“Your stitches are wrong.” 

I stared down at the lure fish in my lap, gutted from throat to anus and half-sewn up again. Jutting from its mouth, the neck of a wine bottle emerged like a bright blue parasite nestled in the delicate cave of its ribs. A technique I’d copied a thousand times in my childhood, sitting on sand cooled by my father’s shadow. But Maurat was right. It was the wrong stitch.

“That’s a tailor’s stitch,” she said. Despite all that had happened between us, she still used the familiar form of address. I wasn’t sure which was worse: that hanging-on of empty closeness, or the idea that she might push me into the formal address as if we had never been engaged at all.

“A double-cross will hold the flesh together,” she said, turning her own fish to show me the neat black threads marching up its abdomen. Its eyes goggled at my stupidity. “Would you like me to show you?”

“It won’t need to hold for long.”

I tried and failed to keep the petulance from my voice; Maurat’s eyebrows rose, and shame sewed its dull needles through my gut. But evidently I was not worth arguing with, and she returned to lacing bottles into dead fish without commenting any further on my technique. After all, I was Avesani—one of the last, now—and she was not. Inducted as far as an outsider could go into my family’s labyrinthine hierarchies without the consummation of marriage. And whose fault was that?

But she knew the stitches and I did not. She had stayed, and I—

We finished with the last of our lures in silence. They lay in the basket, flies pacing the dome of wire mesh, drawn to the smell of rot.

“The Patrons were last spotted between the third and fifth pharos,” Maurat said as we loaded our canoe. “About an hour’s journey.”

My tongue pressed hard against the backs of my teeth, as much at her tone as the epithet itself. They’re not gods, I wanted to argue. They don’t deserve your reverence. But I knew how Maurat would take it, the look of pity she’d give me. So I stayed silent as we pushed our tri-rigged canoe out into the shallows of the blood-warm sea, in search of monsters.

Our boat cut through the waves with the ease of a leaping porpoise, pulled by Maurat’s regular strokes and my feeble, uncertain ones. I could thank my time at the inland business college for that inadequacy; for my fumbling stitches and my untanned skin, and the painful falseness of Maurat’s familiar address. 

I had imagined my return quite differently: garnished with academic laurels, ready to revolutionize my family’s business and take my place behind my mother’s driftwood desk. Safe from the sea and what waited within it.

Instead, my arms burned with every stroke of the oar as we pulled out from the sheltered waters of the cove. This entire coastline was Avesani land, claims which stretched back to the age of poets. The sea here had a mind of its own: a cruel mind. Only our navigators could traverse the fickle currents and ever-shifting sandbars off our coasts. Many others had drowned in the attempt, the neat terraces of our coastal vineyards standing vigil over them as they sank.

Without Maurat’s skill, those same currents would crush me against the rocks and my Avesani blood would mingle with the surf as easily as any outsider’s. And yet without me, Maurat could not safely remain in the presence of our benefactors—for I had been inoculated by the mouthful since the day I was pulled free from my caul, and in my blood was the reminder of that first pact between my ancestors and the very same creatures we named our Patrons today. The pact that would, in theory, keep us safe.

For my father, theory had not sufficed. But of course, he was Avesani by marriage alone. And when he went into the water, I should have been there beside him.

We found the Patrons right where Maurat said we would, their presence marked by an oil slick on the waves, water unnaturally flat yet somehow not still. Each was as broad as a merchant’s vessel and thin enough to slide into the slow, warm shallows, furred with cilia and hunting tendrils, its whole underside a pale inverted stomach studded with digesting prey. They came to these shores once a summer, rising from the abyssal rifts where they feasted on the ice-cold blubber of whales and the thrashing limbs of squid. In brighter seas they sucked down the jeweled red flesh of tuna and living mouthfuls of translucent anemone, gorging until they reached our coast to bask in the sun’s alien warmth, sated and indolent, before returning to the depths. I told myself I didn’t fear them, just as I had every harvest season every year of my life. The lie had never felt quite so despicable.

