Martre:What was she singing?
Rowan: This one won’t come as a surprise. She started arguing with me. “How do you know the maiden is lovely? How do you know the maiden is fair?” She has a good voice, you know. Deeper than you’d think, with her being so little. Anyway, that made me figure she must have had some kind of thing about her looks. You know, the way sometimes beautiful people don’t want you to think of them as beautiful?
Martre: So how did you answer?
Rowan: I’m proud of this one. I improvised a little verse about her beautiful voice and her beautiful knife and thesmell of her hair on a moonless night. I sang about how she was the maiden of milk and honey, you know, because she’d brought me milk and honey? I think she liked that part, because she sang back about how she was the maiden of nightmares and despair.
Katrine: Rowan still calls me Milk and Honey Maiden. I... don’t hate it.
Rowan: We spent a couple of days like that, singing to each other. Or maybe not so much singingtoeach other as singing together? And then singing turned into talking, and before long we were just spending the whole day telling each other about our lives. I talked about when I was a kid, feeling like I didn’t fit anywhere, and then getting on a boat on my fifteenth birthday just to try to find a place that wouldn’t feel too small for me. She talked about the shipwreck that left her on the island.
She wouldn’t let me look at her, though. She was always hidden up in the trees or behind a rock or something. If it hadn’t been for those little glimpses, and the milk and the honey she left me, I would have thought I made her up.
Well, that and the time she put that knife to my throat. I knew I didn’t make that up.
I didn’t mind. Talking was enough for me.
Katrine: It made me so happy. Rowan made me so happy. And I started to wonder if maybe... maybe Idryss had it all wrong, you know? Maybe she’d misunderstood things.Maybe we didn’t have to be all alone. So I went and talked to her, tried to explain.
Martre: And that went well?
Katrine: You know how it went.
Martre: I thought you didn’t want to talk about Idryss. You keep bringing her up.
Katrine: Well, fine. Maybe I do want to talk about Idryss. Because, you know what? I want to know the truth. From you. I want to know which one of you lied. Did you lie to her? Or did she lie to us?
Martre: Does it matter?
Katrine: I guess not. Either way, she wouldn’t let it go. She told me—I don’t want to—
Martre: Take your time.
Katrine: She told me that if I didn’t bring the sailor to her... she’d turn me into a seabird. I was confused, because it’s not like the curse applies to any of us, I mean—we don’t change each other. But then Idryss said, “If you’re not one of us, you’re one of them.” That’s when I knew.
Martre: Knew what?
Katrine: I knew I had to choose.
Rowan: I’ll never forget the day she came down from the trees. She was up there, half-hidden behind a palm frond, and she finally told me about the curse—
Martre: Curse?
Rowan: Well, that’s what she called it, anyway. She said that I couldn’t see her because she was a monster. She said that if I saw her, I’d die.
Katrine: I was so scared to tell them, and then I did, and they just—
Rowan: I couldn’t help it! I just started—
Katrine: They laughed! They laughed at me! I got so mad that I wasn’t thinking, and I—
Rowan: I heard her drop out of the trees right behind me. She had her arm around my throat again—no knife this time, I remember thinking that was progress. She asked what was so funny, and I told her.
Katrine: They told me. They said that maybe they hadn’t seen the whole thing, all of me at once, but—
Rowan: She went so still when I told her I’d been looking at her for months. And then she let go of me. So, real slow, you know, so she could run off if she didn’t want me to see her—
Katrine: They turned around.
