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Once upon a time, in the days of the old kings, lived a noblewoman. She had long dark hair that fell nearly to the floor, and eyes the color of night, and was the indulged and best-beloved daughter of her household, and was called Hana Song. She was quick of mind and considered very pretty, and the men of the province courted her with great passion, but her father turned down all suits for her hand. It was said she had a duty given to her by the gods, a duty that she could not fulfill were she to wed and move to her husband’s home. Very few believed it, for when had maidens ever been given duties by the gods?
One autumn, as the leaves began to fall and the winds and rains came with their usual fierceness, a trading caravan guarded by mercenaries arrived from the distant foreign land. It carried strange and unusual things, from fabrics to spices, dyes to jewelry, trinkets and tokens from the breadth of the known lands. The strangest thing that came with the caravan was one of its guards, a tall woman with eyes like ice and hair the color of chestnuts fresh-come off the trees.
The noble house did not know what to do with this guard, where to allow her to sleep, so they offered her space in the women’s quarters. The nobleman’s daughter took great interest in the tall barbarian and invited her to unroll her pallet in her own pavilion. The noblewoman was very clever and quickly began to learn the foreign mercenary’s tongue, while the mercenary worked hard to learn the noblewoman’s. They became fast friends while the trade caravan began to sell its goods. Each day the mercenary would come back with new words she had written and tried to learn, and each night the noblewoman tried to coax the proper words from her lips and tongue.
Not many nights passed before lips and tongues turned from pronunciation to other things, and the noblewoman offered to allow the mercenary Brigitte to share her own bed. When the caravan leaders spoke of resupply and of returning back to their foreign lands, the noblewoman could not bear the thought of losing her new companion. She went to a nearby temple and offered prayers and sacrifice, swearing never to marry, never to give up the duty that had been placed on her shoulders, if the gods would simply keep this foreigner from leaving. Not, she added firmly and looking towards the skies, by killing her. That would be cheating. She lopped off half her hair as an offering, leaving it to fall only halfway down her back.
Before much more than talk could come to pass, a heavy storm blew in from the ocean, angry winds and ferocious rain buffeting the city. The clouds blocked the sun early and did not depart. That night, the noblewoman rose from her bed, and the mercenary rose with her.
“What is it?”
“The gwishin come, on nights like this,” Hana said. She shed her fine sleeping robes and changed into a guardsmen’s robes and trousers. “I have a duty to defend my home from them.”
“The gwishin? What are they? And how will you fight them? Why do you not call for your father’s guards, the governor’s men, to aid you?” The mercenary was baffled and rubbed sleep from her eyes.
“I am more than I appear to be,” the noblewoman said haughtily, fingers busy tying up her hair away from her face. “But I am the only one who can do this. It is my duty.”
Brigitte followed her, collecting her shield and flail from beside her pallet. “I will go with you.”
“You cannot see them,” Hana told her, “for they are gwishin. They are… the souls of the dead, but they are restless, and it is my duty to fight them. If they should make it into the city, there would be great destruction and all might be lost. You cannot see them. You cannot fight them. Others have tried - the governor’s soldiers saw what happened one night when I was ill and could not rise, and they were barely beaten back by the others who are bound as I am.”
“I will stand with you then, in case there is something I may do.”
“That is kind of you,” the noblewoman said, “if hopeless,” and kissed the guard before walking out the door. “I fight to win and I have not lost yet.”
Brigitte shook her head and followed Hana, out to where the waves met the rocky beaches. From the water rose figures made of shell and seaweed, bone and brine, grasping bony hands and empty eye sockets reaching for the women on the shore.
Hana reached her hands out and all the detritus of the beach rose up and formed a shell around her, so the noblewoman seemed encased in a form of driftwood and rock, her face left unobscured. She laughed, a bell-like tone of beauty that struck the mercenary’s heart. The rock-thing waded into the water and eerie beams began to pulse from it, knocking back the creatures emerging from the water. The mercenary waited, watching the graceful way the haphazard construct moved, bounding in ways nothing real could ever do, and the way the noblewoman laughed and chattered to herself as if no one else could hear. She gloried in the fighting.
Then the mercenary saw one of the creatures emerge behind the noblewoman’s artifact, and reach its claws for her, slicing into the back. The noblewoman let out an angry pained sound, but could not spin around in time. So the mercenary waded in, shield on one arm and the flail in the other. She swung fiercely, knocking the creature away from the construct, and then turned to guard its flanks.
The noblewoman was surprised by the unexpected aid, but was grateful, and together the two of them pushed back the waves of specters far sooner than was the usual. As the last of them shattered into shell and bone and wave-froth, the noblewoman’s construction fell apart and she dropped down towards the rocky shore. The mercenary caught her, cradling the exhausted warrior in her arms, and carried her back to her pavilion in the depths of the night.
“How could you see them?”
“I don’t know,” the mercenary said. “Maybe it was the kiss. Maybe it was that I wanted to? What does it matter?”
“It was nice, having someone else tonight. We are - spread far along the coast.” The noblewoman sighed with exhaustion and burrowed beneath the thick coverlets. “It is not often we fight together. The risk is too great.”
“So then I will stay,” the mercenary said, smoothing the strands of the noblewoman’s hair away from her pale brow.
“But your duty-“
“It is time I made my own decisions, rather than be beholden to anyone else” she replied, “and I am needed here. You cannot continue to do that alone.”
The noblewoman tried to argue, but it was more for sake of form than anything else.
The next day, the mercenary severed her contract, and the noblewoman went to the temple and offered further prayers in gratefulness. The noblewoman never wed, though she and the mercenary were close companions always, and some suspects her promise to the gods was done with her own clever ploy to get what she desired. The mercenary never took another contract, though she would teach the foreign ways of fighting to any who asked, and they stayed in the Song compound until Hana’s parents died and she became the Lady Song. When the next young maiden, clever and quick of fingers and possessed of the Sight to see the gwishin arrived on the shores to join them, she joined their household, and then joined the pair together on the rocky shores the night of the next great storm.