The Changeling Sea

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “I promise,” she said, bewildered but entranced.

  “I’m very serious. You’ll make all your hair fall out, you’ll turn yourself into something.”

  “A periwinkle?”

  He laughed, then, forgetting his warnings. “Perhaps.”

  “Lyo. Did you turn that gold into periwinkles on purpose?”

  His eyes grew light, dancing, making her smile. “Well. Your name was on my mind.”

  “Did you?”

  “What a dull place the world would be if all the mysteries in it were solved. Wait here.” He vanished, leaving, Peri’s bemused eyes told her, his shadow on the sand. He was back in a moment, chewing again, with a huge black book under one arm. “Elementary Dealings with the Sea,” he said, passing it to her; their hands seemed to blur a little into its darkness. Then Lyo murmured something, and the hazy lines of the book firmed. “It’s open, now. It’s a sort of primer for beginning mages.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said reassuringly, “it has lots of pictures.” He paused, his voice on the edge of saying something more. Then he nudged at an expired jellyfish with his foot. “Call me again when you need me.”

  “How can you hear me out there in the forest?”

  “It’s easy. Your voice comes out of nowhere, catches me like a fishhook in my collar, and hauls me to where you are.” She laughed, feeling a sudden color running up under her cheeks. He smiled his quick, slanting smile, then sobered. “Be careful,” he said again; she nodded absently.

  The book had wondrous pictures. She lay beside the hearth that evening, turning pages slowly and dropping crumbs between them as she nibbled her supper. Pictures accompanied each mysterious spell. At first glance they were simply paintings, but as she gazed at them longer, they began to move. Whitecaps swelled; wind picked up spindrift, flung it like rain across the surface of the sea: “How to Achieve a Minor Storm.” Mermaids swam among languorous kelp forests: “How to Attract the Attention of Certain Inhabitants of the Sea.” Between a glass-still sea and hot, windless blue sky, a ship’s sails began to billow: “How to Inspire Breezes in a Dead Calm.” A dark, beautiful horse rode out of the surf: “Recognizing Certain Dangerous Aspects of the Sea.” Kir, she thought, recognizing him. The dark rider out of the sea…She fell asleep with her face against the dark horse and woke hours later, stiff and cramped beside the cold hearth, with the puzzled sea-dragon kneeling beside her, asking, “What are you doing?”

  She built a fire quickly, showed him the pictures shifting under the trembling light. “Look,” she said. “Lyo’s book.”

  “Book.”

  “These are pictures. These are words.” He looked dubiously at the faded writing on the pages, but the pictures fascinated him. Fish and sea-beasts swam through its pages. Sometimes he gave a chuckle of recognition and pointed for her to tell him a word.

  “Sea-cow. Porpoise. Whale.”

  She turned a page that seemed nothing more, at first, than a painting of the bottom of the sea, full of giant kelp and coral colonies and clams and brightly colored snails strewn thickly across sand. Then the picture changed, as if water had rolled over it, altered it to reveal, behind the kelp, faint, luminous towers of shell and pearl. The sand turned into paths of pearl, the bright shells to gold and jewels scattered along the paths as if they might have fallen a long way from great ships wrecked and sunken and snagged by underwater cliffs on their cold journey down. Peri, her lips parted, peered closer. Was there a figure walking down a path? A woman, perhaps, clothed in pearl, her long hair drifting behind her, adorned with tiny starfish and sea anemones?

  The sea-dragon made a sound. His face was very white; his open hand fell across the page as if to block it from his sight.

  “Chain,” he whispered. He looked at Peri, struggling to talk; the words were still trapped, in spite of everything Peri had done, behind his eyes. “Here.” The woman took a slow step; the water shifted again, hid the magic kingdom. But the sea-dragon saw it, hidden within the dark kelp. “Here. It began.”

  Nine

  THE NEXT MORNING, Peri found a black pearl on her doorstep.

  Her shriek startled Lyo out of his secret forest, brushing leaves out of his hair, his eyes so dark they looked black as the pearl. He took it from her silently, gazed at it as she babbled. It was the size of an acorn, perfectly round, with a sheen on it like dusky silk. He whistled.

