“He has gold hair and blue eyes. Like his mother had. He can’t talk very well yet, but he learns fast.” She put her cloak over her arm and went to the door.
Mare said fiercely, “Girl, you take one more step, I will throw a bucket at you. You come upstairs with us and tell the story properly from one end to the other. You can’t just go and leave us here with a jumble like that: sea-women, secret sons, princes wandering into your house at night giving you black pearls…”
“I don’t understand,” Carey said plaintively, staring at Peri, “why it all happened to her. Look at her!”
They did, until she fidgeted. “I washed my hair yesterday,” she said defensively. Mare groaned. Enin grinned.
She drifted to her mother’s house the next afternoon. The days were growing longer; the air was full of delicate, elusive scents. Evening lay in dusky, silken colors over the sea. The sea-kingdom seemed very near the surface, just beneath the lingering shades of sunset. Peri found her mother leaning over the gate, watching the distant sea. Behind her, the garden was sprouting tidy rows of green shoots; there was a peculiar absence of weeds.
Peri’s mother smiled as Peri came up the street. She opened the gate; they both leaned over it then, watching. Peri’s eyes slid to her mother’s hands. There was black dirt on her fingers, even a streak on her face.
“You’ve been gardening!”
“I thought I’d pull a few thistles. It seemed a nice day for it.” Her voice sounded less weary than usual; the lines on her face had eased. Had the sea, Peri wondered suddenly, set her free, too?
They watched the fishing boats come into the harbor. When the last of them had slipped past the harbor-mouth, Peri’s mother sighed, not in sadness, it seemed to Peri, but in relief that everyone was safely home. She said, “I miss you, Peri. The house seems empty suddenly. Do you think you might like to come back?”
Peri looked at her. The old woman’s house felt that way, these days, too quiet, as empty as her heart. “Come back?”
“I never even asked where you’ve been living.”
“Out at the old woman’s house, near the stones. After she disappeared, I stayed there.”
Her mother nodded. “I guessed, when I thought about it at all, that you might be there. I wonder where she got to, the old woman.”
“Maybe,” Peri said softly, “maybe into the sea. Maybe someone…someone special left a pearl on her doorstep and sang to her until she followed the singing.”
“There is no land beneath the sea. You told me that.”
“Well,” Peri sighed, “I don’t know everything, do I?”
“Do you think you’d like to come back?”
Peri turned to glance at the house. The door was open; a last thread of light pooled across the threshold. It might be nice, she thought, to have someone to talk to, now that her mother was talking again.
“Maybe,” she said. “For a little while.”
“You need some new clothes, child.”
“I know. I forget things like that.”
“You’re growing again.”
“I know.” She picked at a splinter in the gate, her eyes straying to the sea. The last light faded; a thin band of blue stretched across the horizon, the shadow of night. She sighed. What did it matter where she lived? “All right,” she said. “I’m tired of my cooking, anyway.” She swallowed a sudden burning; her face ducked behind her hair. “What does it matter?” she whispered. She felt her mother’s arm across her shoulders. The sea began to darken, the night-shadow widened, a deep, deep blue, the darkest shades of mother-of-pearl…
They heard a whistling through the dusk. Peri jumped, for it had shifted abruptly from the street to her elbow.
“Lyo!”
“Goodness,” her mother said, startled. Lyo gave her a deep bow, standing in her weed pile.
“This is Lyo,” Peri explained. “He is the magician who turned the gold chain into flowers.”
“What gold chain?” her mother said bemusedly. “What flowers?”
“Where did you get those clothes?” Peri asked. Lyo had put aside his scuffed and gorse-speckled leather and wool for a more familiar mage’s robe of wheat and gold. It made him look taller somehow; even his hair had settled down.
“The king gave it to me. He said I was beginning to smell a bit briny.”
“Oh. It looks very—very—”
He nodded imperturbably. “Thank you. It’ll do for now. It’d be hard to row a boat in, though.”
“Are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Going to sea to get the gold? The fishers keep asking me that.”
“Oh,” he said, chuckling.
“Well, are you?”
“Not exactly.”
She looked at him, baffled. His eyes shifted colors mysteriously: the green of the seedlings, the brown of the earth; they pulled at her attention until she blinked herself free. “How is the sea-dragon?” she asked, since he wouldn’t tell her about the gold.
“Aidon,” Lyo said. “The king named him that.”
“Is he learning to talk any better?”
“He’s doing very well. I’m teaching him to read. Yesterday we added and subtracted periwinkles. That’s what I—”
“A talking sea-dragon named Aidon,” Peri’s mother interrupted. “What are you talking about? A sea-dragon reading books?”
