Better that way, her brother insisted. Safer that way. There were so many of them . . .
And Jack was one of them, one with them, the men with their wet clothes and weathered faces, the girl with the red-rimmed eyes.
She lengthened her stride, unhampered by the pelting rain and gusts of wind. She was not jealous. What she wanted, she would have. She was an immortal child of the sea, part of the First Creation.
And yet . . .
Standing alone outside the circle of the fire, she had been achingly aware of something outside and separate from herself, the web of human experience. All those others in the taproom had come together in the face of the storm, bound together by some human need, united by a shared understanding of death and love and loss.
Humans died.
She would not die.
But she could do something they could not do.
She walked the long stone jetty that protected the harbor. Waves crested and crashed around her, pouring their might onto the rocks, sending up shoots and plumes of spray, drenching her hair and her skirt. The sea pounded through the soles of her feet and within her chest.
Dimly, she heard shouting behind her. She would not have chosen to reveal herself. She did not want to prompt questions she was not prepared to answer. Not yet.
But she would not let human considerations, human fears, distract her from her magic. She closed her mind to consequences and embraced the water’s power. She breathed it in, licking it from her lips, absorbing it through her skin. She was drunk on the smell of brine, blinded and deafened by the beauty of the tempest.
Lifting her arms to the wind, she raised her face to the rain and sang in the storm.
Her notes pierced the heavy sky, soared like drops of vapor into the clouds swirling and combining high above the earth. Bright shards of music ripped from her throat and flashed like lightning among the currents of air. The energy of the storm pulsed inside her, welled inside her, spilled from her eyes and her heart like song. Like blood.
She felt the clouds shift and break, felt the sea surge and respond, and trembled in the marrow of her bones.
It was not enough.
Voices fretted her, plucking at her peace, stirring her to the depths like the wind moving over the waters.
She lost her man.
He will not be found until this storm is past.
There is nothing you can do.
Resolve stiffened her spine. She anchored her feet on the slippery wet stone and sang in the seals from the sea.
She summoned them by name and by magic, and they came, streaking dark and brindled out of the deeps, racing in response to her song. Leaping, diving, seeking, finding . . .
There. A young man drifting in a fisherman’s smock and boots, his dark hair flowing like weeds. A heartbeat, thin and thready beneath the surface of the water. Her own pulse fluttered in response.
Rain spattered and sank on the surface of the ocean. She felt his breath rising like a chain of silver bubbles, barely linking him to life. Her lungs emptied. Was she too late?
In a burst of notes and panic, she sent the seals scything through the water to bring him up, to bring him in. They curled around him like cats, bumping him with their whiskered heads, prodding him with their flippers, rolling him on to his back like an otter. They turned his white face to the clearing sky and bore him up, making a raft of their broad, sleek bodies to carry him toward shore. She smoothed the waves in their path to a grumble, a ripple, a flourish of foam.
Her power was running out like water from a cup, leaving her emptied, her throat raw, her legs as heavy as wet sand.
She heard cries, raucous and indistinct as the kittiwakes on the cliff. The human inhabitants of Farness straggled along the seawall, watching the seals come in on the tide.
Jack . . .
Even from a distance she recognized him, his broad shoulders, his straight soldier’s posture, and everything inside her shifted and flowed like the changing shore. As if he had power over the very landscape of her heart.
The young fisherman raised his head and coughed. Or was that the barking of a seal?
Her vision wavered. Her mind grayed. She blinked, watching as a figure with flying skirts and braids detached from the huddle onshore.
“Colin!” The girl dashed to the water’s edge like a curlew darting in the tide.
Morwenna smiled.
Then the stones rose up sharply to take her, and the world faded away.
When she woke, she could not hear the sea any longer, only the murmur of human voices.
She recognized the smells of the taproom, beer and smoke, sweat and onions, and the clean soap-and-man scent that was Jack. His hard shoulder pillowed her cheek. His arms and legs supported her as if she rode before him on his horse. She felt cradled. Protected.
Off-balance.
“Never seen anything like it,” a rough male voice pronounced.
Oh dear. She opened her eyes.
Immediately Jack’s arms tightened around her. “Morwenna.”
Only her name, but she felt another shift in her chest as everything readjusted. His lean, strong face was very close, his deep brown eyes concerned.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “What were you doing out there?”
More than she could ever tell him.
She sat up cautiously, aware of the villagers gathered around the fire. She recognized the baker with his curling orange beard, the dark and nervous shopkeeper, the nasty man with the crow’s voice and the weasel’s name. Stoat? Sloat, that was it. The young lovers cuddled in the corner, the fisherman’s muscled arm around the girl’s round waist.
Jack was waiting for her answer. They all were waiting. She was truly a part of their circle now, the focus of all eyes. She fought the urge to hunch her shoulders, to hide from their attention.
“I suppose I must have fainted.”
Jack’s mouth compressed. “Before that.”
“I went outside.”
“Into the storm,” he said flatly.
She glanced out the windows to avoid meeting his eyes. In the wake of her magic, the setting sun had painted the sky orange and rose. “The weather is clearing, is it not?”
“It is now,” Jack acknowledged. “What about the seals?”
She moistened her lips. “They must have washed ashore. In the storm.”
“Washed ashore.” His voice was stiff with disbelief.
She smiled at him. “Like that lucky young man saved by the tide.”
An old fisherman spoke from his place at the bar. “It wasn’t the tide that saved him. It was the selkie.”
Morwenna’s heart beat faster. The seals she had called to her were ordinary harbor seals. But the old man’s guess was uncomfortably close to the truth. The selkie were water elementals like the finfolk, all children of the sea.
Jack’s brows drew together. “The what?”
“The seal folk. They live in the ocean as seals, see, and when they come ashore they put off their sealskins and walk around no different from you and me.”
“Except better looking,” put in another. “And naked.”
“Superstitious nonsense,” Sloat said.
The fisherman stuck out his jaw. “I’ve seen them out there in the waves. Guided me home once in the fog.”
The young man, Colin, lifted his head from the girl’s brown hair and looked at Morwenna.
“My grandda said if you find a selkie’s pelt and hide it, the selkie must bide with you as man or wife,” the second fisherman said.
Sloat sneered. “Your grandda was at sea too long. I knew you Scots had sex with sheep. But seals?”
Jack silenced him with a look. “It’s a pleasant story.”
Morwenna released a relieved breath. Story. He did not believe a word of it.