Riverkeep Read Free

water’s murk. Emory Blummells slipped out the front door of his cottage, clipping the handle back into place with practiced ease. He pressed some lakoris leaf into his top lip, looked around, and sniffed the air—the salt of the water and the sourness of landed seaweed. The clouds were thick, and the roaring wind meant he could hide behind a cloak of noise.
    Conditions were perfect. He grinned to himself, teeth lost behind his wispy beard, as he hurried through the closed market with the quick steps of a fat-legged man.
    His wife would be annoyed if she woke and found him missing, but she’d be pleased with the big pearl trout they’d have tomorrow. Emory remembered the days when she would come with him on his nighttime journeys: sneaking around together in the shadows, finding each other’s hands, and stifling their laughter. That was a long time ago—before their children, when they’d been young together.
    As he reached Main Street he ducked into the tree line, his nostrils filling with the smell of earth. The line of thehilltops and mountain was a smudge against the night sky, above the glow of the lanterns in the center of the village. The fish factories were still awake, laughter and song ringing tin walls seamed by slits of lamplight as the women and men stripped and cooked and packed the day’s catch in boil jars to feed Oracco’s fat stomach.
    Emory moved silently along the seafront in the bushes, parting the damp leaves with his fingers.
    A packer stepped out from a glowing doorway, steam rising from his naked torso, then turned and urinated against the factory’s wall. Emory looked up to the moon, glowing like a silver coin behind the clouds, then eased himself into a deeper shadow, crouched low in a flower bed beneath the window of a sleeping cottage, absently turning his green-stoned wedding ring as he waited for the hot stream’s thrum to stop.
    He was good at waiting invisibly. Once, when he’d been after fowl in the Rydberg Woods, a red balgair had peed on his boot. He’d worn the stain on the leather like a badge of honor, but had to endure the frustration of keeping its origin secret. Emory could keep secrets; like everyone else in Canna Bay, his bones shook with them.
    As the beat of the packer’s water was replaced by the crash of waves, Emory sucked on his lakoris and spat noiselessly into the tin-smelling earth between his boots, neckwound into the high collar of his coat and his hands elbow-deep in the pockets. He counted to sixty, then he spat again and moved forward.
    When he reached the harbor, he used the moon’s weak glow to light the ground, picking his way delicately between the weed-filled cracks, coils of rope, and rusting chains. Bleached-looking buoys were bundled together like giant grapes against a crumbling wall, and the hulking shadows of landed craft loomed comfortingly over him. As the graygulls padded on the masts, Emory caught his breath beside an ancient anchor, then began to cross the reams of spongy, crackling seaweed on the beach.
    The water, when it came, was cold enough to bite through the thick rubber of his wading boots, and Emory shivered happily as he hobbled into his skiff.
    â€œCome on, ol’ girl,” he said to the boat. “We won’t be long in the catchin’.”
    His thick, sure fingers loosed the line that bound it to the jetty and found the oars by touch; then he pushed off, dipping the oars’ blades silently into the water.
    Far out to sea, the mormorach swung its head around.
    The motion of the skiff reached its senses as tingles and echoes that shivered along its body. It switched its focus from the shrill anxiety of the shoal it had been tormenting. The mormorach’s brain recognized food in the patternedsequence of the distant splashes and, with another whip of its tail that scattered the fish like dandelion seeds, it thrust itself toward shore.
    Emory looked back at Canna Bay