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azvolrien · 4 years

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Seal Story

Roan does, in fact, have a backstory; she just tends not to talk about it very much.

Asta wasn’t going to let that stand for long.

~~~

When spring arrived at Dun Ardech, it did so with a vengeance. The trees burst into leaf over the course of just a few days, while the bleak winter hills turned yellow and green with flowering gorse. Down on the rocks, the water horses were foaling; the newborns were painfully cute, but neither the mares nor Riabhach would tolerate either Roan or Asta coming close just yet.

It wasn’t exactly warm, however, and there were still chores to be done. Asta rolled up her sleeves and knelt to weed the vegetable patch, while Roan took a long-handled axe from her workshop and went to chop some more firewood for the hearth.

Asta finished her task before Roan did and wandered up to the outer wall, pulling her coat more tightly around herself. Though it wasn’t her first spring in the Sea Lochs, it was her first at Dun Ardech, and the breeze coming off the sea was much colder than it was in the city at the far end of Loch Gorm. It didn’t seem to bother Roan, but then nothing short of a blizzard could even make her wear sleeves. Asta watched her from the top of the wall for a few minutes before climbing back down and walking out to join her at the chopping block over by the bathhouse.

“That’s the weeds dealt with for now,” said Asta. “It should be ready for the next round of planting soon.”

Roan wiped her brow with the back of one hand and positioned another log on the block. “Good. I thought I might try growing some onions this year – add a bit of a different flavour to things.”

“Oh, that would be good…” Asta sat down on a rock, safely out of axe range as Roan hefted it up and split the log in two in one blow. “Roan?”

“Mm-hmm?”

“Can I… talk to you?”

“Always,” said Roan. She repositioned the pieces and further split the log into quarters.

Asta spent a few seconds staring at Roan’s bare arms, the muscle glistening with sweat despite the chill wind, her tattoos appearing to shimmer in the morning light, and briefly forgot what she was going to say. She shook her head and cleared her throat, looking up at the less distracting sky.

“I’ve been living out here for some four months now, five if you count that very first month back then.”

“You certainly have,” said Roan, placing another log on the block. “Personally, I do – and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it, other than those very upsetting days at the end of the first month.”

“But last night I realised… I don’t really know who you are.”

Roan lowered the axe head to the ground, leant on the handle, and looked at Asta. Something appeared in her eyes that Asta had never seen there before; it took her a moment to recognise it as fear. Her lips parted slightly, but she said nothing.

“No, that was the wrong way to word it,” Asta said, shaking her head. “I’m sorry, that made it sound like I’m working up to saying I’m leaving you. I’m not, and I don’t plan to. I think I’ll stay with you forever if you let me.” The fear vanished; Roan smiled and swung the axe again. The second log fell into two pieces. “I know the important things. I know that you’re brave, kind and the most capable person I’ve ever met. That you helped me when I was scared, hurt and alone. I know you don’t like crowds, and that you’re such a good cook you can make half a trout feel like a Midsummer feast. I know that you sing to yourself when you think I can’t hear you. I know that… there is something in your blood, whether it’s a blessing from a god or just a condition you were born with, that can turn you into an unstoppable killing machine, and that despite that I have not once felt at all unsafe with you, which is more than I can say for many people I’ve met who weren’t berserkers. I know that you love me.

“But I don’t know where you came from, other than a couple of little things you’ve let slip like going to university in Duncraig. I don’t know how you came to be out here.” Asta swept an arm out to indicate Dun Ardech in general. “I don’t know what your family is like, or if you even have one. And I’d like to. If you’ll tell me. I mean, you know everything of note about me.”

Roan didn’t answer immediately. She split a final log into quarters, tied a carrying strap to the axe, and hung it across her back. “Can you help me carry these back to the broch?” she asked, picking up more than half of the freshly-cut firewood and nudging the remainder with her toe. Asta nodded and crouched to pick up the rest. “You’re right,” Roan went on as they walked back to the broch. “I haven’t been as open with you as you deserve. I suppose… I got out of the habit of talking about myself long ago.” They entered the courtyard and Roan shouldered the broch door open. “Give me a while to get my thoughts in order,” she said, kneeling to stack the firewood on the pile by one wall, within easy reach of the central hearth. Asta handed her the rest one by one. “But… Tonight. Over dinner, or after it. I’ll tell you everything then.”

