Tide

by Lacy Sheridan

  One hesitant step forward. Another. I forced every breath to stay even, in and out in a steady rhythm. Forced my back to remain straight, my chin up. Every step further I expected to be attacked, for a monster like the ones from my village to race out of one of the dark buildings. But it was silent.

  It looked so like my village it ached to walk through. The buildings were the same—the same materials, same designs, even the layout was similar. As if I’d returned home only to find it deserted. But this was an old kind of empty: roofs were caved in, doors loose on rusted hinges. The forest had crept in and grown over the signs of human life, crawling up walls and drowning a few that had collapsed. The further I went the worse it got, choked by an unnatural sense of waiting.

  When I reached a well, its stones turned green with moss, I stopped and climbed off Inka. She shuffled and swished her tail, restless and anxious. I put one hand on her neck, shushing her. “It’s alright,” I whispered. I didn’t know if that was true, but she didn’t need to know that. Any moment the selkie could appear, ready to kill us, or worse, for daring to step into his prison.

  Or nothing could appear at all. We could be truly, completely alone.

  I wasn’t sure which I would prefer.

  He had to be here. He had to be. Without him I had nothing, no hope to cling to. So I looked around at the decaying, shadowy buildings, gray and green with age. At the dusty paths gone long without feet to disturb them. I saw no sign of life except the creeping plants and Inka, dark eyes wide and ears alert as she waited beside me.

  I swallowed the dryness in my throat and fumbled over the word before it scraped into the air. “Hello?”

  Only silence. A deep-rooted, terrible silence.

  I glanced to Inka again before stepping away from the well. There were a hundred directions I could pick, and I didn’t know which way to go, so I went forward. On past a building so overgrown I couldn’t tell what purpose it had served. On to a thin street that led to a line of small houses.

  The back of my neck prickled, and I turned without knowing why. Nothing. My breath quickened, but I forced it to slow down and returned my attention to the path I’d chosen. “Hello?” I called again, praying he was in earshot, and that he wouldn’t mind a visitor. “I’m here to talk to you.”

  I got no response. Maybe he was gone after all.

  Inside the house, I heard a cautious footstep, the creak of an old floorboard. I kept my feet from bolting. I didn’t dare take another step closer, but I studied the cracked frame of the door, the darkened and dirt-smeared windows. “Hello?”

  In the corner of a window a shadow shifted, or perhaps it was just the murky reflection of a cloud. “Is anyone here?”

  A wandering thief in search of forgotten valuables, or a trick of my imagination. Not him. After all this time he couldn’t still be here.

  I curled my fingers tight around the strap of my pack to keep them steady and stepped up to the door of the house. Part of me wanted to knock, but what would be the point if I was right and it was empty? So I pushed the door open, bracing myself for some terrible sight on the other side. Another monster, or a collection of corpses he fed off, or gods knew what else.

  It was an empty room. Dusty, shadowed, and with a faint chill, but nothing more than that. I stepped inside. Not empty, not entirely—in one corner sat a single chair, toppled onto its side with a leg broken off. The jagged, splintered stump left sent a shiver crawling through me. “If you’re here, please talk to me. I’m not here to hurt you.”

  That was a laugh. Me, here to hurt a tidesperson.

  But if there was a presence here, it stayed far away and unresponsive. I crossed to the fireplace and knelt, brushing my fingers along the ash. Fresh, warm. A fire had burned here, and not too long ago. The lump of terror rose in my throat again, but I fought it off and straightened. “I know someone is here. Please, I need to speak with you.”

  I held my breath as I waited, looking around as if the selkie might pop out of the walls. Nothing moved, not a whisper of a breath but my own. I trembled at the eerie quiet and raised my head to the ceiling, searching for what to do next. Wait? Keep talking and hope it enticed him to reveal himself? Give up?

  I doubted a selkie, especially one imprisoned by humans, wanted anything to do with a human girl looking for help. Except maybe as dinner. Did they eat people, or just kill for sport? I didn’t want to know.

