PodCastle 621: A Salt and Sterling Tongue

* Author : Emma Osborne

* Narrator : Megan Leigh

* Host : Summer Fletcher

* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh

*

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Previously published by Uncanny Magazine.

Rated R.

A Salt and Sterling Tongue

By Emma Osborne

I found my dying boy curled up in a pile of straw wet with his blood. Seamus rolled over as I entered the barn, and I saw then that he’d chewed his fingers down to the first knuckle.

I gasped.

“I can taste my King in my wet,” he said, rocking forward, naming his lost Merling lord. Seamus could barely keep himself up on what was left of his hands and his knees. I crouched and moved closer and he fell forward onto forearms thin as sticks.

Seamus’ teeth shone through the gore that coated him from nose to navel, and he’d bitten off a few of the scales that dotted the skin of his upper arms. One was stuck to his chin with blood.

“He’s stopped singing, but I can hear him in the waves and in my blood, my lord, my king.”

My youngest boy was the one of the unlucky few who’d heard the music of the Merling King while out collecting cockles, who came home the next morning shivering and soaked and vomiting up seawater, the salt crystalising in his scant beard, newborn silver scales peeping out of his skin.

“Sera, you can’t tell me you don’t hear that sweet melody?” He hummed a few bars of something soft and haunting.

I shook my head, too hurt to speak. I wanted to be angry, but who was there to fight?

Seamus hadn’t come back to himself, come back to me, even after the dying screams of the Merling King rang out across leagues of seawater when our valiant Queen drove her sword into his chest. No, he stayed as the others did: snarling and ready to knock down anyone who stood between them and the sea, ready to drink down salt and pray and weep along with the song of the Merling King, he who would drown us all. He’d become a boy who’d stand in the cold water if he could, would cup it in his hands and swallow it down even though it came back up. A boy who refused food, cursing the taste of dust and dirt.

I’d tried talking. I’d tried shouting. I tried bringing him an old shirt that still smelled like the lavender I’d tucked into his drawers. The overworked healer, our good lad Ned, tried every powder and tincture and smoke he could think of. Nothing shifted my boy or any of the others. Folklore and field medicine counted for naught. All Seamus did was weep until his eyes were so swollen that he could barely see.

“Seamus, son, do you know me?” I knelt down before him, smelling his dirty body and his waste, hating that he’d not let me touch him with unsalted water, or with a warm damp cloth.

He laughed then.

“I don’t understand why you won’t let me go to him, to swim and swim until I land on his island, until I am taken in by his arms,” he said. His eyes were dark, wide, and as reckless as the smash of wave on rock. “You always pull me back, saying no, saying please.”

“Please, Seamus. Come back to me.” My voice shook more than I’d like to admit.

“The salt on my lips is what keeps the dream alive,” he continued. “All I want is to press my mouth into his shoulder, to have his seafoam eyes look into mine, for him to tell me that I’m good, yes, that I’m his.”

“The Merling King is dead,” I said. “You heard his screams, I heard them.