Shadowbridge by Gregory Frost

flat, and so many people died that you couldn’t have made a village out of what was left. The survivors blamed your mother for it all. They knew already she was some sort of ocean spirit. Now she was worse: Leandra the Red-Haired Witch, the Soul-Drinker. Either they couldn’t see her misery or they didn’t believe it. Weejar took in some of the survivors—of course, Tenikemac so typically refused to be a haven for those who’d sold fish on Ningle. The Omelune opinion of your mother, though, spread everywhere. Weejar traded with Tenikemac the same as now. Pretty soon your mother had nowhere to go at all. The whole island had set itself against her.”
    “Why didn’t Grandfather…do something?”
    “What could he do? We were already viewed as no better than a necessary evil by Tenikemac. It’s a role we’ve long accepted, because we make a good living by filling that niche. The taint of the spans was bad enough, and her jeopardizing their men worse, but now we harbored something cursed.
    “When Leandra insisted on accompanying your grandfather and Gousier onto Ningle, the two of them agreed it was a very good idea. She was seventeen. She was a beauty. She ought to have been married. And it was clear that she could never find a suitable husband here. I think they hoped she would catch someone’s eye up there.
    “A few times she went up, and I’m sure she must have been learning all she could of the place. Laying her plans. She said nothing to me or anyone. One morning she went up with the men and never came down again. Vanished right out from under their noses. That was the last time anyone in the family ever laid eyes on her.”
    “She ran away.”
    “That she did, and alone, too. No one thought she could get far, but they had always underestimated her distance. Gousier went looking for her up and down the span and found nothing, not a trace. She’d taken a full purse from the family coffers—we had as much then as now. No one begrudged her that; she would have been given more as a dowry had things gone right. The money meant she could buy herself into the shadows, though. Buy passage to some other great long stretch of spans, leaving no trail to follow, no way to guess which way she’d gone.
    “The day Soter came down those steps, carrying you as proof of his tale of her, of her death, was the first we’d heard of her in years.
    “Your uncle cried like a baby himself. I know that’s hard for you to imagine, but it’s true. So long as he had no idea of his sister’s fate, he could make up whatever he liked, and even if it was awful and cruel and defamed her with every word, it was comforting somehow. Like he kept her alive by inventing a world of failures for her. The truth wiped it all away. It broke him. It went much worse on him than on either of your grandparents. They’d come to accept her choice. Gousier took to drink. What he made in the stall of a day he spent in the pursuit of his own undoing. Trying to erase her, hiding from her. I couldn’t talk to him, almost like he couldn’t see me. One time he fell partway down the steps from Ningle, he was so drunk. For a while he wasn’t allowed to go up. Soter and I filled in as much as we could. Of course then Gousier accused Soter of trying to usurp his position—Soter, who wanted nothing at all to do with fish, but felt he owed your grandfather something for letting him stay. Gousier was crazy awhile, and nothing he said during that time is worth recalling. When it went on past all reason, your grandfather locked himself and Gousier in his workshop for the better part of a whole day. Neither one of them ever told what went on in there, but when they came out your uncle was bruised, bloody, and sober. And quiet. Whatever his opinions were, he said no more about her. Never mentioned his sister afterward, as if he’d never had one. He went back to work and after a time, he eased up. He was good for a bit—you might even remember from when you