Four From the Witch World by Andre Norton

Author:Andre Norton [Norton, Andre]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, General
ISBN: 9780812510065
Publisher: Tor
Published: 1991-01-01T07:00:00+00:00

III: Seasinger

It’s strange sometimes how the scent of someone lingers, like smoke in a still room after the candle’s out. Sif’s presence lingered with me for months. I kept expecting to see her, striding along the beach below Castle Van, or ducking into the tower, or to see a strand of kelp draped over the Seagate—but I never did.

They never found her body. Sometimes the sea does not give up her dead. Old Sul turned out not to be dead after all,

and I could not help feeling bitter that he was not. It meant my sister had died for nothing. She could have stayed.

That spring when Sif disappeared was the start of Ulys’s long misfortune. All the luck seemed to wash away. The weather turned bad—a constant, dismal, murky, damp wind so cold that it cut the bone, but no snow drying the air. Fishing fell off, and the red dead-men’s-hands got into the shell-lish beds. Shore fever took many of the fisherfolk—-but not old Sul. He lived another three years before expiring of an apoplexy. Inwardly, I rejoiced.

But worst of all, the seafoxes dwindled. Perhaps they found another place to winter. I hoped so. Every year my father’s men came back from the clubbing with fewer pelts; almost no white or speckled or silver anymore—only the black and the brown, and those thin and small. Second-rate fur—the Dalesmen paid little for it.

Castle Van went into debt to the Hallack merchants from whom we bought many of our goods. Certain valuable heirlooms about the palace quietly disappeared, sold on the mainland, I think. My father made the crossing more than once to secure us loans, always smaller than he had hoped and at exorbitant rates. He lost a good deal of that money gambling and, probably, wenching.

My mother, in a white rage, whispered—but not to him— that he ought to ask his Dalesmen kin for help. He was too proud for that. They had disinherited him years ago. At last, there were no more loans to be had. My father, resourceless, prowled the confines of our small, gray keep and our small, gray isle, and began to go mad.

My mother, with a kind of desperate determination, refused to despair. All would be put right, she vowed, when I married. She and her maids got me by the hair then and took charge of my rearing—a task she said they had grossly neglected before.

Got me by the hair quite literally. I was no longer allowed to trim it off just below the level of my shoulders, but must let it grow and grow, a waterfall of reddish gold that was heavy and, in the summer, hot. Why couldn’t I cut it? I wanted to know. Why must it be so long?

Because that was what a woman’s hair was for, my mother said, parting the strands along the center of my scalp with a comb—to be a beauty to a husband’s eye. But I didn’t have a husband, I protested. Yet, she countered, brushing, brushing.

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