McKenna swallowed, lifted her diadem, and smiled at him. “Hey...were you serious? About being companions and...everything else?”
“Absolutely,” Tiwa said in a dry, raspy voice.
“Then I accept,” McKenna said. She poised the diadem above her head and nodded. “Now or never.”
Tiwa blushed despite his fear and nodded back. They crowned themselves together. Light filled the hall and then their minds, and there was a distant sounding of chimes and horns, and then darkness.
* * *
McKenna awoke first, and she gasped to find that the hall and the clearing beyond were even lovelier in the crisp morning light.
The fog was beginning to burn off, and the cardinals to sing, and she could just make out the silhouettes of turkeys and of deer weaving through the tree line.
In the foggy dimness of an as-yet half-conscious mind she touched her fingers together to see if she still existed in a way she understood, if she was still a creature of flesh or some kind of spirit. Her hands felt normal, and before she could guard against it a second thought entered her head: she was still alive, but after all this the gods must have transformed her somehow, right? Or else what was the point?
She brought her fingers to her jaw, praying for smoothness, only to have her heart break when the same sparse hairs that had tormented her for a year bristled under her touch.
“We’re alive!” Tiwa said.
McKenna only realized she was crying when she looked to the other throne and saw her vision distorted through tears. A tan shape moved toward her and squeezed her hand.
“What’s the matter?” Tiwa said, closer now. “We’re alive. We’re alive.”
“I’d just hoped...” She shook her head, sniffled, and wiped her nose. “It was so stupid.”
“I don’t think it’s stupid to hope,” Tiwa said. He wrapped his arms around McKenna’s shoulders and held her tight. Her eyes cleared in time to see a pair of cranes alight on an exposed beam. “We’ve got our whole lives to hope, and the world’s bigger than we could ever see.”
“I guess,” McKenna said. She took a deep, shuddering breath, stood up, and kissed the top of Tiwa’s head, most of her sadness evaporating when she noticed how he laughed and rubbed his nose. “So where should we go first?”
“I’ve always dreamed of seeing the ocean,” Tiwa said. He plucked Summer from McKenna’s lap and laid the spear between the two thrones, then stood and planted his hands on his hips. “And I heard from a traveler there’s a village near a ruin called Savannah, where the Orisha grant people powers.”
“Think it’s true?” McKenna said. She shouldered her pack and smiled at Tiwa over her shoulder, a little redness around her eyes all that was left of her tears.
Tiwa laughed and shrugged. “After last night, who can say? But it’s like my dad always says.”
McKenna gave him a curious look, but he rubbed his nose and grinned as he left her waiting. Eventually she punched him in the shoulder and he snickered.
“What does your dad always say?”
“‘No journey ends in disappointment if a woman walks five steps ahead of you.’”
She punched him again, and as they left the thrones and walked into the sunlight their laughter sent deer and turkey fleeing back into the trees.
What happened was this: Barnard received a dream praising him for his cleverness. The winter came, so mild and wet that bumper crops of spinach and asparagus filled the bellies of the faithful and the livestock barely lost a pound.
Winter ended. Cherry blossoms bloomed and a wave of kudzu hid the bones of the electric world for as long as the weather remained warm. The roads reopened and travelers came with trade and stories.
Between the usual tales of wolf men taking sheep and fair folk stealing daughters was the occasional mention of a young man and a young woman who wandered from village to village, the young man laying low brigands and bullies while the young woman sought after ever more spiritual mastery, ever deeper knowledge of the gods.
Some put two and two together and some did not, but as seasons and then years wore on the stories slowed, then stopped. Memories faded, and eventually all who might have remembered had passed on.
What happened was this: A very, very long time after the curse was broken, a mighty warrior and a potent sorceress, both stooped and gray with age, visited the village where they were born.
They paid their respects at the faded memorial of a long-dead druid and left as quietly as they had arrived. Only the gods know what happened before their return, or where their road eventually ended.
* * *
ONCE UPON A SEASTORM
by
Fox Benwell
Once upon a brewing storm, a boy—still a boy, whatever else—sat on the Northern Line trying to see the future. But like the tunnels that he rides, it forks, and there is darkness, and he cannot see at all.
* * *
Some days, he’s not sure that he’s human. And this isn’t new. As far into the past as he remembers, there were stories. His mother traipsed them to the library every Friday afternoon. Maxed out their cards and took the spoils on home, where they’d drape the bedsheets over chairs and sit in caves and castles, telling tales.
Her favourites were the happy ending stories filled with love and riches.
His? His favourites were wilder, full of faerie folk and gnolls and trolls and magic, of moss and stone and sea. And his most-beloved of them all were the tales of seals and mermen and the Finn.
Oh, they scared him. Sometimes, he would lie awake and feel the cold lapping of seaweed at his toes, the stabbing of a trident, or watch the curled, beckoning finger of the Finn in shadows on the wall. Sometimes he would hear a lullaby sung by a voice made of waves, feel the snuffling of whiskers or the memory of thicker skin, and it felt good.