  “It’s very beautiful.”

  “Lyo!”

  “Well, imagine what great oyster fretted itself unknowingly, growing this in silence out of a grain of sand.” He tossed it absently into the air, caught it, his eyes narrowed at the bright morning sea.

  “Lyo, an oyster didn’t roll across the sea and bring me this! She knows this is where the sea-dragon comes! She’ll find him here, she’ll chain him again—”

  “No, she won’t.”

  “But—”

  “She sent you a message.”

  “Yes!”

  “She said ‘I know about you, you know about me.’ If she wanted the sea-dragon back, she would take him, she wouldn’t bother putting pearls on your doorstep. She permits the sea-dragon to come here. Although,” he added, veering off into his own thoughts, “why for only a couple of hours in the dead of night is a mystery. Nothing about any of this makes much sense. The magic seems so confused…”

  “Well, what does she want?” Peri demanded, confused herself. “Lyo, what does she want? The sea-dragon recognized her last night—or someone like her. She walked through one of the paintings in your book. Someone saw her to be able to paint her like that, someone went down to the undersea, and came back up. So why can’t Kir do it? Why can’t you? Go down and ask her what she wants?”

  “Have you ever seen a mermaid?”

  “No.”

  “But you could draw one?”

  “Yes.”

  “How? If you’ve never seen one?”

  “I don’t know. Everyone knows what a mermaid looks like. Now,” she sighed, “they’re even seeing them.”

  “But they knew the word before they saw the mermaid.”

  She nodded, perplexed. “People tell stories,” she said finally.

  “And words,” Lyo said, “like treasures, get handed down through time. Very, very few people make a real journey to the undersea. It is a journey out of the world. But everyone who tells the tale of a sea-journey, or listens to it, travels there safely and comes back again. So don’t assume the painter went down to view that world firsthand. Perhaps he painted his own sea-journey that he made through his mind when he first heard the tale.”

  “Yes, but,” Peri said, “Lyo, the sea-dragon recognized her.”

  Lyo grunted. His fingers searched his hair, picked out a bit of twig. “Well,” he admitted, “maybe you’re right. Long ago, the painter went down and came back, bearing a sea-treasure of strange knowledge…But neither you nor I are going to do that.”

  “Then how will you talk to Kir’s mother?”

  “We. We are going to do a little fishing with the fishers.”

  “Most of the fishers don’t go out now,” she said. “They say there’s a storm at sea, and they’ll wait it out like any other storm.”

  “Has anyone gotten hurt?”

  “No. But—”

  “Then let’s go. Unless you’d rather wait and see what you find on your doorstep tomorrow morning.”

  “No,” she whispered. “I wouldn’t.”

  The few fishers braving the sea’s tantrum had left the harbor by the time they reached the docks; no one saw the magician everyone was searching for except a half-dozen gulls sunning on the posts. Lyo charmed a few barnacles off the underside of the Sea Urchin as he dipped oars into the water. This time, Peri knew, he used magic to row; they cleared the harbor and were into open sea faster than was decent for a small fishing boat. But instead of joining the vague dots on the horizon, he pursued his own course, rowing parallel to the land, heading toward the deep waters beyond the
spires.

  Peri, damp and numb, watched the tall rocks inch closer. She had never seen them from that angle. She had looked between them out to sea, but she had never seen them frame the land as if they were some giant broken doorway between the sea and the land. As Lyo rowed closer, the landscape between the spires changed: now empty, bright sea, now a wave tearing at a crumbling cliff, now white sand and a green wall of gorse, now the old woman’s house between them, looking tiny and faded between the great, dark, sea-scoured stones, the way it might look to a sea-dragon or to someone swimming between them, carrying a black pearl like a message from the sea…She blinked. Were the spires a doorway to the land or to the sea? Who was looking out? Who looked in? Which was the true country?

