by Ann Gimpel
Aegir swam north. Once he cleared Scotland’s landmass, he’d turn eastward. His kind didn’t call the land Scotland, though. Its ancient name was Caledonia. He was headed for a chain of islands scattered above John O’Groats. Currently known as the Orkneys, they’d been the Selkies’ home base millennia ago.
Aegir’s father, Krise, had rebuilt the palace in its current location on the western side of Caledonia hundreds of years before. A rampaging wizard coupled with an effort to escape the beastly weather plaguing the North Sea were the official reasons behind the move, but Krise was nothing if not a diplomat. He hadn’t wanted to tell his people he feared for their safety for many reasons, not only the two he’d given voice to.
As Aegir swam, he thought about Scotland—Caledonia—and its two faces. The one humans saw and another magical land named Arcadia. In contradiction to current mythological beliefs, Arcadia wasn’t a Greek utopia, but open to any with strong magic. Shifters considered the land sacred along with Witches, Druids, and all others wielding White Magic. Over time, Arcadia had become a haven for those such as him, a break from humans who’d written off magic. No one believed in it anymore. If they glimpsed his head bobbing in the waves, they saw a seal, not a Selkie, and it made him sad.
The redirection of human beliefs had taken a significant notch out of magic-wielders’ abilities. Nothing quite like trying to cast spells in the presence of a veritable sea of negative energy. By moving their palace, locating it offshore so to speak, Krise had ensured the continuation of Selkie magic at full strength. He’d played his cards close to the vest, so the other Shifters who continued to reside in Scotland, grumbling all the while about how bad things had grown, never knew Selkies didn’t share their problems.
Aegir surfaced to breathe. He’d been fielding a flurry of telepathic summons from the Shifter Council for the past twelve days. The requests had started out polite enough but had escalated to threats about excommunicating Selkies from the council table if they eschewed their responsibility to Arcadia.
Aegir had answered every message, promised he’d be there soon. It wasn’t as if Arcadia were in trouble. His visits across the magical barrier were more pro forma than necessary.
He’d pointed that out, but the messages had edged from requests to demands. Unable to deal with anything except Jonathan’s imminent departure, he’d shunted things off onto Krise. He’d meant to check in with the elder Selkie before leaving with Jonathan, but it hadn’t happened.
Probably just as well. He wanted to show up on the island that held a gateway into Arcadia with as positive a mental outlook as possible. Having a bunch of Shifters furious with him would only piss him off.
Selkies didn’t interact much with other Shifters for a host of reasons. They were the only iteration of Shifter who spent the lion’s share of their time in their animal form. They were also the only Shifter in danger of being stuck as humans if a crafty miscreant lay in wait and stole their pelt.
Back when he’d been quite young, he’d confronted his father, asking why they bothered to keep up the charade of bonhomie when it was patently false. In those days, magic was stronger and far more visible. The rampaging wizard was but one threat. Demons, Furies, Harpies, and other hazards were commonplace occurrences.
Krise had told him they’d be fools to go it alone.
Aegir wasn’t sure that was still the case, but he wasn’t one to rock the status quo. If Krise and his queen had produced more children, Aegir would have gladly slithered out from under the royal banner. He’d been nonplussed when his father announced he was stepping down. Aegir had done his damnedest to talk Krise into a few more years at the helm of Selkie-dom.
It hadn’t worked.
Familiar landmarks slid past; he altered course still lost in thought. Jonathan and Angus would be in Ireland now. Would Angus muck about in the boy’s mind before he woke him from trance?
Probably. Otherwise, it would be that much harder to alter the lad’s memories.
Aegir shook himself from snout to flippers to tail. He hated the thought of Jonathan’s memories being obliterated, but he had no stake where the boy was concerned.
None.
Aye, and I’d do well to remember it.
Looking backward wasn’t his style, but neither was hardening his heart and forgetting the bright light the boy had shone, illuminating the Selkies’ palace with his quick wit and ready smile.
