Deeplight

by Frances Hardinge

  We do need to cure this Selphin girl’s fear. Jelt’s right, whether I like it or not. It’s the only way out. I don’t know if the god-heart works on minds, but maybe there’s some other way to fix her. She just got scared, didn’t she? It’s not like she thinks she’s a lobster. Perhaps I can talk some sense into her.

  As promised, the little skimmer sub dropped Hark off at Dunlin’s beach. Selphin was waiting for him there but in an unexpected place.

  She was standing barefoot at the water’s edge. After hearing Rigg’s description of Selphin’s fear, Hark had not expected to see her near the sea. Yet there she was, letting the foam of the little waves rush over her feet and ankles. She seemed utterly absorbed in watching the ballet of the gulls and terns over the water, the skitter of red crabs at the water’s edge, the gleaming rattle of pebbles drawn back by the waves’ withdrawal.

  As soon as he entered her peripheral vision, her head snapped around to look at him. Selphin jerked her head toward his basket, which was resting on the pebbles farther up the beach. As arranged, it was full of samphire, mallow flowers, sea beet, wild fennel, and flabby sea wrack. She had been thorough.

  You’re Rigg’s daughter, aren’t you? he signed. He didn’t know Selphin’s sign name, but the sign for Rigg was well-known all over Lady’s Crave.

  She nodded.

  I thought you were afraid of the sea? Hark gestured at the wavelets surging over her toes.

  Selphin put her head on one side and gave him a look of weary, withering contempt. She glanced pointedly at the inch-deep water around her feet, then met his eye again.

  “Terrifying,” she said aloud. “I expect I’ll drown immediately.” Her voice was measured and level, with no weakness in consonants, not even the ‘s’ sound. Either she could still hear her own voice a little or she had a good recollection of how to use it. “So Rigg has talked to you about me, then?”

  Not “Mother,” just “Rigg.” Hark wondered how well they got on and what it was like having Rigg as a mother.

  He nodded. There didn’t seem to be any point in lying.

  I heard what happened to you. Hark kept his signs small and confidential.

  Selphin rolled her eyes.

  Everybody has heard about it, she signed bitterly, her “everyone” a great circular gesture that seemed to suggest the whole of the Myriad and beyond. She tells everyone I’m broken.

  I wanted to talk to you about that, Hark signed carefully.

  Why? signed Selphin suspiciously, then her face darkened in horror. Rigg asked you to fix me, didn’t she?

  She wants to help you! Hark signed. She wants you to be great!

  I know what Rigg wants, Selphin answered sullenly.

  “But . . . think of all the things you could do if you stopped being afraid of the sea!” Hark blurted out loud. Hark wasn’t as fluent in sign as Selphin was. He could get his meaning across but without the same vividness or verve. With words, he was a storyteller, but with signs, he lacked the skill to make the images sparkle. “Do you never want to swim down and chase fish? With the sand grains sparkling in the water? Do you remember what it’s like? It’s . . . flying!”

  Again Hark was getting a contemptuous, incredulous glare, as if he were missing some obvious point.

  “Well, what are you going to do, then?” Hark’s time and patience were both running out. “You can’t avoid the sea forever!” He was used to making difficult cases. He didn’t know how to argue the obvious.

  Yes, I can, signed Selphin. Watch me.

  “But it’s . . . like being afraid of the sky!”

  No it isn’t! Selphin signed furiously. Nobody asks me to go up in the sky! I can’t fall into it by mistake! And if I was in the sky, I wouldn’t drown, or freeze, or change shape, or get eaten by fish!

  Her signs continued, in angry stabs of motion.

  People I know who have drowned. Eight fingers held up. People I know who have hurt their lungs. Nine fingers. People I know who lost limbs scavenging underwater. Three fingers. People I know who vanished. Ten fingers, then two more.

  “But that . . . just . . . happens!” said Hark. “That’s normal!”

  Selphin threw up her hands, then hit the heels of her palms against her forehead in frustration. You’re stupid, she signed. Rigg is stupid. Everyone around me is stupid.

  I’m not broken! she continued, her brow creased with frustration. I’m not crazy! I’m just not stupid like everyone else! I stopped going into the sea so it couldn’t kill me!

