“Does Margryt know about any of this?”
Beck shoots him a wildly incredulous look. “Of course she doesn’t!”
They’re both quiet for a long, uncomfortable moment.
Vale finally speaks. “Where is she? The Selkie. And your child.”
Beck motions outside with his chin. “By the ocean. Waiting.”
Vale gapes at him. “Great gods, Beck, it’s freezing out there. Bring them in.”
Beck shakes his head. “The cold doesn’t bother them. Not like you and me. And they actually like storms. Or any type of wet weather.”
I turn, pad over to the bedroom window and look toward the small beach.
Lightning flashes, and sure enough, there’s a woman sitting on the outcropping of black rock. She’s staring out over the ocean and cradles a small bundle in her arms. Her hair glints silver with each flash of lightning. Astonished, I creep back toward the door.
“The men who captured her lost her skin,” Beck wearily explains. “Tossed her overboard when they realized they didn’t have it. They didn’t want to risk her finding it and regaining her power. I came upon her, drifting in the ocean. She’s not able to transform to her seal form without her skin, and she needs it to have enough strength to get home. I rescued her. Hid her in my cabin...”
“And then the baby.” Vale’s tone is hard, his hands on his hips, his entire demeanor judgmental.
“Yes,” Beck snaps. “About a year and half later, the baby.” He glares at Vale. “Not all of us are able to live like monks.” Beck’s eyes flick down, then widen in astonishment as they light on Vale’s hands. “Great Ancient One, Vale! You’re fasted!”
Vale takes a deep breath, his face gone tight with offense at Beck’s great surprise. “Yes, I am.”
Beck peers harder at the lines, clearly noticing that the sealing marks. Unconsummated sealing marks. His brow knits in confusion. “When did you...”
“Yesterday,” Vale puts in tersely. “And you should know that I’m not alone here.”
“What? She’s here?”
Vale glowers at him. “Of course she’s here.”
Beck’s voice grows heated. “Great Ancient One, Vale, you should have told me! She might have overheard.” He looks around, shakes his head, then massages his broad forehead. “I hope she can be trusted.”
Vale shoots him an incredulous look. “Would I have bound myself to her if she couldn’t be?”
Beck’s mouth tenses into a tight line, and he gives Vale a narrow look. “I suppose not.” He shakes his head again and looks around the kitchen blankly, as if searching for me. He turns back to Vale. “Who is she?”
Vale hesitates, his jaw tightening. “Mage Tessla Harrow. Well, Tessla Gardner now.”
Beck’s eyes light with shocked recognition. “Sweet Ancient One, Vale. Jules’s Tessla?”
“The Tessla he talked about, yes,” Vale staunchly replies, his level stare unwavering.
“Where is she?” Beck glances around again, clearly growing angered on Jules’s behalf, his expression now severe.
My face heats, and I step out of the bedroom. “I’m right here.” I make my way down the staircase, slightly unnerved by the tense silence and the feel of Beck’s hard eyes on me. I look up in time to see his outraged gaze shift from me back to Vale.
Vale gives a long sigh and shakes his head. “Tessla, meet Beck Keeler. We were at University together.” He turns to me with a humorless smile. “As you’ve probably gathered, Beck is also friends with Jules Kristian.”
“A better friend to him than you, it would seem,” Beck snipes, his eyes hot on Vale. “Yet you stand here and judge me.” He looks at me again. “Does Jules know?”
Vale’s gaze is coolly steady. “Not yet.” The words are clipped.
“Let me guess,” Beck snipes at Vale. “You bound her during one of those horrid mass fastings they’re staging.”
Vale sighs. “It was a slightly different situation.”
“Really?” He turns to me, fire in his eyes. “Mage Harrow. Were you fasted to Vale of your own free will?”
I look to Vale, who shrugs at me, resigned. I turn back to Beck. “Well, I’m here at this cottage of my own free will.”
“And the fasting?” he doggedly insists.
“Well, that was, in fact, forced, but...”
Beck rounds on Vale. “So you forced Jules’s woman to fast to you?”
“I’m not Jules’s woman,” I emphatically put in, bristling.
