Authors: Betsy Cornwell
The darkness was almost total, broken only by the beam of the lighthouse and the small, scattered bolts of lightning overhead, not striking down but rumbling inside the clouds, chasing one another.
Mara thought the bright afternoon she’d spent on Star Island must have been in some other life, some other world. She remembered Noah laughing in the sun, his sandy hair catching the light, his skin warm even when he’d plunged into the water to catch her. His strong human hands.
Here everything was cold and wet and lonely.
The storm was quieting. Mara lifted the skin over her head, willing herself into a seal. She kept her feelings to herself as she swam back to the pod.
She was prepared to meet Maebh’s anger right away, but by the time she returned, the Elder was herding the younglings to Duck Island for the night. Maebh sent her only a cold twinge of warning. But Mara knew that in the morning, once the younglings were rested and fed again, Maebh would have plenty to say.
They huddled together on one of the rocks around Duck. Scores of seals—true seals, sweet simpletons with no secrets under their pelts—slept around them, along with the large flock of Eider ducks that had given the island its name.
The younglings piled over one another, squirming in competition for the smoothest bit of rock to sleep on. Maebh, Mara, and Ronan took their places around them, guarding them against rogue waves and toothy beasts.
Mara watched her family fall asleep one by one. Ronan snored, grumbling sealy sounds to himself. Maebh slept on her side and reached out a flipper once in a while, as if she expected to find someone sleeping beside her. Mara felt loneliness coming off them in waves—but maybe it was the reflection of her own loneliness, watching her pod fall asleep and feeling, for the first time, as if she didn’t belong with them.
She recited the younglings’ names to herself as she watched them dream, dusting sleepy flippers over their eyes to ward off gnats. Branna and Innes slept curled over each other as they always did, and Lir, the oldest, stretched himself out by their tails. Bram and Nab slept on their backs, snoring in lighter echoes of Ronan’s deep rumbles. The younglings’ smallness, their vulnerability, made Mara’s heart ache. She wrapped herself over the edge of the rock.
Every lapping wave slapped loud and insistent against her ears. She turned over and over, trying to get comfortable. Finally, Ronan kicked her and snorted his annoyance, so she stopped.
A sharp pain nipped into her back. She scratched, bothered that some maverick horsefly had made it all the way out to the islands to bite her. She rubbed the itchy spot on the rocks, but it didn’t help.
She looked down. Her back smarted, but she couldn’t see a bite. Mara scratched again and her sealskin parted in deep folds, exposing a crescent of pale humanskin underneath.
Mara almost fell off the rock. She glanced around, making sure her surprise hadn’t woken any of them. No one stirred. With a prayer for her pod’s safety, she slipped down into the nighttime green of the ocean.
Though chilly, the surface water was still warmer than the layer of deep Arctic water that lurked beneath it, never warmed by the sun. Mara wanted to stay there, in the in-between. She willed her sealskin back onto her body, but she couldn’t make it do what she wanted. Instead, it peeled off more and more, until a human hand slipped free from her flipper and she felt the top of her head opening up. Soon she was looking at the water through human eyes.
She struggled farther down, hoping the cold deep would remind her who she really was. She might play human sometimes, but she was a selkie, a seal at heart. She refused to be anything else.
She sang the old songs in her head as she dove:
Morgana, Suleskerry, guide me now
My mother, my father, remember me
I call from the sea to the Goddess
Lead me under, show me the way
Finally she swam deep enough that her human parts began to shiver and quake with cold, and the sealskin instinctively spiraled back into its snug fit. As soon as her face knit over with gray velvet, the water flowing around her felt warmer, welcoming. She sighed with relief.
By the time she had settled herself on Duck Island again, the horizon showed gray and silver at its edges. Dawn couldn’t be far away. The younglings wiggled and sniffed in their sleep, chasing dream fish, maybe. Lir had rolled away from the group, and his tail dangled over the edge of the rock, almost touching the water.
Mara winced. She nudged the little one back into the safe center of the pod and wrapped her own body around the edge.
By dawn she managed to stop crying.
eleven
S
WEETHEART
,” said Gemm, sitting down next to Lo, “we have to talk about this.”