Maurat steered the canoe through the tugging currents until we slid into the Patrons’ orbit. This close, the glassy surface of the water resolved into squirming patterns the eye strained to interpret. My hairs stood on end; a tentative bubble of acid pushed against the top of my stomach, but I clenched my teeth until it settled. No doubt losing my breakfast into our sacred waters was all Maurat expected of me.

The stopper popped free from the amphora of goat’s blood with ease. I poured it into the water to stimulate the Patrons’ appetite and ignored my building headache as their tendrils probed the surface for more of that unfamiliar taste. One by one, I tossed the fish with their secret cargo to those waving threads; one by one, the bottles disappeared into the forest of their gastric folds.

There the wine would wait, aging to perfection on its long voyage through the deep, the crushing pressure and strange facts of the Patrons’ digestion imparting each drop with the scrambled memories of every ocean-thing it consumed. We mixed the Patrons’ wine with aged bottles from our vineyards; even a thimbleful per bottle would do. It was that, not the soil or rain or climate, which gave Avesani wine its savor. 

The trick was getting the bottles back again.

As a child, I’d watched my mother and father slip into the water beside those torpid forms, running their hands over the feathery growths that covered the Patrons’ bodies. Part of me had yearned to join them; the other part, the one that grew up, had huddled in the canoe and shivered with terror. My parents disappeared beneath the rippling curtain of the Patron’s flesh to pry the indigestible debris from their ever-eating stomachs: bones and dry coral and our very own wine bottles, returned to us from their journey through the dark. When my parents broke the surface and passed me the bottles, the glass was so cold it clung to my salty fingers, and their touch filled me with loathing.

In silence, Maurat and I finished our work. A line of goat’s blood rolled down the lip of the amphora to coat the crevices of my palm. Rather than rinse my hand in the stillborn waters where the Patrons surrounded our boat, I let it dry to a tacky discomfort as I gripped the oars anew.

“The Patrons are preparing to leave our shores. It has to be tonight.”

My mother used the formal address. She did not look up from her accountant’s quill as she spoke. A goblet sat by her elbow, undiluted wine black as squid ink; only my family could safely drink it at full strength, its hallucinogenic qualities unstaunched. Since the accident that crushed her legs, she was scarcely without a cup. Its smell blurred my vision with the sting of salt. I wondered what she saw when she brought it to her lips. What she might have been looking for within it.

This was the conversation I had dreaded most, ever since I opened the letter with the grim news that summoned me home. This office was the only place Mother would speak to me now, entrenched behind the bastion of that desk hewn from salt-bleached cedar tossed up on our shores a century ago. Behind her, shelves of the Patron’s wine tinted the sunlight to dusk, their glass warped and studded with calcified barnacles and starfish. Staring at them for too long made the root of my tongue ache. Had I ever truly imagined myself in this room, behind that desk, ensconced in the center of my family’s power?

I licked my dry lips. “Maurat is a far better diver.”

Mother’s eyes rose sharply at that. “I see.”

“You don’t want me in the water. It wouldn’t be safe for either of us.” 

“Maurat is not Avesani,” Mother said, lip curling. I could hear the echo of what she left unsaid: She is also not a coward. “Though I am sure she would risk her life to spare you the difficulty, even after you broke off your engagement—”

“I didn’t break the engagement—”

“Of course not. You merely left her without a word, abandoned your family in the harvest time when we needed you the most.”

“I was trying to save this family! To build something on a foundation of sense, not blood pacts and mysticism—”

“And look what your sense has built for us,” Mother said. “It built your father a tomb. Was it sense, leaving him to be pulled into the Patrons’ stomachs?”

I couldn’t have known—it was never supposed to happen like that—I never wanted—

No. There was nothing, no excuse worth its air. 

