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She grips at her throat, falls silent.
"We should pray, or sing," suggests Sigfrid Jonsdatter, and the others look at her poisonously. They have been trapped apart for three days, and all they wish to talk of, all they can speak of, is the storm.
The women of Vardø are looking, all of them, for signs. The storm was one. The bodies, still to come, will be seen as another. But now Gerda speaks of the single tern she saw wheeling above the whale.
"In figures of eight," she says, her ruddy hands arcing through the air. "One, two, three, six times I counted."
"Eight by six means not much at all," says Kirsten dismissively. She is standing beside Pastor Gursson's pulpit with its engraved stand. Her large hand rests upon it, the broad thumb working over the carved shapes her only sign of nerves, or grief.
Her husband is among the drowned, and all her children were buried before they breathed. Maren likes her, has often gone about her tasks with her, but now she sees Kirsten as the others always have: as a woman apart. She is not standing behind the pulpit, but she may as well be: she watches them with a minister's consideration.
"The whale though," says Edne Gunnsdatter, face swollen so tight by tears it looks bruised. "It swam upside down. I saw its white belly shining under the waves."
"It was feeding," says Kirsten.
"It was luring the men," says Edne. "It set the shoal about
Hornøya six times, to be sure we 'd see."
"I saw that," nods Gerda, crossing herself. "I saw that too." "You did not," says Kirsten.
"I saw the blood Mattis coughed upon the table a week ago,"
says Gerda. "It has never scrubbed off."
"I can sand that out for you," says Kirsten smoothly.
"The whale was wrong," says Toril. Her daughter is burrowed against her side so tight she might have been sewed to her hip by Toril's famously neat stitches. "If what Edne says is true, it was sent."
"Sent?" says Sigfrid, and Maren sees Kirsten turn a thankful eye upon her, thinking she has found an ally. "Such a thing is possible?"
A sigh comes from the back of the kirke, and the whole room turns towards Diinna, but she tilts her head back, eyes closed, the brown skin of her throat gleaming gold in the candlelight.
"The Devil works darkly," says Toril, and her daughter presses her face beneath her shoulder, cries out in fear. Maren wonders what terrors Toril has woven into her two surviving children these past three days. "He has power set above all but God 's. He could send such a thing. Or it could be called."
"Enough." Kirsten breaks the silence before it can deepen. "This will help nothing."
Maren wants to join her in her certainty, but all she can think of is the shape, the sound that brought her to the window. She had thought it was a bird but now it looms bigger and more unwieldy, five-finned and upside down. Unnatural. It is impossible to stop it leaking into the corner of her vision, even in the blessed light of the kirke.
Mamma stirs, as if from sleep, though the candles have been reflecting off her unblinking eyes since they sat down. When she speaks, Maren can hear the toll silence has taken on her voice.
"The night Erik was born," says Mamma. "There was a red point of light in the sky."
"I remember," says Kirsten, softly.
"And me," says Toril. And me, thinks Maren, though she was only two.
"I followed it through the sky until it dropped in the sea," says Mamma, lips barely moving. "It lit the whole water with blood. He was marked—it was meant from that day." She moans and covers her face. "I should never have let him to sea."
This brings a fresh wave of wailing from the women. Even Kirsten can do nothing to quell it. The candles stutter as there is a rush of cold air into the room, and Maren turns in time to see Diinna striding from the kirke. What words Maren could offer, as she puts her arm about Mamma, would be bitter comfort: There was nothing for him but the sea.
Excerpted from The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave. Copyright © 2020 by Kiran Millwood Hargrave. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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