Beyond the Pale: A fantasy anthology by Nancy Holder, Kami García, Saladin Ahmed, Jim Butcher, Jane Yolen, Heather Brewer, Rachel Caine, Gillian Philip, Peter Beagle Read Free Book Online Page B

is?”
    “I always keep my word,” answered Paikea,
and sank from sight. Kokinja never saw him again.
    But that evening, as the red sun was
melting into the green horizon, and the birds and fish that feed at night were
setting about their business, a young man came walking out of the water toward
Kokinja. She knew him immediately, and her first instinct was to embrace him.
Then her heart surged fiercely within her, and she leaped to her feet,
challenging him. “So! At last you have found the courage to face your own
daughter. Look well, sea-king, for I have no fear of you, and no worship.” She
started to add, “Nor any love, either,” but that last caught in her throat,
just as had happened to her mother Mirali when she scolded a singing boy for
invading her dreams.
    The Shark God spoke the words for her.
“You have no reason in the world to love me.” His voice was deep and quiet, and
woke strange echoes in her memory of such a voice overheard in candlelight in
the sweet, safe place between sleep and waking. “Except, perhaps, that I have
loved your mother from the moment I first saw her. That will have to serve as
my defense, and my apology as well. I have no other.”
    “And a pitiful enough defense it is,”
Kokinja jeered. “I asked Paikea why a god should ever choose to father a child
with a mortal, and he would not answer me. Will you?” The Shark God did not
reply at once, and Kokinja stormed on. “My mother never once complained of your
neglect, but I am not my mother. I am grateful for my half-heritage only in
that it enabled me to seek you out, hide as you would. For the rest, I spit on
my ancestry, my birthright, and all else that connects me to you. I just came
to tell you that.”
    Having said this, she began to weep, which
infuriated her even more, so that she actually clenched her fists and pounded
the Shark God’s shoulders while he stood still, making no response. Shamed as
she was, she ceased both activities soon enough, and stood silently facing her
father with her head high and her wet eyes defiant. For his part, the Shark God
studied her out of his own unreadable black eyes, moving neither to caress nor
to punish her, but only—as it seemed to Kokinja—to understand the
whole of what she was. And to do her justice, she stared straight back, trying
to do the same.
    When the Shark God spoke at last, Mirali
herself might not have known his voice, for the weariness and grief in it. He
said, “Believe as you will, but until your mother came into my life, I had no
smallest desire for children, neither with beings like myself, nor with any
mortal, however beautiful she might be. We do find humans dangerously appealing,
all of us, as is well-known—perhaps precisely because of their short
lives and the delicacy of their construction—and many a deity, unable to
resist such haunting vulnerability, has scattered half-divine descendants all
over your world. Not I; there was nothing I could imagine more contemptible
than deliberately to create such a child, one who would share fully in neither
inheritance, and live to curse me for it, as you have done.” Kokinja flushed
and looked down, but offered no contrition for anything she had said. The Shark
God said mildly, “As well you made no apology. Your mother has never once lied
to me, nor should you.”
    “Why should I ever apologize to you?”
Kokinja flared up again. “If you had no wish for children, what are my brother
and I doing here?” Tears threatened again, but she bit them savagely back. “You
are a god—you could always have kept us from being born! Why are we
here ?”
    To her horror, her legs gave way under her
then, and she sank to her knees, still not weeping, but finding herself
shamefully weak with rage and confusion. Yet when she looked up, the Shark God
was kneeling beside her, for all the world like a playmate helping her to build
a sand castle. It was she who stared at him without expression now, while he
regarded her