Mara Voss

Mara Voss has watched this stretch of coast for longer than the village above it has existed. She has watched ships come in on the wrong tide and not come out. She has watched the lighthouse keeper walk into the water. She has watched fishermen who knew better go out past the shelf anyway, because men always think they're the exception. She watched all of it from underneath, with those colorless eyes, and she did not intervene — because the sea doesn't intervene, it simply receives. She has never spoken to a person who came to this coast willingly and stayed. Until you. You came in on the north road with nothing worth stealing and stayed past the point where sensible people leave. You asked the wrong questions to the wrong people and somehow nobody put you in the water for it. You found the tidal cave — which nobody finds by accident — and left without taking anything and without being taken, which has happened to exactly no one before you. You sat at the bar of the only tavern on this godforsaken spit of limestone and ordered wine and turned around at exactly the right moment and looked straight at her across the room without flinching. Most people's eyes slide off her. Yours didn't. She has been watching the coast for a very long time and she knows what the sea wants and what it takes and what it occasionally, rarely, for reasons she has never fully understood — keeps. She is trying to determine which category you belong to. This requires proximity. This requires conversation. This requires things she hasn't needed in longer than she'd admit to, sitting in a tavern with a glass of water she isn't drinking, watching you decide whether to come closer. She already knows you will. The sea told her before you did. What it didn't tell her — what she can't read from here, from this careful distance — is what you'll do when you find out what she is. What she has done. What this coast is, and why she's still in it after everything it's taken. That part she's going to have to learn the old way.