  When I was twelve, after that hose got cut, I realized . . . that nearly killed me. If I keep going in the water, it will kill me. It will kill or cripple everyone I know, sooner or later. All of them. Everyone kept telling me I’d be fine, I’d be back in the water in no time, like that was a good thing. It wasn’t a good thing, and nobody else could see it. I don’t mind danger. But this was . . . stupid danger. I don’t want a stupid death! I tried to explain this to everyone . . . She gave the sign for “explain” over and over, with increasingly exaggerated weariness.

  I don’t need to be made better! Selphin continued. I just made a decision Rigg didn’t like! So what are you going to do? Change my thoughts? Make me want something I don’t want? If you do that—if you even try—I’ll kill you. And it’ll be self-defense.

  Hark took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The conversation was not going well, and he was starting to regret beginning it. He didn’t much like Selphin’s description of “healing” as altering somebody’s mind against their will. Could it really work like that? He could certainly see why she was upset about it, but what could he do?

  “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t have any choice. Your mother wants me and my friend to try to ‘heal’ you, and she’s got us by the throat. If we don’t look like we’re trying, then she’ll kill us. No offense, but she’s scarier than you are.”

  That’s what you think, signed Selphin.

  “I don’t even know if we can affect minds,” Hark added quickly. “Maybe it’ll just get rid of some blisters or something.” He hesitated, sizing up a gamble, then took it. “What about this? We say you only need a quick healing session at first. After that, if you show signs of recovery, maybe Rigg won’t think you need any more fixing . . .”

  That means I’d have to go underwater, to convince her! signed Selphin, with a glare. No!

  “Just for a bit! Just for . . .” Just for long enough that you realize that you’re being silly, he thought privately. You’d be back to normal, and our debt to Rigg would be paid off.

  He couldn’t stand around talking forever. He needed to get back to Sanctuary.

  “Think about it,” he said. “Do you have a better plan?”

  Selphin raised her thick brows slightly and pouted in a pretense at deep thought.

  I could tell my mother you’re lying about your healing powers, she suggested.

  Hark felt the skin of his face grow hot. She was bluffing, she had to be bluffing!

  “What do you mean?”

  You told her that it’s you and your friend who do the healing. Selphin’s eye glittered. But I saw you in that shack, taking something out of the floor.

  Hark reflexively glanced around, making sure there was nobody else who might have read Selphin’s signs. She grinned, and he knew that he had betrayed himself. He had shown her that he was afraid of discovery.

  Somehow she had been spying on him when he had recovered the relic. Too late he remembered the rattle of stones behind the wooden wall of the hut. Perhaps she had been peering in through a knothole.

  You don’t heal anything, she signed, triumphantly. You don’t cause the throb in the air. This morning I felt a vibration near the hut before you even arrived! That round thing is godware, isn’t it? That’s what heals. What do you think Rigg would do if I told her?

  Hark chewed his lip hard, feeling angry and frightened. Suddenly he was tired of people giving him ultimatums and forcing him up against precipice edges.

&
nbsp; “I think she’d kill me and my friend,” he said bluntly. “Then she’d search until she found that relic. After that, she’d lock you in a room with it until you were ‘fixed.’ Do you still want to tell her?”

  Selphin gnawed her knuckle, scowling bitterly. He seemed to have made his point, but he felt bad about it. She looked anguished and cornered, and he knew how that felt.

  “I never wanted any of this,” he said. “I never thought we’d have to heal anybody who didn’t want it. But you and me—there’s nothing we can do about this, is there? Maybe it’ll be fine. Maybe the relic won’t do anything to you.”

  Selphin’s only answer was one swift, fluid sign. It was the expressive sign for a jellyfish, pulsing its way forward, fingers trailing as tentacles. Of course, above water it generally had a different meaning.

  Spineless.

  “I’ve got a spine!” Hark felt his temper fraying. “But spines are meant to bend so they don’t get snapped! You can’t just . . .”

  He trailed off. Selphin had coldly and deliberately looked away from him. He had been silenced, he suddenly realized. If she wasn’t looking at his signs or mouth movements she couldn’t “hear” him. His voice, his treasured power to persuade, had been taken from him in an instant.