Beck’s head jerks back toward me and he grows silent, brow tensed, studying me with evident confusion.
I let out a heavy sigh. “It’s a long story. Really. It’s fine.”
“It’s...fine?”
“Yes,” I insist. “I’m glad Vale and I are fasted. I’ve grown...quite fond of him.” My cheeks grow heated. “Very fond.”
Vale is eyeing me with surprise. Then his mouth quirks and breaks into a ridiculously wide smile, his gaze growing hot on me, his fire quickening.
Beck takes in Vale’s besotted smile, my flushed face and our strangely unconsummated fastlines. He shakes his head with some disapproval. “I truly don’t understand either of you.”
“You don’t have to,” Vale says tightly. “Truly.”
Beck’s head draws back, his expression immediately chastened. He clears his throat and shifts awkwardly. Then, as if screwing up his resolve, he offers his hand to me. “Mage Harrow,” he says with somber formality.
I take his hand, his handshake firm and warm. “It’s Mage Gardner, actually. But I’m glad to meet you, Mage Keeler.” I square my shoulders and hold his intent gaze. “We should invite your Selkie and your child inside.”
A small measure of surprise lights his eyes, followed quickly by relief. He slumps down, as if profoundly tired.
“You’re not able to keep your Selkie on the Galliana, then?” Vale asks. “I remember crews turning a blind eye to that sort of thing.”
I stare at Vale in shock as I realize that Beck likely isn’t the first mariner to take a Selkie as a lover.
Beck shoots Vale a sharp look of censure.
A bemused smile comes to Vale’s lips. “Tessla’s a refugee from Doveshire, Beck. She got caught up on the front lines. Do you honestly think you could say anything that would shock her?”
Beck look at me with surprise, then gives me a respectful nod and turns back to Vale, sighing heavily. “Ray and I were always a bit suspect. It’s one thing to have a Selkie on board...for sport.” His eyes dart uneasily to me, and I huff out an impatient sigh, prompting him to continue. “But to fall in love with a Selkie...well, the word staen’en was bandied about. At first jokingly, but then as a true threat.” Beck lowers his head. “They’re putting priests on the ships now. There’s no way to keep her with me anymore, especially with our baby. And she has nowhere else to go.” He looks to Vale, imploring. “We’re in a terrible situation.”
“Her name is Ray?” I ask.
“I call her Ray, but that’s not her true name,” Beck tells me distractedly. “Her Selkie name is impossible to translate.” Curiosity lights Vale’s eyes. Beck takes a deep breath and makes an undulating motion with his fingers. “It means...‘the shimmer when sunlight sparkles on the water on a hot, bright day. The way it looks from under the water, looking up. What the light does to the blue.’ They have a lot of words like this.”
Vale tenses his brow at Beck. “How do you know all this?”
“She uses Common Signage. I taught her.”
Common Signage. I remember hearing about this—a language of hand gestures developed by mariners, so they could easily communicate with other mariners who spoke different tongues.
“And the child?” Vale asks, his tone slowly losing its judgmental edge.
Pa
in flashes across Beck’s features. “His Gardnerian name is Gareth. His Selkie name is...” He makes a cage with his hands, turning his hands in toward each other, the fingers separated and curved into bars. He gives us both a weighty, sorrowful look. “It means ‘trapped heart.’” Beck’s face dissolves into sadness. “He’s more Gardnerian than Selkie. He has a silver glint to his hair, but that’s it. No gills.”
“So he’s trapped on the surface,” Vale says sympathetically.
Beck nods. “I thought...perhaps they could live here. With you. Under your protection. You certainly wouldn’t be the first wealthy man to keep a Selkie.”
Vale’s face goes tight, and I can tell he’s trying not to take offense.
Misery clouds Beck’s expression. “I’m sorry to be asking this of you. She’s...they’ve nowhere else to go. Please, Vale.” He turns to me, beseeching. “Tessla...”
My fire is running strong and decided. I know full well what it feels like to have nowhere to go. My eyes meet Vale’s. “Let’s go get them.”
Vale nods in assent, his fire now flaring as decidedly as mine.
