Home From The Sea: The Elemental Masters, Book Seven (12 page)

“But do you think he’d have enough work for us?” Sarah asked, doubtfully.

“There’s only one way to find out,” Nan countered, and grinned when Neville quorked and flapped his wings.

“Ask! Ask!”
the raven said, with great enthusiasm.

“There, you see?” Nan spread her hands wide. “Even the birds like it.”

Mari went to bed anxious. Tomorrow would be her birthday, and not just any birthday, but her eighteenth. As if that wasn’t enough, she had learned from experience that as her birthday went, so the rest of the year seemed to go. The year it had stormed on her birthday was the year there were so many storms that Daffyd Prothero had been almost the only fisherman to reliably bring in catches.
That year had been good from a financial point of view, and that had been the year that many silver pennies went into the jar under the hearthstone, but it had been a nerve-wracking one for Mari, and more somberly, they’d attended three funerals of drowned fishermen that year. There had also been several wrecks, and bodies had even washed up in front of the cottage.

On the other hand, the year that the day had not only been bright and clear but as warm as summer had been an unseasonably mild one, with just enough gentle rain for the garden.

She had another reason to be uneasy as she went to bed. As the day had neared, her father had been acting strangely. She caught him staring at her with an odd, apprehensive expression on his face, many times. But whenever she tried to ask him anything that wasn’t a commonplace, he swiftly changed the subject. Maddening.

And somewhat alarming.

And there was the third thing. What would the coming year be like, if the day was marked by one or more of the Tylwyth Teg folk turning up? She shuddered to think.

When she rose at dawn, at least one fear was assuaged. The morning was bright and clear, with no signs of storm. Daffyd had somehow managed to smuggle a posy of violets into the house and it was sitting in a teacup at her place at table when she came down from the loft to make breakfast. He managed to do this every year, and every year it made her smile. Her presents were laid out there too; extravagant ones that made her eyes go round—a tortoise-shell brush and comb and a matching hand-mirror so she wouldn’t have to use a bit of broken mirror propped against the wall. Two tortoise-shell hair-combs to put her hair up like a lady. And a string of beautiful blue glass beads, not the round cast ones, but the polished, faceted beads that sparkled like gemstones in the light.

Her da was nowhere to be seen—but she knew where he was. On her birthday,
he
did the work of bringing the water from the stream, and a moment after she picked up the lovely beads to admire them, she heard his boot knock at the door to push it open.

“Oh
Da!”
she exclaimed, as he put the pails down beside the door. “This is too much! I don’t deserve all this!”

“Eh, well,” he replied awkwardly. “You’re a lady now, and a lady deserves some pretty fripperies that are all hers, and not passed down to her…” Then he sat down heavily, as if he had a tremendous weight on his shoulders. “And… I have something to be telling you, my girl. I don’t want to, but I’m bound to. ‘Tis about the Prothero luck, and how we come to it, and and what we must do to keep it.”

She sat down, beads forgotten, though she clutched her hand around them. “I don’t understand what you mean, Da,” she said, slowly. Was
this
what the little Tylwyth Teg had been hinting at?

“You know how you used to see things, when you were small?” he asked, slowly and carefully, as if each word cost him dearly. “Creatures, I’d call them. Maybe… small people that came to play with you?”

Shocked, she took a deep breath. “I still see them, Da. I never stopped. And they talk to me and show me things. Like where to find things, like that lump of ambergris. I still see the Ellyllon—I saw three just the other day. One of them was the one that tripped up the constable. I just didn’t tell you, because you were so upset when I spoke of them.”

He passed his hand over his face.

“Da?” she said, hesitantly. “What’s it mean, Da?”

“It means they never lost interest in you,” he said, and shook his head. “More than that, I dun know.’ He furrowed his brow. “I have to begin at th’ beginning. It was back, far back, afore Owen Glendower, may be all the way back to Arthur and the Merlin and Gwenhwyfar. My da didn’t know how far back, nor did his. But this is the way of it. There’s Tylwyth Teg, and then there’s Tylwyth Teg. There’s all manner of the Verry Volk. What you’re seein’, you’re seein’ the People of the Water. Don’t matter what kind, fresh, salt, still or running. Now, back in the days before even Arthur, Math ap Mathonwy was the brother of Don, and he was King in Gwynedd. That’s here, that’s the name of the old kingdom. When he needed a handmaiden, his magician Gwydion advised him to seek out his
niece, Arianrhod. Now she was supposed to be a virgin, you see, Math needed that power in bein’ virgin because he was almost as much magician as Gwydion. When she arrived at the great hall, she stepped up to the throne and Math asked, ‘Are you a maiden?’ Not wanting to be shamed before the court, she replied that she was. Then Math took out his magic wand, bent it and said, ‘Step over this.’ As she did so she gave birth to two boys, right there on the spot. And that was Gwydion’s doing, because he wanted her. In her shock and shame she fled the Castle of Math and has no more to do with this tale.

“One of the boys was taken up immediately by Gwydion and he became the hero of another legend. The one that was left was beautiful like no other child that’s ever been seen, like the sun and the moon together, and there wasn’t a woman that didn’t dote on him as a boy, and lust for him as a man. On the day of his naming he was taken down to the sea. Upon seeing the ocean for the first time he leapt out of his nurse’s arms and jumped into the sea. He became a god and Math named him ‘Dylan’—that means ‘wave.’ Dylan Eil Ton was the first and father of the shape-shifters of the sea, the Selch. And he sired children on many women, and some of those women and children chose to live in the sea with him, in halls and villages they built beneath the waves. You know of the Selch, aye? The seal-folk?”