  Then, as she blinked again, cloud fell over them, pearl white, chill, blinding. Lyo stopped rowing. They stared at one another, their hair beaded with mist. The sea, reflecting a cloudless sky moments before, had turned a satiny gray. Peri heard a light laugh, almost a sound water might have made lapping against the underside of a boat, but not quite. She slid to the floor of the boat, holding herself tightly, trembling with cold. Something shook the Sea Urchin’s bow, a giant hand beneath the water playing with a toy boat. Peri tried to make herself smaller. Lyo, his face oddly milky in the strange mist, stood up and tossed the black pearl back into the sea.

  A hand reached out of the water and caught it. A face looked up at them from beneath the cold, gentle water. Long hair coiled and uncoiled. Starfish clung to it, and sea-flowers, and long, long loops of many-colored pearls. The face was very pale; the heavy, almond-shaped eyes held all the darkest shades of mother-of-pearl…Kir’s eyes.

  She was very close to them, yet farther than a dream, just beneath the waves sliding softly over her face. She held the pearl underwater in her open palm, waiting, it seemed to Peri, for something to happen. Nothing did. Lyo looked transfixed by her. She watched them, swaying beneath the water, her eyes expressionless, or too strange to read. She said something finally; bubbles flowed upward. The words themselves, popping out of the water, sounded very distant. Lyo smiled. He picked periwinkles out of the mist and scattered them on the water. A few drifted down, clung to her hair. She smiled, then, a small, careful smile without much humor in it.

  “What did she say?”

  “She said,” Lyo answered, “that I am very strong.”

  “That’s a peculiar thing to say,” Peri said morosely.

  “Not really.” His voice shook; she realized then that some of the mist beading his face was sweat. “We’re having an argument at the moment about who is going to do what to the Sea Urchin’s bow.”

  Peri closed her eyes. “I wish I were at work,” she whispered. “I wish I were scrubbing floors, I wish I were—”

  “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

  “I never had one. What happens if you lose?”

  “I don’t think I’d better.”

  A sudden thought cleared Peri’s head. She opened her eyes, stared at the little pool of water that had splashed into the bottom of the boat. She was still shivering with cold, but her fear had gone. “Ask her,” she said tightly, “if she tried to wreck this boat before. Ask her if she recognizes it.”

  Lyo rolled his eyes at her. A sea gull with blood-red eyes had come out of nowhere to sit on his shoulder. “You ask her,” he said.

  Peri leaned against the side of the boat, stared down at the woman with Kir’s eyes who floated as easily as moonlight on the water. “Did you?” she whispered; in that close, strange mist it seemed even a tear falling into the water would echo. “Did you take my father out of this boat when he went out to fish? My mother thinks you did. She looks for the land beneath the sea. She thinks he’s there now, that you took him there and sent his boat back to us empty.”

  The woman gazed back at her, her eyes secret, unblinking. She spoke again; her voice sounded like water trickling in some hidden place.

  Peri looked at Lyo. “What did she say?”

  “She said that no one from the world of air has come into the sea-kingdom for many years.” The sea gull was nibbling at his ear; he shrugged a shoulder irritably and it flew off with a cackle.

  “He went out to sea,” Peri said, “and never came back.”

  “Many fishers do that,” Lyo said gently. “They take such risks.” The woman said something else, her hand closing and opening again on the pearl. Peri, listening closely, could not unravel her words from the murmur of the tide.

  “If your father had cast his heart into the sea, his body might have wandered into her country,” Lyo translated. “But his heart came with his boat into harbor every night. So his bones may be in this sea, but his heart remains where he kept it all his life.”

  Peri was silent. The woman, silent, too, studied her. The Sea Urchin’s bow had not wavered from pointing at the same distant tangle of gorse; she still held it. Her face blurred slightly under a wash of foam; long, pale hair drifted. She spoke again.

  “She says she has no quarrel with the fishers.”

  “Not for wanting her gold?”

  “She says the gold falls out of the lost ships into her country like rain falls on land. It means little to her; it is the work of men, and belongs to the country above the waves.”

  “Then what does she want?”

  The woman’s other hand rose out of the water; she tossed something silver into the boat. It struck the wood at Peri’s feet, and she jumped. Lyo picked it up.

