Chapter 1 – Banished
The wind that swept the Oruji coast carried no mercy. It hissed through the thorn fences, rattled the drying fish racks, and stole the warmth from the skin of the man walking the clan's outer path.
Kayo kept his eyes forward, his jaw set like a man facing a firing line. Behind him, the voices were not loud — no Oruji would waste the breath to curse an osama aloud — but they were constant, a muttering tide of fear and contempt. "Death shadow," they called him. "Curse-bearer." He had heard It all before, but each repetition drove the point deeper: he no longer belonged.
At the edge of the camp, the eldest of the council stood waiting beside a post of carved driftwood. On it hung a single strip of red cloth — the mark of exile. No words were offered, no farewell rites spoken. One of the elders lifted the strip, tied it around his forearm, and stepped back. The red would tell every clan along the coast that Kayo was without tribe, without shelter, without protection.
He could have fought the sentence. He could have stood before the fire-pit and sworn on the bones of his father. But the truth was heavier than the humiliation — he had failed the hunt. He had loosed an arrow meant for the sand-lion, and in the chaos of the chase, the chieftain's son had fallen instead.
Kayo walked on.
The sand turned darker near the shoreline, damp with the memory of tide. His stomach growled. There would be no more smoked fish, no roasted maize from the clan's storehouse. He would live on what the sea granted — or what he could steal from the careless.
The day bled into dusk, the horizon smearing gold into crimson. Kayo found a cluster of rocks where pools had formed with the ebb. Small crabs, shells, darting slivers of fish — it was enough. He crouched, breaking open a shell with the stone he carried, sucking the salty flesh into his mouth.
It was as he ate that he noticed the stillness. The wind had fallen. The waves rolled in without sound. The air seemed to hold its breath.
Then — a sound that was not a sound.
It came like heat through his blood, like wine through his head — a melody that curled around thought and memory alike, a voice that was both far away and inside his skull. He froze, the crab shell slipping from his fingers.
From the black water, something rose.
At first, he thought it a trick of moonlight: a glimmer of pale skin, the gleam of shells. But then she stepped from the waist of the sea, water falling from her in sheets, and he knew this was no dream.
Her skin was the deep bronze of wet sand lit by dawn. Her hair fell in ropes of dark silk, threaded with shells that clicked softly in the breeze. Around her waist lay a sash of woven kelp and beads, but from the hips down, the moon caught on the silver-black sweep of a tail, scales shifting like oil over water.
Kayo's breath caught. He had heard the stories of the Adunma Tide-Sisters since childhood — sea spirits who could drown a man with a kiss or bless him with pearls beyond count. The Oruji feared them, but the old songs whispered that some men had loved them and been loved in return.
"You are far from your fires, landborn," she said.
Her lips moved, but the words slid into him the same way the song had, sinking beneath the ribs, touching something deep.
"I live where I can," he said, his voice low, unsure whether he spoke aloud or only thought it.
She tilted her head, studying him as one might study a strange shell. "And would you die where you must?"
He felt the pull then — not from her eyes, though they were green as river jade, nor from her body, though it was shaped with the grace of both woman and wave — but from the promise that vibrated in her voice. A promise that the sea itself might claim him and make him part of its endless story.
"What is your name?" he asked.
"Sirayi," she said. "Last of the Adunma Tide-Sisters. And you, man without clan, have walked into my tide."
A small wave lapped at his knees. Her hand lifted — slim, strong fingers, webbed faintly between — and brushed his palm. The touch was shock-cold, yet the heat that flared through him was almost painful. He knew then that he would not step back, no matter how deep the water rose.
Behind him, faint on the night air, came the beat of the Oruji drums — a rhythm for warning, or for summoning hunters to war. It did not matter. The only rhythm he heard now was the slow, certain beat of the tide, and the quiet song curling around his thoughts.
The moon rose higher, silvering the wet stones, the curve of her shoulder, the gleam of her tail. Sirayi's gaze did not leave his.
"You will come to me," she said. Not a question.
Kayo felt the truth of it sink into him like a harpoon. And though he had been cast from the firelight of his people, though the sea was a thing of fear, he found himself smiling.
Because in that moment, he knew that exile was not the end. It was the beginning — and whatever waited in Sirayi's tide, he would face it, even if it drowned him.
The drums faded. The waves whispered. And in the hollow between heartbeats, he heard the mermaid's song again, shorter now, but sharper, like the promise of teeth hidden in a kiss.