The Bride of the River Spirit

The rains had not stopped in forty days, and the River Vire, which had cradled the village of Stonereach since before anyone's grandmother's grandmother, had risen up out of its banks like a thing remembering an old grievance. It swallowed the lower fields first, then the mill, then the orchard where the children had always gathered crabapples, and at last it came lapping at the doorsills of the houses on the high street, grey and patient and cold. Three had already drowned. The grain was rotting in the lofts. And the elders, who had whispered the old word among themselves for a fortnight before they dared say it aloud, finally said it: a bride. The river wanted a bride, as it had wanted one in the famine years and the plague years, and it would not lie down again until it had her.

They drew the lot at the well, and the lot fell on Maren the weaver's daughter — or rather it fell on her little sister Pell, fourteen and trembling, and Maren had stepped forward before the headman finished speaking and said, in a voice that surprised even herself with its steadiness, "I will go instead. She is a child. I am not." And because Maren had no husband and no mother living and a tongue too sharp for the village's comfort, no one argued very hard.

So they dressed her as a bride. They wound her dark hair with the last white river-lilies and put her mother's wedding shift on her and walked her down through the drowned street at dawn while the women keened the drowning-song, and they bound her wrists with a cord of plaited reed — not cruelly, but so that she could not, at the last moment, swim. At the place where the old stone jetty went down under the flood, they set her in the flat-bottomed boat, and the headman wept and would not look at her, and they pushed the boat out onto the wide grey back of the Vire, and Maren of Stonereach went out to be married to the river.