The moon was a hammered coin of silver when the river gave her up. She crawled to the shore, coughing muddy water from her lungs. Aquatic weeds stuck to her arms and legs, and a mucky film remained on her tongue. She had the sense of being on a journey, but she could not recall her destination or when she had gone beneath the surface. Only one truth shone bright in her mind -- the river had given her back.
       Farther down the gravel spit of the river bank, a light bobbed. The woman wiped her eyes and called out, voice scratching like reeds against a stone wall.
       "Who's there? I need help."
        But she felt strong enough to walk for days; the road beckoned. She would follow it until she could remember what waited at the end.
        "Leyvan! Leyvan is home!" called the man holding the lantern.
        The name fit as perfectly as her cotton tunic, and she grasped it in her mind. Leyvan. Wouldn't she feel it if this was home? The road seemed more inviting than the dimly visible huts on the hillside.
        The man approached. "You've been gone so long." He held out a blanket, but she refused; the air was warm and redolent with summer grasses. "Come back to the village. Oura has been waiting for you to return."
        Leyvan followed him up the hill, panting and continuing to spit out murky water. Oura was standing in the open door of one of the huts, fire light making her gray braids shine. She was familiar, so Leyvan went inside. The man with the lantern went away, but she could hear him repeating the news, loud enough to wake the village. Leyvan is home.
        "Dry robes," Oura said. "That's what you want."
        The other woman helped her take off the filthy tunic and placed a clean cloth in her hands with the familiarity of a life-long friend. Leyvan wiped the muck from her legs, wincing as she found raw flesh circling one ankle. It didn't bleed. When she was clean enough, Oura provided her with a robe similar to the discarded one.
        "I can't remember leaving," Leyvan explained, uncomfortable with Oura's quiet. "Look at my ankle. Someone was keeping me."
        "You were fortunate to escape. How did you get free?"
        Leyvan hesitated. She couldn't remember any faces, only shapes looming above as she sank from the surface. There had been a lot of them.
       "I don't remember. The current should have taken me farther away. Instead it brought me back."
        "The gods move in those waters as they please," Oura said. "They saved you."

        She didn't fall asleep, though she wrapped herself in the blankets Oura provided. She lay on one side and then the other, tossing until warm water ran from her aching ears. The sounds of the night came to her, familiar yet fresh. Her body told a story she didn't remember. Purple bruises on her arms where she had been grabbed. The wounded ankle from being shackled. Had it been a band of slave traders? More likely she had been foraging and wandered too far east. The neighboring clan must have taken the chance to kidnap her. That was the tale she would give them in the morning. Even if imagined, it felt as true as memory.
        In the morning, Oura hurried her to the largest hut in the center of village. The rest of the clan had waited to break their fast until Leyvan joined them. The small loaves of oat bread and cheese should have sharpened her appetite. Instead she felt like rocks were in her belly. Around the cooking fire, more than a dozen men and women sat. Several young children stood with their parents, gazing blankly at her.
        The man who had found her the night before passed one of the loaves. She held it reluctantly.
        "Leyvan, you must eat," he said. "No one may partake before a guest."
        She took a small bite. The dry bread scratched as she swallowed. The silence broke. Questions rained on her, but the answers she gave didn't satisfy. She repeated what must have happened -- the journey, the strangers, being tied and escaping. Running through the forest like an animal until she plunged into the river, dragged along by the water until it delivered her back home. Her tongue burned with every word. One of the little girls kept moving closer, green eyes bright, like flecks of mica in a stone.
        At night Leyvan went to Oura's hut again, but she didn't feel tired. From where she lay, she could see a sliver of the night between the slats of the wooden door. It turned deep black, then began to lighten again, and still Leyvan didn't sleep. She finally pulled the blanket over her head so she could pretend to wake later. In the dimness, water seemed to close above her head again and again, smudging the first light of morning. When Oura left to get the morning's water, Leyvan sat up and stared at her surroundings, trying to blot out the memory.
        "There was more than one," she told Oura later.
       The frown lines in the older woman's face sharpened for only an instant. "Don't keep speaking of it," she said. "If you were taken by the eastern clan, the men would paint themselves for a raid. They'd bring back a head for every day you were missing. But you can't even remember what they looked like. We can't break peace unless you know."
        "I don't want heads. I want to stop remembering."

        Leyvan told her story, what she remembered and what she could invent, each time someone asked. The little girl with the green-speckled eyes seemed always to be near, following at a distance. Leyvan ate as little as she could while still appearing to eat; she sipped from the clay mugs of water and milk and mead that were offered; she went to the pits where the villagers relieved themselves. But it was all pretend. She felt no hunger or thirst.
