The Changeling Sea

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  He was listening, as the sea-dragon had listened, alert for every pitch and shading in her voice. He picked up a word unexpectedly, hearing an overtone.

  “Kir.”

  She swept at her hair with both hands, utterly perplexed. “I should take you to the king,” she said, and was horrified at the thought. “I can’t walk into his great house with you in the middle of the night and explain to him—me, Peri, who mops floors at the inn—that you are his human son and Kir is his sea-child and—I can’t, anyway,” she added with vast relief. “He left with Kir. Lyo. Lyo can tell me what to do with you.” The sea-dragon was listening patiently, his teeth chattering. She put her arm around him, coaxing him to his feet. “At least I can find you a blanket. Can you walk? Not very well, but no wonder, you just got born.”

  She took him into the house, wrapped him in an old quilt and rekindled the fire under a pot of oyster soup. The light springing over his face made her eyes widen. His hair was as gold as the sea-dragon’s chain; his eyes were sky blue under gold brows. Like Kir, he was tall, slender, broad-shouldered; like the sea-dragon, he was constantly in motion. He paced while he nibbled bread. He burned his fingers in the fire, poked himself with a needle, startled himself with the cracked mirror, tripped over the trailing quilt, and dropped everything he picked up, including his bread and a bowl of oyster soup. Peri made him sit down finally, curled his fingers around a spoon and taught him to feed himself. The first spoonful of hot milk, oysters, melted butter, salt, and pepper he swallowed amazed him. Peri laughed at his expression. An answering smile sprang to his face, mirroring hers. It was a smile startlingly unlike Kir’s, sweet and free of bitterness. She gazed at him, silent again, forgetting to eat. He waited, alert to her silence, as curious and patient as the sea-dragon had been, balancing its lumbering body in the waves among the fishers’ boats to listen to them talk.

  “I wonder if you even have a name,” she breathed finally. “I wonder what your mother called you, just before she died. You must look like her. I wonder if, down in the sea, they ever took off the chain, turned you back into this shape…I wonder if they ever taught you anything at all, even ‘yes’ and ‘no.’”

  “Yes and no,” the sea-dragon said obligingly, “and dark and light, sun and moon and day and night: They never speak, but to and fro together through the world they go.”

  “Or did they just keep you chained from the day they took you? Is this really the first time you have been human?”

  “Human.”

  “Like me. Like the fishers.”

  He let the bowl sag forward in his hands as he listened, his eyes intent on her eyes, her mouth. His own eyes were heavy; the sea-dragon’s struggle out of the sea had tired him. She righted the bowl before he spilled it, coaxed him to eat more soup before he nodded away and tumbled off his chair. She made him lie on a blanket beside the hearth; he was asleep, soundlessly, before she covered him.

  She stood watching the firelight lay protective arms across him. Twice in one day, she thought; two princes have come into my house. One dark, one light, one day, one night…And then she fell into bed without getting undressed.

  She woke again in the dark to the roar of the high tide. A puddle of moonlight splashed through her open door. It creaked as she stared at it, then banged shut making her jump.

  The blankets lay scattered, empty beside the hearth. She was alone. She got out of bed, went to the window. The milky, moonlit sea dazzled her eyes; she leaned farther out, blinking, and saw it finally: the sea-dragon with all its streamers swirling about it taking the silver path of light between the spires, back into the sea.

  She worked groggily at the inn that day. Carey, bewailing the loss of the gold unceasingly, it seemed, became to Peri’s ears like a background noise of shrill, keening gulls’ voices. Even Mare, with all her good sense and humor, was cross.

  “How could he have been so stupid?” Carey demanded. “How could anyone with the power to turn gold into anything at all have turned it into a bunch of flowers? All that gold, Mare…Peri, you were with him. Did you have any idea he would do anything so barnacle-brained as that?”

  Peri shook her head and swallowed a yawn. Carey stood in front of her, wanting something, some word of explanation, of hope. When none came, she made a desperate noise and stared out a window.

  “I’m going to run away.”

