She did not answer. She did not know how.
The ship shuddered, sinking below the surface of the sea. The sailor clung to the rail, watching her. “Perhaps you are stronger than you think, Daughter of Aigir. Can you not draw on the power that is your birthright?” Sorrow came into his face. “If you do not save me, save yourself. Do not let her rule you. Do not let her win.”
And then a wave crashed over his head, and he was lost from sight.
Endain dove into the sea and caught his arm, dragging him to the surface again. His body was heavy and cold, but she held onto him. He coughed and sputtered in the air that brought his kind life. She was relieved. She didn’t want him to be dead. She didn’t want him to join the mass before her mother’s throne.
“I will bear you to land,” she told him. “I will spare your life, if I am able.”
She swam with him a little ways, and knew she could not carry him. So she reached deep into herself and caught the thread of the sea god’s power, and with it called down a lesser star from heaven. Endain knew nothing of ships, so she shaped the star into a whale, huge and mighty. She climbed onto the whale’s back and laid the sailor down beside her. He stirred, and opened his eyes, and began to weep.
“Why are you weeping?” she asked him. He hadn’t wept before. She didn’t understand why he did now.
“I am overwhelmed by your mercy, lady.”
“Do not thank me yet,” said Endain. “The moon still shines in heaven. My mother has not called me back down into her hellish Hall.”
“Perhaps she has no charge to call you,” said the sailor. “Not until you must bear the nets.”
“We must hope that that is so.”
The whale bore them south through the cold sea. The crescent moon slid slowly down the rim of the sky, until it disappeared altogether.
Nothing happened. Endain was not seized by the curse. The wind blew through her hair and she looked at the sailor and was undone by his wisdom, and her own foolishness.
“All these centuries I have acted the slave without claiming the scant bit of freedom allowed me.”
“You did not know,” the sailor told her. “And neither did I. It was only a guess. A wish.”
“Then it has been granted.” Endain smiled at him.
He smiled back. She felt it, pricking at her heart.
So the whale carried them long through the waters of the sea, and at every crescent moon Endain did her duty, singing to the night. But the sailor bound a cloth about her mouth and plugged his ears, so her music did him no harm.
At last they reached the shores of Endahr, and Endain sent the whale out into the sea, bidding him to return when she called him back to her.
Then Endain stood with the sailor on the shore, the wind clawing at her hair and the sea lapping at her heels. “You are saved,” she told him. “What will you do now?” And her heart trembled, for she loved him, and feared he would leave her.
But the sailor raised one hand to touch the face of the sea god’s daughter. “Would you think me a beggar if I asked you to be my wife?”
Endain was filled up with joy. “If you are a beggar, then I am a thief, for I’ve stolen you away from the sea.”
And he laughed and kissed her under the wide sky, and she went with him to his village, where they were wed with the music of bells.
Endain was content, though she was seized sometimes with a sharp longing for her home. On those days, she strode down to the sea and wept awhile upon the sand, stirring her feet into the water, drawing on the strength of her father. But when she had quenched her longing, she turned to see the sailor waiting for her, his hand outstretched, a question in his eyes.
“I thought I had lost you,” he would say, as she left the sea and stepped once more into his arms.
“I would never leave you of my own accord,” she would answer. “I love you far too much for that.”
The sailor dreaded the day when the sea would take her back from him, but he never spoke of it to her.
Every month, when the crescent moon rose into the sky, Endain would sing in the tiny house she shared with the sailor. She bound her own mouth willingly. She stuffed cotton into his ears. And he held her as she sang, tears streaming down his face and hers, for the power of her music moved them both.
A year passed in this manner, and Endain and the sailor lived in happiness, sorrow touching them only rarely. It happened that one month, when the moon had risen and set and Endain ceased her singing, that she wept more than usual, and the sailor looked into her eyes and asked what ailed her.
Then she wiped the tears from her face. “Oh, my heart, the ninth year is approaching, and already I feel the pull of the sea. I must return to the doom that my mother put upon me, and I know she will bind me tighter than before. I know I will not be able to come back to you.”
The sailor looked at her, and knew there was yet something more.
“I must leave you, and the child growing within me.”
Then the sailor’s heart broke, because he had not known about the child, and because he knew she spoke the truth. He had counted the years, too. He had hoped he counted wrong, but he had not. “Perhaps she has forgotten you. Perhaps she will leave you in peace.”
“Perhaps,” said Endain, but she did not believe it.
The crescent moons waxed and waned, and on the eve of the ninth year, when Endain would be called upon to man the nets with her sisters, she bore the sailor a daughter in their little house. The child had her father’s dark eyes and her mother’s hair, the frothy pale color of seafoam.
A moment only, Endain held her daughter with the sailor beside her, before she felt the pull of the curse, stronger than ever before. She kissed her daughter, and laid her in the sailor’s arms. And then she kissed him too, passionate and long.
“I love you, oh my heart, but the sea is calling me now. I must answer, or my mother will come, and find me here, and kill you both. Four hundred more years of my curse I can bear, but your deaths I cannot. Keep her. Hide her from the sea and from her birthright. Hide her from my mother, lest her and those after her be bound by my fate. Promise me.”
“I promise,” said the sailor, his face wracked with grief.
Endain’s heart broke, but she left the little house, her husband and her daughter, and strode down to the shore of the sea.