“You will go into the water,” she said in the face of my silence. “You are the last scion of our house; the Patrons will accept no one else. This is the one thing that you must do. Retrieve his final memory, or leave and do not come back.”

I could not agree; I could not argue further. I stood there as mute as a waterlogged corpse, until, disgusted, she tore her eyes off me to bow back over her papers.

“I do not hold you responsible for his death.” She spoke to the lines of figures before her, as if trying to convince them. “But I find myself wondering if he blamed you, in the end.”

The words were designed to strike a fatal blow. Perhaps they would have; but I had already turned them on myself, night after night, and so they merely slid into the embrace of a wound already cut to the bone. 

“I suppose we’ll never know,” I replied. Like it was a balm, and not the salt I rubbed daily into my grief.

My mother looked up one final time. “There is one way to know.”

Maurat found me on the beach that night, a bottle of pure wine plunged into the sand a few feet from where the swelling tide laved at the rocks. I’d stolen it from our cellars on the vague idea of choking the horrible stuff down, getting drunk on the waste of it just as much as the wine itself. I could wade into the surf with its icy depths in my veins and try to remember what it meant to be a part of this family. But I hadn’t the stomach for even a taste. 

The full moon washed the tide in silver. The same waters where my mother had birthed me, and where my father taught me how to dive, his hand a gentle guide in the wordless press of water, back when I had known that no bad thing could ever happen to me with the warmth of that broad palm on my shoulder. 

By the time Maurat’s footsteps shushed across the beach to me, the wine bottle’s moon-shadow had swung a long pendulum across the sand. It was a perfect night for the harvest, the very last before the Patrons returned to their unknowable roads through the deep. 

Maurat sat close enough for me to feel the warmth of her strong arm beside mine. Once I would have leaned in, taken comfort in her solidity. Maurat always pursued her desires without fear or hesitation. There had been a time when that fascinated me. Now I could almost hate her for it.

“Did Mother send you?” I said.

Maurat glanced at me sidelong. “Is she the only thing that binds us together now?”

I managed a strangled laugh. I couldn’t even look her in the eyes. “You should go. If she asks, I’ll tell her you tried to talk me into it.”

“You’re full of shit.” 

I blinked. Her tone hadn’t changed at all, but the words startled me into staring at her face, and with a terrible relief, I saw she was angry. I’d been so afraid of her pity.

“You’ve already treated me very badly, you know. You don’t have to make it worse by pushing me away now.”

“I have nothing left to offer you,” I said, spreading my empty hands. “Mother has already as good as adopted you. I’m not your responsibility anymore.” 

“You were always more than that to me.”

“It would be better if that wasn’t the case.”

“Better for me? Or easier for you?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I whispered. It was hard to imagine anything being better or easier ever again. 

“You don’t know,” Maurat repeated, still angry, but smiling a little now. “Well. Here is what I know.”

She turned on me, a riptide of motion, and before I had fully registered her hand gripping my shirtfront and braced for the inevitable slap, I was tasting the salt spray on her chapped lips. Just as quickly it was over, and all I could think was that she must have really meant the familiar address after all. 

“To be clear,” she said, “my motives are hardly selfless.” 

I drew a shaky breath. I had to stay on track. “You can’t marry me.”

“And why not?”

“Because I have to leave again.” That was the fate I couldn’t inflict on her: the thought of Maurat leaving this place, hemmed in on all sides by the uncompromising land, was unbearable. 

Maurat watched me closely. “Your mother will disown you?”

“Unless I walk into her office tomorrow and put a bottle of the Patrons’ wine on her desk.” Which I couldn’t. We both knew that.

“Why do they frighten you so?”

“Is that a serious question? They—” Killed my father. My throat closed around the words, swallowing the untruth in them. She knew I had feared them long before that. “I thought if I went to school, learned how to turn our vineyard into a proper business, then no one would ever have to dive again.”