       Sometimes at night before she slept, she stared at Oura's sleeping face and tried to remember. It was clear they had been friends before the river stole her memory. But she couldn't place Oura at any other age, couldn't imagine her in any other role. Oura braided Leyvan's hair, listened to her fragmented recollections, gave her a bitter draught each night to heal her soul and restore her body. They went everywhere together, as if Oura feared she would get lost and forget how to get back to the village. Oura kept her from the riverbank, insisting on drawing all their water in spite of her age. Leyvan felt that whatever the river had wanted, it had gotten that night. She wasn't afraid of it any longer.

        From childhood she'd heard the stories of the river spirit; before she was born, before her grandfather was born, the spirit had caused a flood, nearly wiping out the village. Behind the thin drift of pipe smoke, Grandfather's dark eyes seemed endless. Leyvan remembered how the other children had gone to play when he started telling this story; she had stayed in the family hut to listen.
        "Drowned beasts from forest and farmland washed up with the floodwaters," he muttered. "The dogs and the bear attacked as if they were still alive. They ate every living being they could catch. You would expect that from beasts of prey. But the cows, the deer, and the sheep ate alongside them. When the village was empty they went back into their grave, back to the water. They had to fill the belly of the river spirit."
        His face was wet and she thought the smoke must be stinging his eyes, but the smoke didn't bother her.
        "Tomorrow we will make the offering," he said at last. "And the next year… and the next year."
        Leyvan recognized that he was sinking into himself; he would soon fall asleep when the pipe was done. She got up from the packed ground and took her basket from its place by the door. She was sad to think his years of prophesying would soon be done; he rarely spoke god-words now, even after the potions and the smoking hut.
        "I'll buy flowers for you, too," she said. "You'll come with me?"
        What he said didn't make sense, and so she forgot it. Dreams, an old man's dreams.

       Now his words came to her. On her arm was the same basket, but she was tall now. Leyvan almost reeled as his voice struck her memory. I'll be long dead by the time it's your turn. He had been confused; he'd walked with her to the riverside the very next morning, and she'd been the first to cast the handfuls of white flowers on top of the water. His face had never looked the same to her after that; he had become more silent each year, until at last he no longer spoke at all. When she was nearly grown, she had found him beneath an oak at the edge of the village. Next to his body was the small vial he'd warned the family never to touch; it brought death to those who desired it.
       She blinked the vision away, staring instead at the caravan that had come to trade. In the afternoon sun there was nearly too much color to bear. The wagons overflowed with silk robes, red clay totems, spices that tickled the senses. Oura's face began to light up when she spoke about the next festival. Leyvan hadn't noticed her presence.
        "Every village from here to the ocean will be celebrating the sunrise," she said as they approached the wagons. "We'll buy white flowers, and bells to ring as the sun comes up."
        The first wagon was driven by a young man with a serious frown. He passed baskets of the white blooms to anyone who could pay a few bronze pieces. Leyvan wanted flowers, but she had no coins.
       "You can have some of my flowers," Oura said.
       Oura bought a large basket and moved to join the huddle of villagers surrounding the next wagon. A bird clattered his beak against the wooden rails of his cage. A child tossed a pebble and the bird fluttered up in fright. Its foot was tied to a nail in the bottom of the cage and the rope stretched taut for a moment before the bird returned to his perch.
       She didn't want to look at the bird and its poor scarred leg any longer. As Oura spoke to another of her friends, Leyvan decided to return to the river and see what it might tell her.
        She slipped away from the caravan, creeping as if she was doing something shameful. If the rest of them could see how little she felt like a living person, they would turn her out into the road. Oura was the only one who might speak for her, yet Leyvan suddenly needed to get out of her presence. Her own skin was beginning to smell as bitter as the liquid she'd been drinking each night. Her memories were fuzzy and she felt exhaustion in all her bones. If she got in the water now she would sink beneath the first lapping wave.
       Her desire to travel west had been a burning flame in her mind but now it only smoldered. She wanted to see that city she had heard of -- another of Grandfather's tales, but this one sounded true. Tomorrow she would pack a few supplies and leave. Tomorrow she would be able to think; every move was like surfacing from water far deeper than the river had been.
        The river was barely moving on top, but Leyvan remembered the current pulling her, tugging the rope taut between her foot and -- something at the bottom of the riverbed. They had drowned her, she knew. The shapes had gone away after the last silver bubble had risen from her desperate lungs. Why had the river spit her out alive? Half-alive, really, unable to feel thirst or hunger.
       She sat down on the stony bank and looked at her ankle. It was still as red and raw as the first night. She touched it, expected pain, but it felt like nothing.
        "It won't go away." It was the girl's small voice. Leyvan knew it before she turned and saw the green eyes.
        "Why not?" she asked. "How do you know?"
        "You said why. You said you died and the water gave you back."
