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.
“Not a fish,” he said, heavily. “Not so much as a minnow. And every net in ribbons. They know. And they’re punishing us, just as they threatened. They have the whip-hand, Mari. They can ruin us without thinking twice about it.”
He didn’t have to say anything more. They had that money put by under the stone, of course, but when that was gone, they’d starve. Fishing was all Daffyd Prothero knew. Could they even go shellfishing in the tidal pools? Would they even dare, knowing they could be slashed by something they couldn’t see? And what about winter? You couldn’t wade in the freezing winter water without losing your feet.
Now she was in a rage all over again, but not at her father, but at the Selch. Cruel, nasty things they must be, to start on this before she’d even had time to get used to the idea!
Well, two can play the nasty game, she thought angrily. Before her father could say another word, she pushed past him and out the door, and if she hadn’t been stepping on sand, for certain her footsteps would have been less “steps” and more “stomps” as she made her way down to the sea.
She had no idea how to make herself known, magically, so she settled for working up her anger into a mighty storm inside her. She waded ankle-deep into the surf, ignoring the chill that bit into her feet, and flung furious words out over the water.
“Oh, so you want me so badly that you’ll cut up my da’s nets and threaten to starve us, will you?” she shouted. “And what if I say I’ll be selling myself in the streets of Cardiff before I let you force me to do anything that’s not to my liking, eh? What then? What’ll that be doing to my magic that you want so badly?”
She really had not expected an answer, but to her shock, before the last echo of her voice ebbed, a great grey bulk heaved itself up out of the surf in front of her.
She took a few alarmed steps back, as the bulk resolved itself into an enormous bull-seal, which snorted and bellowed at her. For a moment she felt a chill of fear, but her anger took it away again.
“Oh, so you don’t like that, do you?” she spat, standing her ground. “Well, too bad for you! Tisn’t Merlin’s world no more; I’ll make it known to you! I can be taking Da to Cardiff. I can be getting him a job in the shipyard, aye, I can!” A memory flitted through her mind about the Tylwyth Teg being unable to come near iron or blessed things. “I can be getting him a job on a great iron ship, and then you can froth and fume all you like and you’ll not be able to touch him! I can be making myself Roman and taking myself to a convent, that I can! Then where will you be? Hmm?”
The bull-seal bellowed again, heaved itself taller, and then it wasn’t a seal there in the surf, but a gray-haired, gray-bearded man standing up with a sealskin cloak about his shoulders. There was an angry fire in his eyes and a sour twist to his mouth. “Oh, you will do that then, will you, Mari Prothero? You think that will be the saving of you?”
“I’d like to see you be arguing with God over who’s to have me, Selch,” she challenged him. “If you want me, if you want the magic in my blood, ’twill be on my terms, and you’ll be bargaining with me and not my da.”
The Selch went cold as the sea in winter and as still as a glassy calm. There was still anger in him, but he had leashed it and brought it to heel. “Someone’s been talking out of turn,” he mumbled.
So the Tylwyth Teg had been right!
“What, I call it a friendly word,” she countered, hands on her hips, and chin stuck out belligerently. “And so it is. For once, you won’t be the one making all the rules, Selch. If you want me, you’ll be bargaining with me.”
“And for what?” the Selch scoffed, pulling himself up and staring her down. “Treasures? Ah, you mortal wenches, so greedy for gold and gauds! This isn’t Merlin’s day, as you said yourself, and the Selch can’t be pulling great treasures out of the sea just on your say-so.”
“Not treasures. Choices,” she replied firmly. “This isn’t the day of Merlin, that’s true as true, and a maid doesn’t go meekly to whatever man she’s thrown to.”
His eyes widened with surprise, then narrowed with speculation. “I’m thinking your father might have something to say about this.”