“They aren’t monsters,” Maurat said softly. Then she deftly leaned forward, that same sureness of movement and muscle, to pluck the bottle from the curious waves. “Your father shared a glass with me, on the eve of his final dive.” 

“That was dangerous.”

“I understood the risks.” 

A sliver of moonlit steel leapt to her hand; with a practiced motion she dug her diver’s knife into the cork and effortlessly pared it free, as if it were no transgression at all. The salt air sharpened with tannins and shark’s blood.

Raising the open bottle, she tilted her head to the moon. “I dreamed of the far places where the Patrons go, deeper than light and time. When I woke, your father said I nearly bit my own tongue off at the root.”

I almost moved to stop her. But the bottle was at her lips, that priceless wine flowing down her long throat. My breath stopped; goosebumps pebbled my skin. She lowered the bottle and stared at me, her eyes swimming with pelagic visions.

“It was so beautiful,” she said, her lips stained dark as a new-moon sea. “And somehow, I felt you there.”

She leaned forward; I tasted the wine on her mouth, sweet as the gauzy flesh of blind abyssal fish, bioluminescence exploding behind my eyes. She kissed me deeper. The surface of my tongue prickled with ship spars and urchin spines as she bore me back towards the sand, soft as silt on the bottom of the sea. For a moment, I could believe her—could sink into the thought that I had been there, present with her in any way except the one that mattered. That, maybe, my father had felt me there too.

I closed my eyes, and let her kiss me into the dark.

When I came back to myself, I was alone with the open bottle beside me and the surf nuzzling at my trouser cuffs. The harvest moon bored an icy hole into the top of the sky as I climbed to my feet. By its light I could see the private docks, the rows of canoes bobbing in the tide.

One of the canoes was missing. It did not require much thought to realize who had taken it, and where.

For a long while I stayed rooted to the sand, the humid air heavy on my skin; like I stood on the soft tongue of some great creature, its breath held, waiting to see what I would do next. As long as I stayed frozen, I could pretend that I was helpless; could wait for the horizon to tip dawn over its palm and then start walking inland without looking back.

But I had already tried that once. So I stepped onto the dock, and seized a pair of oars.

By the time I passed the fourth pharos, my arms shook so badly I could scarcely keep the oars in my blistered palms. The Patrons’ cove remained glass-smooth, even as the waves outside grew restless. Their presence warped the moonlight into a bulging lacuna on the water’s surface, with the dark wedge of Maurat’s canoe poised on its edge. She balanced on the pontoon, the air bladder slung on her back and the ballast wrapped around her hips. The night beat black wings around her. 

I knew her, and I knew her plan. It was the straight line, the simplest way that we could all get what we wanted. She would dive for me, put the bottles that my father had bought with his life into my hands. I would remain in the family. I could honor my oath to her without guilt. 

Or, she would die. 

“Maurat, stop!” I could barely force the words out through my exhaustion. “Please, don’t—”

She dove, her form perfect, mathematically certain of where her head would break the surface. Then she disappeared into the water, where certainty meant nothing at all.

My muscles screamed as I pulled the oars harder. It did not occur to me to save my strength; I had no inkling of my own intent until I neared Maurat’s empty canoe and pulled on my own air bladder, mask, and ballast. Beneath me, the patterns that moved on the water’s surface coalesced into a language of twisting eels, one no human was ever meant to understand. 

Nausea barrelled up my throat again. I couldn’t do this. I had left because I couldn’t do this. Because I had realized there was no safety, no certainty, and that the best way to cope with danger was to get as far away from it as possible. But I had failed. I was right back here, staring down the same terror, and far less equipped to face it than I had ever been before.

It was not just the Patrons I feared. It was the knowledge that my father would not be there when the water closed over my head; that he would not be waiting, as if time and regret were as permeable as the surface of the water, and in diving now, I could return to him when he needed me most. There would be nothing. Only me. 

But the same blood still ran in my veins. I was still my father’s daughter.