        "I was confused. You believed that?"
        The little girl looked miserable and Leyvan couldn't understand why. She ought to be at the wagons, petting the horses on their velvet noses and begging for cheap ragged dolls.
        "You still believe it."
        "I just don't remember. I want to, but I can't."
        The little girl came closer and put the basket of white flowers between them. "My mother gave me a coin for these. You have to buy them yourself or it doesn't count."
        Leyvan smiled. "I'm sure the gods would understand."
        "Not the gods. The other one."
        "Either way, you've bought a fine offering. Your mother knows best."
        The little girl shook her head. "I don't want to be the one, but Oura will be too old soon. When she can't keep you, it will be my turn."
        A sick feeling spread in Leyvan's stomach. The words brought a flash of Oura's face, a much younger face, a face with green eyes. She hadn't even been born when was Oura that age, but she remembered it.
        "Your turn for what? I don't need anyone to look after me now."
        The little girl picked up a stick and began to make a drawing in the soft dirt. Waves for water, a path and a hut for the village. In the water, an enormous claw. "He will swallow them all. If he isn't fed."
        "There's no such spirit in these waters," Leyvan said automatically. "I remember that tale from when I was your age! I took a basket to the river just like you. One year I was chosen to throw the first white petals out on the water -- they floated away and looked -- "
        She suddenly couldn't speak. They had looked horrible. They had been like bone fragments, like dead white eyes, like maggots on a corpse. She remembered being terrified of the water spirit but even more terrified of what the blooms covered up.
        "Smell them," the little girl said. "Then you'll understand."
        Leyvan took the basket and plunged her face into the flowers. She breathed deep in panic, hoping the sweet scent would clear her head. Instead a death stench filled her lungs. In her memory, the petals floated away from each other. Down under the water a few silvery bubbles rose from a wrenched face with glaring eyes. It was a woman, her arms bound behind her back, her foot tied to a heavy iron ball. Leyvan had scattered those flowers and seen the face of the dead woman. Gagging, she dropped the basket, petals scattering in the breeze. She remembered how they would look from below -- white shadows blocking the early dawn light. By the time the sun came up fully, the river would be covered with them, and the woman would be drowned.
        "This happened before," she said, out of breath with panic. "This happened to me."
        The little girl began to cry. "I wasn't supposed to talk to you. They'll throw me in with you if they find out."
        "Your parents wouldn't do that." Leyvan was struggling to make sense of the nausea, the images of years past.
        "But they're not my parents. They're like Oura. They're just keeping me for now."
        Leyvan wanted to comfort her, but the lapping of the water was deafening. She'd been that small once, she'd made her first offering every year for a decade. And then she'd become the offering. She could feel the scratchy seams of the ritual robe. Just like the one Oura had given her the first night after she came back. Leyvan had walked calmly, silently, to the water's edge when she was twenty. They villagers had been waiting with baskets of flowers. Oura put the rope around her foot, and Oura's hands were smooth, and her face was young. It was the last face she saw when they threw her from the small boat, as the iron ball dragged her swiftly to the riverbed.
        "How many times?" Leyvan asked. "How often have they drowned me?"
        "Every year since before I was born."
        Leyvan looked at the little girl's serious, bright eyes. She looked frightened but full of life, too. "What's your name?"
        "Dita."
        Leyvan looked at her own hands. They were unchanged. She had not aged. Oura was getting old. Thirty or forty years of swallowed water and violent returns to land, yet none of it showed on her except for the eerie, bloodless raw wound around her ankle. If she went with them again this year, would she ever come back? Maybe she would rot away by the time Dita came of age. She would be only a ruin of silt-covered bones greeting the new sacrifice.
        "They'll never drown you," Leyvan said. "Say nothing to them. And don't go to the water tomorrow. Stay inside."
        Leyvan stood up and went back to Oura's hut. She took off the robe; she had to find something else, something that wouldn't be poisoned with this drowsy calm. What had Oura been giving her to drink? Why didn't someone show concern that her skin was colorless and her wounded leg wouldn't heal? She had never let herself consider these questions, though they simmered in her skull. If she couldn't be permanently drowned, she was halfway to being a god. No wonder the villagers were frightened of her.
       Behind Oura's bed, she found a dirt-smudged shift with a torn sleeve. She put it on. She looked in the small iron kettle; Oura's bitter drink smelled stronger than ever. The fumes alone made her feel almost at peace. The lid clanged as she slammed it down. No more calm. No more forgetting.
       Levyan sat on her bed and tried to recall everything she'd heard about the water spirit, its hungers and its hates, the way it brought drowned creatures upon the land if it wasn't fed.

