POV: Liora
Jorin arrived the next morning and mornings after with a hammer, a sack of nails, and the kind of expression that meant he had identified a problem and was not planning to leave until it was resolved.
The cottage roof had three holes and a family of starlings. He climbed up without asking permission, which saved us both the awkwardness of me deciding whether to grant it.
"You do not have to do this," I said from the doorway.
"I know." He drove a nail with two clean strokes. "I want to."
"There is a difference between wanting to fix my roof and wanting to fix what happened." I leaned against the doorframe. "I need you to know which one you are doing."
"Right now I am doing the roof." He glanced down, the corner of his mouth pulling upward. "The other one will take longer than a morning."
"The roof is also somewhat pointless," I said. "I am not staying, Jorin. A moon, maybe two — long enough for my hands to heal and my legs to remember what solid ground feels like. Then I am leaving."
He went still on the beam. Not the dramatic stillness of a man absorbing a blow, just a brief pause between one nail and the next.
"Leaving for where?" he asked.
"I have not decided yet." I turned my cup in my hands. "Away. That is the working plan."
He looked at me for a moment, then drove the next nail. "Then I am fixing the roof for the month you are here," he said. "You are welcome."
Fair enough. I let him work and made myself useful with a broom, and somewhere between the starlings and the second pot of tea he climbed down and sat at my grandmother's table and asked the question he had been holding since the square.
"The island," he said. "What was it actually like."
I considered the range of honest answers available to me. Most of them involved tentacles.
"Cold," I said. "The south beach was gentle. The north cliffs would kill you in bad weather. There were fruit trees behind the castle walls and a cistern with fresh water, which was actually fortunate."
"You found the castle on your own?"
"The cave opened onto a path. I followed it." I turned my cup in my hands. "The castle was old but solid. I cleaned it room by room because it was the only thing I could control, which tells you something about my state of mind at the time."
"And the creature from stories?" He kept his voice even, which told me he had been thinking about how to phrase this for some time.
"The stories are not wrong." I met his eyes. "There is something and I survived it. That is the version I am prepared to offer right now."
Jorin held my gaze with patience, then nodded and picked up his tea, and I added that to the small precise list of things he had done right since I returned.
He also brought me through the market every few days, which turned out to be less of a pleasant walk and more of a demonstration of how quickly a village can organize its hostility when properly motivated.
The fishmonger's wife turned away before I reached her stall. Two women I had known since childhood crossed the street from me. A man near the grain merchant watched me pass from his doorway without blinking, and when I held his gaze he still did not look away.
People who have decided they are the wronged party tend to stare that way — openly, without embarrassment, wearing their grievance as credentials.
"They are not being subtle," I said.
"They stopped trying to be subtle days ago," Jorin said. "A fisherman's nets came up empty. They needed an explanation, and you were the most available one."
"Their gods are not real and their tradition kills people. That is the explanation. The rest is weather and bad luck and the general incompetence of men who blame women for tides."
Jorin was quiet for a beat. Then he stepped to the herb stall, paid without negotiating the price, and handed the bundle to me.
No argument, no reassurance, no attempt to soften what I had said into something the crowd could digest more comfortably. He simply moved us forward, which was its own kind of answer.
The walk back was worse. I felt the watching between my shoulder blades the whole length of the market.
A man near the butcher's stall said something as we passed, low enough that the words dissolved before they reached me. His companion's laugh, however, carried just fine.
"Charming village," I said.
"They are wrong," Jorin said, his jaw set.
"They are wrong and they are also the only village within a day's crossing, so the moral satisfaction of being right is doing me limited practical good."
The place found its rhythm after that, and the rhythm was not kind. Dried fish appeared on the cottage step — the old signal, used when people wanted someone to understand they were being assessed and found wanting.
I brought it inside and ate it for supper, because principle is fine but fish is fish. A stone hit the cottage window. Small, not large enough to break anything, large enough to be deliberate.
Jorin arrived, took one look at my face, and did not ask what had happened.
"You should not be alone at night," he said.
"I managed alone on a cursed island for weeks."
"The island did not know your name." He sat across from me at my grandmother's table, hands around a cup, eyes steady. "Here you are visible, which is a different kind of danger entirely."
He stayed until the light went, which I did not ask him to do and did not tell him to stop.
When he finally left he latched the door from the outside with careful attention, and I stood in the middle of the room and listened to his footsteps fade down the hill.
I could not sleep. I lit a candle and opened the back room — the one my grandmother had kept shut for years. The door stuck against warped floorboards, gave with a shove, and the air that came out was stale and herbal.
The shelves were precise. Jars of herbs arranged with a healer's logic, carved symbols cut into the wood edges with deliberate intent. Not my grandmother's hand — more practiced, older.
Beneath the bottom shelf, wrapped in oilcloth, I found bone tools worn smooth with use, plants bound in thread that dissolved when I touched it, and a cloth embroidered with a pattern I recognized immediately.
I held it to the candle. The spiraling lines, the knotwork at the center — identical to the markings on the medallion, executed in thread instead of metal.
My grandmother had told me once, on the night she died, that her sister was the shaman of this village. She said it once, pressed the medallion into my palm, and told me to keep it close. Some things are safer as secrets.
The shaman had lived in this room. My grandmother had sealed the door after her sister died and left it sealed for the rest of her life, and when she finally gave me the medallion she was not being sentimental. She was completing a handoff she had been holding for years.
The offering, the island, the cave. I sat on the floor of my great-aunt's workroom with the embroidered cloth in my lap and felt the shape of a plan that had been running considerably longer than I had been alive.
My father was the elder. He knew the old stories. He had sent me to that island knowing exactly what was there, and the knowledge sat in my stomach with the weight of a stone I could not put down.