The Salt Grows Heavy

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For Jeff Solomon,

this is what you get for not giving up on me

I

The First Night

Where are you going?

I pause. In the penumbra, the fading dusk gorgeted by coral and gold, you could be forgiven for mistaking the ruined house a ribcage, the roof its tent of ragged skin. The foundation, at a careless look, could pass for bones, the door for a mouth, the chimney a finger crooked at the sky, or at a wife who would not be a savior.

Ash sleets from the firmament in soft handfuls of black, gathering in gauzy drifts around my ankles. The sky is ink and seething murk, whispering secrets to itself, the clouds snarled like long, dark hair. I glance into the house. Two of my daughters look back, eyes shining. They are seated astride a twitching form, its limbs too small to have belonged to an adult. Like cats, they croon to one another even as they nibble their fins and fingertips clean. My breath snags. Only days old but already, they are the best of their parents. They have their father’s full lips, his blue eyes, his supple sun-warmed skin.

And they have my teeth, my deepwater hair, like the lures of the anglerfish spun into thick coils. Nothing sticks to those radiant strands, no amount of gore or mud. Which is fortunate, given how messily my offspring eat.

One fishes a gnawed-down fingerbone from her maw, flicks it to the ground. The other pounces and for a moment, I glimpse the fair circle of their victim’s face; its eyes gouged, its cheeks flensed, its skull emptied of sweetbreads. Mermaids—especially those born half-prince—leave nothing to waste.

Of course. I forgot. You can’t speak. My apologies.

I look back. The plague doctor flutters a hand, voice strange behind their mask. Today, they are dressed most austerely: plain black robes; a broad-brimmed hat; the half-skull of a vulture, carefully bleached, unornamented save for a single hieroglyph embossing its brow. Alone of my husband’s people, what few remain after the apocalypse of my children’s hunger, the plague doctor is not afraid. Has not ever been afraid. Do you know where you’re going?

I consider the question. I’d toyed with the idea of going home. In my dreams, I still swim that soundless black, still travel its eddies of salt and cold nothing. My sisters are alive in these nocturnal fantasies: colorless, resplendent, their hair floating like a frothing of wedding veils.

But those are just baseless images pieced together by the unconscious, invoked by a longing that has since had time to turn septic. I have been on dry land for too long; the depths would devour me the way they would any creature of the air.

Well? The plague doctor steps closer, fearless. Eyes green as the humid, hated summer.

I shrug.

To my astonishment, they laugh.

Such a pair we make. I don’t know what I’m going to do either, what with the kingdom being eaten to nothing. The look they slide me—heavy-lidded and coquettish—is so audacious that I soundlessly laugh in spite of myself. If you don’t know where you’re going, do you at least know what you plan to do?

I shrug again. Over the snow-gilded mountains, I know there are kingdoms without number, pastoral and beautiful, each ruled by another prince or king, another czar and his court of calm-eyed lackeys. Another man like my husband: beautiful and terrible and cocksure in the magic he’d thieved from his bride.

There. I could go there, perhaps. Find another sovereign who’d fish a mute from the waters, who’d marry her, bed her, murder her sisters for a superstition, and then pry the teeth from her gums for the sake of caution. I could find one of those again, maybe, and wait until my daughters come to gnaw his country down to its bones.

As though conscious of my musings, the plague doctor nods, their voice hollowed by the fluted bone. Even after all this time, I cannot tell whether they are male, female, neither, both, some gradient wicking between definitions. And you shall know her by the trail of dead.

A harpy phrase. I smile at the music of it.

How do you feel about company?

I cock my head.

A doctor is always useful, they tell me, fox-sly. What do you say?

I say nothing, of course. My husband cut the tongue from me when he discovered I was pregnant; braised it with five-spice and saffron before feeding me the tender slivers. Animal meat was forbidden, but assisted autosarcophagy, his soothsayer had crooned, would ensure pliance.

But I smile, nonetheless, and it is answer enough for my new companion.

We burned the kingdom to cinders. Pillars of choking smoke rose from the bodies we’d heaped into neat stacks, stinking fattily, saltily of crisping pork. The plague doctor had insisted. To leave the bodies as they were was to invite disease, an epidemic that would rot the soil, infect the waters.

What is the point of revenge if you can’t enjoy it? The plague doctor chuckled as they led me and my chocolate-stippled horse—my husband’s last gift before our children made a feast of him: a sullen gelding who loathed him as much as I did—from the smoldering ruins.

I offered no reply and instead watched the smoke, like warnings of what would be.

In winter, as in the spring, the taiga is beautiful. Pine trees and white spruce scrape at the firmament, skeining the snow in strange patterns. There are smaller plants too, aspen and alder and birch, even colonies of withered ferns. Occasionally, I catch sight of wolves in the tree line, shark-sleek and grey; of bobcats glaring yellow-eyed from some desecrated barrow; of foxes, their muzzles sodden and dripping with red.

The plague doctor’s breath plumes through the air as we walk. Mine does not. Though I hold no particular affection for it, the cold has never been a thing I fear, a fact that once amused my husband’s court to no end. They made me promenade through the winter, my naked skin irridescing with frost. Still, my companion insists on swaddling me in fur: woolly gloves and a bearskin coat of unusual pallor.

It would look strange if you weren’t dressed for the weather, the plague doctor says in way of explanation as I fondle my gifts, the lining smelling of musk and frankincense oil. The fur itself is almost satiny, a delight to massage between my fingers. People would ask questions.

I scan the wilderness. There is no one but the hares and the badgers here, nothing but the trees and the quiet, the hawks and the wights—the unsleeping dead, burning forever, unable to rest—pacing spindle-limbed through the gloom. If there are men concealed in the boughs, they harbor no interest in our acquaintance. For fear of my plague doctor, perhaps.

Or me.

The plague doctor laughs, arsenic-sharp, a bark of a noise, before crunching into a bright red apple. "A stranger is an easy target, easier still when they are as strange as you. If you had believed our former kingdom cruel, a place of treachery, let me assure you that it was the finest of