       It was evening when her betrayer came back. She smelled like sex and was wearing a carved bone charm that a man from the caravan had been selling. Leyvan was waiting beside the doorway, and she didn't give Oura time to speak. The skinning knife went in through the back of Oura's neck with hardly any sound and she dropped to the floor, the red tip of the blade protruding from her throat. Blood hit the ceiling, but Leyvan didn't flinch. She must be painted for what she had to do next. She had no warpaint, but blood would do.

        Leyvan stayed hidden in the hut all night. The planks of the door had small gaps, and between them she watched a black strip of sky become spangled with stars and then begin to pale. She watched the villagers moving in silence, each one carrying a basket of reeking white flowers. Dita and her parents were nowhere to be seen. When the last villager had passed by, Leyvan slipped out into the empty pathway and kept going up the hill until she heard the girl's voice from inside one of the huts.
        "I don't want to go," the girl shouted. "It's not fair."
       "There's no other way," a woman said sharply. "It will be a mercy to put that thing back beneath the water."
        Leyvan shoved the door open and stepped in. The man and woman stared at her, first in confusion, then with growing fear. They made no move to shield Dita.
        "She's not ready yet," the man said, voice wavering between anger and terror. "She was chosen for next year."
       "Chosen to be like me?" Leyvan asked.
        They refused to answer.
        "Go outside. Keep quiet," Leyvan said to the girl.
        The man and woman were stunned, as incapable of fighting back as if they had taken that last huge draught of Oura's poison. By the time they recognized what she wanted, it was too late. They fought but she was stronger, and their fists and clawing hands caused her no pain. Leyvan brought them to the ground, first the man, then the woman, and she cut them once for every year Dita had been alive.
        When they had paid in full for their betrayal, Leyvan took a satchel from its peg on the wall. She filled it with food and took the chunks of flint from beside the cooking fire. Then she stepped around the bodies and went outside again.
        The sun was halfway over the edge of the earth now. She grabbed Dita's hand silently and they hastened up the pathway, out of the village. Dita was quiet for the moment. Leyvan knew that later, there would be weeping and rage. At the crest of the hill, Leyvan stopped and they watched the sun complete its rising. Troubled voices began to rise from the crowd of villagers.
       The sun pulled away from the horizon like a sticky ball of candy. Then a dull thud shook the earth, and the water shimmered and undulated, and a creature surged upon the shore. Mud at the water's edge birthed animals and people, all bloated past recognition, all grasping for the nearest living being.
       An early snow seemed to be falling as white petals coated the ground, scattered from dropped baskets.
       The villagers began to flee, but their panic came too late. Leyvan saw the man who had brought her back on the first night of her return. A drowned dog sank teeth into his leg and the man hacked at the dog with his dagger. It didn't flinch, but dug its swollen paws into the mud and dragged him irresistibly toward the water.
       The huge creature in the middle of the river had no eyes, but it had a massive round hole for a mouth and it sucked the water inside. The current dragged them all with power that thrummed through the earth, up through Leyvan's feet. The drowned devoured the living, even as they disappeared together into the creature's throat. A woman tripped as she tried to climb the river bank, and a claw wreathed in river weeds burst from the mud beneath and pulled her down in a churn of blood and viscera. Leyvan couldn't put together everything that the monster was; it was a throat, a fan of closely packed teeth, pincers that burrowed and a spine armored with skeletal fins. When the monster's ragged mouth closed on the last of them, Leyvan finally turned away.
       Dita still said nothing, but she began to cry under her breath, an unsettling, quiet sound after the carnage. Leyvan felt sick from what they'd seen, yet her spirit was untethered from something that had been smothering it. Moments from years past had started to surface in her mind, at first only a word or two between herself and Oura, then whole days, and weeks. Other festivals from years past, and millions of petals that smelled sweet until they became a death shroud.
       Dita began to talk after a long while. She thought Leyvan was like her; they'd been raised for it. They had no parents, no families, only guardians. She told about the festival wagons and the way they treated the village like it was infected, never staying the night. The two of them walked on, turning west. In the evening, they still had met no one along the road. The river beside them was calm, and Leyvan stepped into it and washed the blood away until no trace of Oura or Dita's keepers remained.
       "Aren't you afraid it will come here?" Dita asked, putting just her toes into the water.
        "No. It's going to starve."
        As she spoke, Leyvan realized the wound was beginning to sting. She washed it gently and marveled at the fine tendrils of blood escaping. A forgotten sensation nuzzled in her stomach. Hunger. Thirst.
       She remembered all the old stories now. There was a city many miles away where thousands, more than thousands, lived. It was on a coast, and huge boats came with new stories and unusual passengers. A once-dead woman and a little girl chosen for sacrifice could conceal themselves among the crowds of people. Then they would board one of the boats and go somewhere new, a place where no monsters waited to feed.