She nodded, because of course, those were some of the tales that old woman had told the children in her care.

“Well… they’re real. And it happened that back in the day, when Arthur was just a boy, maybe, there was a fisherman who found a seal caught in his net. And since he had some of the magic in him, and could see it was something special, instead of killing it, he spoke to it kind-like, and said ‘Now don’t you move, for you’ll tear my net. I’ll free you and you can be about your business.’ And so he did, and instead of swimming off, that seal followed him, and drove fish into his net so he had a catch the like of which he’d never seen. And when he beached his coracle, it came ashore, and before he could turn around, a man stood where the seal had been. ‘You’ve
done me a kindness unasked,’ said the main. ‘So I’ll offer you a bargain.’ This was the bargain. It seems that the blood of the Selch was growing thin and unthrifty, and they were getting fewer. So they said to the Prothero of that time, ‘You take one of our girls to wife. She’ll have two children, one for you and one for us, and then she’ll come back to us. In return, your fishing will never fail, and your boat will never founder, and you’ll never drown. And that will be the bargain that you’ll make for all your kin from now until when the sun fails. A Selch bride or a Selch groom, two children, and your nets will always be full of fish.’”

Mari listened to him wide-eyed, mouth agape. It sounded mad. But she had
seen
the Tylwyth Teg for herself. She’d seen them trick the constable. And it certainly explained why her father felt confident on the water in any weather, how he never failed to come home with a catch and—

“Blessed saints!” Her hand went to her mouth. “My mother—”

He nodded, then gestured towards the sea. “Out there somewhere. And your brother with her. Now you know why we live away from the village and within the sound of the sea. Trust me, with Selch blood in you, away from the sea you’d run mad with longing. As it happened, when the time came for your mother to leave me, we both knew that times were different. A man’s wife and one of his children missing—that’d be noticed. And people would talk about how my da’s wife run off with a gypsy, and how
his
wife went out fishing and drowned… in the old days we could keep ourselves to ourselves and never mind. But can’t do that now, not with the village so near. So she went out kelping where the village could see, and your brother Ronan with her, and her folk made a great rogue wave to come up to shore, and away they swam.”

“Constable Ewynnog doesn’t like that story,” Mari said, meditatively.

Daffyd shrugged. “Like enough there’d have been a constable here to see what was what if your ma had just gone off and no good explanation for it.” He sighed. “But here’s the long and the short of it. A bargain’s a bargain, and you and I have had eighteen years of
Prothero’s Luck and were bound into the pledge as sure as in a net. You’re eighteen, and the time has come for you.”

For a moment she couldn’t fathom what he meant. And then it came clear in a flash, and she brought up her head sharply. “You mean—
I
have to take some… Tylwyth Teg man I don’t even
know
to husband? It was all well and good for you, da, you only had the fathering! I’ll be the one doing
work
with two babes, and for some stranger?”

Her father flushed. “Mari… it’s a magic made in the long-ago, and I don’t know what will happen if—”

There was a snicker, and both their heads whipped around. It was the wicked-eyed seaweed-girl sitting on the water barrel. “
I can tell you that you won’t like it. If you break the bargain, then you’d best find yourself a place far, far, far away from the sea, and then find a magician stronger than the sea. The magic grows stronger with each mating, and now it will tear you apart if you break it. If you run, the sea will call you, and you’ll either run mad, or you’ll answer it and go to it and never come out no more.”

She tittered again, leapt up off the barrel, and vanished.

Mari felt her whole body go cold with fear.

Her father gulped audibly. “Well,” he said, into the deathly silence. “There it is. You keep the bargain or…”

She looked up at him, fear turning to fury. “Or else?” she said, angrily. “That simple? Oh—oh I
hate
magic!”

And she burst into tears.

At first, her father was guilty and tried to comfort her. But then, as she alternately wailed and railed, he grew impatient, then angry.

And finally he shouted. “And just what did you think you would be doing with your life, you young limb? How is this different than if I’d said, ‘Mari, I’ve found you a husband, you’ll have him’?” His tone turned mocking. “Did you think you’d meet a prince riding on the sand and be whisked off to some castle? Or maybe you thought one day your Tylwyth Teg would show you a heap of gold and you could live like a duchess? Well, this is the wide, real world, my girl,
and most of us do things we’d rather not for longer than we want, and you might as well get used to it!”

Such blatant unfairness shut off her tears and made her splutter. “Oh!” was all she could manage.
“Oh!”
because what she wanted to say was something so vile she wouldn’t ever say it to her own father, however much she
felt
it right now.

Instead, before he could stop her, she shoved the table right into him, pinning him in his chair. “I know that no
good
father would barter away his only child like—like—beads from a peddler!” And she threw the beads still in her hand at his face, and ran out the door.

But not seawards. Oh no. Right now, the sea was the last place she wanted to be. And not to the village; what comfort was there for her in the village? No, she ran across the sheep-meadow, across the road, and into the hills. She thought she heard her father calling her name, but she shut her ears to it, and ran and ran and ran until she ran out of breath, and fell sobbing to the turf.