The Selkie

by Melanie Jackson

  “I wish…” Ruairidh looked down for a moment, uncertain if he was glad or sorry to have heard this tale. For the first time in his life, he had an urge to see and know his mother. It had been easier not to think of her when he had imagined her long dead and beyond his reach.

  “Yer Hexy shall mellow wi’ time, though,” Cathair consoled him. “She isnae pure sidhe. The babe shall see tae her surrender. It is always that way with the MacNicol.”

  “Aye? Even if she should have a girl babe?”

  “Assuredly, my son. It will just take a bittock longer. In any case, ye’ll need tae take some fruit back wi’ ye. If she is MacFie and MacNicol, the craving for it will be strong. Ye’ll need tae bring it tae her until she is ready tae come here herself. And ye’ll have tae persuade her by the season of inundation. Once the storms begin, the tide will be tae strong for one in a delicate condition.”

  Cathair rose. Ruairidh could see him setting sentimental memories aside.

  “But that is for later. We’ve more immediate troubles. Come along, now. Ye need tae talk tae the others. And we need tae talk wi’ ye as well. There has been another attack on the pups.”

  Ruairidh nodded soberly. “Aye. And I’ve news about that as well. It is as ye feared, Da. The finmen are behind those who hae gone missing. And it was they what gave the ancestor’s body tae the circus. I fear that Sevin is attempting some new and evil necromancy. There is a new pall over Wrathdrum. And we ken from the past that once a finman begins a conquest, he’ll nae be content until he has dominion over all the sea. I am also worried, fer Hexy dreams of him.”

  Cathair looked grim at this news. “Has she the sight?”

  “She doesnae ken. Mayhap it is only bad dreams.”

  “And mayhap not. I’ll send swimmers for the council. The People must be warned.”

  “Why are they nae here?” Ruairidh asked with surprise. “Surely they kenned why I went ashore.”

  “My son, ’tis nearly Beltane. They are abroad, as they maun be. Since this last war of men consumed the land, it has made males scarce. There has been a greater welcome for the People frae the lasses in the villages.” He said practically, “They and we must repopulate. Let us hope that some of them are fertile unions.”

  “That is fair news, of course,” Ruairidh answered after a moment. “But I cannae stay fer long. Ye’ll have tae explain it tae the council wi’out me. I dare nae leave Hexy tae long on her own. She likely tae gae wandering.”

  “I trust that we shallnae be long in gathering. This news is eagerly awaited. But the council must hear yer words firsthand. We’ve had twelve hundred seasons of peace with the finfolk. There are many who will be reluctant to act against the finmen unless they are convinced beyond all doubt that they are responsible for recent events.”

  Ruairidh sighed and gave a reluctant nod. “There is one other thing, Da, which I want tae know before we leave the subject of my mother.”

  “Aye?” Cathair looked wary.

  “What happened tae Irial? Where is she? I know that she said tae never come near her again, but ye must have looked in upon her a time or twa. We always dae look over the women even if we never touch them again.”

  Cathair rubbed his nose. “I saw her once, perhaps twice. Be assured that nothing bad happened tae her. You are thinking of the women who have hard labors and then hae children nae more? That didnae happen in this case. All went well at the birthing. She gave ye and yer brother up tae me, not because she was ill but because ye needed the sea. And the Pendeen feys wouldnae accept ye—though I believe the Twlwyth Teg would hae welcomed ye both had ye not needed the sea tae live. Their numbers hae dwindled tae.” Cathair spread his arms wide, then slapped his hands together. He added briskly, “After yer birth she went back tae practicing her magic, only this time she set about vexing the mortals of Pendeen.”

  Ruairidh stared at his father in consternation.

  “And ye never saw her again?”

  Cathair smiled sadly at his son, his dark eyes as bleak as Ruairidh had ever seen them.

