A Hero's Throne by Ross Lawhead

Author:Ross Lawhead
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Book, Fantasy, ebook
ISBN: 9781595549105
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2012-12-19T00:00:00+00:00

_____________________ VI _____________________

Terrified now that she was so far out to sea that she couldn’t see the shore, Gretchen clutched tighter, resolving her dead man’s hold around the seal’s neck. This done, she then concentrated on breathing, which was fairly difficult under the circumstances.

She cursed herself. She was in a world of trouble now, and no mistake. There was a word for her creature-companion and she knew it well: selkie. It was a word she had learned from her great grandmother when she went around to her house as a very young girl. Her great grandmother had just a couple battered children’s books kept in a box with some uninteresting wooden toys. When those stopped amusing, and Gretchen got restless, then Great Grandmother would talk to her. Sometimes it was just about what was going on with the people in the village, but on occasion she would tell one of her stories, one of the old and ancient tales of the area.

Gretchen always had trepidations about the stories and would never ask for one. That was because the stories absolutely terrified her. There wasn’t one of them that ended well for the little girls (and it was always little girls; Gretchen felt, even at five years old, that the way her great grandmother poked her in the ribs whenever she said “little girl” was needlessly heavy-handed). And, just like the situation Gretchen was in now, the heroines were always such victims of circumstance or innocent desire that there didn’t seem, at any point in the story, a way for them out of the sticky messes they had become mired in. Inevitably, that lead to their death, which her great grandmother would draw out beyond all taste or decorum, even for a five-year-old.

And so while she hadn’t spent much more than a dozen afternoons by herself with her grandmother, and had only actually heard a small number of her great grandmother’s tales, every word of them were etched on her young mind. They were much more memorable than those of the battered children’s books with their toothless pastel colours and safe endings, or indeed any of the books she owned and read repetitively. But she could remember every phrase of her great grandmother’s stories—“The Orphan Girl and the Goblins,” “The Seamstress and the Tricksie Brownies,” “The Changeling and Its Sister,” “Bluebeard’s Young Bride,” and, of course, “The Selkie Mother.”

Yet even with those vivid warnings to deter her, here she found herself being pulled out to sea on the back of a changeling man. She could almost hear her great grandmother say, “I told you so.”

The sky continued to darken, but she could see something on the horizon. It was a grey lump that grew quickly into a black, rocky jag of a windswept island, probably not large enough to provide food or shelter for even one small sheep.

Which is not to say that it was empty. There were shapes moving along the top of it; she could see human silhouettes dancing on the island’s crest.

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