“One more funeral that needs doing,” she utters, her eyes moving to the locked door of the vestry. “We need to keep an eye on Pip. Keep him away from the water.”

“I doubt she’d go for him. No meat on his bones.”

She doesn’t find this amusing. “I’m serious. Tito was with his five sisters. It took only him, not the girls.”

I agree to her precautions. Her eyes fall to the sack I bartered from Sigga.

“What’s this?”

“Fish meal. It’s all I could find.”

Bryndis unties the drawstrings and opens the sack. Her nose turns up at the smell. “It’s gone bad.”

“Scrape off the moldy layer. Some of it will still be good.”

The conversation withers, much like our dwindling prospects. High up on the wall, the eyeless sockets of the sea monster gather dust.

Stepping into the yard, we find Pip with his hands in a pail of seawater. Tongue extended, he toils at some strange task.

Our sister is already annoyed with him. “What are you doing now, Pip?”

His face lights up at us. “Kaspar, I have something for you. Come and close your eyes.”

“Not now.”

“Come quick!”

I only indulge the little twerp because denying him will make it worse. He tells me to take a knee and close my eyes.

“I have made you a crown, Kaspar,” he says. “The most wonderful crown of them all.”

“I see. It is my coronation day, is it?”

“Glory be,” he says, placing something on my head.

It is wet and it smells bad. It also squirms like it’s alive. When Bryndis squeals in disgust, I shake it off. There on the ground lies a ring of small starfish, stitched together with a needle and thread. The creatures writhe and twist, dying in the open air.

Revolted, I shove the little turnip away. Pip flops onto his backside, hurt.

“Don’t you like it?”

I storm into the rectory. “What is wrong with you?”

Bryndis shakes her head at our disturbed little brother. “Told you he wouldn’t like it.”

16

16

THE FISH MEAL is rancid, but we force it down. Pip leaves a bowl outside the vestry for father. When supper is over, Magda knocks on our door to ask if we have any tobacco to spare. Bryndis finds a pouch of it on the mantle. Magda fills her clay pipe and tells us that the mermaid has taken another lad. Cleto, a boy of fifteen, was snatched from the beach at sundown.

“How awful,” Bryndis remarks. The boy in question had once tried to woo my sister, but Bryndis disliked his stringy hair and hangdog face.

The flame of the match dips as Magda lights the pipe. “The men won’t go near the water now. Most are hiding in their huts or gone uphill to the trees.”

Pip watches the smoke drift to the rafters. “Hugo took his family and left.”