Teela knew she’d become as rigid as Mantis. Her heart was racing in her chest and her body was tingling with unpleasant awareness. A sensation of foreign hatred and despair was seeping from the hooded woman and into her, and it was all Teela could do to remain standing. She wanted to contort into herself and die on the muddy ground beneath her feet at that moment, if only to put an end to the agonizing emotions assailing her entire being.

  But, more than anything, Teela wanted to see what Mantis would do with all of that rage. She needed to confirm, with irrevocable certainty, that she really was as bad as she seemed.

  In what felt like the blink of an eye, Mantis made her move. None of them were quick enough to match her pace or even to follow her exact movements with their eyes. It was too unexpected and too fast to understand, at first.

  She jumped sideways, almost colliding with the front-facing wall of the nearest building, and raised her hands to pry open a hole in the deteriorating wooden shutters of its sole window. There was no glass underneath, Teela saw, when Mantis ripped out several thick boards of the shutter panels with her bare hands and reached into the space inside with an arm.

  Through the gaping hole that was created, Teela was able to see the two male figures that quickly fell to the ground with seemingly no cause. But she knew better than to believe that. Mantis had been so fast, so much swifter than ever before, that her links had emerged and disappeared almost invisibly. In less time than it took to follow an event with one’s eyes, Mantis had extinguished two lives.

  Then it got much worse.

  Mantis was like an animal. Her breathing was audible and pained, as if she was injured, while she worked to rip out the remaining shutter boards. When the opening was wide enough, she climbed in and disappeared into the dimly-lit room.

  A forge burned in the far corner of the room and lit the small space unevenly. A rack of metal tools and one with horseshoes covered the inner walls, and a table laden with various sizes of pots and pans spanned the middle of the room. In front of it, a man had fallen with his neck twisted to the side. Mantis pounced on him and picked him up in her arms like he weighed no more than a sack of grain. She came over to the window and pushed him through legs-first. Then, she went to collect her second victim. It was a boy.

  He’d died beside the anvil, holding a hammer. He was younger than Teela, perhaps twelve or thirteen. Mantis reached him and, as she’d done with his father, picked him up to bring him over to the window.

  When both of her victims were on the muddy ground, Mantis jumped out and stood by the bodies for a prolonged moment, looking down at what she’d done.

  There was silence for what seemed like a lifetime. Teela was burning with stabbing pain and anguish, most Mantis’s but some belonging to herself. She could not look away from the youth’s paralyzed face, from the macabre expression he’d worn when he died. His eyes were partly open, as was his mouth. His hair was black, like Teela’s, and curly.

  He could not have been a bad man. He’d not been a man at all.

  A gasp.

  All four of them who’d been standing by the corpses lifted their gazes at the same time to confirm, horror-stricken, that the worst thing that could have happened was happening.

  The mother had come to see what all the noise was about. She stood at the inner door that separated the workshop from the rest of the house with a small child held in her arms. A little boy, no older than two.

  The woman’s eyes found Mantis through the window’s opening, focused on her red mouth for a long moment, and then flooded with tears. She said nothing. Her knees wobbled and gave out, and she fell to the ground on a low heap, her arms folding tightly inward to cradle the infant in the space between her chest and her bent head. Her long tresses of black hair fell over to cover her face and her child. Her shoulders began to shake with silent sobs.

  With terrible dismay, Teela peeled her gaze away from that devastating sight and saw that Mantis was moving again. She picked up the boy in her arms, looked down at him for the duration of a long breath, and then raised her eyes to Yilenn. The siren looked crushed. Her red eyebrows were knit and trembling and her lips were slightly downturned. She caught Mantis’s meaning and, without a word, went over to pick up her burden in her own slender arms.

  Mantis stooped to collect her second kill and, with the siren at her side, started moving away from the home she’d destroyed without even a second glance.

  Teela was in a state of horrified incredulity. She felt her feet move and start following after the women. She was vaguely aware that Leroh paced dumbfoundedly beside her, and that many folk had come to watch them from open windows and doors. As, Teela was starting to realize, was common with Mantis, nobody dared to approach them or to say anything. They knew what walked among them, and they understood their own impotence against it.

  The horses were near where they’d left them, untouched. No one had dared to hitch them, so they’d been left to wander the streets freely. At a whistle from Mantis, her stallion came to meet her, and Clover followed his lead.

  Both bodies were raised by the straight-faced God servants up onto the black horse’s back unceremoniously and, as the stallion started moving, Teela could not look away from the unnatural way their limbs dangled down limply. It brought forth the image of Mantis’s rabbits hung at her saddle during their journey.

  That was all these people were to her. Food for the Gods.

  Mantis walked them all through the streets in the direction of the shore.

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  Leroh was numb. His body felt like a distant part of himself that moved on its own. His knowledge of the world around him was hazy, misted by a light blurriness as if he were in a dream.

  They made their way to the rocky line of separation between the land and the Sea leading their horses by the reins. No one said anything. There was nothing to say.

  Leroh wanted, with more intensity than ever before, to be at home. He wanted to lie down on his straw-stuffed mattress and be engulfed by the familiar scent of safety. He wanted to see his friends, to be told a crude joke by Kird and laugh alongside Tem at his cousin’s tasteless humor. He wanted to eat a warm meal of porridge sweetened with honey and feel the comforting weight of its richness filling his belly to satiation.