Aegir would see the boy again. He knew he would; it was foretold according to the Sea Witch. She’d shaken a bony finger beneath Aegir’s nose and warned him the boy would be grown to manhood and would carry no memory of his time with the Sea Folk. He hadn’t liked her prophecy, but like all divinations, it was seeded with truth.
He swam faster. Not only was he late showing up in Arcadia, he was centuries past prime mating time. Krise had stopped nagging, but Aegir was all too aware he needed to locate a mate. She didn’t have to be a Selkie, but she’d have to agree to live among them.
It was a stumbling block for most other types of Shifters, and he couldn’t marry a woman with no magic at all.
He broke the surface to breathe and slapped his tail hard in a trough between two staunch waves. He’d have been happy raising Jonathan, but that future wasn’t open to him. He needed to buck up, pull his head out of his ass, and produce a child of his own.
One no one could take away from him.
He glanced at the stars. If he added a wee bit of magic to his trajectory, he’d be at his lair in the Orkneys before dawn. Once there, he’d make a beeline for Arcadia, put on his best company manners, and apologize all over the place for being late.
Arcadia didn’t need him—or any of the Selkies and other magic wielders who helped keep her safe. Seat of White Magic, it was worth protecting, but the enchanted land had its own resources.
He had no idea who’d come up with the idea of Shifters, Selkies, Witches, and Druids making certain the land was never alone. More than a millennia back, one of the Druid sects had moved there permanently. Aegir had been surprised the rest of them continued to do more than visit occasionally after that, but he was damned if he’d be the one who flew in the face of tradition.
Maybe he’d suggest they loosen up the schedule, though. Not worry so much and threaten drastic measures—like excommunication—if someone happened to be a wee bit late. The more he considered it, the better he liked the idea. It would be a decent beginning. He’d float it past the Shifter Council—once they weren’t out to hang his head from a pikestaff.
Chapter 2
Raene bent over the large double oven in her bakeshop in Wick, a tiny hamlet on the northeastern coast of Scotland. The township straddled the River Wick and extended along both arms of Wick Bay. Because it was so far north, six months of the year provided extravagant hours of darkness.
Perfect for a creature like her. One who held secrets and aimed to make certain they remained hidden.
Sweat slid down her face, and she mopped it with a sleeve as she rearranged loaves and buns in the oven. The Wedgewood commercial gas range was old and cantankerous. So long as she moved things back to front and side to side, they didn’t burn. Not that it would matter much. The village was very small, and she maintained the only bakeshop. If people wanted fresh bread, either they made it themselves or bought it from her.
She straightened and shut the oven door. Jamming a hand into the small of her back she rubbed at the sore places. It was past time for her to shift and slip into the sea. Usually, she closed up her bakery in the middle of January, but this year her closest friend had been nursing her husband through a serious illness.
Raene had known he was dying. So did Ula, but she kept up a brave front. Privately, she’d asked if Raene could put off her annual holiday, and Raene didn’t have it in her to refuse.
Everyone assumed she left for warmer climes, returning in early May. If they knew the truth, that she lived in the sea, they wouldn’t have believed it. Magic had fallen out of fashion at least a hundr
ed years before. Edged out by science, very little in the way of superstition remained.
Raene had lived a long time. She’d survived eras where those like her were burned or hanged. By employing a combination of stealth and wariness, she’d managed to conceal her dual nature for the most part, except for a fifty-year stint when a man had hidden her skin, binding her to her human body. She’d hunted and hunted for her stolen pelt, but the longer she was separated from it, the weaker her magic grew.
Finally, with her husband on his deathbed, she’d wrested the truth from him as he wandered in a delirium. The temptation to run back to the sea was overwhelming, but Rolf had treated fairly with her—if she discounted the way he’d tricked her out of her skin. After checking her pelt was where he’d said, she’d eased him out of this world, hastening his passage with magic to put an end to his pain.
