Tide

by Lacy Sheridan

  “I don’t know.”

  “If they had, where? Where did they bury their dead?”

  He jerked his chin to the way I’d entered the village. “Outside the borders. Near the waterfall, there’s a graveyard of sorts. I passed it when I first came here.”

  I climbed to my feet, calling for Inka, skimming the streets for her. “I have an idea.”

  He followed. “Do tell.”

  “Just…just let me think. Let me try it.” So many people had died here at Aven’s hands, indirectly or otherwise, and I needed to sort through them. Sort through what I knew and what I might find. Whether it was for the girl who had drowned, or Shiral’s father, or somebody else, Aven’s imprisonment was punishment for a death. I knew that. It had to be. And what more poetic hiding place for the key to his prison than with the one who called for it?

  “I’ll be here, then,” he muttered as I checked that my supplies were in place.

  I made it two steps from him before I stopped, needing to say the thought tugging at some thread in my mind. “Aven.” He paused in the doorway. “You’re wrong.”

  “About?”

  “I don’t see you as a threat. Sometimes, maybe,” I admitted. “Sometimes I think you want me to. But a monster like the stories say you are wouldn’t feel guilty about a little girl he didn’t mean to kill fifty years ago.”

  “I never said I feel guilty.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  And for the first time I wasn’t the one left staring at the selkie’s back as a comment sat hanging in the air between us.

  The graveyard was where he’d said it would be. After navigating around the collapsed, ruined pieces of forest radiating out from the village and the rocky edge of the river, I spotted it through the trees, a rough clearing dotted with stone markers.

  I didn’t often visit the place of my own village’s dead. I didn’t see the point in it. Some claimed the stones held their spirits, so that they were never truly gone, and others that their spirits lived in the clouds above, but I didn’t like the idea of either. Visiting and speaking to an empty body while the spirit it had once held looked on from the sky seemed wrong, perverse. If my mother’s or grandmother’s spirits were in their markers, that was a tragic existence after death. So I avoided it when I could but for the two days a year we took gifts, on their birthdays. Even though there was no body beneath my mother’s marker, Papa liked to go.

  The graveyard of Aven’s village was identical to that of my own. Little stacks of smooth, water-worn stones, each reaching to a few inches above my ankle, were scattered throughout. Some were old, mossy or toppled over. I could feel how long it had been since anybody had visited. As many people came here as went to the village. The bodies had been abandoned along with everything else.

  How was I supposed to know what marker belonged to whom? I knew the most relevant of the ones from my home because I’d been taught them, but there was nothing to distinguish one from another. There were no names etched into the stones. I could dig up the whole clearing if I liked, churn through bodies long rotted away, until I found some sign of the skin. But it would take days with only my hands and be nothing short of harrowing. Perhaps I could find a shovel in the village. It would make the job go faster, at least.

  I left Inka at the edge of the clearing and stepped carefully across the grass. The unnatural pressure of the village was so faint I could almost close my eyes and imagine I was somewhere far, far from Aven and his danger and magic, from any trace of tidespeople. But when I opened them, I was standing in a graveyard, searching out the people Aven had killed.

  I shouldn’t have felt like I was intruding on something sacred, but I held my breath as I walked the perimeter of the clearing, then wove between the markers at random. Searching for something, anything, that would tell me what to do next. Some pull from Aven’s skin, perhaps. He’d said he would know if it was near, so maybe it had the same effect as the village. Something that warned, on a silent, instinctive level, that there was magic near.

  I felt nothing.

  I almost went back to Inka and left, but a little wave of movement in the corner of my eye stopped me. A flash of deep, rich blue, and my first thought was Aven and those impossibly blue eyes. But when I turned toward it, there was only a little bundle of flowers swaying in the wind. A few blue, a few purple, a tiny bunch growing out of the otherwise plain grass around one of the markers.

  I was walking to it before I knew what I was doing, staring down at the flowers. They were innocent, plain, nothing unusual at all. I’d seen plenty of wildflowers sprout up in random places at home.