“I’m thinking Daffyd Prothero has nothing to say about this, so long as the letter of the bond is kept. This is between me and thee. You’ll be giving me two things, Selch. You’ll be giving me a teacher for this magic, and you’ll be sending a pod of your young men to proper court me.” She tossed her head, and looked him in the eye. “I’m not a slave for your taking. On land, I have a choice of who I’ll go with and who I won’t, and I’ll be having that self-same right on the here and now. I won’t be bred like a sheep. I’ll be proper courted and won. Or it’s Cardiff and the iron ship and the convent, and an end to your nonsense. Forever. The bond and the bargain will end with me.”
His face turned red, he shouted at her, he called her all manner of names, the half of which she didn’t even understand, but she saw the fear in his eyes when she said the words “an end to your nonsense,” and she stood her ground.
He was stubborn, but she was more stubborn than he, and she sensed that he had a great deal more to lose than she did. Why, she didn’t know, but she was sure that he did.
Finally, as the sun set behind him, wreathing him in fire that made her squint, he gave in. Not with a good grace, but he did.
“Pah!” He spat in the water. “Mortal troublemaking cow that you are! I should send for the sharks to cut you down where you stand! My grandsire ordered your mother to take the boy and not you, and he must have been a prophet, to see what sort of a virago you’d become! I’ve more than half a mind to make you shark-food.”
“So do so, and be done with it,” she countered, and with that, she knew she had won. His words confirmed it.
“Your teacher you will have, and I wish you joy of him,” he snarled. “And your courting you will have, nor will I stint you, for Great Llyr knows why but you’ve plenty of our young bulls already bellowing and fighting over you.”
Oh, so?
“But don’t flatter yourself, nor think it’s for your face,” he added nastily. “’Tis the magic, as you said. And here will be my demand in this bargain—the better to be done with you, you’ll be birthing twins, not singletons, and we’ll be having ours once we’ve got a wetnurse. And they’ll be boys, so there will be no more of this again! A man will not have this missish folderol about choices and courting. A man will take a comely wench to his bed and no foolishness. My father was a fool twice over for letting Afanyn choose what babies she’d bear.” He snorted. “Sons it will be for the Protheros from this day on.”
“Done,” she said instantly, though the idea that he could somehow make her have twins, or boys, was laughable.
“Done!” he snarled, and then he was a seal again, and huffing and heaving himself back into the surf, and the deep water, and he vanished beneath the waves at the same time as the last of the sun.
Arguing with the Selch-chief had worn out her temper, so it was with a fairer face she talked with her da over the net-mending, explaining to him what the Tylwyth Teg had told her and how she had bartered.
He brooded over that a bit. “Your mother would tell me tales,” he said slowly. “Not the old stories, but just what life was like with her people. She was fair sick for the sea, though we live right at the edge of it, and sicker for her own kin. I did my best to make her comfortable, not so lonely, until her part of the bargain was done. She had to wait until your brother was old enough to swim, you see. Seems seal-pups don’t swim till they’re at eight weeks old. For one born to human shape, it’s twice that.” He sighed. “She’d planned to slip her shape and birth him as a seal, but she got caught a little early, and once the birthing started, it was too late to shift. We were goi
ng to say she’d miscarried, and then when the pup was old enough, she’d have a row with me and storm off in public and I was to say she’d gone back to her people.”
“Which would have been true,” Mari pointed out, her head bent over the net.
“Aye… aye. I thought it was a daft plan. No dafter than having the Chief call a wave to take her and your brother, though.” She looked up, and he shook his head, dolefully. “But I was sayin’—she told me tales. Seems usually they’re short of boys, so the Prothero bargain has always made sons, but when the time came for my bargain, they were short of girls. Your mother told me that the Chief-that-was told her that ‘the girl wouldn’t do,’ after you were born, and ordered her to take the clan the boy after all. So she did, and that’s why you were left instead of your brother.”
She thought that over, her hands moving swiftly with cord and shuttle among the cut strands. “Was the Tylwyth Teg right, I wonder? Is it that I have truly strong magic in me, and they wouldn’t trust that among them?”
