Home From The Sea: The Elemental Masters, Book Seven

by Mercedes Lackey

  Her da was nowhere to be seen—but she knew where he was. On her birthday, he did the work of bringing the water from the stream, and a moment after she picked up the lovely beads to admire them, she heard his boot knock at the door to push it open.

  “Oh Da!” she exclaimed, as he put the pails down beside the door. “This is too much! I don’t deserve all this!”

  “Eh, well,” he replied awkwardly. “You’re a lady now, and a lady deserves some pretty fripperies that are all hers, and not passed down to her…” Then he sat down heavily, as if he had a tremendous weight on his shoulders. “And… I have something to be telling you, my girl. I don’t want to, but I’m bound to. ‘Tis about the Prothero luck, and how we come to it, and and what we must do to keep it.”

  She sat down, beads forgotten, though she clutched her hand around them. “I don’t understand what you mean, Da,” she said, slowly. Was this what the little Tylwyth Teg had been hinting at?

  “You know how you used to see things, when you were small?” he asked, slowly and carefully, as if each word cost him dearly. “Creatures, I’d call them. Maybe… small people that came to play with you?”

  Shocked, she took a deep breath. “I still see them, Da. I never stopped. And they talk to me and show me things. Like where to find things, like that lump of ambergris. I still see the Ellyllon—I saw three just the other day. One of them was the one that tripped up the constable. I just didn’t tell you, because you were so upset when I spoke of them.”

  He passed his hand over his face.

  “Da?” she said, hesitantly. “What’s it mean, Da?”

  “It means they never lost interest in you,” he said, and shook his head. “More than that, I dun know.’ He furrowed his brow. “I have to begin at th’ beginning. It was back, far back, afore Owen Glendower, may be all the way back to Arthur and the Merlin and Gwenhwyfar. My da didn’t know how far back, nor did his. But this is the way of it. There’s Tylwyth Teg, and then there’s Tylwyth Teg. There’s all manner of the Verry Volk. What you’re seein’, you’re seein’ the People of the Water. Don’t matter what kind, fresh, salt, still or running. Now, back in the days before even Arthur, Math ap Mathonwy was the brother of Don, and he was King in Gwynedd. That’s here, that’s the name of the old kingdom. When he needed a handmaiden, his magician Gwydion advised him to seek out his niece, Arianrhod. Now she was supposed to be a virgin, you see, Math needed that power in bein’ virgin because he was almost as much magician as Gwydion. When she arrived at the great hall, she stepped up to the throne and Math asked, ‘Are you a maiden?’ Not wanting to be shamed before the court, she replied that she was. Then Math took out his magic wand, bent it and said, ‘Step over this.’ As she did so she gave birth to two boys, right there on the spot. And that was Gwydion’s doing, because he wanted her. In her shock and shame she fled the Castle of Math and has no more to do with this tale.

  “One of the boys was taken up immediately by Gwydion and he became the hero of another legend. The one that was left was beautiful like no other child that’s ever been seen, like the sun and the moon together, and there wasn’t a woman that didn’t dote on him as a boy, and lust for him as a man. On the day of his naming he was taken down to the sea. Upon seeing the ocean for the first time he leapt out of his nurse’s arms and jumped into the sea. He became a god and Math named him ‘Dylan’—that means ‘wave.’ Dylan Eil Ton was the first and father of the shape-shifters of the sea, the Selch. And he sired children on many women, and some of those women and children chose to live in the sea with him, in halls and villages they built beneath the waves. You know of the Selch, aye? The seal-folk?”

  She nodded, because of course, those were some of the tales that old woman had told the children in her care.

  “Well… they’re real. And it happened that back in the day, when Arthur was just a boy, maybe, there was a fisherman who found a seal caught in his net. And since he had some of the magic in him, and could see it was something special, instead of killing it, he spoke to it kind-like, and said ‘Now don’t you move, for you’ll tear my net. I’ll free you and you can be about your business.’ And so he did, and instead of swimming off, that seal followed him, and drove fish into his net so he had a catch the like of which he’d never seen. And when he beached his coracle, it came ashore, and before he could turn around, a man stood where the seal had been. ‘You’ve done me a kindness unasked,’ said the main. ‘So I’ll offer you a bargain.’ This was the bargain. It seems that the blood of the Selch was growing thin and unthrifty, and they were getting fewer. So they said to the Prothero of that time, ‘You take one of our girls to wife. She’ll have two children, one for you and one for us, and then she’ll come back to us. In return, your fishing will never fail, and your boat will never founder, and you’ll never drown. And that will be the bargain that you’ll make for all your kin from now until when the sun fails. A Selch bride or a Selch groom, two children, and your nets will always be full of fish.’”

