I had been preparing to walk into the sea for twenty-two years, and the sea, when I reached it, was warm.

That was the first thing wrong. Saltmere's water in late summer had a knife in it, mineral and sharp, and the elders had said I would feel it tear at my ankles like an animal that had been waiting to be fed. The water around my feet was not waiting. It was lifting me, in small, unimportant motions, the way an aunt would smooth a child's hair on a feast day.

I kept walking. White linen heavy with seawater dragged at my legs, the gown my mother had hemmed at the ankle so I would not stumble in it, the gown she had bleached three times over a winter to make sure the white was right. The shore was behind me. The lanterns of Saltmere were small as wave-foam now, and I did not turn to count them. If I turned, my mother's face would be in the line of women on the rocks, hollow in a way she had practiced, and I would have had to know whether she was holding my younger brother's hand. I had decided not to know.

The water reached my waist. The water reached my chest. The water reached the line of my collarbone, where I had pinned the small white flower the village girls had given me, so the god of the deep would smell something other than my fear. The flower was already gone. I had not noticed it leaving.

I filled my lungs once, deep, the way a swimmer does before the long stroke. I had practiced this breath since the priest first showed me how, in the stone basin behind the chapel, when I was nine. I used to count it in the bath, the way other girls counted the buttons on a betrothal dress.

Then I walked deeper.

The sea closed over me. The pressure folded along my ribs, attentive, not crushing. The lanterns of Saltmere went brown above me, then ochre, then they were gone. There was nothing for a while except dark water and the dim blue of my own gown lifting around me like the last light of a vanished day.

This was the part where I should have struggled. The elders had said the body would betray a Sea-Touched at the end, would claw and thrash and disgrace the offering. The priest said it was the god demanding spectacle. The mothers said it was the god being merciful, taking the body's struggle so the soul could go quiet.

I did not struggle. My body was very tired. It had been tired for twenty-two years. I let the deep pull me down by the gown.

I expected the maw next. The maw was in every story. It was in the chapel carving above the funeral bell, an open mouth ringed with teeth the size of a child's hand. It was in the priest's breathing when he came to bless me at the new moon. It was in the way my mother set bread on the table at supper and would not look up from it, as if the bread were a thing already gone.

There was no maw.

There was light.

It came up at me from below, slow, blue, the same blue that lived between the petals of the deep iris my grandmother used to keep in her window before they took her away. The light did not flare. It rose to meet me the way a hand extended in the dark finds the hand it has been reaching for.

There was breath.

My lungs filled. I had not opened my mouth, and the salt water around my face was no longer water in the way water had been a moment before. It was thinner where it touched my face, and then it was air, and then it was water again past my hair. The deep had decided, on some matter I had not been consulted on, that I was permitted to breathe.

There was an architecture. Walls. The shape of a long corridor opening below me, walls grown from coral that had spiralled the way smoke spirals when it has nothing else to do. Carvings cut so deep they made shadows of their own. Small lights in the walls themselves, slow, internal. A floor of black sand.

There was a figure.

It was standing where the corridor opened, where the carving was deepest. Tall. Mineral-pale. The shape of a man only because the eye, in that moment, needed it to be the shape of a man, and accepted my eye's request as a courtesy. There was an ease about it that made the corridor feel small, the way a stone in a stream makes the stream feel small. His eyes held their own light, the same blue as the corridor walls, and they rested on me with a weight that was not pressure but presence, the way a tide rests against a shore it has known a long time.

I had been told my whole life what this would be. I had been told the god of the deep was a great cold mouth at the bottom of the sea, that he was teeth and salt and the appetite of a thousand storms. I had been told he would consume me. I had been told it would be quick, then it would be slow, then it would be merciful. The stories had not agreed with one another, and I had not noticed how much they did not agree until I was looking at him.

He did not consume me.

He looked at me.

He came forward, not closer, in the way a tide does, not stepping. The water around me went a little warmer. I did not understand that part yet. I would, later. He stopped a careful distance away, the light from his eyes inside my eyes, gentle, as if he were lending me the seeing of him. I was standing on black sand, in a white gown that had stopped lifting, in a place I had been raised to die in, and I was watching the god of the deep not kill me.

"Bride," he said.

The word came down through the water like a stone with the edges worn off it. It did not echo. It arrived. It sat in the chamber the way a thing rests when it has been put down for the first time in a long while.

My mouth opened. I did not know if speech would work. I could not, if I was honest, remember what my voice had sounded like a moment before.

"I am here," I said.

The voice was mine. The strange thing was that it was the voice I used at the supper table, plain and small and not at all the voice I had practiced for this moment. I had practiced something grand. The grand thing did not come.

He stayed where he was. He did not step. He did not move toward me with a hand, with anything. He looked at me the way a man looks at a sentence in a language he thought had gone extinct.

I waited for the maw. The maw did not come.

I waited for the consumption. I waited for the priest to be right, because if the priest was right then the village was right, and if the village was right then my mother had been right to bake the funeral bread before my walk, and the hollow look in her face had been a kindness, a saving up of the grief I would otherwise have had to do for her.

The water around me stayed warm.

I noticed, dim under everything else, that the journal was in the canvas bag at my shoulder, and the bag was dry. The leather of the journal does not stay dry in seawater. The leather of this journal was staying dry. I did not know why.

A thought arrived whole, in the voice of the journal I had been keeping since I was eight.

Why isn't he killing me?

I turned my head a little, slow, so as not to frighten it, and I looked at him, and the question stayed in my mouth, and my mouth did not open, and he kept looking back. The corridor behind him ran into a kind of darker dark and I could not see how far it went. I had a feeling it went very far.

He spoke again. The same word. The same slow placement.

"Bride."

He paused. He had said it the way a man says a word that has been put in his mouth by someone else, the way a child recites at the chapel, and it occurred to me, in a thought I would pull apart later, that he was saying it because someone had told him to say it, a long time ago, and he had not had reason to question whether it was the right word.

I did not answer. My hand was at my chest, where the small white flower had been, and was not anymore. My hand was on the place I had been told would crush, the place that had been waiting twenty-two years.

I felt the blood in my wrists, in the soft place below my jaw. It had not quickened.

Why isn't he killing me?

Somewhere very far above, my mother was walking back from the rocks. She would be walking with her hands inside the apron of her best dress. She would be walking past the chapel where the carved maw watched the door. She would be walking toward the table where the bread for my funeral had been cooling for two days.

I thought, with the clearness of a thing being seen for the first time:

She has already started eating it.

The god of the deep, who had not yet killed me, took a single slow breath I could see in the way the architecture moved. The carvings shifted in their light. A drift of pale shapes appeared at the far end of the corridor and was gone again, before I was sure I had seen them.

He waited.

I waited.

The water held us in the place where the question I could not yet ask was the only thing left in the room.