“Your mother never said and I never asked,” he replied. “It didn’t seem my place. What I know is this: they have a clan-hall of the old sort, everyone under one roof, on an island that no one can find. She said it wasn’t really ‘in the world,’ whatever that means. Probably like the fae mounds the Tylwyth Teg live in—you can dig into the mound all you like and you’ll never find the way into their halls unless they take you.”
She pursed her lips, and nodded. And wished she was some great scholar who knew the ancient ways. All she knew were scraps of tales and bits of song and the stories the old woman had told her.
“The Chief rules all the clan. In the old days, she said, before Christians came, there was a deal of Selch-maids coming ashore and taking mortal lovers for the siring of children, but something about the Christians put a stop to that. I don’t begin to understand it.” He bound off the tail of his cord and rewound his shuttle. “That was why the bargain was made with the Protheros in the first place.”
“But what about all the tales from land-side?” she asked. “About the fishermen catching Selch-maids and making wives of them? About Selch-lads coming to women who called for them?” She had remembered that story when she’d stormed down to the sea, how you could call a Selch to you by shedding seven tears into the ocean.
“I suppose that calling a Selch to be your lover counters being Christian?” he hazarded. “And as for the fishermen catching Selch-maids, in all the tales I ever heard, I never once heard of them as churchly sorts.”
Well that made sense. Fishermen, especially ones like her da, who worked alone, were generally either extremely devout Christians or a good bit pagan in their relationship with the sea. The devout Christians would obviously not be looking for Selch; if they ran across a seal in their nets, well, they might be kind enough to set it free, but most likely would kill it, and if being around a Christian negated the magic that let the captured one shift from seal to human, well… those fishermen would never know the truth. The others would not be the least bit surprised to find the seal turning to a girl, and if she was pretty enough, would quite readily steal her sealskin to keep her with them.
They worked on in silence for a while. And while they worked, she felt something sour working its way to the surface of her mind, making her stomach churn and putting a cold lump in it at the same time.
Because she had not forgotten her father’s deception in all this. And she loved him, but he had lied to her. She, being herself, just couldn’t leave that sitting.
But this time, no more tantrum, no raging. Just have it out with him.
“Why did you lie to me?” she asked, bitterly. “All these years… knowing what was going to happen. Why did you lie to me?”
“I…” he began, then stopped.
“You had better not tell me you thought it was for my own good,” she snapped.
He sighed. “Well, how was I to explain it to a child?” he countered. “I admit it, I was a coward. I didn’t want to talk about it. It’s not the sort of thing a man feels comfortable about talking to a girl-child.”
Her mind flashed back to the day he had unceremoniously announced that they were going to Clogwyn, for no reason that she could see, and she found herself left alone with the postmaster’s wife, who had cheerfully and without any hesitation spent the afternoon educating her on “the business of being a woman” while the two of them worked over the laundry tubs for her enormous brood. On reflection, now, it had been a logical choice. Mrs. Bythell clearly enjoyed the company of Mr. Bythell in every sense; she had a hearty, earthy, practical, no-nonsense attitude toward it all, and was no bad person for a young girl to come to for instruction in such things. But at the time, Mari had been greatly confused as to why it wasn’t her da telling her all this, and why he’d left something so personal and intimate to someone who was almost a stranger.
“But—” she objected.
“Mari, I’m not a brave man when it comes to women,” he said, desperately. “I knew there’d be crying. I knew there’d be temper. I knew there’d be all manner of carrying on. And I didn’t want any of that! So I put it off, and I put it off, and finally I couldn’t put it off any longer, so I bought you those beads, and—” He dropped the net out of one hand and ran it through his hair in frustration. “—and you know, fool that I am, I reckoned if I gave you something pretty, you wouldn’t be as angry.”
She didn’t quite know how to answer that. “You were going to barter me away like a sheep, and you thought beads would keep me from being angry about it?”