Sometimes, that was worse. Because belonging there meant that, perhaps, the cotton castles weren’t his after all.
His mother loved him. Wove a net of happiness and wonder, fed and clothed him, taught him all she knew. But the shadow of the sea stayed with him as he grew, and all the while he wondered whether he might be a seal.
Theodora Hearn was definitely something.
The other children didn’t like him. Didn’t understand his need to move, the way his heart would race if the walls were too thick or air too dry. They poked at his love of wild things. Called him animal and changeling child, and marked him dangerous.
He had asked her once, expecting her to laugh and tell him that he’s no more Phocidae than hedgehog, but all he got was silence and the smallest, saddest smile.
* * *
The next time seals were mentioned he was ten, and he was not expecting it.
He’d been psyching himself up for a Big Conversation for a week or two. Ready, but a thousand times not ready, too. He threw open the window for some air, but when his mother joined him he could barely breathe, even from the safety of their bedsheet cave.
“Mama,” he said, his heart breaking, “I think I’m all wrong.” And he told her that he didn’t fit this skin, that he wasn’t ever who the world thought he should be and the words it used for him were misaligned.
“My poppet.” She leaned closer. “There is nothing wrong with you, at all. I’m sorry if I got it wrong.”
And by way of explanation, she told him a story.
“Everybody knows the story of the selkie wife whose anxious husband locked her skin away so she would stay. But once there was a woman—wild and sad and all alone—who wanted nothing more than to belong.
“One night it got so bad that she left the house and walked and walked and walked along the beach, willing for the sea to help her, or to take her in. And as she walked, she cried a storm, and seven of those tears fell right into the ocean. Seven wishes, all for the same thing.
“And the sea answered.
“She scooped the baby up, and warmed it up against her chest, and right there on the beach she knew where she belonged.
“You see...you are not wrong at all. You were a gift.”
“But—”
“Whisht.” She stopped him with a finger, for she still had more to say. “And I’m sorry if I got it wrong. It’s hard to tell the gender of a seal.”
He did not really know what she meant: whether she meant he was a selkie in the actual, proper, see-it-with-your-own-eyes sense, or like a sort of allegory—a word that he knew because sometimes his mum would sit down with a mug of tea and tell him about different kinds of stories and the ways they work. But he supposed it didn’t matter. Not then. He was loved, and she did not mind that he was different.
They switched pronouns that day, choosing he and him to better fit his form. And his mother took him for a haircut and did all the necessary adult cringey things like talk to doctors about puberty. And with those changes and with time his troubles eased.
With time and teenagehood the tales of seals were pushed aside, becoming more story than fact, more past than present. But still, Theodora Hearn always felt a little wild, and sometimes he would wonder what she’d meant that day and whether, if he went up to the attic, he would find a sealskin neatly folded, in a box with all his baby things.
He never looked. It scared him, and he didn’t want to know.
But then...
Today Theodora Hearn sits on the Northern Line, his savings in his pocket and a hundred questions on his mind, and he is going home to find out who he is, and how to be.
* * *
King’s Cross—home of young wizardling dreams—is commuter-busy, packed with people in a hurry. Good. There’re fewer chances he’ll be noticed.
Not that anyone would know. Not yet. He has—he looks at his watch—nine hours before his mum will find the note.
He packed sandwiches. Sardine. And his mother’s chocolate chip banana bread, both neatly wrapped in silver parcels. But he stops to get a coffee just to kill the time, and then he sits, back to a pillar, and watches all the ordinary people trotting through their ordinary lives.
A small, Chinese Slytherin in wizard robes and flip-flops drags her dad towards the queue for pictures by the platform. Theo grins at her tenacity, but as she joins the line, he wonders whether he’s the only person to have dreamt not of the castle but the lake.
It tempted him. The water. Always. And though he would not—could not—bear the chlorine and the stares and the way his body felt in Lycra at the pool, he longed for it, and that longing grew stronger until one day he could not stay still, could not bear to be confined by cotton castle walls, and when his mother was asleep he slipped out in the dark, and headed for the Thames.
The first time, he was terrified. Terrified of London’s less-than-honest folk, and walking into trouble, terrified of getting lost, or being swept away to sea. But the thought of moonlit water in this summer heat was too delicious to ignore, and so he went.
That’s where he met the boy. A beauty. He smiled like a lazy trickster god, and when he moved, he moved with all the loping ease of water. And for a moment, Theo wondered whether whiskered kisses weren’t a memory but something in his future.
Theo ducked beneath the god-boy’s boat to catch a breath, and the water raked his hair, and soothed him, and was everything he ever needed.
He rolled beneath the surface as he swam, relishing the way the city river toyed with him, pushed and pulled and left its dirt-slick, greasy mark beneath his nails. He laughed. Right there underwater, great bubbles of joy. Then he dove deeper. Swam a little farther. And when he rose, lungs burning, he was being watched.