Lo uncurled from her fetal position on the couch. She scowled at Gemm’s orthopedic shoes. “About what?”
Gemm made the same accusations Noah and their parents and her therapist had spouted all last year: She woke up before dawn, drew or painted through breakfast and lunch without eating anything, then wound up on the couch, circles under her eyes, her blood sugar so low she would almost pass out. Or she ate all day, nonstop, devouring anything in the house, then locked herself in the bathroom with a bottle of ipecac syrup or, once she had built up an immunity to that, just her own fingers.
“How long do you think you can live like this?” Gemm didn’t sound as if she were just making a point, even though Lo knew that was the truth. She sounded as if she really wanted to know the answer.
Lo shrugged. She sat up slowly, still looking at the floor.
“Six months more? A year? Two?” Gemm took Lo’s chin in her hand, forcing their eyes to meet.
Lo wrenched her chin away and looked down again. “I don’t know,” she mumbled.
“Yes, you do. Ask your body. It will tell you.”
She had to look at Gemm then. The idea of communicating with her body seemed as ridiculous as . . . as talking to a fish. A fish was a stupid creature, low and cold and ugly. Down in the muck, like her stupid fat body.
Gemm took Lo’s hand and molded it under her own, keeping her first and middle fingers straight. Lo recoiled from the sight of her bile-worn nails, but Gemm’s hold was firm. She guided Lo’s hand to her left wrist and pressed the pads of her fingers down on the skin there.
Lo felt her own heartbeat rushing through her too quickly, carrying oxygen to muscles too empty to do anything but tremble. Her throat still stung from her last retch, though she hadn’t even eaten yet today. She set her mouth hard, remembering her vow never to cry in front of family. She came close a lot, but always managed to scrape by without tears until she was safely alone.
She felt Gemm’s fingers, cool and paper-dry, on her other wrist. “Do you feel it?” Gemm asked.
Lo nodded, scowling.
“That’s your heart working too hard, harder than a heart your age should have to work.”
Did Gemm’s voice break? Lo wasn’t sure.
“I often forget I’m not so young anymore,” Gemm continued. “My body is the only thing that remembers.” She stroked her own cheek, kneading at the wrinkles there. “Every choice I ever made, everything I did, my body kept a record. It tells me stories, and I have to remember to listen.”
Gemm touched Lo’s chin again, but gently now. “Make your body strong, Lo, and it will thank you, now and when you’re an old woman like me.” She leaned forward, her voice urgent. “Keep it sick, and you might not live long enough for it to tell you stories.”
Gemm wrapped her arms around Lo, and she surrendered, the tears and saliva from her sobs blending together on her grandmother’s shoulder.
twelve
A
INE
hated the way he touched her. He touched her as if her skin couldn’t feel, her hair couldn’t pull, her limbs couldn’t bruise. He touched her so that even when he was far away, as he was now, she never felt untouched.
Oh, she didn’t think he was trying to hurt her on purpose—he just didn’t understand that hurting her was even possible. The worst was when he made her eat. He stuck his fingers in her mouth along with the food, just to make sure it got down her throat. She used to bite him when he did that, but eventually she understood it wouldn’t help. He didn’t feed her for days after she bit, and Aine had never quite resolved to starve herself. She still thought she might escape someday.
She couldn’t even tell him her name. He called her Hope. She thought that was stupid. Once he’d caught her, she’d known better than to hope for anything. Every youngling heard the stories of captured selkies and their lifetimes on land. She’d never heard of someone from her pod actually being captured before, but then, maybe the Elders hadn’t wanted to scare them.
Still, she wished she’d known to be scared. She had just been sitting at the top of the beach, quiet and happy, watching Ronan pray. He wasn’t quite grown yet, not so tall nor so broad as the other males, but he was strong and kind and serious. As he bowed toward the moon, waist-deep in the water, Aine had thought to herself that no one ever had a better brother than she had in Ronan. He told her stories, saved the fattest fish for her, and even let her nip onto his tail for rides through the water, barreling through the cold depths so much faster than she could swim by herself. The Elders were always distracted, caring only for their own grown-up business, but there wasn’t a single day when Ronan wasn’t there for her.
