SSCS 02: Installment 10 of 32
How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
This is Installment 10 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!
Previously…
Then, gently, a weight came to rest on the exposed side of Mina’s neck, the Other One touching her, still staying where Mina couldn’t see. Next, a slow, soft stroke downward toward her throat, the touch turning faintly sharper as Gran-Tom’s claws were let to curl in. Mina couldn’t even guess what Hedwin was thinking now. Probably he just saw gran-Tom, standing over her acolyte, maybe even as though the old priestess was protecting her. Around the compulsion, bile tried to burn up the back of Mina’s throat.
…How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
Installment 10: 19.0720
“Where have the roses got to, Mina?” The words were hissed and sibilant, slow and scratching. In a dark room, the Other One’s voice was like a shiver walking up your spine. Now, in the open air of morning, it skittered over Mina’s skin and skirled away a half-distance, as though it was really wind stirring the leaves and pebbles making the words. “Where are the tea things? and the gloves for climbing the brambles? Where are the scratches on your shins that show me that you care? The Moon will be riding low tonight, Mina, and our throat must be warmed for singing. You wouldn’t want us to mis-chant our song, would you Mina?”
“Of course not, gran-Tom.” Mina’s voice was still forced out sweetly, her body forced to sway into the sharpness of the Other One’s touch, like a puppy nuzzling for forgiveness. Something soft and wet slipped along her shoulder, and she became aware of at least one of gran-Tom’s tentacles looped around her arm there and writhing slowly down her back beneath her shift. Another oozed across her toes as more words were pulled out in her voice. “But there are no roses to be found today, alas. Someone else has eaten every one.”
With her eyes cast down, Mina could only watch the shadows, and they said very little. Slow movements and strange shapes of something near at hand. The kraken had been silent these long moments and she trembled, wondering if she would see its shadow swooping in on them at any moment, or if it would move too fast to see, if gran-Tom’s puppetted tentacles were only a precursor to what was coming next. And then the tentacle looped around her arm slipped low enough to see, and Mina sucked in a startled breath at the sight of translucent turquoise brushed with pink and gold.
Too startled to remember her caution, Mina jerked her eyes – the only part of her not held fast – upward to see the dark edge of gran-Tom’s shoulder, weedy green and oyster black, and past it the full bulk of the kraken looming above and behind. Its tentacles were splayed everywhere, surely wrapping gran-Tom too, and so very close it seemed like the limp and weighty crest of a wave poised just over Mina’s head, waiting.
“Well, shall we pull the roses out of their intestines then?” gran-Tom asked, and it was gran-Tom’s voice this time, the scratchy sibilance gone to be replaced by something still scratchy but also vaguely musical, in an anciently dusty sort of way.
Mina could turn her head now, could look gran-Tom in the eye and see the old priestess’ grin hidden there, even as more kraken tentacles looped down around her shoulders, like deadly curtains.