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From her earliest memories she has dreams, nightmares of the ocean and its depths. It is cold there in a way that she has never felt in the waking world, for all her people dwell in a land of unending ice. Here, the cold is a measurable thing, a matter of ice and snow in all their forms. Everyone of those forms has a name, a place in the shape of things, and the people have ways to deal with them, and the knowledge of when nothing can be done except to wait. There the cold is a part of being, unmeasured and in some way she cannot quite grasp, meaningless.
When she is lonely here, she need only talk to her mother, or other villagers. She can talk to the dogs and the birds, for all that they do not understand. The sound of her own voice is a comfort in its way. There, it is lonely in a way she doesn’t think she could bear, even though she senses other people with her. There are no people like her. But the people who are there are beautiful, and strong, and hers in a way she cannot name. Still the loneliness remains, as if it were her breath in that dark place.
She loves them. But she is afraid of the cold and the dark, and she does not feel ready to go to them.
So she struggles out of her dreams, fighting for the surface and the warmth of her bed. When she wakes, she remembers only that she hates to be cold, and wants always to remain in the warmth and the safety of her parents’ home.
***
The storm roars around them and she is afraid, she is surprised to find, not of the storm or the screaming birds, but of her father. She sees in his fear a madness she has never seen before. The boat begins to tilt in the force of the winds her dead husband’s people have caused, and she shrinks back as he turns towards her.
She can barely hear him screaming under the storm’s roar, and is glad of it. The few words she can make out are ugly in a way she would never have believed he could be.
The sea is waiting, as it has always waited, singing her down, calling to her bones. She had never wanted to leave the safety of her parents’ home and now she is brought face to face with why. The sea is as much within her as without.
He is her father, and he loves her, she knows it. Yet she’s not surprised when he shoves her overboard, as if in some way she expected this.
He is a traitor, the waves sigh. He is a fool, the winds roar. They are none of them deserving (they are all of them deserving) and they cannot keep her above the waves in the warmth of the sun any longer. She needs to come home.
Still, she fights the storm and the ocean’s pull and her father all at once, clinging to the side of the boat, afraid to drown and learn how much truth there is in the dreams now surfacing in her mind. She does not know these people and already she is losing something precious to them.
Home, the sea howls. Mother is coming home, mother is coming down out of the sun’s realms. Voices upon voices rise through the water in greeting, and she knows each one in her bones even though she does not yet know how to speak to them.
Her screams are lost in the storm, lost in the birds’ screams, but when they see what is being born from her hands they turn away. Father does not; he did not see them at first, watching the sky in a panic, but the horror in his eyes grows as he sees what is happening. Yet he does not stop, continuing with his face a mask of fear and pain, and she stares up into his eyes in outrage. He backs away as the last finger is gone and she begins to sink.
Her last sight of him is pain and grief overtaking the fear, as his last sight is pain and betrayal in her eyes as she sinks in a cloud of her own blood.
She sinks in a cloud of her own blood and it is life. She sinks into the embrace of seals and walruses, to the singing of whales, and it is life. All the voices she can hear are full of welcome and a kind of warmth that needs no fur to shield it, no fine walls to keep out the cold. No fire, no light, nothing that will leave and nothing that can be taken away without being replaced. All the ocean is thick with her children, all the water shot through with her blood made flesh, and she can hear them singing everywhere in joy at her coming back to them.
And vaguely, distantly, she wonders when she was supposed to have left. Something in her rises as her body falls, gently carried into the deeps by the whales, greeted by the squid. She feels welcome now, numbed by the cold and the dark, yet lit up from within by the songs. This is a place some part of her never left, she thinks, when she chose to go to the land and learn of the people taking her children.
What she has learned does not speak well of them.
***
He cannot sleep anymore without the nightmares coming. He needs the sleep desperately, as hunting becomes harder and harder, as the ocean seems to retreat from his people. They are going to starve if this continues, and his wife insists it is because of his betrayal of their daughter.
In his heart, he knows that she is right, but it is a long time before the pain in his body and the fear for his wife become stronger than his fear of facing Sedna. When that time finally comes, he finds he does not know how to do it. Walking along the shore, taking his canoe out to the halfway point where he lost her, these do not work. He thinks about trying to dive down to her, and is met by a seal attacking with a ferocity he has never seen in them.
He can only imagine what more might come to him, should he try to make it past that first defense.
When he returns to his wife, she is quiet at first. It is only after he sits across from her that she begins to speak, telling him of a dream she had and a way he might reach their daughter. There seems no other way, even though the idea frightens him.
He can only look away in shame when his wife asks him how frightened Sedna was. So he does as his wife instructs, and she carries the fish he has become out onto the ice and down to the sea.
What he sees as he swims is cold, and frightening, and a wonder he could not have imagined. So much life! It swirls around him, takes him for one of its own and does him no harm. Here, all the things that terrified him as they fell from Sedna’s fingers are somehow beautiful. They are in their element, and their home is not his.
But when he reaches his daughter, and finds himself a man again facing Sedna’s rage, he feels at home in spite of the crushing weight of the dark, in spite of the cold, in spite of his own fear. Sedna’s pain and betrayal had crushed him, but her anger he knows like he knows his wife’s smile, like he knows the scent of a coming storm. But this time he does something he has never done before, having always left it to his wife to smooth things over between them.
He apologizes. Without asking anything in return, humble and terrified, he admits the wrong he did Sedna was unforgivable, and asks nothing for himself. But for the rest of the people, if she might show mercy, he would gladly give his life. Looking into her eyes, he can see Sedna is thinking of her mother, of the friends she’d had above the waves.
He offers to braid her hair as they speak, and she allows it. Only when he is done and stands before her again does she answer his plea, and while her answer is yes, it comes at a cost. If his people are to be at peace with her people, in spite of the killing, they must be treated as people. There are things they will not do, and things they will, and they are a long time talking before he is ready to leave the depths.
But he finds himself lighter when he leaves, for the sense of peace he has gained in speaking to her.