  There was nothing strange about the marker, either. Like the others, it was a simple stack of stones, precisely arranged so they wouldn’t fall. But there were no other flowers in the clearing. Not a single one. I crouched down before the grave and reached out to touch the little stones. They were cool and smooth under my fingertips.

  “Come to pay your respects?” a voice asked, and I jumped, heart leaping into my throat. My head jerked to stare at the man standing a few steps away, both hands clasped over his walking stick. The man whose cottage I’d found on my way to the village.

  “I—I’m sorry, I didn’t know anybody would be here, I…” I stammered, wracking my mind for an excuse. I didn’t have one.

  He shook his head with a sad smile. “No, I’m sure she’d be happy to have another visitor.”

  “She?”

  “Rosa, her name was.”

  “Oh.” I looked at the marker and yanked my hand away from the stones. My heart pounded, my palms slick with nervous sweat. “Was she your…”

  “Daughter,” he supplied.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “She died long before you were born, girl. There’s no need for you to apologize.”

  I looked from him to the marker again, and a tremor began in my fingers. I tried to curl them to stop it, but it kept up. My voice lowered to a whisper. “She drowned, didn’t she?”

  He was silent until I looked to him, and then asked, “Is that what he told you?”

  “He never meant for her to be hurt.”

  “If I’d known you were stupid enough to believe a selkie’s word I would never have shown you that path.”

  I straightened and turned to face him. This time I saw the lines of wear and grief in his face, the anger beneath them. “I’m sorry about Rosa, and about everybody else who died, about everything that happened, but I need his skin.”

  “Nobody will see that skin ever again. Not you, not him. He deserves his punishment.”

  “He’s been serving his punishment for fifty years. Maybe he did deserve it, but hasn’t everybody suffered enough?”

  A cold hatred crept into his voice. “If he’s released in another fifty years it will be too soon.”

  “You buried it instead of her, didn’t you?”

  “If I was wiser I would have burned it.”

  That was the answer I needed. I dropped to my knees again, digging my fingers into the grass and dirt. It curled around my hands, damp and cold, clinging, but I didn’t care. I clawed it away as fast as my hands would let me, ravaging the serene resting place. The old man hobbled to me, leaning on his stick and grabbing at my arm with his free hand, but I shook him off. “I need his skin!”

  “Whatever he’s done to charm you, girl, it’s a lie! He’s a monster, and our world and theirs are better off with him bound to that godsforsaken place!”

  “My brother needs it!” I shouted. I paused, hands in the dirt, and looked at him. For the first time, I let the tears pushing at the backs of my eyes free, and they rolled down my face in hot streaks. I forced every word out between them. “Rosa has been dead for fifty years. She shouldn’t be, but she is. My brother might not be, and Aven is the only one who can get to him.”

  “Give your brother up for dead, girl. If your last hope is that selkie, he’ll be dead soon anyway.”

  I was breathing hard, heart racing in my chest. I di
dn’t know what more to say to him. I didn’t know what to do. Would he hurt me, if I kept digging? But there was some glimmer of sympathy in his eyes, of understanding. He’d been desperate too, desperate enough to do something only legends whispered of. “Maybe Aven’s a monster,” I admitted. “Maybe he’s done terrible things. But maybe he can do good things, too, and he should have the chance. My brother deserves the chance.”

  For a long moment, so long I thought the day might end around us before it was broken, he watched me. I couldn’t move, and he didn’t speak. Then, he broke the silence with a simple, tired question. “Your brother, he’s a good man?”

  I nodded. “Very good. Better than almost anyone I know.”

  “You can’t trust a selkie, girl.”

  “I know. I don’t know if I can trust him to help me, but he’s all I have.”

  He pulled a leather band from around his neck, holding it in the air. A key hung on the end of it, catching in the sunlight. I nearly snatched it from him, but kept my hands at my sides. “Rosa would have liked you. She always wanted to go on adventures. You take it back to him and you find your brother. And if that selkie gives you any trouble, come back to me and I’ll take his skin from him again.”