  I closed my eyes, pushing my fingers into my scalp and thinking. I needed to make this work. I needed to try something.

  What had Grandmama said about the tidespeople? Things beyond the terrors described in the stories. Secrets, she called them.

  They’re vain, you know. They don’t often care about what our people think, but when they do, they like to be shown that we know they’re above us. They like gifts. Shiny baubles or a meal they know we need.

  I didn’t have any precious trinkets to offer, but I did have food I needed. “Alright,” I called to the empty house, digging through my pack. I tore a generous chunk off the loaf of bread I’d bought, almost wincing as I did, and placed it on the floor in the center of the room. I stacked a couple of the fruits I’d packed beside it, then set a candle down with them. “These are for you. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

  As I turned to go, I was sure I felt the chill of eyes on me again. I forced myself to ignore it and keep walking.

  Hours passed. At first, I wandered the village, taking in the emptiness of it and debating over whether it would be appropriate to scavenge for any supplies that might help me. I decided against it, not wanting to upset the selkie if he chose to notice me at all. The silence sank deep into me and made my skin crawl, so I returned to the well with Inka.

  When the sun touched the tops of the roofs I thought I’d given the selkie enough time to accept or reject my gift. I didn’t want to spend a night here unless I had to: the thought made my insides twist and knot in fear. As terrible as this place was in daylight, I imagined it was a hundred times worse in the dark. I crossed to the house, listening for any change in the quiet, expectant air.

  A tiny shuffle, perhaps, as I crept closer from the side. The door was open halfway, and I couldn’t for the life of me remember if I had closed it or not. There hadn’t been a breath of wind through the village all day, so it couldn’t have moved on its own. Maybe I’d only thought I’d pulled it closed behind me. Maybe it had swung open with the rebounding force after I’d left.

  Maybe it hadn’t.

  I didn’t look inside. I pressed my back to the wall, holding my breath. Legend said that some tidespeople could hear a human breathing, hear their heartbeat; if that was true, he could probably hear mine going a hundred miles a second, but I silenced every movement I could. The lone sound from the old house was the continued broken, muted shuffling, something far too big and intent to be a scavenging animal.

  “I can smell you out there,” a voice said after a moment, and I jumped out of my skin. My muscles turned to stone. “Come out of hiding.” The voice was touched by a note of impatience—no threat, no anger.

  I inched into the doorway, voice gone. He sat against the far wall, one leg bent and the other stretched before him, and turned the bread I’d left for him over in his hands. He tore a piece off and ate it, eyes concentrated on me: deep blue eyes scattered with flecks of a paler shade, like the ocean.

  He wasn’t what I’d expected. In my head, I imagined the same people that invaded our village, gruesome and wrong. Their scaly, uneven skin and gnarled teeth drove themselves into my brain, but he was nothing like that. He looked human. A very thin and not healthy-looking human, but human nonetheless. His skin had an almost sickly pallor, a touch too pale. He wore no shirt, and I could count his ribs, see the jut of his shoulders and hipbones. His dark hair was too long, reaching past his shoulders in a rough, overgrown way, and he pushed a strand away from his face as he got to his feet. I’d been staring too long, and his lack of proper clothing, wearing only a pair of worn, dark pa
nts, made me cut my eyes away. My feet shuffled back a step.

  He stopped at the movement, keeping the distance between us. “Thank you. For the food.” I nodded. “It’s been…a very long time since a human came here.”

  “They tell us to stay away,” I managed. A human. He’d said it so easy, so casual. So it was true—he was one of them.

  I glanced up and caught the flicker of an insincere smile on his face when he replied. “Why are you here, then? To say you’ve met a selkie, or just rebelling?”

  “You’re a selkie,” I said, letting it sink in and settle in my mind. And then it hit me. The story had been true. He was here. He was real. I had to repeat it, if only to make myself hear it again, “You’re a selkie.”

