted and swirled. The waters around Alanie began to froth as kraken surged upward.

Come and hunt; come and see.

She could feel the kraken rising from the depths, feel the ocean rushing past her skin, faster and faster, see the sunlight streaming down through the waters, and the specks that floated far above, so small so small.

See what I have baited forth, Alanie called. He is soft. No gristle at all. He is soft.

Moriabe’s children surged for the surface.

Eliam was still shouting and Elbe had grabbed Alanie’s arm to point at the boiling waters all around, but all their words were lost. The ocean’s roar drowned them out completely. The only sounds in Alanie’s ears were the voices of the kraken, rising.

Sister, the kraken called. Sister.

Alanie spread her arms wide, welcoming her kin.