  Mari listened to him wide-eyed, mouth agape. It sounded mad. But she had seen the Tylwyth Teg for herself. She’d seen them trick the constable. And it certainly explained why her father felt confident on the water in any weather, how he never failed to come home with a catch and—

  “Blessed saints!” Her hand went to her mouth. “My mother—”

  He nodded, then gestured towards the sea. “Out there somewhere. And your brother with her. Now you know why we live away from the village and within the sound of the sea. Trust me, with Selch blood in you, away from the sea you’d run mad with longing. As it happened, when the time came for your mother to leave me, we both knew that times were different. A man’s wife and one of his children missing—that’d be noticed. And people would talk about how my da’s wife run off with a gypsy, and how his wife went out fishing and drowned… in the old days we could keep ourselves to ourselves and never mind. But can’t do that now, not with the village so near. So she went out kelping where the village could see, and your brother Ronan with her, and her folk made a great rogue wave to come up to shore, and away they swam.”

  “Constable Ewynnog doesn’t like that story,” Mari said, meditatively.

  Daffyd shrugged. “Like enough there’d have been a constable here to see what was what if your ma had just gone off and no good explanation for it.” He sighed. “But here’s the long and the short of it. A bargain’s a bargain, and you and I have had eighteen years of Prothero’s Luck and were bound into the pledge as sure as in a net. You’re eighteen, and the time has come for you.”

  For a moment she couldn’t fathom what he meant. And then it came clear in a flash, and she brought up her head sharply. “You mean—I have to take some… Tylwyth Teg man I don’t even know to husband? It was all well and good for you, da, you only had the fathering! I’ll be the one doing work with two babes, and for some stranger?”

  Her father flushed. “Mari… it’s a magic made in the long-ago, and I don’t know what will happen if—”

  There was a snicker, and both their heads whipped around. It was the wicked-eyed seaweed-girl sitting on the water barrel. “I can tell you that you won’t like it. If you break the bargain, then you’d best find yourself a place far, far, far away from the sea, and then find a magician stronger than the sea. The magic grows stronger with each mating, and now it will tear you apart if you break it. If you run, the sea will call you, and you’ll either run mad, or you’ll answer it and go to it and never come out no more.”

  She tittered again, leapt up off the barrel, and vanished.

  Mari felt her whole body go cold with fear.

  Her father gulped audibly. “Well,” he said, into the deathly silence. “There it is. You keep the bargain or…”

  She looked up at him, fear turning to fury. “Or else?” she said, angrily. “That simple? Oh—oh I hate magic!”

  And she burst into tears.

  At first, her father was guilty and tried to comfort her. But then, as she alternately wailed
and railed, he grew impatient, then angry.

  And finally he shouted. “And just what did you think you would be doing with your life, you young limb? How is this different than if I’d said, ‘Mari, I’ve found you a husband, you’ll have him’?” His tone turned mocking. “Did you think you’d meet a prince riding on the sand and be whisked off to some castle? Or maybe you thought one day your Tylwyth Teg would show you a heap of gold and you could live like a duchess? Well, this is the wide, real world, my girl, and most of us do things we’d rather not for longer than we want, and you might as well get used to it!”

  Such blatant unfairness shut off her tears and made her splutter. “Oh!” was all she could manage. “Oh!” because what she wanted to say was something so vile she wouldn’t ever say it to her own father, however much she felt it right now.

  Instead, before he could stop her, she shoved the table right into him, pinning him in his chair. “I know that no good father would barter away his only child like—like—beads from a peddler!” And she threw the beads still in her hand at his face, and ran out the door.

  But not seawards. Oh no. Right now, the sea was the last place she wanted to be. And not to the village; what comfort was there for her in the village? No, she ran across the sheep-meadow, across the road, and into the hills. She thought she heard her father calling her name, but she shut her ears to it, and ran and ran and ran until she ran out of breath, and fell sobbing to the turf.

  She heard the bubbling of water as she wept into the moss. And she heard a soft little voice nearby.

  Please don’t cry.

  With difficulty, she raised her head. It was another of the Tylwyth Teg, one of the little water-girls dressed only in her hair. “And why shouldn’t I?” she asked bitterly. “And why should you care?”

  The little thing looked distressed. Don’t you remember what we told you? Didn’t you hear what your father said? Why do you think the Selch wanted the first of the Protheros?

  It was hard to think through the fog of emotion, but think she did. Had her father said something about… that first man having power?

  “The—magic?” she said, hesitantly.

  The tiny thing nodded. It’s strong in you, Mari. Strong, strong, strong. You can’t escape the net, but you can make conditions. Bargain, Mari, bargain. Don’t be tame, like a sheep. Be strong, like a master! The little thing looked about her quickly. I have said all that I dare. Remember! Remember!

  And with that, she flipped over and vanished beneath the water of the stream.

  5

  WHEN Mari returned to the cottage, her father was gone. The beads he had bought her were laid on the table, and the kitchen had been straightened. She clenched her jaw. If he thought that was going to mollify her.…

  She was thinking hard about what she had learned as she set things to rights. It was hard to think, she was so very angry, but doing things that required a good bit of main strength helped her wear some of that temper away. Although she was minded to give herself a holiday, she did the usual chores—all except for the cooking. He could just make do with cold rabbit from last night. The words of that helpful Tylwyth Teg kept going around in her head. Bargain. Well, and what can I bargain with? And what would I bargain for? She couldn’t bargain away the business of being handed off; not without her da paying a price she really didn’t want him to pay—no matter how angry she was with him. So where, in this trap, was there something that would give her some sort of relief and freedom? And what could she offer to get it?