  “Was.” He ripped off another piece of bread, frustrated. “Until they took my skin. Now I’m somewhere in between. Not human”—his blue eyes skimmed me, and I took another half-step away, quaking under his gaze— “but not a true selkie anymore, either. Bound to this damn village even though the people who did it are long dead.” His voice turned bitter, and he kicked at a piece of rubble on the floor beside him. I winced at the sound of it skittering across the wood.

  He’d asked me why I was here. I took a deep breath and squared my shoulders, forcing myself to face him with my chin raised, not cowering. Even though my pulse raced like a bird in a cage, even though my knees felt like they might give out if he kept looking at me so closely. I was here for Tobin. Tobin would’ve faced the selkie with no fear. “I need your help,” I said.

  He almost looked amused at that, but then his brow furrowed in anger. “My help? Your people stole my skin, imprisoned me, left me to die, and you ask for my help?” As he spoke, he strode toward me, and I forced myself to stand my ground, though I was near shaking. I braced myself to be hit, but he only flexed his fingers, then curled them into fists, like he stopped himself before he could touch me, and turned away. “If you’ve come to bribe me with food you can leave.”

  “I had nothing to do with what happened to you. It was before I was born.”

  “It doesn’t matter. They’re your people. If you had been there you would have done the same, I’m sure.”

  “How can you be so sure? You’ve known me for less than five minutes and not even asked my name.”

  He turned again, a challenge in his eyes. “You haven’t asked my name, either,” he pointed out.

  A blush, fueled more by annoyance than anything else, snuck onto my face, and I crossed my arms over my chest, chewing on my words. “My name is Hania. What’s yours?”

  “Aven.”

  “What will it take for you to help me?”

  Aven laughed. “I don’t want anything to do with a human. Go home.”

  “What if I find your skin?” The question burst from me, but I knew as soon as it was out that it was the only option I had. I had nothing of interest to him to bargain with.

  He gave me a cautious look, head tilted as he studied me again. “What makes you think you can find my skin when I’ve spent fifty years looking for it?”

  “I can go places you can’t. I’m not bound.”

  Anger flashed through his eyes at the reminder, but he kept it in check. “Do you have any idea what a selkie skin looks like? Where it might be hidden? How to handle it and bring it back safely if you did find it?” I wanted to defend myself, tell him I’d manage, but my voice had gone again. “The forests here are miles thick. There are countless places it could be hidden within them, and beyond that there are at least six villages in riding distance it could’ve been taken to. And that’s if I’m lucky enough they kept it nearby instead of shipping it halfway across the world. A little thing like you has no hope of finding it. Go. Home.”

  A little thing like me? My skin prickled, and I stared at him. He didn’t look so impressive himself, tired and thin and frail. Like he’d given up. And not so scary, either, for a tidesperson. “Are you really willing to wait another half a century for somebody else to offer to try?”

  His eyes narrowed as he stared at me, and he took a moment to answer. “What do you want in return?”

  “When you have your skin again take me to your world.”

  He scoffed. “Why the hell would you want me to do that?”

  I couldn’t tell him. The words died on my tongue, and the images were rising in the back of my head. The woman’s voice. The silence after they’d gone. “Please,” I said. “I need to go there.”

  “To the Realm of Tides? A little human girl?”

  “Please,” I repeated, not wincing when my voice cracked at the word. If I needed to beg on my knees to get to Tobin I would. Whatever it took.

  Aven watched me. Neither of us spoke. He took me in, and then his gaze travelled around the room, ever so slowly, and he worked his jaw. I steeled myself for him to refuse, half of my mind scrambling to find another plan—as if there were any—but he nodded. “Alright. If you can return my skin, I’ll take you with me.”

  The tension flooded out of me. I could have sobbed. I could have hugged him. I didn’t dare do either. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. And don’t blame me if you get killed.”

  The silence was going to drive me insane. After one night of it I was ready to scream.

