The Keeper's Confession

He had not told her everything. Keepers never do. That night, with the village quiet and afraid, the old man finally said the word he had been swallowing for forty years. Adrellan. The drowned city. He said it should have stayed a story, the kind told to keep children off the rocks. But he had seen the salt throne once, as a boy, when the water thinned during a bad winter, and he had never been able to make himself forget the shape of it. Edda listened with her hands flat on the table. She was not afraid, exactly. She was the kind of person who needed to know things, and a city under the water was a great deal to know. "They will want a keeper," the old man said. "They always want someone to mind the tides for them. And I am too old to go down that road." He looked at her then, and she understood the rest without him saying it.