  “Oh, please,” Mare sighed. “Stop caterwauling about the gold. It’s gone. We’ve lived our lives so far without it, and if just living peacefully won’t make you happy, I don’t suppose a fortune will, either.”

  “You’re sorry about it, too.”

  “All right, so I am. It would be fine not to have to scrub floors and listen to you complain every day; if you’re going to go, then go for goodness sake, girl, and give us a rest.”

  “All right, then,” Carey snapped. Peri lifted her head. Something in the tense, poised lines of Carey’s body reminded Peri of Kir’s desperation and helpless anger.

  “Don’t go,” she said softly. Carey’s miserable, furious gaze swung to her. “Maybe he’ll be back. He has magic in him. He had the power.”

  The anger vanished from Carey’s face. She went to Peri, grabbed her broom to keep it still. “Yes. You’re right. If he could turn gold into flowers, why can’t he turn the flowers back into gold? He could, couldn’t he? If we could find him, if we could ask him.”

  “Those flowers are probably down in the south islands by now,” Mare said. “And so, if he knows what’s good for him, is the magician. You heard the fishers yesterday when they came in. If the magician had been anywhere within reach, they would have corked him into a beer barrel and tossed him back out to sea.”

  “But—” Carey said stubbornly.

  “What?”

  “The magic was real. It was real, Mare. Peri is right. He has the power.”

  Mare was silent, frowning uncertainly. Peri closed her eyes a moment, wishing she could curl up under a table and take a nap. An image of the sea-dragon exuberantly breasting the moonlit waves swam into her head. Yes and no and dark and light, his voice said, just as her head nodded forward against her broom and snapped back up again.

  “Peri!” Mare exclaimed. “You’re falling asleep!”

  “Sorry.”

  “What have you been doing at night, girl? Meeting phantom lovers?”

  “Yes,” she said, yawning again. Unexpectedly, Carey laughed.

  Peri’s house was empty when she came home that afternoon. She ate bread and cheese beside the hearth, then crawled gratefully into bed before the sun went down. She slept deeply with-out dreaming; when she floated drowsily awake again, she wondered why it was still dark.

  Someone was moving in the house. “Kir?” she said sleepily. “Lyo?” Then she came fully awake, for the door stood open and the bright moon hung like a lantern over her threshold.

  A hand brushed her lightly. “Two fine ladies rode to town, in a carriage of seashells pulled by a prawn.”

  “You’re back!”

  “You’re back,” he echoed. He had already pulled a quilt over his shoulders; he was rubbing his dripping hair with a corner of it. “Peri,” he added, and she started.

  “Who taught you that?”

  He burrowed more deeply into the quilt, then held out his hands to her cold hearth. Peri got out of bed. The fire she built chased away the fog in her head along with the darkness.

  “Lyo,” she exclaimed as the sea-dragon knelt to warm himself. “Has he been with you in the sea?”

  He touched his mouth, feeling for words. Then he said in an arrogant, scholarly voice, “A species of Ignus Dracus, which originated in the warm, light-filled waters of the Southern Sea—oops, sorry.”

  She smiled wonderingly. “Is that how you turned human? If so, his spell last night didn’t work too well; maybe tonight you’ll stay human. But—” A frown crept into her eyes. She stopped the curious sea-dragon from putting her hairbrush on the fire. “But all I can teach you are words,” s
he said, groping with words herself to say what she meant. “How will you know what they mean? How can you say where you’ve been? What you want?”

  “Want is empty, have is full,” he said. “Want is hungry—”

  She turned; he stopped talking. But something in his eyes spoke, insisted, that when she taught him the language, he would have more to tell her than of kelp and shrimp and children’s rhymes. He put his hands around his neck suddenly. “Chain,” he told her. “Chain.” And she saw the human feeling in his eyes.

  She took his hands, held them toward the blaze. “This is fire,” she said.

  “Fire.”

  She tugged him up, led him to the open door. “Those are stars. That is the moon.”

  “Stars. Moon.”

  “Sand,” she said, pointing to it. “Sea.”