  It felt as if the village knew what was trapped here, an angry power lying in wait, and was holding its breath and hoping it’d go away. I saw not a single animal within the invisible borders, not even a bird flying overhead. Though the plant life that had taken over was the lush green of summer, the sun looked dimmer here, the air cooler. My skin prickled, the hairs on my arms standing on end; my instincts knew this wasn’t somewhere I should be.

  I wondered if I should’ve listened to them after all. Even the weeds appeared to shrink from Aven as he stalked along the empty street, every movement silent and intent. Though he was thin and weak, a sense of ancient, primal danger radiated from him. The kind of danger that sent humans scurrying into our homes when the sun went down, kept us lying in our beds with our eyes closed when we felt and heard things prowling outside. I’d never truly feared the tidespeople before they’d attacked—they’d been too distant a threat—but I knew there’d been a time, before the war, when they’d passed through our villages by night to hunt. And though it had ended long before I’d been born, when I stood near Aven, some part of me understood that time precisely.

  He didn’t speak. When he looked at me, the few times he bothered, his gaze held an expression as if he was looking at some strange little bug he’d found. Curious but slightly disgusted. He had to be frustrated that he was forced to rely on someone like me to escape his prison. I tried not to let Shiral’s story run through my head. Tried not to remember that Aven had killed her father, and gods knew how many others. Nothing would stop him from killing me too. Papa would never know what had happened. He’d hope, for a while, that I was still somewhere, fighting my way home, but months would pass. A year. And he’d know I’d lost.

  My fingers twitched toward the knife secure in my boot, but I didn’t draw it.

  Aven kept a few steps ahead. The slope of his shoulders, the tension in his back—now covered by a loose shirt worn thin with age—reminded me of Tobin when I’d watched him hunt bigger game. Silent, careful, alert. But there was something more graceful and animal in Aven’s movements. He was slighter than Tobin, lighter on his feet. Not a human replicating what he’d learned, but a creature born understanding the game of predator and prey. I thanked the gods that, for the moment, I wasn’t his prey.

  “This is it,” he said, and I jumped at the sound of his voice. He stopped, and I stepped beside him. I looked from him, to what lay before us, and back before I made myself ask the question.

  “This is it?”

  He nodded once. It was a pile of rubble, nothing more. Splintered wood and crushed stone, leaves and weeds crawling over every inch. I could see what had once been the skeleton of a house—a bit of wall here, a shattered chunk of roof ther
e—but that was all.

  I stepped over a beam and suppressed a tremor. If the rest of the village was too cold for summer, it was like winter here. The air hung heavier and more stagnant than anywhere I’d ever been, and I half expected my breath to cloud in front of me. Goosebumps raced along my arms, and I wrapped them around myself to stop the chill. This was the heart of what had happened. The center of the awful cloud hanging over his village was in this spot as much as it was in Aven.

  “How did it—how did it happen?” I asked, my voice catching in my throat. Not out of pity or sorrow for him, but out of the lingering fear and nerves racing under my skin.

  “It?” he echoed. I cut my gaze away and looked down, nudging a piece of debris with the toe of my boot. I’d thought if he showed me the place where he’d last had his skin it might help me, but now I didn’t see how. Half a century had passed since then. It could be anywhere. And the place was destroyed.

  “How did you lose it? How does a selkie…lose their skin?”

  “Painfully,” was his simple answer, and he took a few steps across the scattered remains, past me again. I thought he would leave it at that, but then he continued. His voice weaved through the air like a wind, so soft I had to shuffle closer to hear it. “Humans don’t possess magic, but they possess weapons crueler than any we have. For a day and night I was here, chained up and beaten while they stripped my skin from me inch by inch. I poured every bit of my magic into saving it, but all I managed was to bring the building down on us.”

  Shiral’s words flashed into my mind: The worst storm…it went on for a full day and night, and then it ended. I swallowed all the questions that brought with it and opted to ask only one. “The storm back then—you did it, didn’t you?”