What the Tide Left

The tide in the saltmarsh leaves things. Everyone in Reed Hollow grows up knowing it. Driftwood, mostly, and netting, and the occasional sad sodden boot, and twice in living memory a body — because the marsh is where the river argues with the sea, and bodies are what arguments leave behind. So when the boy Teg came running up the causeway at low water shouting that the tide had left a man on the flats, nobody in Reed Hollow was surprised. They were a marsh people. They took their lanterns and their handcart and they went down to do the decent thing, which was to bring the drowned man up and bury him above the salt line where the water could not have him back. It was old Marda who got close enough first, and it was old Marda who stopped, and held up her lantern, and said the word that changed the village. "Breathing." The man on the mud flats was breathing. Slow, and deep, and even, the breath of someone asleep rather than someone half-drowned, which was its own small impossibility — a man does not lie on the open flats through a whole tide and merely nap. But that was not the thing that made the gathered villagers go quiet and still and move, without deciding to, a step back from him. The thing was the crown. He wore a crown. Not a circle of gold such as a story-king wears — the marsh folk had no stories with gold in them, they were a poor people and their tales were poor too — but a band of dark worked iron, salt-pitted, ancient, fused so close against his brow that the skin had grown a little around it the way bark grows around a nail. It was not a crown anyone had put on him recently. It was a crown he had been wearing, the village understood with a collective crawl of the skin, for a very long time. Possibly always. "We don't have a king," said Teg's father, into the quiet. He said it the way you say a thing you want to be true. "Marsh folk haven't had a king in two hundred years. We don't hold with it. Everybody knows we don't hold with it." "Then somebody had best tell him," said old Marda. Because the drowned man had opened his eyes. They were grey, and they were calm, and they were not the eyes of a man waking in confusion on a strange mud flat surrounded by strangers with lanterns. They were patient eyes. They moved over the villagers of Reed Hollow one by one, unhurried, the way a man counts a room he means to come back to, and then the crowned man drew one long breath of the cold marsh air, and he spoke, and his voice was quiet and dreadful and entirely sure of itself. "Two hundred years," he said. "I have been under the salt two hundred years. I felt every one of them." He sat up, slow, the mud sliding off the iron crown, and the village stepped back again as one body. "Someone put me there. Someone closed the marsh over a living king and let the tide keep him, and went home, and told their children there had never been a king at all. And I have lain in the dark a very long time with nothing to do but wonder." He stood. He was not tall. That was almost the worst of it; he was an ordinary-sized man, and the ordinariness made the iron and the patience and the two hundred years more terrible, not less. "So I will ask the question I went down with," the Saltmarsh King said, and the cold tide pulled at the flats around all their feet, going out, going out. "And I will ask it of this village first, because this village is where the tide chose to give me back. Who took my throne? Tell me that — tell me true — and I may yet leave Reed Hollow standing." Nobody answered him. Nobody in Reed Hollow knew the answer. But old Marda, holding her lantern, found that she could not quite meet the drowned king's patient grey eyes — and she was eighty-one years old, and her grandmother had been eighty-one once too, and had told her, just the once, on a night old Marda had spent the rest of her life trying to forget, exactly why the marsh folk did not hold with kings.