I pulled my knife from its belt, drawing a neat line down the back of my arm. My blood would seal the covenant, as it had for centuries. Artlessly, I threw myself into the ocean’s embrace. 

Darkness. The sting of salt in my nose. A rush of bubbles, then eerie silence. I hit the bottom within seconds and kicked the clear water full of silt. Pressure on every side; blind disorientation, with no way of knowing where the Patrons lurked. There was only the water, my air bladder forgotten, the cord to loosen the tether on my ballast far from my mind. I was swimming in my father’s blood in an ocean so deep the sun had never touched its winding currents.

A hand clutched my arm. Maurat’s face bloomed out of the murk. 

Question – you – here – emphatic. She practically jabbed the signs at me.

Help – you. The words came clumsily, but for once my hands remembered.

Maurat seized my wrist; hysterically, it occurred to me that she was touching me more than when we kissed. Her eyes tracked the blood from my cut, a ribbon of precious red hanging delicate in the milky water. Then a shadow moved between us and the moon. 

The Patrons had come.

I pushed my back to the sandy bottom, facing the eclipse above. Every instinct screamed to kick for the surface but that would mean death, pacifying blood or no. Maurat’s hand seized mine as we flattened ourselves against the seafloor, side by side, watching the leviathan drag its vast stomach over us both.

At first, it looked almost feathered. Then like tatters of pale sea-rotted flesh. Then like coral, fleshy waves and curls drifting gently in the current. A porous membrane between sea and stomach that crawled with forgotten relics. Stones. Shards of whale bone. A mobile graveyard passing over us. And in it, the bottles.

The function of their distinctive glass became clear now. They glowed with a ghostly light amidst the Patrons’ natural bioluminescence, shining like beacons. My heart pounded in my chest, but still I breathed as I had been taught to breathe: shallow sips from my air bladder through the diving mask clenched in my teeth. It would not last long. If I stayed here, I would drown. So I did the only thing there was to do: I reached out, seized a handful of the creature’s digestive lining, and let it lift me off the seafloor. This close, its tendriled underbelly brushed against my face. My skin prickled at every point of contact; pins and needles stabbed my fingers and palms, and then I felt nothing at all. This was how my father died: trapped fast, pulled inward, disappearing without a trace. A panicked rill of bubbles surged through my nose; with lazy interest, the cilia above reached for their source. 

And then Maurat’s hand seized my shoulder, and squeezed the panic away. I watched her show me what to do: her sure fingers closed around the glowing bottles lodged in the creature’s underside and gently worked them free, letting them drop to the sandy floor below. I let her guide my hands to the next, the familiar chill of glass cutting through my alienated flesh. My hands moved across dead coral bleached by stomach acid, the hard beaks of giant squids and the occasional fisherman’s harpoon, twisted into strange shapes by their passage through the Patron’s unlikely interior. 

When my fingers closed around something hard and narrow, I did not recognize the human bones until they were already drifting away behind me. On their own accord, my hands continued to move; found the delicate bow of a tibula and the rounded dome of a skull. 

They could have been any unlucky sailor’s bones, caught in a storm and sunken into the deeps. But my hands understood what my mind could not. My father had returned to me, and I let him drift free, into the water tinged with my blood and tears.

By morning, we had collected the bottles from the seafloor, a barnacle-encrusted row of them on the sand between our beached canoes. Maurat and I sat side by side, staring at their impossible shapes. 

We’d left the bones to the sea. It was a traditional Avesani burial, after all. Now when I went into the water, my father would always be waiting for me.

I wonder if he blamed you, in the end.

Each batch of wine was unique, flavored by the metaphysical imprint of everything the Patron had consumed on its long journey through the ocean, every ounce of water and life. 

There is one way to know.

My father’s life, distilled into bottles. His disappointment in me, or his love. Perhaps even his forgiveness. I needed to taste it, no matter how bitter.

I selected a bottle; Maurat pared the cork free. Together, we drank my father’s last blessing deep.