  “After that first season, nay, I didnae. Why would I? I was mistaken in her. It was all magic. She wasnae my true aroon, Ruairidh. And she didnae love me either.” Cathair touched his son’s arm. “I believe she loved ye and Keir, though, as much as she could, poor heartless, tearless creature. Sometimes Fate decides these things—and often she knows best.”

  Ruairidh shook his head, for the first time uncomprehending of his father’s sentiments and the way of the People. He could not imagine ever being willingly parted from Hexy or any child they had. Surely his heart would shrivel and die if he tried. He could never accept the exile that had been his father’s lot.

  Seeing his expression, Cathair added, “If ye feel otherwise for this woman, then she is your true aroon, Ruairidh, and ye’ve been doubly blessed. ’Tis a’ the more reason to bring her safe tae the sea.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Ruairidh was gone and Hexy had to find him. The compulsion was unnatural and infuriating, but she had no choice. He’d become an addiction, and whether waking or sleeping, she craved him. His presence was necessary for her happiness—maybe even critical for the survival of their child. Something inside her was crying out for nourishment, and no food she ate seemed to answer the need.

  She wanted a reasonable, socially understandable explanation for what she was feeling—but her previous life experience and logic had abandoned her. All that was offered in its place, all that made sense—however nonsensical— were the wild legends and what she thought of as some sort of biological magic.

  At first, she had been unhappy, but not alarmed by his absence. Ruairidh had said that he would be gone for a day. She had not been pleased when the day stretched into two, but had not allowed more than normal concern to color her thoughts.

  But then the dreams returned, terrible dreams about Sevin and two others attacking seals and fishing boats, and they grew worse during the dark of the moon. Some of them were so real that she could have sworn that she had been an eyewitness to a real event. There were other dreams, too, dreams where ranks of selkies sat as a hostile jury and condemned her for luring Ruairidh away from them.

  The current that carried her thoughts, waking or dreaming, was running fast and deep. There was no resisting the direction in which it was taking her, fight it as she might.

  She vexed herself with questions. Was this relationship with Ruairidh and all the discomfort it entailed a good thing? A bad one? She knew what society’s jurists would say. Yet she was coming to believe that some things were amoral, that some things could only be assigned meaning because of their effects on oneself and others. Religion and its narrow rules of human morality—or even science, the new religion— didn’t yet admit the existence of the reality she faced. It did not know of selkies and their culture. Neither science nor religion had an adequate framework for judging her actions.

  Hexy couldn’t bear the waiting anymore. She walked through the days and too many of the nights frightened by her thoughts, her always growing inner anxiety over the possible reasons for Ruairidh’s failure to return outweighing external fears of her pregnancy and alienation from her previous life. And poured over the top of all this was a growing fright of this evil creature that haunted her dreams in an increasingly personal manner. It seemed that he now sensed her there, for sometimes he would turn and scan his surroundings as though searching for a hidden watcher.

  Something inside her was amiss as well. The babes—for she no longer doubted that Ruairidh was correct about her being with child, and she suspected there might be two—were crying out for something in tiny voices that hurt her head. And she did not know what it was the children needed. She had tried every fruit available in the village and even taking mallow sap, but nothing helped for long.

  Given this feeling of near certainty of disaster if Ruairidh did not return soon, the question was not if she should begin a quest to find him, but simply where she should start.

  In th
is she was stumped. In spite of their intimacy and the feelings flooding through her body in heated surges that told her to act—now—she knew almost nothing about who and what Ruairidh was.

  He was a selkie. But that was just a word. What did that mean? Where did he live? Where had he gone? What could be keeping him away? His father? Heaven forbid, could it be his mother? Had he learned something so awful about his past—or his mother—that he was unwilling to return to her?

  The whole of their relationship she had wandered through some dreamy mental twilight, and only now was her brain beginning to awaken. Part of her was afraid—afraid of kicking over a wasp’s nest of new realities that would forever change her perceptions of the world. Once this mental veiling was pulled away, she would have to face the truth about what Ruairidh was. And the truth about what she was, too. Was she ready to face it?

  Did she have a choice?

