Spoiler! :
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Damn it all.
Elmo clutched her sword hilt tightly as she slipped around a corner, narrowly avoiding a police officer leading a donkey loaded with drunks. As it was, the man even looked up as she scattered broken bottles with the cleat of her sandal, but Elmo was already gone. She'd almost forgotten how to do this. It rankled, but the baba had been right; the years had been too long.
Actually, it more than rankled.
She was going to die if she didn't shape up. She should have known that it had been too good to last, that the baba wouldn't be able to protect her.
When had she started acting like a child again? She thought she had grown up twenty years ago and yet she had been clinging to the baba's hem like a toddler.
It was disgusting.
Elmo flinched as a rat skittered away underfoot. No smell of fish, no smell of the ocean. She was safe for now. This tiny village smelled of goats and milk and squash. Kind of like that boy. Hin.
He was gone too. They'd gotten him too, because the baba had kept him.
But that was Elmo's fault, wasn't it?
She slipped into another shadow.
It was all her fault in the end, wasn't it?
o-o-o
Lutrinae had been handsome. Tall and dark, with a perpetually scruffy chin and hair that wouldn't quite stay in place. He'd been smooth and playful and he always seemed to want to be holding hands. Always. When talking, when eating... always.
That should have been her first clue. That, and the way he always smelled of the ocean. She had only seen the ocean once at that time, when she had been little, barely able to remember at all. But she did remember the smell, salty and thick and crisp. It was how he smelled.
But she was a stupid little girl then, who didn't listen to her elders, and so she didn't think anything of it.
One day, she fell asleep beside him as they lay on a hillside and woke to find him watching her with a wrinkle between his eyebrows. That was the first time she ever suspected something could be out of place.
"What's wrong?" she asked, pulling her arms up to her chest self-consciously.
"What is it like?" He leaned on one elbow so that his face hovered above hers. She couldn't meet his gaze, so instead she focused on his collarbone.
"What?"
"Sleeping?"
That had made her laugh.
"What?" she barked with laughter, like a seal, "What do you mean, 'what is sleeping like'? How should I know? I'm asleep!"
"How do you do it, though? Falling asleep?"
He'd leaned down a little, so that his nose barely brushed hers and his chest came to rest on her shoulder. One arm stretched over her, hand planted in the grass by her waist. She squirmed and giggled at him.
"I dunno. You just get sleepy and you close your eyes."
"That doesn't work for me." His voice was gentle and his skin was warm as he brought his face down to rest his cheek against hers. His weight settled across her chest, catching her hands in between their bodies. For a brief moment, warnings from her mother about burdens that men left behind flitted through Elmo's mind, but then Lutrinae breathed in deeply at her neck, pulled away and smiled at her. She smiled back.
"Well then, how do you get to sleep?" she asked, trying to keep any butterflies out of her voice.
"I don't."
"You don't remember, probably. Everyone sleeps."
"I don't."
She'd argued playfully with him, in the unsteady, unsure way of flirting that she knew as a fourteen year-old girl from a small village of sheep-herders and lamp-makers. He wasn't able to convince her that he never slept, but there was a worry planted somewhere deep in the back of her brain, nearly lost in the sensation of his thumb brushing across her stomach.
He wasn't in town for very long. Maybe a month or so. The innkeeper complained that he kept her guessing about whether or not he would actually pay for his room that he never used except to store his things.
He had paid the innkeeper, in the end, with a pile of tattered bills weighted down by a gold watch that Elmo had never seen him wear. He carefully arranged it on the doorstep, then turned and took her hand, pulling her through the darkness.
They flitted from inn to barn, and under trees to under temples, him all the while whispering sweet nothings in her ear. Promises of all the things she would see.
Their sixth time - in an actual bed this time instead of the long grass that had been their first - he'd brushed the hair out of her sweaty face and smiled at her.
"I think it worked this time. Finally."