Once he was gone, so was she.
Years passed—a whole lot of them—before she ventured ashore again, and she picked the other side of Scotland this time. It was how she’d ended up in Wick. She’d have to leave sooner or later, but she had another decade before that option switched from choice to necessity.
Another peek inside the oven told her today’s bounty was done. She shut off the gas and removed her loaves and buns. She’d already put out a sign letting the villagers know that after today, she’d be gone. A grief-stricken Ula had hinted about perhaps traveling with her, but Raene forestalled her friend by listing out dozens of mythical kinsfolk she made certain she saw every year.
Ula had patted her on the shoulder, told her all would be well, and commiserated about Raene’s holiday not being so much of a holiday after all. Raene hated lying to her friend, but she’d had no choice.
Not unless she skipped donning her seal form for an entire year, and she wasn’t willing to do that. The half century she’d spent without her skin had taught her many things, including how critical time in the sea was for her dual nature.
The string of bells over her shop door tinkled. Raene bustled trays of hot bread into the front of the bakery. No reason to arrange the loaves and buns on doilies in the display case. They’d be gone almost as soon as she could ferry them from the kitchen.
The next few hours passed quickly. By eleven in the morning, she’d sold everything edible in the shop. After bidding her last customer goodbye, she hung out her “Gone on Holiday, Back 1 June” sign and twisted the deadbolt to ensure no one else pushed the door open—despite her sign. A steep, winding set of stairs led to her living quarters above the bakery. She didn’t need to do much to prepare to be gone, and she’d catch the train that left at two.
That way, anyone who was interested would see her leave town. And no one would notice her exit the train at its next stop because by then she would have cloaked herself with magic.
Excitement thrummed through her. The sea was her natural environment. She’d ended up wearing her human form most of the year through a combination of capitulating to an era unfriendly to magic and taking pains to never, never be separated from her pelt again. Being rejected by the local Selkie pod played into her decision too.
She hung her apron over a hook and stripped out of the white smock and pants she wore when she baked. Raene never bothered with underthings. They’d come into fashion long after she was born. Goose bumps dotted her naked arms and legs, and she hurriedly tugged a pair of black gabardine breeks from her old-fashioned dresser and put them on over her stockinged feet. Stout tan boots followed. Once she’d laced them, she pulled a beige woolen sweater over her head and a plaid woolen coat over that. It wasn’t raining, but she wrapped a length of wool around her bright hair anyway.
She double-checked the latches on the two upstairs windows and grabbed her battered old valise. Her skin was waiting for her a few kilometers south of Wick, shrouded by spells atop spells, in one of the many caves dotting Scotland’s rocky coastline. No ship—not even one as modest as a rowboat—could penetrate that section of coast. She’d have to teleport there, but it was easily done.
A glance at the clock on her bedside table told her she had plenty of time to walk to the train station, but it would be good to lock up and get going. The phone rang, jangling and discordant. She ignored it and trotted lightly down the spiral staircase. It was still ringing when she let herself out the door, turning to lock it behind her.
She’d had an answering machine for a while but hated having to remember to check it. In the end, she’d gone with keeping her life as simple as she could and donated the annoying electronic device to a secondhand shop. Ten minutes later, she stood at the train station’s window, offering up money for a ticket. She always bought one all the way to Glasgow. It was the only time she ever wasted money, but she had to make her travel plans look real.
Boarding document in hand, she went to sit in the small station. The train would show up in about three-quarters of an hour. By the time she got on and staged her exit, darkness would be well on its way.
Once she’d settled in to wait, she let her mind range wherever it wished. Not a luxury she generally indulged in. Her mother was half human, half Selkie. She was magical, but she couldn’t take seal form. If she knew who Raene’s father was, she’d been very closemouthed about it. Raene had questioned her nine ways from Faery but had never gotten any answers.