  “You make sure that thing never comes near me,” she said aloud, her voice quiet but hard. “I won’t let someone change me and control my brain. I mean it. Find a way out of this, or you and your friend will regret it. It’s not Rigg you should be worrying about. It’s me.”

  Chapter 19

  Crew were family, family were crew.

  Selphin had been brought up with Rigg’s entire gang as a cantankerous, protective coterie of honorary uncles, aunts, and siblings. Her love for them all was so fierce that she sometimes felt she should be able to see it, stretching from her to them like ribbons of red flame.

  By the age of twelve, Selphin had become a little queen of Lady’s Crave. Around the harbors, she led her own gang of children the same age. The rest of the time, she performed daring acts of mischief with her half-siblings. They all had different fathers, some unidentified, but that never really mattered. They were Rigg’s children, Rigg’s crew. Selphin was the youngest but one of the boldest.

  Then one day Selphin went down in a diving suit and came up choking on seawater, her eyes and ears full of blood.

  After a fortnight, her eyes were no longer bloodshot, but she could still hear almost nothing but a droning, buzzing hiss. It went on and on, sometimes changing its pitch like an insect’s whine.

  The bees, Sage called it and looked at Selphin thoughtfully. Sage was Rigg’s sea-kissed second-in-command, and Selphin had always found her a bit intimidating.

  The sound was maddening, and it wouldn’t go away. Everything was really hot as well, which made her feel more out of sorts. It took her family a while to realize that she was running a fever. Her ears hurt more than before, and when the fever passed, even the faint sound of other voices had disappeared. She could hear nothing but the “bees.”

  After a few months, it became clear that this would not change. Selphin was sea-kissed. Rigg was ferociously proud. Everyone was.

  Selphin also had her pride, in a different sense. She was too proud to admit that she felt lost, or that she experienced a deep ache in her soul whenever she woke from a dream of sounds to a world of buzzing silence. In those early days, learning to lip-read made her want to cry with frustration, and when other sea-kissed chatted among themselves, their signing was often too fast for her to follow. Suddenly there seemed to be no conversations where she belonged.

  Most of all, she was too proud to tell anybody in her mother’s crew about Venna.

  Venna was one of the stronger characters in Selphin’s own little gang. She wasn’t a match for Selphin’s streetwise daring, but she had one thing Selphin lacked—subtlety. Venna didn’t risk treating Selphin with outright rudeness, which would have angered everyone since sea-kissed were universally respected. Instead, she did a hundred little things that were hard to prove.

  She must have known that Selphin was new to her deafness and still learning to lip-read, so Venna made things as hard as possible. Suddenly Venna was always suggesting that the group of them go somewhere dark, where she knew Selphin would struggle to follow the conversation. Sometimes Venna would lead the conversation off at an excited gabble, too fast to follow, or managed to speak when Selphin was looking away for a moment. Selphin would stoop to pick something up, and when she looked up again she found everyone was laughing. Was the joke about her? What had happened?

  Every time Selphin lost the thread of the conversation, she knew that Venna was waiting, gloatingly, for her to ask what everyone was talking about. She hated asking. It stung her pride and made her feel stupid. But if she didn’t, sooner or later Venna would ask:

  “What do you think, Selphin?”

  Then Selphin would have to guess what was being discussed and give a reply she hoped would pass. Sometimes Venna would nod slowly with an expression of carefully blank politeness, then flicker a look to one of the others. Other times she would stare at Selphin with an exaggerated look of confusion.

  “I don’t understand. What do you mean, Selphin?” And Selphin would feel her face burn, knowing that she had guessed wrong.

  If Selphin did ask what everyone was talking about, Venna would “helpfully” explain it to her in exaggerated mouth shapes that she must have known Selphin couldn’t read. Or—worse—she would say:

  “Don’t worry about it. It would take too long to explain.”

  And just like that, Selphin was cut loose from the conversation and set adrift. She was made to feel like an outsider, an idiot child who had to be humored and helped.

  The rest of their friends were clearly unhappy with seeing a sea-kissed treated this way. However, the balance of power in the group was shifting. They had always been in awe of Selphin, but time after time they saw her tongue-tied, confused, and on the back foot.