"What worked?" She was still young enough, still new enough, that she was never quite sure if he was laughing at her sometimes; if she was doing things right. It had hurt, for one thing; more than he'd said it would. As it was though, he was kissing her neck, so lightly that she was having trouble thinking. His thumb brushed over her stomach again, calluses tickling the fine hairs.
Then one night he was gone. No note, no message. All that was left behind was a small pile of crisp new bills weighted down by stacks of unfamiliar coin.
She never did find out if he actually did sleep. If he had, she had never seen it.
She didn't know the way home. No one in the hotel knew her village's name. So she waited in the room, waiting for him to come back.
The morning the money ran out, she was violently sick. The next morning after that, as she heaved over the toilet, she realized that he wasn't coming back and she realized why. It had been something her mother had told her about, frightened her with and now it was happening. That was when she first met Mayuko. The baba, looking exactly the same then as she always had, came banging on the door, complaining about the retching noise. Elmo had opened the door, her bottom lip still smeared with sick, and the baba had frozen, fist in mid-pound. She looked down at Elmo and made a noise deep in the back of her throat.
"I know that smell," she said, and her eyes widened.
"He's gone already, isn't he?" she asked abruptly, lowering her hand. Elmo didn't know how she knew, but suddenly the stupid, frightened, lost little girl was crying and the baba's robes were cool as she pressed her face to them. Mayuko's hands came to rest lightly, cautiously, on her head and shoulder, but she didn't object as Elmo sobbed into her silks and brocades patterned all over with butterflies.
"Come and see me when your son is born," was all the baba had said after Elmo's tears had dried.
And then she was gone. She left nothing, not even a name then. The hotel staff didn't even know who she was.
o-o-o
It had taken Elmo a long time to hear the rumors about Lutrinae, but once she began to hear things, she couldn't not hear things. The Great Otter, he was. King of the Sea. That was when she had given her son to Mayuko and then run away as quickly as her legs could take her. She wanted nothing to do with it all, this talk of blood and death and things better left unsaid.
She wrinkled her nose as she passed by another rowdy bar, sword tucked carefully against her chest to keep any pugnacious customers from trying to challenge her. She wanted a beer. Or a bottle of rice-wine. Something strong enough to keep her from noticing the way her sweat smelled of brine and sea breeze. That had never gone away after the first time he had held her hand. The oil on her clothing could only do so much to mask it and now, outside the baba's boundaries, there was no telling who would notice.
o-o-o
The ambassador's eye had popped like a water balloon beneath Elmo's sword, splattering clear jelly and blood across the hot cobblestones.
Mayuko looked on calmly as the fish man flopped weakly, hopping about in circles with his body's last convulsions. Elmo cleaned her sword as carefully as she could. She smelled of fish guts.
"Is Antonio here yet?" the baba asked quietly, as if she were in her room brushing her hair instead of daintily standing among death.
"He's in the kitchen," Nu answered, waiting expectantly for... something. Whatever it was, the baba indicated the ambassador at her feet.
"Thank you, my dear," she said. "I think this one will do."
Elmo found that nothing much was making sense anymore. It was like the words the baba was saying came out as garbled nonsense, even if the sounds were perfectly clear.
"You have been very helpful, Elmo, and I thank you," the baba was saying and Elmo was faintly aware that she had laid a delicate hand on the swordswoman's shoulder. "But there isn't a place for you here anymore."
"What?" Elmo asked, trying to clear the cotton out of her ears by blinking rapidly. It made sense somewhere in her brain.
"Find Lutrinae."
"I won't have anything to do with that bastard," Elmo said. Blink, blink, blink. "Besides, he's dead."
But the baba's hand was gone from her shoulder and as Elmo watched numbly, the house - courtyard, circle of holes and everything - folded itself up and put itself away. She had seen it unfold once - only once - but it was exactly the way she remembered. She was left standing in a circle of sandy dust as wide around as her arms, with a circle of tiny white mushrooms surrounding her. Even as she watched, they shriveled up under the hot sun of the seaside town.
o-o-o
Elmo clutched her sword tighter. She had forgotten so much in the baba's shadow, taken so much for granted.
Damn it all.
Spoiler! :
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