* * *
Vale and I follow Beck down the path to the arcing beach, a lantern swinging from Vale’s hand. The rain is only spitting, but lightning still flashes, and muted thunder sounds over the ocean. Pin-like drops of rain are driven into my skin by the fitful wind, stinging and bitterly cold on my face.
Ray, the Selkie, recoils as we approach. Her thin form is lit by the guttering lantern light, and her gray eyes widen with fright. She looks cornered, hunted, and my compassion rises in response to her staggering fear of us.
She’s hugging a baby in her arms, perhaps only a few weeks old. The child looks Gardnerian, with gray-green eyes that hint of a stormy ocean, shimmering skin and a shock of black hair. Touches of silver at the tips are the only hint of his true lineage. Ray is dressed in a Gardnerian man’s tunic, pants and cloak, her silver hair whipped about by the wind, her white skin tinged with blue undertones. There’s a row of gills on either side of her neck, ballooning in and out fitfully. She is stunningly strange, but very beautiful.
Vale and I slow to a stop at a careful distance as Beck goes to her, signing in a rapid stream. Her mouth trembles as she clutches wildly at her child, sure we’ll steal him away at any moment.
I meet her eyes briefly, and an immediate sense of recognition lights inside me. My heart rushes out to her, fire blooming inside me in a protective flare as Beck tries to calm her, to no avail.
“Tell her I know how she feels,” I call out to Beck over the howling wind.
Ray’s head jerks toward me, her whole body flinching at the sound of my voice. Beck looks briefly to me, then places one hand on Ray’s shoulder as he signs to her with the other.
Tears sting my eyes, my voice breaking. “Tell her I know what it’s like to lose your family. To lose your home. To have nowhere to go.” Vale is silent beside me, but I can feel his fire reaching out to me. “Tell her we’ll help her.”
Beck is furiously signing, clearly desperate to assuage her fears.
Her eyes are now locked on mine, and I can feel a kindred understanding taking root between us.
Her breathing is still erratic, the trembling of her mouth more pronounced, but the fear in her gaze has lessened, replaced by a profound misery. The sparse rain beads on her pale skin as we take stock of each other.
Then Vale’s signing to her with formal grace, and I gawk at him before quickly reining in my surprise. Of course he knows Common Signage. He was on and off ships for three years.
Ray’s body wilts, but she makes the same sign over and over to both Vale and me with emphatic force—her fist repeatedly hitting over her heart.
“What’s she saying?” I ask Vale.
“She’s thanking us,” he says, looking to me with concern.
Ray sets her gaze full on me and lets loose a stream of conversation in a high-pitched, multitonal language, her gills flaring repeatedly, her hand shaking as she signs.
“I can’t translate,” Beck laments. “She’s not signing clearly enough.”
Ray’s multiple tones coalesce into a deep, resonating wail as she looks to the ocean and points out toward the line of the horizon, her arm trembling, her palm turning up. Then she sets her ocean eyes back on me and starts another rapid stream of indecipherable multitoned words.
I don’t need a translation. I’m clear on what she means.
Somewhere out there in the turbulent black water are her people. Her home.
Chapter 30: Runehawk
We bring Ray and the baby inside, just as the storm begins to gain force. I take Ray’s wet cloak and guide her to a chair by the kitchen fire. Vale takes Beck’s cloak and bag and sets them aside, the two men discussing Beck’s danger-fraught journey here. Ray slumps down in her chair, seeming to fall into an exhausted trust of me, the gills on her neck now limp. She hands me her baby, her ocean eyes beyond weary, and then, to my great shock, pulls her tunic completely off.
A stinging flush rises up my neck, suffusing my cheeks. I quickly avert my eyes from her full breasts and large blue nipples. Ray reaches for baby Gareth, who squirms agitatedly in my arms and whimpers for her. Wildly uncomfortable, I hand Gareth over, and Ray pulls him close. Gareth immediately latches hungrily on to one of her nipples.
Face burning and not knowing where to look, I chance a quick glance at Vale.