Lyo’s brows rose. “You didn’t tell her?”
“No.”
“Tell me what? What sea-dragon? What gold chain?” She watched her daughter and the strange-eyed magician look at one another uncertainly. “Peri, what have you been doing while I haven’t been paying attention?”
“Oh.” She took a long breath. “It’s a little hard to explain.”
“Then you’d both better come in and have some supper and explain it to me,” her mother said, sounding so much like her old self that Peri felt a sudden bubble of laughter inside her.
Lyo sat at the hearth, beginning in a calm and methodical fashion to explain while her mother chopped up carrots and onions for soup. Peri kept interrupting him; he gave up finally and let her tell the story for a while. Peri’s mother sat down slowly in the middle of it, a paring knife in one hand and an onion in the other. The color came back into her face as she listened. She laughed and cried at different parts of the tale, and then, as Peri told her about the king and the sea-woman meeting each other under the moon, a stillness settled into her face, like the calm over water after a storm. She had finished her sea-journey, Peri realized; she had gone and come back to the familiar world, the one where she sang old sea chanteys and knew the names of all the shells on the beach.
She was silent for a long time when Lyo and Peri finished the story. Peri knew what she was seeing: the long, brilliant, fleeting path of sunlight between the spires. She saw the onion in her hand and got up finally. “Well,” she said softly. “Well.”
“That’s partly why I came here,” Lyo said. “The sea-dragon misses Peri.”
“I can guess why. She’s the first girl he ever saw.”
“Yes.” Lyo stopped a moment, his expression awry. “Yes. So the king wondered if Peri might consider coming to the summer house to teach Aidon again.”
“You mean after work?” Peri asked, dazed.
“Peri, you can forget the brushes, the buckets. The king will pay you well for teaching. And the sea—Aidon will be happy to see you again. He likes being human, but he misses you. He had to give up his brother; he shouldn’t have to lose you, too. Would you like to do that?”
“Teach the sea-dragon in the king’s house?” She nodded vigorously, thinking of the prince’s blue-eyed smile, his need of her. “Oh, yes. But doesn’t the king want you to stay? I don’t know very much beyond adding and subtracting.”
“Oh, I’ll stay awhile. Teach you a little magic,” he added nonchalantly. “If you like. Just so you won’t get into trouble…” He paused again, staring so hard at a wooden nail in the floorboards that she thought it
might rise out of the floor. Then he shook himself, ruffled his hair with both hands, and met her eyes. “Are you?” he inquired.
“What?”
“Planning to fall in love with any more princes?”
She thought about it, gazing back at him. Then she sighed deeply, her hand sliding into her pocket to touch the black pearl that held all her memories. “I don’t think so. One prince is enough in one lifetime.”
“Good,” Lyo said with relief. He pulled beer out of the air then, and yellow daffodils, and a loaf of hot bread that looked as if it had come straight out of the innkeeper’s kitchen.
“Lyo!” Her mother, face in the flowers, was laughing.
“It’s all right, he’ll get his payment tomorrow.” He poured a basket of early strawberries into Peri’s lap. “There will be a sea harvest of periwinkles coming in on the morning tide that this village will never forget.”
Peri, her mouth falling open, saw periwinkles turning to gold all down the beach as the sea swept them tidily out of itself. “That will make Carey happy.”
“Perhaps,” Lyo said. “Perhaps not even that will make Carey happy. It’s an odd thing, happiness. Some people take happiness from gold. Or black pearls. And some of us, far more fortunate, take their happiness from periwinkles.” He leaned over Peri, impelled by some mysterious impulse, kissed her gently. “I’ve been wanting to do that for some time,” he told her. “But you always had one king’s son or another at hand.”
Like him, she was flushed under her untidy hair. “Well,” she said, “now I don’t.”
“Now you don’t.” He watched her, smiling but uncertain. Then, still uncertain, he sat down beside her mother to help her clean shrimp. Peri’s eyes strayed to the window. But the magician’s lean, nut-brown face, constantly hovering between magic and laughter, came between her and the darkening sea. After a while, watching him instead, she began to smile.
About the Author
PATRICIA A. McKILLIP discovered the joys of writing when she was fourteen, endured her teenage years in the secret life of her stories, plays, and novels, and has been writing ever since—except for a brief detour when she thought she would be a concert pianist.
She was born in Salem, Oregon, and has lived in Arizona, California, and the England that is the setting for her novel The House on Parchment Street. Her other books include: The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (ALA Notable Children’s Book), The Riddle-Master of Hed, Heir of Sea and Fire, Harpist in the Wind (Balrog Award), Moon Flash, and The Moon and the Face.
Ms. McKillip currently lives in Roxbury, New York.
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