Asta nodded, squeezed her shoulder, and leant in to kiss her cheek. “I can wait that long.”

Roan kept her promise. That evening, after a filling helping of fish-and-parsnip soup, she set her empty bowl aside and sat back in the warm dark of the broch, linking her fingers over her belly and gazing at the fire. Asta finished her own bowl and settled down beside her, hugging her arm and resting her head on her shoulder.

“You know what my surname is,” began Roan.

Asta nodded. “Captain Steel mentioned it. NicBruide.”

“Yes – except that it’s not really a surname. It’s a patronymic, or a grand-patronymic in my case. I was raised by my grandfather, Bruide MacDovran. Dovran being the name of his father. ‘Nic’ is the feminine equivalent of ‘Mac’ – means ‘daughter of’, or ‘granddaughter of’ in my case. It’s not common these days to keep using patronymics, not here at least, but my family kept the tradition.”

Roan smiled, still looking at the fire, and went on. “You would have liked him. Very, very tough old man, but the best Granda a little girl could hope for. You think my tattoos are impressive? He was almost covered in them from the waist up. He said his hair was red like mine once, but it was long since grey by the time I came along. He told such amazing stories about his adventures when he was young. Taking a boat all the way downriver from Kiraan to Stonemouth. Riding with a tribe of thuru-hunters on the Hawk Steppes. Travelling deep into the mountains and seeing a dragon flying in the distance.”

“Roan, dragons have been extinct for centuries,” said Asta, smiling.

“There hasn’t been a confirmed sighting in centuries,” Roan corrected. “The Dragon’s Teeth are vast – who knows what’s hiding out there somewhere? I couldn’t tell you what he really saw, but until the day he died he swore up and down that he’d seen a dragon.” She paused for a moment, sighing. “My parents and his wife were never in the picture, at least not that I could remember. It wasn’t something he liked to talk about, so I never learned the details of exactly what happened, but when he felt I was old enough to understand he told me that when he was away one day, the… stronghold? No, not exactly, more of a fortified steading. Anyway, his home. It was in a valley somewhere to the north, but I don’t remember it at all – I was too young. He was away, and it was attacked. He never said who by. Bandits, marauders, maybe just someone trying to settle a score. It probably doesn’t matter now. They put the whole place to the torch. Somehow I survived when no one else did, and he pulled little baby me from the wreckage.

“He couldn’t bear to stay there after that, so he packed whatever he could salvage and took it – and me – down to a wee house by the sea. It’s not there any more either, but it was a fair distance up the coast from here, away to the north where the rocks give way to dunes.” She went quiet again. Asta silently took her hand and interlaced their fingers. “He gave me his name. I suppose using my father’s – his son’s – or my mother’s was too painful for him.”

“What was your father’s name?” said Asta. “Or did he never tell you?”

“Oh, it wasn’t so painful he couldn’t do that. It was Euan. My mother was Lorna; my grandmother was Morag. But it’s true, he very rarely spoke about any of them. We lived in that little house for twelve years. He taught me himself back then; my numbers and letters, of course, how to read and write, but also how to set a trap for a rabbit, how to clean a fish and sail a boat, all kinds of other things. How to fight.” She lifted her free hand and tapped a knuckle against her forehead. “He was a berserker as well; in his youth he’d been the kind of warrior people told stories about, fierce and lethal but only in service of the right reasons. He realised I carried the madness as well – we’d gone into a village on market day, and I’d got into a fight some other children – and taught me how to channel and focus it rather than letting it control me when it rose. I owe him a lot.” She freed her arm from Asta’s hold and laid it around her shoulders instead, hugging her in against her side.

“When I was twelve, he decided I needed to start going to school, so we abandoned the cottage and moved to Inverbeg, away from the sea on the bank of Loch Dubh – the next one north of Loch Gorm,” she added when Asta frowned in geographical uncertainty. “Not a big town, so not too overwhelming for me, who’d grown up mostly away from people, but big enough to have a high school. He found work at the harbour while I concentrated on my studies. He wouldn’t hear of me dropping out to help him.