No one had been more surprised than she the storm-tossed, cloudy night when she’d been walking a deserted beach on the Isle of Skye. She’d felt odd all that day. Antsy and not right in her head. She ran a fever and had escaped into the night to let the chill air caress her body. After leaving her clothes beneath a handy boulder, she’d run barefoot on the beach, feeling like she was doing something dirty, something wrong, but not caring.
As soon as she dipped one bare foot into the sea, heat shot from it, igniting her entire body. If she’d truly been engulfed in flames, it wouldn’t have felt any different. A ripping, gnashing, tearing sensation blasted through her. Bones broke, skin stretched and reformed, sprouting a thick, reddish fur. With the last of her hands before her arms shortened and her fingers turned to flippers, she felt her elongated snout.
Before the transformation totally died away, she’d plunged into the sea, delighting in her effortless transit through first shallow and then deeper water. If she’d still had human vocal chords, she’d have laughed the first time she surfaced when she blew salty spume over a meter into the air.
Raene understood what had happened. Her magic manifested. She was not quite eighteen and realized her father had to be a pureblood Selkie since three-quarters blood was a bare minimum required to shift. In her imagination, he was a Selkie prince or maybe even a king, but one with a jealous wife. She and her mother always had money, so maybe the prince/king had paid her off handsomely to keep her mouth shut.
Figuring out how to hide her skin after that first shift had been a challenge. Magic was far from second nature, and it took her many tries before she was satisfied no one would make off with her pelt. How it had simply materialized would remain a mystery.
The train’s strident whistle cut into her thoughts, and she rose to her feet and snatched up her empty valise. It was a prop, but she tried to create the illusion of normalcy. The train chugged to a stop, and she showed her ticket before boarding.
Raene took a seat near the back of the second car. Once the train lurched forward, she wove webs of magic around herself. I’m not here and don’t look here spells mixed with a simple concealment casting. Since she’d kicked open the door to her memories, she wondered where her mother was. She’d left her in the northern reaches of Norway more than a hundred years before.
Her mum hadn’t been nearly as thrilled with Raene’s news about taking seal form as Raene expected her to be. It had been the beginning of the schism that eventually separated them. By then, her mother had taken up with another man, a purely human one. It seemed like a bad idea to Raene, and she’d quietly pointed out a few of the problems. After that, her mother told her it was past time for he
r to strike out on her own. While Raene was still reeling from the rejection, her mother had said something curious, called Raene ocean-marked without explaining precisely what it meant. Afraid it was some arcane curse, Raene hadn’t turned that rock over to peer beneath it.
She exhaled sharply. Her stepfather had to be long since dead, but she’d never heard from her mother again. The Selkies had a pod that traveled from the North to the Irish Sea and back again, but when she’d approached them, they’d not been overly friendly. She never knew why, but assumed they looked down on her because her blood wasn’t pure, and she’d never had any formal instruction in how to employ her magic.
Or maybe they sensed she was ocean-marked, and it was even more of a malediction than she’d imagined. Regardless, the pod had been her first stop after she’d gotten her skin back, and she hadn’t been in the mood to kowtow to anyone’s weirdness.
Or criticism.
They hadn’t wanted her, and she hadn’t stuck around to argue the point.
She’d done all right on her own. Figured out what she had to. She watched the station placards change as they passed small settlements. Rather than pulling the bell cord for a special stop, she waited until the train steamed into the next station to the south before slipping unnoticed out the door.
She assumed no one remarked on her egress since no one spoke with her. Raene struck out on foot, head down, walking quickly. Once she cleared the hamlet’s borders, she ducked behind a boulder and left her valise in an unobtrusive spot. She’d come back by this place to collect it in a few months. If it was here, great.
If not, she’d buy another.
Darkness closed in with the coming night. Once it was complete, she summoned a teleport spell, visualized her cave, and hoped the muted blaze of light from her magic wouldn’t bring anyone running.