Phases, gen & PG, original fic
Disclaimers: None, really. They're all mine for once, and this is what happens when I've been reading McKillip again. Written for the spook_me Halloween challenge; at least one more story may yet show up for that before Halloween. Beta courtesy of
draconis and
tarshaan -- thank you!
Rated: PG for Gothic-ness, I think.
lomedet, you may not want to read this, I'm not sure.
Phases
Half the moon shone in the sky, white as the marble the villagers carved and sold so dearly, brighter than one candle but not brighter than three. The waves skimmed lightly up the beach, marching towards the high tide line with successive patches of barely-darkening sand. No spindrift lay at the ebbmarks; the sea was far too quiet for that, barely rippled by the waves and unruffled by any wind in the hours after sunset and before midnight.
Up at the top of the path down to the beach, Lynnet sat waiting, wrapped in her darkest cloak for concealment and wearing her warmest clothes against the chill from the ocean. Midwinter still lay seven weeks away but the cold was already settling in. Lynnet sat alone because no local would come to Greenwater Point by night, nor by day when that half-moon rode through the sky, and she sat waiting because she did not believe in curses, or magic, or anything she couldn't see, touch, or explain.
Lynnet might yet have to change her view on magic and curses, for she had no explanation of where the first dancers came from; she only saw them moving in the moonlight.
The pair swayed in the light, dipping in and out between the shadow of the cliff and the slowly shading stretch of sand. One taller and broader, the other smaller and more lithe, they wore some dark material and had flowing unconfined hair of a light shade that looked white as spume in the moonlight. They moved easily through the sand as if it had hardened itself solely for them to dance on; loose drifts never snagged their steps, no shell gave way under heel or toe, nor spiny remnant pierced an instep to cause a hop. Such surety was so monstrously unfair as to make Lynnet irritable. Not only were they a mystery; they were a beautiful, graceful one.
There were three pairs of dancers by the time she realized she could see no track in the sand, either.
No furrow of kicked-aside dry sand from the cliff-face where the trail ended. No wet, dark footsteps from the sea, and those fabrics flowed as if dry, not wet. And, Lynnet finally noticed, their clothes danced in a breeze that did not make its way up to further bedevil her hair from its straggling braid nor flutter the collar of her dress inside her cloak.
Five pairs of dancers by then, and they were moving like the drift on the waves, a long sinuous line of motion with partners passing along and below the line like a high wave curling in on itself on the way to shore. A balefire sprang up inside the high water line while she was studying the dance, burning white as the moon, blue and green as seawater by daylight, faint orange and red along the edges like the coral jewelry Lynnet's mother drew out for special occasions.
And despite not having seen who had piled the wood for this fire, nor yet who had lit it or how, still Lynnet could not see why these graceful swaying forms were so dangerous that the locals would not come to watch and wonder at their grace and strength and speed.
Sixteen dancers now, tall and small, broad and slim, dancing in a mad cross-pattern and weave of motion that darted from the very edges of the waves, flirting with damp shoes if shoes they wore, to the shadows of the cliffs, dipping in and out of darkness as agilely as they dodged the water. It took her half the dance to realize they mimicked gulls in flight for fish or scraps, and by then their silent call had tugged her to her feet and most of the way down the path.
She had no such grace as they, although she was surefooted enough in daylight. Tonight, Lynnet stepped carefully lest she lose her footing and go off the edge of the path. She went cautiously in the shaded cliff's edge that had been cut into a path long years ago, but she was already stepping in tempo with them as she moved, and although she noticed it not, she wove into and out of the moonlight as she followed the path down, and down, and down at the same fast-slow pattern as their current dance which tugged them back from the cliffs and almost into the water, like the undertow of an ebbtide.
Lynnet had a dozen questions in her mind as she walked -- who are you, what are you, what brings you here at during the quarter moon phases, why only then, do you ever come at full tide, why do you dance here, who plays for you that you hear them and I do not, who gathered the wood, why do you need a fire, why don't you all dance at once, do you dance in the daylight, what breeze do you bring with you? -- all of them leading to a dozen more. She had a cat's curiosity and a cat's eyes in the dark and the immortality of youth which never dreams it might die. Then she set foot onto sand and found a form waiting for her, hand out to draw her into the dance.
Lynnet relinquished everything for skin pale as sea foam, hair with curves and curls like the edge of a wave, and eyes dark as the bottom of the high tide whirlpool off the point.
He led her into the dance as if she had always known the steps, as if there were no such necessity in the body as food or water or rest, as if the sea would always be there and the cliff and air was only one more encumbrance to be shed. If he smiled with teeth sharp as shells she did not notice. If his fingers wrapped her wrist like seaweed clutching a drowner she did not feel her skin prickle under the touch and the hairs on her nape stand on end. If her breath caught when he kissed her, she never dreamed it was in terror, there under the setting moon.
Nine couples danced there while the tide rose to the foot of the path and above. No dancer stood there by dawn's ebb of water over sand and shell, nor did footprint of a mortal maid disturb the water-beaten sand.
Lynnet's body never washed ashore on the point nor down the coast.
Her clothes were never found on beach or rock.
Not in her brother's day. Nor her niece's. Nor her great-nephew's.
Not even now.
And no one goes near Greenwater Point at half moons.