“The Vu Trin are moving in to shut down the Eastern Pass,” Vale is telling Beck, his mouth set in a hard line. “Nothing good will come of that, I can assure you.” Vale grows darkly reflective for a moment as Beck sits and pulls at his boot laces. Then he looks toward Ray and gives a jolt of surprise at her state of undress, his eyes momentarily going wide. He shoots me a brief, stunned look while Beck tiredly pulls off one of his boots, throwing it down with a dull thump.
“I’ll...fetch us some food,” Vale announces to no one in particular, then flees to the pantry.
I strive to tamp down my embarrassment, realizing this must be her people’s way of things. Shifting my focus to the comfort of our guests, I realize I don’t know where anything is in this cottage. Bedding, cloths to use for diapers, something to turn into a makeshift cradle.
“I’ll be right back,” I say with an attempt at a congenial smile. Both Beck and Ray give me worn, distracted glances.
* * *
Vale’s pulling a small wheel of cheese off a shelf as I enter the pantry. He places it in a woven reed basket on the small table before him.
“I’ll put together the food,” he tells me matter-of-factly, pulling down a jar of fig preserves, some sausage and salted fish with efficient industry. “They can stay in the downstairs bedroom. They’ll need some bed things, of course—they’re in the hall closet. Perhaps you could get the bedroom together for Beck and his half-naked companion.”
His eyes flick briefly to mine with mischief, and I smile shyly, still somewhat mortified.
“It was a bit of a shock,” I admit. “When she pulled her tunic off.”
He gives me a look of wry agreement. “Yes, well.” He pauses, then grows thoughtful, resting his hands on the table for a moment. “Perhaps they have the better way of it. Nursing comfortably. Out in the open.” He shrugs. “Why should our women hide in the shadows with their babies?”
He goes back to picking items off the shelves, and I study him. He’s incredibly open-minded, this fastmate of mine.
I eye him archly. “So I have your permission to go around the house half-dressed?”
Vale pauses, a wicked gleam in his gaze. “Oh, most enthusiastically granted, Tessla.”
Our fires briefly flare, and I look away, both thrilled by his intense interest in me and slightly abashed. I remember that’s he’s already seen me half-naked and knows what my breasts look like. I push
the memory of that terrifying night away, but a cold unease lingers.
“But you don’t need my permission to do what you want,” Vale says, leaning toward me over the table, half-serious. “Do you, Tess?” There’s affectionate understanding in his tone, and it bolsters me, his flare of heat softening to a caress that gently enfolds me.
And I like him calling me Tess.
As he turns back to the shelves, I have a sudden bold idea.
“I’m going to make the fires,” I tell him decidedly. “In the downstairs and upstairs bedrooms. With my new wand.”
“Tess,” Vale says, a mildly cautionary note to his tone, “you were only just recently Magedrunk.”
“I’ll be fine,” I firmly rejoin. I hike up my skirt and smoothly pull my wand from where I’ve sheathed it in the top of my shocking, well aware of the flash of thigh I’m giving him.
His heat gives a hard surge. Vale rakes his hand through his hair. “It drives me to distraction when you do that.”
I give a throaty laugh. “Oh, I know it does.”
I let my skirts drop, thrilled by the feel of my weapon in my fist. My wand. All mine. My magic hums toward it.
I slice the wand through the air and point it at him, my other arm arced theatrically over my head. I motion toward the food basket with my chin as I pose, regally straight.
“Go feed everyone, Vale Gardner,” I say importantly. “I’ll take care of the Magery in this house.”
Vale laughs and narrows his eyes at me. “Look at you, so eager.” He grins wolfishly, and I swing away from him, starting for the kitchen.
“We’ve quite a few guests,” he calls after me, the words thick with amusement. “Try not to set the house on fire.”
“Like you almost did our first night here?” I toss back over my shoulder.
He laughs. “You have an unsettling effect on me, my love.”
I light up like dry brush at being called “my love.” I pause, unsteady, then stop and turn to him, waves of delight washing over me. He tilts his head, studying me intently. I go back to him and pull him into a long, deep kiss, my hand knotted in his hair. His hands are light on my back, as if frozen with surprise. I pull away, reveling in how his eyes have grown dark and blurred as he smiles down at me.
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