  The relief that washed through me was like a drink of water on the hottest day of summer, something I needed so bad it ached. “Thank you,” I murmured as I took the key with shaking hands. I’d never meant it more. “Thank you, thank you.”

  He nodded once and turned to go. I didn’t waste any more words with him; I dug into the dirt again, hands flying until they struck something solid. It wasn’t buried deep, but I had to dig a wide hole to find the edges and free them. It was a chest, a plain wood-and-iron chest not unlike the ones most kept at home. My arms screamed in protest when I pried it free and shoved it inch by inch onto flat ground, and my fingers trembled as I brushed dirt and slivers of root from the lock and worked the key into it.

  The hinges squealed and groaned as I pushed the lid up, but they worked. Inside was what appeared to be only a pile of dark, dusty cloth at first, and I stared at it before I could make sense of it.

  A pelt. Mottled black and gray, crinkled with age, but a pelt. A true sealskin. I’d never imagined what Aven’s skin might look like, but there it was. I ran my fingertips along it, feeling the smooth softness of it, the warmth as if it was alive. And I laughed.

  How long had it been since I’d truly laughed? Before Tobin had been taken?

  Maybe I was losing my mind with stress and fear. Maybe I was hysterical with relief. I didn’t know and didn’t care. I sat on my heels and laughed, stroking the skin again and again. Ensuring it was real and there. This wasn’t a dream. I’d found it.

  When I was breathless, my vision blurred with tears of grief and anger and joy, my entire body weak and shaky, I pulled the skin from the trunk and hugged it to my chest. It was heavy, heavier than I’d expected, but felt so solidly, comfortingly real I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

  “Let’s go, Inka,” I managed, stumbling my way across the clearing.

  I was breathing hard again by the time I shouldered my way through the rotted door of the old house. It swung loose and tired behind me, letting a long stream of sunlight inside before cutting it off again. Aven was in the center of the room, stretched across the floor on his back. Pebbles lay scattered around him, and in a dull, mindless rotation he tossed them one by one at the ceiling, letting them crack against the wood and fall down. He didn’t appear to care when they struck him. I wondered if that was just Aven, or if this place had drained the life from him. The stories told of selkies as vibrant, passionate creatures. This one was angry and restless and defeated.

  Though he looked half in a trance, at the sound of my entrance, he bolted to his feet. The fluidity of every movement still startled me, and we stood there, staring at each other. His gaze roamed over me, a combination of surprised and concerned, and I knew I must have looked terrible—dried tears cutting paths down my cheeks, dirt coating my hands and arms and ground into the hem of my dress. And then I remembered the ache in my shoulders. I dropped the skin down onto the floor between us, too tired for ceremony. I’d imagined the things I could say to him at this moment, the ways I could throw his doubts in his face now that I’d proven him wrong, now that I, a little human, had saved him. But they were gone. His blue eyes followed the skin as it settled on the floor and then fixated on it. I couldn’t read his expression.

  Then, his gaze traveled from it to me and a smile almost showed itself at the corner of his mouth. “You found it.”

  “I found it. Now you owe me.”

  He knelt, running slender fingers over the skin. “Now and forever, Hania. I hate to say it to a human, but I’m in your debt.”

  In your debt. They were the sweetest words I’d heard in weeks. I’d accomplished one thing, at least, one thing I hadn’t been sure I would. Not only had I found the legendary selkie, but I’d done the one thing that would convince him to help me. Maybe I wasn’t so bad at this adventure thing after all.

  “So, put it on.” I was dying to see him as a true selkie. As he was, Aven radiated the unearthly power of the tidespeople, but I knew he was a shadow of what he should have been. With his skin restored that would change.

  “It’s not that simple. I have to be sure it’s not damaged, that they haven’t done anything to it…”

  “What damage could a human do to a selkie’s skin?’

