“Not the salt,” muttered an old fisherman, narrowing his eyes as he prodded the sludge with his boot. “Not the tide, either.”
Another villager crossed his arms, the cords of his neck straining. “Then whose hand?” His gaze lingered on Brynja longer than the others.
She kept her hands folded in her lap, trembling against her wool skirts. Clinging to her skin, the reek of salt was impossible to scrub away. She lowered her eyes, though suspicion pressed on her from every side.
Whispers moved like an undertow: “Cursed.” “Unnatural.” “The sea wants blood.”
Children, pale with fear, pressed into their mothers’ skirts while men sharpened their voices to points, testing a blade.
Then came the sound—wet and dragging—something vast shifting beyond the tide. The villagers turned as one, silence snapping tight over the shore. Out of the gray surf, the sea heaved up its offering: a heap of mangled flesh, half fish, half ruin, slick with the same black sludge that had devoured the nets.
The smell hit first, rank and metallic. A child screamed. The fishermen staggered back. Brynja’s breath caught as the thing rolled closer with the swell, its glassy eyes locked wide, as if it too had seen the hand that wrought its undoing.
“God preserve us,” someone rasped, though none believed He was listening.
And still Brynja’s fingers twitched, betraying her with their tremor, the salt-stench clinging as though the sea itself had branded her.
Washed up on shore—the heap of mangled flesh—was a sheep, which lay on the stones, its fleece sodden, clumped in heavy ropes that stank of brine. Its clouded eyes stared past the gathering crowd to nothing. Gulls circled and shrieked, their wings flashing knives in the pale sky.
“An omen,” an elder muttered, beard trembling as he crossed himself.
“Not chance. The sea speaks,” another whispered, lips cracked from salt wind.
Stepping forward, each syllable faltered on Brynja’s rough voice. “I did… not… this.” She clutched her shawl tight at her breast, knuckles white.
The men watched her. A pause. Then a hissed word: “Fræmlingur.” Outsider. Her vowels, bent and uncertain, marked her as foreign even more than her pale, strained face.
A boy spat into the tidepool at his feet. A woman pulled her daughter close, eyes never leaving Brynja. Silence gathered around her, heavy as stones in a sling.
That night, the wind moved through the harbor, restless. Brynja’s voice rose with it—low and fractured, carrying across the water in a tune that wavered between hymn and lament. It threaded through the creak of moored boats, through smoke leaking from peat fires.
Behind shuttered windows, villagers froze. A fisherman’s wife leaned into the darkness of her doorway, whispering, “She sings to the sea.”
By dawn, the shore buzzed with rumor. Nets gone, dissolved as before. The name passed in tight mouths and lowered voices—Brynja, Brynja—as if speaking it might call the tide against them. And still, the sheep’s wool sagged black on the rocks, stinking of rot.
The night she hummed at the pier, her voice carried soft as tidewash over planks slick with kelp. Lanterns burned low along the harbor, casting restless light across the water. By morning, the boat was gone—ropes untied, hull vanished into the gray expanse, leaving an empty mooring stone wet with spray.
Inside the chapel, a man growled, “They heard her.” His voice echoed off stone walls darkened by soot. “The sea answered her call.”
Standing before them, Brynja’s shoulders were drawn tight beneath her shawl, lips parted but soundless. Her breath fogged in the cold air, eyes flicking from elder to fisherman to wife clutching a cross at her throat.
“Confess,” demanded another, his fist slamming the pew. “What are you?”
“I… am nothing,” she whispered in broken Faroese, the words collapsing under her tongue.
“Liar,” hissed a woman, stepping back as though Brynja’s shadow might stain her.
The chapel swelled with mutters, harsh as gull-cries. Fear thickened into rage. Brynja’s chest tightened, the walls pressing closer, the carved Christ above the altar gazing down with eyes of wood and indifference.
Before hands could seize her, she fled. Doors slammed against the wind as she burst into the night. Down the cliff path she ran, skirts whipping, stones cutting her soles. The tide roared, black and endless, flecked with moonlight.
She stumbled into the surf, breath ragged. And then—soft, familiar, impossible—her mother’s voice rose from the waves, gentle as lullaby, urgent as prayer.
“Kom, barnið mitt…”
Salt spray stung her eyes. She waded deeper, the sea clutching her waist, her chest, her throat. The cold bit with teeth, yet she did not turn back. The voices of the villagers shrank behind her, swallowed by the tide.
She let go of air, arms opening wide as if to embrace. The water closed around her, carrying her down into its dark mouth. Brynja chose the sea.
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