“But, see… he’d always had this cough, an old infection that had never completely left, and as he got older it got worse. He saw a healer regularly to keep it at bay, but even so he couldn’t work as hard as he used to. And I decided that after everything he’d done for me, the least I could do was to make sure he could be comfortable in his old age. So I applied to the University of Duncraig and asked to study finance; it seemed like it would be a good way to make money, or at least get better at saving it for him. I’d always been good with numbers.” Roan sighed again and closed her eyes, rubbing the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger.

“I think he knew full well it wasn’t what I really wanted, but he was still so proud of me for getting in, telling all his friends at the pub about his clever granddaughter. He’d never gone to uni, you see. He asked what I wanted in celebration; I wanted my first tattoo. This one, if you’re curious.” She tapped a symbol on her left arm, one Asta always thought looked a bit like a shield crossed by a lightning bolt. “He paid for it, but that was the only one he paid for. The rest, those were all me. It got to be a sort of tradition. Every birthday, every festival, every exam I aced, I got another tattoo. Got to be on fairly close terms with the tattooist, actually.”

“You must have done very well in your exams,” murmured Asta, tracing a fingertip along the adder basking on Roan’s right forearm.

“I did, since you noticed,” said Roan, grinning. The smile disappeared. “And then… he… passed away, a few months before I finished university. I got this one in his honour.” She pulled her hair back to show the tattoo on her forehead, a crescent crossed by a broken arrow. “He had one similar, though the exact patterning on the crescent was different. Like I said, he was a very heavily tattooed man.” The smile came back, though the beginnings of tears showed in her eyes. “I buried him at the ruins of the old cottage, down by the sea. He’d been happier there than he ever was in town. The last few months were… hard, but I graduated with a decent mark and found a job in a bank in Duncraig. I don’t think they expected someone with quite so many tattoos, though, so they stashed me in a back room to do my bookkeeping.”

“That doesn’t sound like you at all,” said Asta.

“It wasn’t,” agreed Roan. “It was suffocating, but I stuck it out for a while. I waited until exactly a year after I started and handed in my resignation. The seal I have on my back? That was a reclamation of sorts. They’d… politely requested that I not get any more while I was working for them.”

“So you got the biggest tattoo you have the second you left?”

Roan nodded. “City life wasn’t for me anyway. You said it earlier – I don’t like crowds. So I was out on the street pondering what to do with my newfound freedom, and just thought… I have to go home. Back to the sea. Granda had left everything to me; I took what I could carry – the head of my spear was his, though I mounted it on a new haft – and sold the rest, including the house in Inverbeg. I came out to Dun Ardech and set to work on making it liveable again after however many years, decades, centuries it had been abandoned. It didn’t even have floors or a roof when I got here, just walls. When I’d finished, I took one last trip back to see my tattooist and got these two.” She indicated the water horses inked below her cheekbones. “I’ve been out here by myself ever since. Until you came along, of course.”

“Do you have any other relatives?” asked Asta quietly.

“Maybe, somewhere,” said Roan. “Granda never knew about my mother’s people; all he ever said was that ‘she came from the sea’ and never spoke about her own family. I might have a whole army of cousins out there on her side, but they’ve never got in touch if I do.” She gave Asta an affectionate jostle. “So for all intents and purposes, we have that in common; both alone in the world, you and I.”

Asta lifted her head from Roan’s shoulder and pressed a kiss against her lips. “Not any more,” she said, taking Roan’s head between her hands and giving it a little shake as if chiding a mischievous puppy.

“No, I suppose not,” said Roan, touching her forehead to Asta’s and sliding her other arm around her waist. “Well, Asta-my-love, congratulations; you now know more about me than anyone else alive.”

“I’m glad you told me.” Asta trailed her hand down Roan’s braid and lifted the end to tickle under her chin. Roan grimaced playfully and batted it away. “You… Well, you make sense now.”

“I don’t know if I’d go that far,” said Roan. “But I’m glad I told you too.”

~~~

Roan’s mother was one of the Sea People (remember them?); she stole a boat and defected in her mid-teens, disillusioned with the culture, but was caught in a storm en route to the mainland and washed up on the shore where Bruide and Morag took her in. As Roan says, she never spoke about her life before that, so her new family knew nothing of it.

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