POV: Liora
My father spoke about the Offering the way he spoke about everything: slowly, with the grave authority of a man who had confused volume with wisdom. His words carried across the square, touching every face I knew, none that knew me back.
I stood at the edge of the crowd because that was where they preferred me. Two women shifted when I arrived, pulling their daughters closer, as though whatever I carried might be catching.
"The Offering is sacred," he said. "It has protected this village for generations, and we give our devotion to the deep."
I bit my cheek to keep my mouth shut. Devotion, he called it, a generous word for sending girls to drown for gods no one had ever seen.
"It is an honor to be chosen." Calla's tone carried from the middle rows, bright and careless. "The gods of the deep see the worthy among us."
She stood with her arm through Jorin's, his broad shoulders angled toward her, his hand resting on her waist. My sister, freshly promised to the boy who had promised me first, wearing her new claim the way she wore everything — effortlessly, publicly, aimed at me.
"Liora," she called, loud enough for the rows around her to hear. Jorin's jaw tightened, but he did not stop her. "I almost did not see you. You have a talent for disappearing."
My fists tightened at my sides. If I opened my mouth now, I would hand her exactly what she wanted — a scene at our father's ceremony, another mark against the difficult daughter.
"Twenty-two and not a single offer," Calla continued, turning to the woman beside her with practiced pity. "Even on matchmaking day, no one came. My mother says it runs in the blood because Grandmother was the same. Broken under the skin."
My chest went rigid, the heat rising fast, because my sister was speaking about the woman whose body was barely cold in the ground. The woman who had raised me when our parents could not be bothered.
"Funny," I said, and the words cut clean across the square before my survival instinct could stop it. "The gods seem to see every girl in this village except you, Calla. Either the blessing is very selective, or our father is."
Her lips parted, but nothing came out, just the wet click of a mouth caught empty.
"Though if the sea did take you," I said, holding her gaze, "it would probably spit you back. Even the deep has standards."
The silence was not reverent, just the held breath of a village watching the elder's own daughter cut his favorite to the bone. My father's eyes found mine, and the recalculation in them was small and cold and final.
I touched the medallion at my throat and hummed the three notes beneath my breath.
The Offering bonfire roared, throwing shadows that twisted every face, and the shaman circled in her painted mask with a wet leather bag that smelled of brine.
I stepped into the line of unmarried girls, most of them years younger, clustered together, not one standing close enough to touch me.
One by one, the shaman approached with a small bag of stones. Each girl reached in, pulled a stone, showed it blank, and relief cascaded through families, mothers pulling daughters close.
Then a girl stepped forward who should not have been there. Small and birdlike, barely old enough to qualify, her hands shaking so badly she could hardly reach the bag.
The girl pulled the stone free, and the sea-sign stared up from its surface — the rune of the deep, carved dark and deliberate. Her mother's knees buckled.
The sound the woman made was low and animal. I knew it. I had made it five nights ago, holding my grandmother's hand as her breath thinned to nothing.
The girl looked at the stone, then at the crowd, searching for someone to explain why the world had stopped. She was shaking so hard the rune blurred in her fingers, and her wrists were thinner than the rope they would bind them with.
She did not understand yet, but she would. Soon she would understand that no one in this crowd was going to move.
That the relief coming off the other mothers was so thick I could taste it — gratitude that the stone had chosen a girl who was not theirs.
She was someone's child, and they were going to let her go.
I took the stone from her hand and held it high enough for the firelight to catch the rune. "I will go instead."
The square went silent. Not the reverent silence of a village honoring its traditions, but the brittle silence of people watching someone step off a cliff.
My father wanted to decide what happened to me, and I had decided first. I would leave this village tonight — not on the road I had imagined, but on the sea, and whatever waited on the other side was better than another morning in this house.
"The gods accept a willing offering," my father said, and his tone was steady and his eyes were dry. "The courage of this woman honors us all."
Calla smiled from behind his shoulder, wider now, satisfied. Jorin looked elsewhere, but she did not.
"I accept," I said, the way every girl before me had said it, the ritual words that tasted of nothing. "I give myself to the deep." Not one of them met my eyes.
By the time the women came to prepare me, the sun had already begun to set.
They braided my hair with salt-stiff fingers and dressed me in white thin enough to see through, and none of them spoke to me.
"You can keep that," one of them said, nodding at the medallion. "It is too small to matter."
My hand closed around it. "It matters to me." She shrugged and turned away, already finished with me.
They led me to a boat, and the oldest fisherman muttered as I climbed in. "Do not speak or look at us. Whatever happens on that island is between you and the deep."
"Touching," I said. "I will remember you in my prayers." He flinched, and good, because I wanted him to flinch.
The island rose from the mist: dark rock, vegetation clinging to cliffs, a shape on the ridge that might have been a ruin.
Whatever was here, the village had always known. My father had always known, and he let his own daughter climb into this boat.
One of the men found the cave mouth without searching, because he had done this before. They pushed me toward the dark.
I turned to the fisherman whose boat I had spent one full moon repairing in the cold rain. "You could stop this," I said.
He did not meet my eyes. "The gods require —" He stopped, jaw working around the rest.
"The gods are not here," I said, and the words held steady even though nothing else did. "Just men too afraid to say no."
They shoved me inside, and the ground was sharp and slick with water. My foot caught stone, and I went forward hard, my head meeting rock with a sound that fractured thought itself.
Behind me, the grinding scrape of boulder across the entrance, men sealing me in, and then nothing but darkness.
And through the ringing and the fractured dark — a touch on my leg. Warm, not the cold stone, not the damp sea air, but alive and deliberate, moving up my calf with a patience that made my stomach drop.
I tried to open my eyes and could not. The warmth stayed and moved up my body, patient and careful, and the dark swallowed everything else.