The boy laughed at the seal-boy bobbing out beside his narrowboat, and slipped out of his clothes to join him. And when they kissed, two heads just above the surface, and then under—fingers meshed like pennywort—Theo was as full as oceans.
It became a habit then. Every second Tuesday, Theodora’s mother worked, and rather than stay home with all his schoolbooks, Theo headed for the water. Every second Tuesday, two boys would explore a little more, of the river and each other, each time going deeper, further, trying something new.
And they both were caught up in this new eddying love—which everybody knows makes you invincible—and neither one was careful.
* * *
And now... Theodora Hearn does not know who he is, for he has heard the stories.
You’ve been warned about him. Child-snatching temptress. Faker.
Nothing with the boy felt fake. Not while they were doing it. Theo loved him—the way his skin would smell of white soap and of sparks and wood smoke, and how his fingers gripped but never left a mark. He loved the way this wild boy talked of open skies, and travelling, and stars.
But after—as they sat upon his boat and stared at the pee-stick with its thin blue lines silently blaring POSITIVE—the loping sea-roll of the boy turned hard and sharp and angry.
That night, Theo heard names that he’d thought were locked inside his past.
Trickster. Changeling. Pervert. Freak.
There are stories, old as time, in every newspaper and mummy-blog across the country, policing what our bodies are and who they’re for and what they’re meant to do. You’ll know them, sure as you know of the waterkind. That night, the god-boy threw them all into the open.
* * *
Halfway to Edinburgh, Theodora Hearn stares hard at his reflection, flecked with redbrick terraces and pylons as they fly along the track. He doesn’t recognise it, but he’s not sure what should be there looking back at him instead. And if he’s honest he’s not really looking, because all those words are in his head and warping everything before his eyes.
What are you, when you’re not quite human?
What happens when you—
Nerves roil around his insides, and one hand wraps instinctively around his stomach, as though that’ll protect them both from words he cannot even think.
That night—that dreaded awful night—Theodora ran all the way home and tore up to the attic looking for some answers as to why. Evidence that he was real and wanted, and nothing like the god-boy’s tongue proclaimed.
He expected secrets stuffed into a box. He half expected sealskin. But his mother travelled light, and all there was up there were neat, dated and alphabetised boxes of paperwork and a chest of neatly folded sheets and blankets. He unfolded each of them, in case, and his mother’s camphor-cinnamon-stick bundles rolled across the floor.
He tried under her bed—shoes, and baby pictures which Theo had asked her to take down on the day of the haircut because all those dresses made him feel too squirly on the inside. And he tried the backs of kitchen drawers, searching among long-forgotten keys and screwdrivers and cables.
He found nothing. Nor was there anything of use in the dad department. No spine-cracked Doctor Spock or Fatherhood for Dummies, or carefully clipped articles about unusual families who are in other ways exactly like your nuclear households: warm, striving and joyful, bringing up their kids as best they can.
He found nothing but remnants of blanket forts and stories, and although that was everything, it was not, in that moment, quite enough, and crying tears of rage and shame and Oh-Gods-how-am-I-supposed-to-do-this, Theodora hatched a plan to travel north, to the start of everything, the Once Upon a Time.
* * *
At Waverly, he unwraps a sandwich, wolfs it down, then flicks through magazines in Smiths to pass the time till he can board.
His pack is heavier than it had felt this morning. In it, he has everything a boy—a
seal—a runaway could need. Socks and pants and his mother’s old scrapbook of stories they had found and loved and told again. A pen. A sleeping bag, musty from the attic. A hat. And a ukulele, on which he knows how to play five chords, each of them as angst-filled as the last.
Once upon a seastorm, a woman stepped onto a beach and found a seal.
Once upon another...
But try as he might, he could not see the future.
He needs to know what happens next.
She’ll be on her lunch break now. In the tiny room for nurses, with its strange coffee and cardboard smell and windows that won’t open. For a moment, he wants to turn back, to find a bar of Chocolate Cream and take it to surprise her.
But—
“Mint, dear?” The old lady next to him stops knitting to offer him an open packet. “Fix what ails you.”
“No, thanks.” He tries not to sigh, but her voice is soft the way his mother’s is, their accent far from most of London, and a hint of worry leaks out of his lungs.
She shifts her own mint to her cheek and sucks on it a moment, watching him intently. “Suit yourself.” And he’s going to go back to thinking when she says, “Where are you headed?”
“North.”
“Och, aye?”
He nods, not quite trusting himself to say more.
“On your holidays?”
“I’m heading home.”
He expects the usual probing questions—where is home? Was he away for school? What is he going to be?—and dreads them, but she merely flashes him a look, and nods, and goes back to her knitting—something small in a deep forest green.
Theodora’s never seen somebody knit before. He watches as her fingers move all on their own, pushing, pulling, sliding. Her eyes close, but her fingers keep on going, and her lips move just a little, muttering intent. And he’s sure that it’s magic—an incantation to turn thread into a sheath of warmth and care.
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