  Though she knew in her heart that it would be a pointless exercise, she had searched Ruairidh’s room, hoping for some clue of where he might have gone. Though she had not expected any obvious answers, the blankness of the chamber’s somber interior was frustrating. There was nothing there to suggest that Ruairidh had ever been there—not even clothing. There were only the shadows of shivering leaves against the window’s half-drawn curtain and an empty carafe with silvery smudges at its neck.

  Hexy paced in front of the sooted hearth in the library, hating the smell of the cold damp ashes but having no desire to kindle a new fire. Fire was one more thing that was anathema to her now. It was one more sign that she was withdrawing from the world. And where it would end, she could not guess. There was only a distant hope that it would finish in some happy manner.

  Certainly there was no going back, whatever the eventual outcome. The life stream, like time, only flowed one way, and that wasn’t backward.

  She had to think. Logic and intuition were her only weapons. What did she know with certainty? She knew that Ruairidh had gone into the ocean and headed south and west. But the ocean was a huge place, and with the finmen involved, possibly an unnaturally hostile one. And she did not know where to begin her search after that. She needed guidance. But from where or whom? It was insane to think that she could go down to the seals who slept on the rocks offshore and ask them where Ruairidh was. They were likely just seals.

  And if they weren’t, what if they could also tell that she was part faerie and they hated her and her children? They apparently hadn’t accepted Ruairidh’s mother.

  Her inquiries among the natives near Fintry had not been helpful. The only one who would talk to her at all about legends was Mr. Campbell, and he had not offered her anything useful beyond the advice to read a few of his old books. She had necessarily needed to be somewhat discreet in her questions, approaching him with queries that any curious visitor might ask. It was a shame, because she was certain he knew more, and could eventually be coaxed into speaking if she had the time to persuade him in stages.

  She had been so distracted by the babes’ hunger when they spoke, but now that she thought back on it, there had been something in his demeanor—or maybe his speech…

  Hexy closed her eyes on the dark room and, murmuring softly, she reconstructed their conversation.

  “I’ve heard these songs, about sealmen becoming women’s lovers, entrancing them and then stealing their children from them.” Hexy had swallowed and forced herself to go on. “And others about women killing selkies by rubbing their necks with Orkney grass—”

  “Or yew,” Mr. Campbell had supplied, his face oddly serious. “Yew is poison tae all magical beasties, seelie or not. But mind, ye must rub it on their necks or in their mouths or it’ll do ye nae good. That’s the only place for the magic tae get intae the blood.”

  His expression was supposed to be indulgent, but his eyes had remained curious and watchful.

  The vulnerability to the neck she already knew about from firsthand experience. Rory could touch her there and make her weak, or lustful, or able to ignore pain. But the news about the yew was something she didn’t know. She would remember that. It might work to deter finmen, if she could bear to have it near her for any time.

  Hexy forced her mind back to her meeting with Mr. Campbell.

  “But what are the selkies, Mr. Campbell?” she had finally asked. “Does anyone really know about them? Where are they supposed to live?”

  “I think none but the selkies can say for certain. Some people think that they are fallen angels, and that when the rebel angelic horde was cast from heaven, some went tae hell with Lucifer, some fell tae land and became faeries and others fell intae the sea and became the slioche nan Ron.”

  “Slee-ock non Rone?” she’d repeated.

  “The children of the seals, aye. But others say they are the souls of the drowned given another chance to live through means of sorcery. And there are others still who will swear that they are the Clann Righ Lochlainn fo gheasaibh—the sons of the King of Lochlann who were bespelled by their jealous stepmother and condemened tae live in the sea for all eternity. But that’s the fanciful Irish for you.” Mr. Campbell had shrugged then, suggesting that fathoming the Irish mind was impossible. “What you need tae do, mistress, is tae go down to the beach and weep seven tears into the water. That’ll bring a selkie for certain. Or find one of their cast-off skins and hide it from him. Then ye may ask him any number of questions and be certain tae get some answers. Then come and tell me about it, for I’d dearly love tae know more about them myself.”