  “Sand.” He fell silent, gazing out at the restless tide. “Sea,” he whispered, and as she led him in, she wondered if the sudden wash of fire across his eyes had hidden love or hate.

  He roamed the house, touching everything, remembering many of the words she told him. Finally he turned to her with the same scrutiny, touched her tangled hair.

  “Hair,” she said.

  “Hair.” He bent slightly, peering into her eyes, then at her nose with such intensity that she laughed. He startled, ducking back as gracefully as a fish. Then he smiled.

  “Nose.”

  “Nose.”

  “Eyes.”

  “Eyes.” He stared into hers again; even his lashes were gold, she saw, against a milky skin that had never been touched by the sun. She drew a breath, pulled herself out of his summer blue gaze, and called his attention to the floor.

  “Feet.”

  He grew drowsy soon; it taxed his strength, she guessed, to heave that sea-body onto dry land. But before he fell asleep beside the fire, he told her a story.

  “Once upon a time,” he said in Lyo’s voice, “there was a king who had two sons: one by the young queen, his wife, and one by a woman out of the sea. The sons were born at the same time, and when the queen died in child-bed, her human son was stolen away, and the sea-born son left in his place. Why? No one truly knows, only the woman hidden in the sea, and the king. And perhaps the king does not even know. Why?

  “Why is the wind, why is the sea, why is a long road between the world and me.” He fell silent, watched the changing expressions on her face. He reached out, put his hand on her hand, and went to sleep.

  When she woke in the morning, he was gone.

  She went to work, puzzled. She searched for signs of the sea-dragon as she walked to the inn that morning, and again in the afternoon when she walked back. She cooked potatoes and sausages for supper, leaving her door open to catch the mild spring breeze. A shadow fell over her frying pan from the doorway; she whirled, and found the magician leaning against the doorpost.

  “Lyo!”

  He smiled. “I kept smelling something wonderful. I followed my nose.” He looked thinner, she thought, and wondered what and where he ate. Certainly nowhere in the village. She took the pan off the flame and held it out to him. He took a smoking hot piece of potato, juggled it between his fingers, then bit into it and sighed.

  “It’s so good it must be magic.”

  “Lyo, where is the sea-dragon?”

  “In the sea,” he said with his mouth full. She gazed at him, perplexed; he took a sausage from the pan. She sucked at a tine of her stirring fork.

  “Well, why?” she said. “Can’t you make a spell work right for once?”

  He raised his brows at her, speechless as he bit into the sausage. “What,” he said when he could finally speak, “are you asking?”

  “I’m asking why you can’t change the sea-dragon into a prince for more than a couple of hours at a time.”

  “Why can’t—”

  “First you change gold into flowers, then you change the sea-dragon, only you—”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t change him?”

  He shook his head, reaching for the pan again. She set it down finally on the table; they sat down, nibbled out of it, he with his fingers, she with the oversized fork.

  “Then who did?”

  He shook his head, looking as curious and as baffled as she felt. “I have no idea. It doesn’t make any sense. That’s really what I came to ask you.”

  “Me?”

  “If you knew why it—he—changed so suddenly. And at such an odd time. Did you see anyone? Hear anything?”

  She shook her head. “I was there when it happened; I was still watching the sea. It just crawled out. There was no magic. It just changed. He. Lyo.” She paused, groping while he waited. “He is so—so—”

  “His mother,” Lyo said, finding another sausage, “was said to be very beautiful.”

  “Then why did the king love a sea-woman? If he had a wife like that?”

  “Well.” He chewed a moment, thoughtfully. “As I have heard, they barely knew each other before they were married. The king knew the sea-woman longer than that, I suspect. I think she was not a passing fancy, but someone who came to love him. The king didn’t realize he would come to love his own wife as well. He married and forgot about the sea-woman, but he saw her one last time just before he married. And that was one time too many. Nine months later the queen was dead, her child taken under the sea, and the changeling cried in the royal cradle instead.”

  “It is sad.”

  “It is.”