  All the stories she knew that involved bargains with the folk cautioned that you had to be very careful… and why would they bargain with her, anyway, when they already had a bargain and a pledge?

  Unless…

  The water-creature had implied that she was different from all those other Prothero girls. Very different. Well, and I am speaking up for myself, and not being a silly ewe-lamb about this! But that couldn’t be all of it. There’d been that talk of magic, as if she herself had it.

  Wait… she didn’t actually know that much about her family, come to think of it.

  She sat herself down with a cup of tea as a treat and pondered that. There might not have been that many Prothero girls, come to think of it, since the Prothero name had come down from the old times intact. Which meant that most, maybe all, of these bargains had involved a Prothero lad and a Selch lass, rather than the other way around. I rather doubt there’s many men in the world that would balk at taking a random girl into his bed provided she’s comely enough. She had no illusions on that score about her father—who had been known to tumble the odd girl in a haystack during harvest or the occasional Traveler wench that seemed willing. She had always assumed that his reticence in talking about her mother was due to grief but now… now she began to wonder if it was because he simply didn’t know that much about her, hadn’t really cared that much about her, and really didn’t miss her. It wasn’t as if she was actually dead, after all. She’d simply paired up with him, done her duty, and off she was back to her own people. So he wouldn’t even really have guilt over her loss. Presumably, she was happier where she was now than she had been with him.

  I wonder why she took my brother and not me?

  It certainly would have been easier all the way around if she had.

  Maybe he was more Selch than me? Or maybe she’d been told to bring the boy with her.

  Or maybe—maybe this magic that had been hinted at made her dangerous to take to the sea.

  She shook her head. No point in speculating; she was wasting her time doing that when what she needed was to figure out what the Tylwyth Teg had meant.

  It was more than just that she had magic in her. That trait was possibly very desirable to the Selch, but hardly of any use to her if all it meant was that she could see the Tylwyth Teg.

  Ah, but if she could learn to use it, that might well be a different story altogether.

  How did you go about learning the magic, anyway? There were no Druids anymore, nor Bards, who also were supposed to know the ways of magic. She couldn’t exactly march up to some university, even if she could get to one, and demand to be educated in it.

  The more she thought about it, though, she realized it would be very, very useful if she had the knowledge of it. Just seeing what the Tylwyth Teg had done convinced her of that. I could use it to make that cursed constable leave us be, for one, she thought sourly. She didn’t entertain any notion of jewels and princes and castles; even in the tales that sort of thinking generally bought you more trouble than it was worth. But little things, like making Constable Ewynnog take his bothering self elsewhere, or calming the storms so that the Clogwyn fisherman came home safe.… now that would be magic worth having.

  Bargain, bargain, bargain. The Tylwyth Teg, both the good one and the naughty one, had implied the Selch were interested in her magic. And obviously they had some sort of magic of their own, or else how could they become seals and all? Could the Selch have teachers of such things?

  It seemed possible. So… could she bargain for such a teacher? How would they take to that?

  She drummed her fingers on the table-top, contemplating that notion for a good long while. Was that what the good Tylwyth Teg had meant for her to do? Possibly, but that was not all that it was; she felt that deep in her bones. There was another bargain she could make, or at least, another that the Tylwyth Teg had seen.

  Then something new occurred to her. The vow was that she was bound to take a Selch to husband, but unless her father misremembered, it wasn’t that the Selch could force their choice of man on her… it was she had to take the Selch husband. But the choice of who that would be.…

  Now that was an interesting thought.

  Hmm. The old tales all say that if a man mistreats his Selch-wife, her bond is free and she can go back to the sea. Does something like that work for us, I wonder? Not that her father was the sort to mistreat any woman. And the prospect of irritating an unknown man until he raised his hand to her di
d not appeal.

  But this might mean she could make them give her the choice of husbands, especially if they wanted the magic in her blood that much…

  I see it now, aye. I do believe I can make them give me the choice.

  She actually got a little thrill out of that notion. She’d never had the illusion that she was a great beauty; certainly the lads of Clogwyn didn’t go trailing about after her the way they did after Braith. Somewhere, vaguely in the back of her mind, she had always supposed that she would marry some fisher lad or other, probably as much because he had his eye on the Prothero cottage as because he wanted her, but as long as he was a good lad and gave her da help on the water, that would have been all right. But to force the Selch to send her their comeliest lads, and to have them vying with each other, each courting her harder than the last, well… that would give any girl a bit of a thrill. And it would ensure she’d get herself a temporary husband who would be pleasing and wouldn’t try to force himself on her.

  Even as those thoughts crossed her mind, movement at the beach caught her eye; she turned to look out the window and she saw her da laboring up the shore with a burden, and it didn’t look like fish.

  As he neared, she saw that it was his nets, all of them. Now why would he bring them up here, wet, instead of spreading them to dry?

  Soon enough she had the answer to that question, as he bumped the door open. His face was weary, and for the first time, ever, she saw fear in his eyes. When he cast the nets down on the floor, she saw that every one of them had been cut up.