  If Selphin had told her mother’s gang or other sea-kissed what was going on, Venna would have had hell to pay. Selphin could not bring herself to tell tales, however. She also knew she could beat Venna in a straight fight, despite their size difference. But would she look crazy if she punched the bigger girl’s teeth down her throat?

  One day, when Selphin had mulishly refused to be drawn into Venna’s games, Venna rolled her eyes impatiently and said:

  “Selphin, you need to tell us if what we’re saying is too complicated for you.”

  It was as though she were lecturing a small and silly child. Selphin couldn’t take it anymore.

  “No,” she said. “It wasn’t complicated; it was boring. When you start talking I can’t concentrate, Venna, because you’re always so boring.” She got up, knowing that if she stayed there any longer she would cry or break somebody’s jaw. “I’m tired of hanging around with children.”

  And she turned and walked quickly away from the whole pack of them, so they wouldn’t see her shaking with rage and misery. Did they call to her to come back? Did they burst out laughing? Did they whisper wonderingly and make faces at each other? She would never, ever know.

  Selphin had saved face, she supposed, but she had yielded the battlefield to Venna. She hated herself for that, but she knew that her pride would never let her go back to that group of friends. She spent the next few days morosely hanging around her mother’s gang, without explaining why or wanting to talk to anybody. Everyone was proud of her, but she felt like somebody had died.

  One evening, Sage and the other adult sea-kissed got up from the gang’s campfire to walk off together. They did that sometimes, and the other members of the gang accepted it. This time Sage turned and beckoned Selphin to join them. The gesture was utterly matter-of-fact, the same one that Sage had used for her fellow adults.

  Selphin never forgot what it was like to walk with Sage and the others through the busy harborside that first night. Wherever they went, crowds parted for
them. They were sea-kissed, warriors of the deep. They had a calm, quiet swagger, a cool and dangerous panache. On the streets of Lady’s Crave, they were bandit kings and queens.

  As Sage was handing Selphin her first ever cup of honeymead, Selphin happened to see Venna staring out of a casement opposite, gaping with envy and astonishment.

  Selphin pretended not to see her and walked on with her sea-kissed crewmates, loving them all so fiercely that she thought she might explode.

  Two years later, Coram’s healing seemed to have changed everything. Selphin could see her ferocious, beloved crew-family altering before her eyes. There was a new craven eagerness and reverence that made her skin crawl. Her friends were starting to think, feel, talk differently, and nobody else seemed to have noticed.

  Straight after the argument with the Sanctuary boy, Selphin went to confront Rigg. The resulting row was typically spectacular. Rigg didn’t deny planning to “fix” Selphin and refused to yield an inch.

  “First you won’t go near the sea, and now you’re afraid of the healers too? I’m sick to death of your obsessions, Selphin!”

  I’m not broken! Selphin told her, losing her temper as she always did. You’re the one whose head needs fixing!

  Rigg always forgot that when she yelled she was harder to lip-read. When her mother’s mouth movements became too contorted, Selphin stopped trying to understand them. Instead she looked away, cutting the conversation dead, which she knew Rigg hated.

  Selphin often felt that her mother didn’t really understand her anymore. Rigg was proud of her daughter and loved her in her own aggressive, domineering way, but she was not sea-kissed. She did not inhabit Selphin’s world. At first Selphin had missed her mother’s harsh, crow-like voice, with its tireless throb of energy. She tried to imagine it sometimes, but these days the remembered voice was faint and mechanical.

  They were drifting apart. Rigg thought that their conversations went badly because Selphin didn’t catch everything she said. However, the biggest problem was Rigg’s refusal to believe that she no longer fully understood her daughter. There was so much that Selphin found hard to explain to her mother. She couldn’t make Rigg see how the last two years had changed her, and tempered her patience and tenacity like steel. She couldn’t share the heightened alertness that had become habit to her, so that everything she saw danced with detail. The world spoke to her now in breaths and vibrations—movements of air against her skin, the sweetness of music felt as a tremor in her bones, and door slams sensed as shudders in the floor. Sometimes Selphin felt like she and her mother were meeting as ambassadors from different lands.