  “A ring,” he said. His voice shook again, strained. “Letters on it—”

  “U, V,” Peri breathed. “It’s the king’s ring. I threw it into the sea.”

  “Of course. I should have guessed. Young floor-scrubbers are constantly throwing kings’ rings into the sea.”

  “Kir brought it to me.” Her eyes widened then; she added urgently, “Lyo, tell her about Kir—”

  “She knows about Kir. She gave him to the king. What do you think this tempest is all about?”

  “But, tell her—” She gripped the side of the boat and leaned far over, until it should have tilted, and said it herself. “Kir! Kir wants to come to you! Please let him in! Please—”

  “Peri!” Lyo shouted. Pale hands came up out of the water, caught Peri’s wrists, and pulled her down until the Sea Urchin was almost on its side. Peri’s own hair floated in the water; the sea washed over her face and she sputtered. The water was icy. She drew a breath to scream, and drew in another swell instead. Then the Sea Urchin lurched; she tumbled down to the bottom of the boat, spitting out sea water, her eyes and nose running. The bow was free, drifting; the fog seemed to be thinning. Lyo was staring at her hands.

  “What are you holding?”

  She blinked salt water out of her eyes. Webs of pure moonlight attached to irregular circles and squares of twigs and dried seaweed…She sniffed, wiped her nose on her sleeve, still blinking. In the center of each web was a tiny crystal-white moon. She caught her breath.

  “My hexes!”

  “Your what?”

  “My hexes. I made them to hex the sea. Lyo, look at them!”

  “I am,” Lyo said wonderingly.

  “She turned my black thread into moonlight!”

  “Wait—”

  “I made them without moons and threw them into the sea with the king’s ring. I thought the sea-dragon ate them!”

  The fog had blown away; they were wallowing perilously close to the spires. Lyo plied the oars, fighting the tide. Gulls cried, circling the spires; a sea otter, on its back in the waves, cracking a shell against the stone on its belly, paused to give them a curious look.

  “I think,” Lyo said, with a neighborly nod at the sea otter, “you’d better begin at the beginning. Begin with the word hex. Who taught you to make one in that shape?”

  “The old woman.”

  “What old woman?”

  “The old woman who disappeared, whose house I’ve been staying in, she taught me. I made hexes to throw into the sea because it too
k my father—that’s when I first saw the sea-dragon.”

  “When—”

  “When I threw the hexes in. Kir was looking for the old woman, too, and he found me on the cliff drawing hexes in the sand.”

  Lyo pulled the oars up, leaned on them, looking at her. The Sea Urchin continued along its course. “Kir knew the old woman, too?”

  “He said she came out to watch the sea with him, once. He wanted to talk to her; he said she knew things. But she had already gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “Just gone. She went away and never came back.” She sighed a little, her eyes on the tiny house tucked into the gorse.

  Lyo said gently, “People left you, this past year.”

  She nodded. “My mother, too. She didn’t leave—she—It’s like you said. She went on a sea-journey, in her mind. She hasn’t come back yet. Anyway, when Kir found me drawing hexes, he asked me to send the sea a message for him.”

  “And the message was?”

  “Part of it was his father’s ring.”

  The magician said, “Ah,” very softly. His arms were still propped on the oars; his eyes, for some reason, were gray as gulls’ wings. “And now the sea has returned the king’s ring and your hexes.”

  “But she changed my hexes. They were ugly before, twisted and dark—that’s how I meant them to be. Now they’re full of magic.”

  Lyo touched one lightly, curiously. “So they are,” he murmured, and shook birds off the upended oars.

  “But why? Why did she give them back?”

  “Why is the wind, why is the sea…? She gave them back for a very good reason.”

  “What reason?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” the magician said, and dipped the oars back into the water. Then his eyes fixed on something beyond Peri’s shoulder, narrowed, and changed again. “Look.”

  She turned and saw the king’s ship on the horizon, all its white and gold sails unfurled to the wind, wending its way back to the village.

  Ten