  “You’re forgetting these are the same men who imprisoned a selkie. They must’ve had some tricks at their disposal.” He spread the skin out across the floor, handling it as if it were made of glass. I saw nothing unusual about it and folded my arms.

  “And you’re stalling. What, are you worried it won’t work? I didn’t go skin a seal for you.”

  He gave me a seething look that said I was right and stood. I found my eyes unable to stray from him as he slung the skin across his shoulders.

  It settled on him far better than I imagined, turning his thin frame sleek. The dark color rippled across his pale skin, a sharp contrast, and for a moment I couldn’t tell where Aven ended and it began. They were one and the same. I heard the wind pick up outside, rattling the house, and then it swept through the room. Not strong, but salty and cool, like a breeze off the ocean. The candle blew out, casting us into faint shadow, but Aven appeared to glow. His eyes were too bright a blue, and the air around him gleamed in ways my eyes couldn’t follow. Even as I watched, the skin seemed to wrap around and melt into him. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing—some ethereal being, dark and graceful and exotic, or the human-playing man I’d met? Both at once?

  He tilted his head back, eyes closed. The tension had left him. By the time the strange illusion faded, he was standing there as if nothing had happened at all. The skin was gone, and Aven looked like he always had. But then he moved, and the change was clear: he stood taller, prouder, more powerful. The light shifted across his skin and created a subtle, startling ripple of color, sealskin and human skin dancing around each other. I blinked at the sight of it and couldn’t keep myself from shifting half a step away from him. He cast me a slanted, amused look.

  “Suddenly scared now that I have my power, Hania?”

  It took me a second longer than I wished to reply. “No.”

  “Good,” he said with a soft laugh, and continued out of the house. I stared at him, and he called over his shoulder, “Are you coming, then?”

  I hurried to catch up, almost tripping over my own feet. Inka trotted along beside me. Were we going now? My stomach twisted into knots at the thought, and I almost stopped again. I needed to go through my supplies again, be sure I had what I needed. Decide what to do next. Make a plan. I hadn’t gotten that far yet; Aven had been my focus.

  But now I was so close. Tobin felt in arm’s reach. My heart hammered in my chest, and my breath felt too thin. This was what I’d wanted, what I’d been desperate to make happen, and now I had no idea what to do with i
t.

  Win. That was what I had to do with it. Win for Tobin, and Edrick, and Papa.

  There was no going back. Only forward.

  I followed.

  Aven had found his way to the nearest edge of the village with a sort of familiar ease I didn’t possess in my own home. He knew every inch of the place and I could tell, but I could also see the longing in his face as he stared into the trees. His feet paused at the border before looked to me. Out in the open, beneath the golden sun, he turned into a piece of art. A figure stepped out of a painting. A true warrior of the tidespeople. A strange surge of fear and excitement went through me.

  “Aren’t you going to go?” I asked.

  He shook his head with a soft laugh aimed at himself. “I haven’t left this village in half a century. All I wanted every day was to leave.” I understood the questions that held. What if he couldn’t? What if it hadn’t worked after all? What if there was nothing for him left on the other side of that invisible line?

  “So why don’t you?” He glanced at me again in answer, blue eyes boring into mine. “You’re free. Don’t tell me the great and powerful selkie is daunted by freedom?”

  He took a deep breath and scoffed as he looked at the forest. “Of course not.” And he stepped forward.

  I followed behind him. The air felt cleaner on the other side, fresher. Full of light and hope that hadn’t been there before. I looked to the sky and inhaled the scent of the summer woods.

  One more step forward.

  “Where are we going, exactly?” I asked, grabbing onto an overhanging branch for balance as I climbed over a large rock blocking the path—which wasn’t a real path at all, but, as far as I could tell, a randomly chosen way through the forest. Aven navigated it with ease, not bothered by any obstacles we came across. But even Inka looked uncomfortable.

  “The passing.”

  “The passing?”

  “The passing. The way home.”

  “Now?” I couldn’t help that the question resembled a yelp.