“So I’m a fool!” he burst out. “If I were a cleverer man, don’t you think I’d have got me a wife by now?”
She just stared at him, torn by so many emotions that she didn’t know which one was uppermost. She just let them spin around her until they exhausted themselves and ran out of her, like water out of a cracked jar. And only then did she speak.
“You’re not a fool, Da,” she said. “You’re the village idiot.”
“I can’t argue with that,” he said mournfully. “The only fit wife for me was the one that was bound to me, will-she, nill-she.”
Mari snorted. Then went back to her net-mending. “I can’t say I forgive you, for that would be a lie,” she told him crossly. “But I can see why you did what you did. Or—why you didn’t do what you should have.”
“That’ll do,” he sighed.
When at last she went back up to her bed and laid herself down in it, her disordered thoughts finally fell into a pattern. An epiphany of sorts. She realized at that moment that her da, much as she loved him, and she did still love him, was exactly what he had said.
He was not a brave man. Not just about women. He was not brave about anything. Going out in the teeth of the storm? That wasn’t brave. Not when he knew the Selch and the Selch magic protected him. Fishing in all weathers? The same. Dealing with anything that made him uncomfortable? He fled or left it to others. Facing down the Selch? Not only would he not face them down and confront them on their bargain, he hadn’t even had the courage to try and think of a way out of it, as she had.
No, her da was not a brave man.
But he loved her. He cared for her. And yes, maybe there was some self-interest in that, for after all, he would need to have a child to barter to the Selch eventually, but even though she might be deluding herself about it, she truly thought that had never entered his mind.
And despite being powerfully angry with him, she still loved him. Just now, she could see him for what he was. A bit feckless. A bit careless. A bit of a coward. But he really had done the best that he could for her, and given the Prothero luck, that hoard of coins he had for her under the hearthstone could just as easily have been drunk away. There were plenty of men who’d have done just that.
She sighed. It was a hard thing to have to see her father for what he was. A hard thing and a sad thing. Maybe, though, this was what growing up was about.
Part of it, anyway.
Now I know why that bad Tylwyth Teg was laughing at me, she thought, frowning into the dark. She knew my da for what he is. And there I was, binding myself with my words to whatever would save him. She must have thought me a right goose.
But then again, according to the tales, the Tylwyth Teg knew nothing of love; could not feel it, could not give it. And, St. Mary help her, she still did love her da, her feckless da.
So let the fae laugh.
She would be the one laughing last.
She felt her mouth curving up in a little smile. Oh yes, she would be laughing. Tomorrow there would be handsome Selch here. And they would be courting her. And she could hold out for as long as she pleased, until one pleased her. Really, that was not so bad now, was it? Not so bad a prospect at all.
Better than the prospect you had before, now, be honest, she told herself. And it was true.
And there was the promise of a teacher in magic as well…
A pleasant thrill ran up her backbone. Now that… The Tylwyth Teg might well be singing a different tune if Mari mastered this magic. The Tylwyth Teg might well find herself in just a bit of a pother, facing off someone who could best her at her own game. This magic business… it meant that for once, she wasn’t going to be thought of as Daffyd Prothero’s daughter, nor the Selch’s unwilling bargain piece. She would have something that was her very own, hers, and no one else’s. Hers to do what she wished with. Her… power.
Oh yes. Oh, yes.
Now that was something to smile about.
Mari woke early, and the first thing on her mind was to wonder just when—and how—the Selch would put in their appearance. She didn’t have to wait long.
It was a good thing she had gotten up before dawn and made herself tidy, for as the first rays of sun lanced into the eastern sky, they came out of the sea.
She saw them from the window—for what else could it be but the Selch—six great grey shapes rising up out of the surf, then rising taller, then approaching the Prothero cottage across the shore, striding solemnly up from the waterline. She came out to meet them, the wind off the sea pushing her skirts into her legs.
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