  Mother would berate him, hurt him. And Teela. He wanted, too, for that to occur and run its course so he could put it behind him. He longed to be able to skip the next few days of pain and jump straight to that point in the near future where his life and that of the Mantis would split forever.

  Standing there by the ominous waters of the Sea’s realm, Leroh made a promise to himself and resolved to keep it no matter what. He swore, before the all-seeing eyes of the God that had almost come to claim him, that he would take better care of his sister. He would put more effort into Teela’s upbringing, and truly strive to perform his duty as a son and a brother by seeing to her happiness as well as her physical well-being.

  If Leroh had been as attentive as he should have every single day without fail, if he’d tried more sincerely to keep his oath to his family, none of this would have ever happened to him. Teela had only sought to escape their bubble of security to get his attention. He’d stubbornly always refused to give it to her. For most of her life, he’d made a point of ignoring her unless it was strictly necessary to interfere in her life, be it with their mother or with the strangers and tavern-goers his sister so loved to harass. Whenever Teela got too close to danger, he’d been there to do the bare minimum, but he never truly strove to appease and understand her, to get to the bottom of her behavior and devise a solution. Like a boy, he’d felt annoyed by her constant disobedience. He’d thought it childish of her to break all rules of proper conduct in an attempt to be seen, to be cared for. But he’d been the childish one all along.

  His sister had no one.

  Teela didn’t have friends. The boys and girls her age excluded her, and she’d never shown much interest in them, either. She had no other siblings to rely on, and, in all honesty, Mother hated her. She disdained Teela much more than she did Leroh. For her disobedience, and her lack of appreciation for what she was given, and her bothersome conduct, Mother despised her.

  Leroh had, too.

  Now here they were.

  If Teela had been a happy child, if she’d had the benefit of a supportive brother, someone to guide her with care and love, perhaps she would not have chosen the first monster that came along to follow away into the unknown. Certainly, she would have cared enough about Leroh to think twice about putting him through everything he’d had to go through because of her.

  But, when they resumed their old lives, Leroh would make sure to pay more attention to her. He’d talk to her more, and explain what needed explaining with tolerance rather than irritation. He’d figure out a way to make her feel content with her simple and respectable life. It could not be so hard, if he set his mind to it, to decipher what she needed in order to be happy, and to help her acquire it. A friend, a suitor, a distraction from the mundane, any of those things could greatly improve her quality of life. Leroh knew some girls her age enjoyed crafting bracelets and other sorts of accessories out of reeds as a pastime. Perhaps he could nudge her toward an inane and hopefully entertaining activity such as that.

  In his optimistic pondering, Leroh had been facing away from what transpired at the beach, but when he heard the sudden splashing of water, he instinctively spun to see what it was. His own defensive reaction betrayed him. He saw the Mantis carrying the larger man, the father, in her arms into the water. She was fully clothed, only having removed her cloak and boots. Beside her, the siren was undressed, with just the cover of her light shift. In her arms, she carried the young lad.

  Leroh could not watch, and he could not look away. He was stuck in an inertia of pained indecision, observing the scene that was the payment for his life and trying to convince himself that he’d forget all about it, that the image would not remain engraved in his mind for the rest of his days.

  Soon, the women went from knee-deep to waist-deep in the water, and when only their upper torsos were visible from the shore, the Mantis approached Yilenn and handed over her load. The siren was motionless for a time, looking down at the boy’s face. When she finally raised her gaze to the Mantis, she nodded her bright-red head once and then disappeared beneath the infinity of frothing waves.

  The Mantis stayed there, immersed in the Sea, for a while. Then, to Leroh’s shock, she started cleaning herself. In a bizarrely methodical way, she used her small hands to rinse every visible inch of herself with frantic intensity. She reached up to scrub her face and neck. Then she scratched her scalp for a long time and rinsed her short locks of hair by submerging her whole head under the water. For what seemed like too long, she stayed down there, and Leroh even began to fear that she’d not surface at all, that she’d been taken by the ocean somehow, but her head of dark amber eventually poked out to the surface.

  Leroh did not imagine Yilenn swimming away with the lives that had bought his survival. He did not dare to wonder whether she’d reach her God in time to deliver her cargo, or if it all could have been in vain. He tried to let her go from his mind as fleetly as she’d abandoned them to deal with what they’d experienced.

  The Mantis made her way back to the shore and donned her cloak and boots first. Afterward, she collected Yilenn’s clothes and strange shoes from the rocky ground where they’d fallen, mindlessly discarded, and squeezed them into her horse’s pannier.

  “Take us home now,” Teela said. Her voice was low and gravelly. She did not sound like herself, Leroh thought with distress. He turned to assess his sister and found her face set in an expression of disgust very unlike her.

  She received no answer. The Mantis only stopped to contemplate her for a moment, and there was anguish in her beautiful face. Her blood-red lips were pressed into a flat line and her hands were clenched into twitching fists at her sides.

  Then, she raised a foot to her stallion’s stirrup and jumped up to mount him.

  “Are you taking us home or not?” Teela yelled the question.

  When the Mantis started riding away without a word, inland-bound, Leroh saw no other choice but to follow after her.