At least, not until he’d let the fisherman take her. Ronan hadn’t even turned from his prayer; he hadn’t even noticed her leaving the beach. He’d just stayed in the inbetween, facing the moon, like the rest of them.
Aine stood, shaking her head violently to push away the memories of her brother. When that didn’t work, she backed up into the corner of the little room and ran forward. Her head slammed into the sharp wood at the edge of the window. Black flooded over her eyes.
She came to when a thick, salty trickle slipped into her mouth, onto her tongue. She blinked. She licked the blood away from her lips and sat up, letting the sharp throb on her temple drown out her thoughts.
Eventually the pain faded, and she felt the blood drying on her face. She scratched at it and tiny brownish flakes came off, but not enough to look clean. The fisherman trimmed her nails very short.
Aine licked her hand and rubbed it hard across her cheek, trying to wash the blood away before the fisherman came home. She stared at her little child’s hands. The Elders told her taking her skin off would let her grow up, but she hadn’t grown a bit since that Midsummer ceremony. Her stupid humanskin felt dry and tight and bulgy, as if her inside parts wanted to grow but her skin wouldn’t let them.
She thought maybe if she had her sealskin back . . . but that wouldn’t do any good, either. The fisherman had it—she knew he must from the stories; she’d never have gone with him, otherwise—and she knew he wasn’t stupid enough to keep it anywhere she’d find it.
Oh, she shouldn’t have thought of her skin. Because every time she did, she started to wonder if maybe it had been more than just the skin that had made her leave her pod.
Hadn’t she been a little curious? Hadn’t she smiled at him when he put his finger to his lips and beckoned? She’d smelled fish on him, and she was so hungry from the days of fasting before the ceremony. Hadn’t she thought he’d feed her? Hadn’t she followed him willingly from the beach, away from the safety of her pod?
Aine slumped down the wall until she was lying prostrate on the floor. Yes, and yes, and yes. She had gone without struggle. She had stopped fighting him long ago. Even her escape attempts were reduced to ramming her head against the window, and she knew she did that to knock herself out more than anything else.
This, everything that had happened, was her fault. All hers. She didn’t deserve to escape.
thirteen
M
ARA
took a deep breath, as if her courage were an organ that could draw strength from the air, like her lungs.
Maebh stared at her, pretending patience. Her eyes were narrow and dark. It had been almost a week since they’d discovered each other on land, and Mara clearly couldn’t avoid explaining herself any longer. In fact, she could hardly believe Maebh had let her wait this long. Now they stood together in a shadowed cove of Cedar Island, and clearly Maebh would wait no longer.
She wished she knew how to start. Every time she opened her mouth to speak, only anger and accusations sprang to her lips. She knew yelling at Maebh again would just make things worse. She would have to bear it—she would have to apologize if she ever wanted to see land again.
But Maebh was on land too—how can she punish me?
Mara shoved that thought away.
She bowed her head to one side, exposing her neck, a sign of surrender even in this human form. “I’m sorry, Elder.”
“I should hope so, Daughter.” Maebh frowned. “You can’t begin to understand the risk you’ve created.”
A growl scratched at Mara’s throat, but she refused to let it out. “I know.”
Maebh nodded at her. “Go on. You swear never to create such a risk again?”
“What?” The growl escaped against her will. “What about your risk, Maebh? Can you promise to stay away too?”
“I—” Maebh looked toward the lighthouse. “Just tell me: are you willing to give it up, or aren’t you?”
Mara’s mind rushed toward two separate answers, leaving her torn and battered between them. She needed Maebh’s respect, her goodwill, if she was ever to become the next Elder. Maebh would never pass leadership of the pod on to Mara if she believed she would endanger it in any way—no responsible Elder would.
But she couldn’t give up the land, the dry air on her humanskin, the bright, sharp colors of sand and grass and sky. She couldn’t resign herself to turning human only at the Midsummer ceremonies, to drawing out her life for hundreds of years as only a seal. She knew it was the change that made her age—every selkie knew that. Every time she shifted, seal to human, human to seal, she got a little older. She had been born seventeen summers ago, but she might look eighteen by now, or even twenty. If she kept changing so often, she’d barely live longer than a normal human like Noah.