  “The sea-dragon doesn’t even have a name.” She poked holes in the potatoes with the fork, brooding, while Lyo watched her, his eyes sometimes smiling, sometimes secret. “I wish the king and Kir would come back. Then—oh.” She put the fork down. “What will Kir say? He doesn’t have a home on land or sea; the sea-dragon is only human in the middle of the night—”

  “It’s an odd pair of sons for a king to have.”

  “Lyo, you have to do something.”

  “I am.” He bent over the pan again. “I’m going to finish your supper.”

  The magician taught the sea-dragon in the sea by day; by night it crawled out of the sea to tell Peri the words it had learned, and to learn more from her. Peri, keeping such odd hours, felt life begin to muddle like a dream. She found herself mumbling “scrub brush” and “soap” as she sloshed water across the floor at the inn, and stray bits of children’s rhymes ran constantly through her head. She saw little of Lyo; she assumed he slept at night, along with everybody else who lived their lives oblivious of the double life of sea-dragons. The ship that had carried Kir away remained stubbornly away.

  “I heard,” Carey said, full of gossip one morning as they began to work, “that the king took Kir up to the North Isles to marry some lord’s daughter.”

  A huge soap bubble, rainbows trembling in it, fascinated Peri. She stared at it and tried to imagine Kir married. Like a breath of dark wind, something of his own frustration and panic blew through her. He might marry, but he would never love, and then there would be yet another child trapped in one world, yearning for another. And another young woman cruelly betrayed by the sea. She sighed. The bubble popped. The story would go on and on…

  Mare tripped over her feet. “I’m sorry, Peri. Where did you hear that?” she asked Carey.

  “From one of the girls who works in the kitchen. She was bringing supper to some of the guests and heard them talking. They said Kir was restless and unhappy. The king thought marriage would settle him.”

  “Poor Kir,” Mare said, and Peri looked up from the hearth she was cleaning.

  “Why?”

  “There’s no magic in marriage. If they become friends, though, that would be different. But royal folk rarely get to marry their friends. They have to marry power or wealth or land or—”

  “Well,” Carey said wistfully, “at least they have that.”

  “Oh, Carey!” Mare said, laughing. “You’re impossible.”

  “I can’t help it,” Carey said stubbornly. “I want to be
rich. I want that sea-dragon’s gold. Then I’ll be happy.”

  Peri cooked supper for herself, and crawled into bed as soon as the sun set. The sea-dragon woke her out of her dreams to the roar of the sea, the wind shaking her door, the little barque of the moon sailing among scudding clouds. “Saucepan,” she taught him. “Wall, fork, bread, salt.” When her house held no more new words, she taught him sentences. “I am hungry. I am thirsty. Where are you? I am here. What are you doing? I am stirring onions in a pan, I am combing my hair…” As the nights passed and the sea-dragon consumed words like shrimp, they made the sentences into a game.

  “What are you doing?” he asked as she drank water.

  “I am drinking water. What are you doing?”

  He moved to the door. “I am opening the door. What are you doing?”

  “I am putting wood on the fire. What are you doing?”

  “I am looking at your seashells. What are you doing?” he asked, with such a peculiar expression on his face that she laughed.

  “I am jumping up and down. What are you doing?”

  “I am walking to you.”

  “Toward you.”

  “I am walking toward you. What are you doing?”

  “I’m still jumping. What are you doing?”

  “I am walking closer toward you.”

  “To you.”

  “To you. And closer. What are you doing?”

  She stopped jumping. “I am standing still,” she said.

  “And I am walking. Closer. Closer.”

  She stood very still, silent, watching him come, the sea-dragon in the prince’s body, with the gold in his hair and the firelight sliding over his skin. “I am coming very close.”

  She swallowed. “Very close.”

  “I am touching you.” His hands were on her shoulders. Then she saw the simple need in his eyes, and she put her arms around him.

  “I am touching you.”

  “Yes,” he said softly, and she felt the long sigh through his body. “You are touching me.”

  She watched him fall asleep in front of the fire. Her heart ached at his loneliness. Like Kir, he was bound to the sea, in body if not in heart, and loving him was no more possible than loving his brother, whose wild heart cried out to follow the tide.