  Hexy had smiled blindly at what she thought was the postmaster’s attempt at humor and nodded her head. She didn’t tell Mr. Campbell that she had already wept into the sea and brought forth one of its legends, or that she had accidentally hidden his skin and still failed to gain any answers or even understanding about what he truly was. All it had done was drive her into Ruairidh’s arms and give him some power over her—and the children she now carried.

  “I need to go.”

  “Lass.” Mr. Campbell had stopped her as she turned to leave. His voice was hesitant as he asked, “You are not a MacFie, are you?”

  “My last name is Garrow, you know that,” she answered. “But why do you ask, Mr. Campbell? What’s wrong with the MacFies?”

  “Nothing. ’Tis just that there are stories about them and the silkies of Sule Skerry.”

  “Stories?” The fine hairs on Hexy’s arms had begun to rise, erecting themselves with incipient alarm. MacFie had been her maternal grandmother’s maiden name.

  “Well, the name MacFie comes from MacDuffie—which is an Anglicization of MacDubhsithe. That means son of the black faerie. Some of the clan was supposed to be descended from the Irish sithe—the unseelie ones.”

  “How interesting.” Hexy marveled at the sound of calm interest her voice achieved even with her heart in her throat.

  “The only clan I know of more tied tae the selkie are the MacNicols. That name means both son and daughter. It is thought that they can bear both male and female children tae the selkies.” Mr. Campbell had sounded suddenly uneasy. “Are you well, lass? You look a wee bit pale.”

  “I’m fine, Mr. Campbell. About the MacNicols? Why does this make them unique?” she’d prompted, saying her paternal grandmother’s maiden name casually, giving it the American accent because it comforted her with its normalcy. Campbell’s rendition imbued it with too much power.

  “Your pronuciation is all abroad, lass. Mac is for son and Nic is for daughter. They are long gone from these parts, all moved away a century ago. It was thought by the natives that the MacNicol women were the special choice of the selkies for mates because they were the only ones who could bear live selkie females. Ye even look like a MacNicol lass with that red hair and those green eyes. But if ye were a MacFie or a MacNicol, ye’d would know it.” Mr. Campbell had laughed suddenly, sounding relieved.

  “I would? How?” Hexy had forced her lips to smile.

  “All MacFie children are said tae be born with scales betw
een their fingers—”

  Not scales, Hexy thought; webbing. She had been born with webbing between the first joints of her fingers and still had the slight scars from where the perplexed doctor had cut it away. Her grandmother had had this defect, too.

  She pressed her fingers together and listened carefully while Mr. Campbell went on.

  “Supposedly, the MacNicol women were all horribly allergic to yew,” Mr. Campbell continued. “With all the trees leafing out up by Fintry, you would be weeping your eyes out day and night if you were of that clan.”

  “How strange. Well, thank you again for the books. I shall read them soon.”

  “You dae that, lassie. It’ll dae ye some good, I’m thinking.”

  Hexy had managed another smile before she turned and stepped out into the day.

  Hexy opened her eyes onto the library and resumed pacing. Her visit had been helpful in some ways, she supposed, but it still hadn’t told her where to start her search for Ruairidh.

  Hexy paused in her perambulation and rubbed her tired eyes.

  Mr. Campbell was right about the allergies. Her allergic reactions weren’t bad yet, but her sensitivity increased with every passing hour that she was divided from Ruairidh and whatever shielding affect his presence had on her.

  She had to decide what to do. And she had to leave Fintry before the people noticed the change in her—her inability to eat anything with salt in it, to stand strong smells—especially fire—her craving for shellfish in the raw, her need to bathe in the sea. Her appetites and compulsions were growing unruly, perhaps even dangerous.

  It was ridiculous—mad, even—but perhaps it was time for her to go down to the rocks and talk to those seals, or whoever else was waiting there. And if that didn’t work, then maybe she would cry seven more tears into the ocean and see whom it brought this time.