The room erupted into cheers, and Fin was already stepping away from the beaming Talis. His dark gaze was searching through the long room, and I couldn’t bear it anymore; I took Caro’s hand and rushed toward him, and we embraced, full of the same healing warmth that had glowed through our clasped hands yesterday, as radiant and natural as sunlight.
Full of love.
Epilogue
WE left for Esting a month later. Our ship was larger than the Imperator but much plainer, a supply vessel the Fey had captured in battle over a year ago. Our crew were the last remaining Estinger soldiers, all of whom would be leaving with us.
Wheelock was captaining the ship for our journey home. After he’d recovered, he told us the story of his sojourn with the merfolk, but it started to seem as if even he didn’t believe it. He still moved in a daze, more the formal old man than ever, and I knew it would be a long time before I’d see that secret smile again.
But he was living, and I was more fiercely grateful for that than I could have guessed I would be.
We all needed to go home, and Fin needed to take up his crown. He had to claim his kingship in person without delay—and make the official announcement in Esting of Faerie’s freedom.
“If I’d had my cabinet around me, all the advisors, they’d never have allowed me to do it so simply,” Fin had told us the same night he and Talis announced the independence. “The economic ramifications, the withdrawal—but this is right. Whatever breaks because Faerie is free, I’ll fix it if I can. But I couldn’t be . . . king . . .”—he always pronounced the title slowly, carefully, as if the word itself contained all that heavy burden that he was working so hard to bear honorably—“a single day without giving them the freedom they should never have lost.”
He was a hero now, the hero he’d always wanted to be, although he couldn’t quite see it. He’d only signed his name, he insisted. Being wounded in battle to free the Fey seemed to mean nothing to him.
But I was still so proud, and I loved him so much, and I loved the king he was becoming.
I loved Fin and Caro both more than ever, and they loved me. The three of us could easily have married in a Fey ceremony before we left, but we didn’t want to; Caro still had Bex waiting for her back home, after all, and none of us quite felt that marriage was the right word for what we shared. Caro and I refused the titles Fin kept offering, too, but none of that meant we weren’t family.
Parting from my mother only confirmed that for me. We’d shared a cool goodbye in her parlor the day before my departure.
I agreed to read her letters, if not to write my own. Watching Fin grapple with his father’s death had made me realize that I wanted to do that much, at least for now.
But forgiving her for the pain she’d caused Jules, and the buzzers, and me, was still off the table.
My farewell with Mr. Candery was far warmer and more loving; we had a long, lingering tea together the morning of my departure, chatting over rhodopis berries and pots and pots of clary-bush.
“I will always be glad you came, Nicolette,” Mr. Candery said, “and grateful to your charming prince, too, but not nearly so grateful as I am to you.” He raised his hand, guessing the protest I was about to make. “I know, I know, you’ll say the new king’s not yours. Perhaps he isn’t, in the Estinger sense. But you’re in Faerie now, Nick, and everyone in this place sees you three for what you are. He is yours, as you are his, and Miss Hart’s too. I am so glad to see you loved and happy.”
He walked around to my side of the table. I stood, and he hugged me close, cupping the back of my head in his long, thin hand.
His embrace felt like a father’s blessing, and I knew I would carry it with me all the way to Esting.
I was leaving without my beloved buzzers, without my Jules, but there were other things I would take back with me: pride, grief, gratitude. I was grateful most of all that the Ashes were destroyed. Talis had given me fer promise that fe would see the geyser stopped up, destroyed, now that the Fey controlled their own land again. When I heard that promise, the echo of the soldier’s screams finally started to fade from the back of my mind.
My mother had given me something else, too. Lampton Manor was mine again, at least by law. My mother still lived, and so my father’s marriage to Lady Halving had never been legally valid. The witnesses to Mother’s survival included no less a personage than the king himself. And as king, Fin was head of the Brethren church now—absurd thought! I knew Lord Alming would be even more pleased with that development than with my taking back Lampton.
I thought of that large estate, of my savings, and then of Runner—of all the longing and intelligence and ambition in her, of her search for a real, caring home—and I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the place.
The Lampton Girls’ School of Engineering. I was mentally drafting my letter to Lord Alming about it already.
When we stepped onto the gangplank leading up to the airship that would carry us home, I didn’t get sick looking down at the receding ground. I walked confidently forward up onto the deck, and when I glanced back, the height didn’t bother me at all. I’d already flown much higher through the sky on Jules.
And I was flying with people I loved again now. I stood with Caro and Fin and Wheelock at the prow of the small airship, waving down at Talis and Mr. Candery and a small throng of Fey. I thought I saw a glint of metal among them, of the hand I’d chosen for my mother waving up at me, but I wasn’t sure.
It didn’t matter. My family was standing right next to me.
The crew tossed down the ropes that tied us to the ground, and we sailed into the blue.
Prologue
THE color at the bottom is so deep, there are few who would call it blue.
There is light there—a little—for those who can find it. It shifts in the water, a vague, New England light. Just darkness unless you look carefully. If you want real light, you’ll have to stay on the surface.
The Isles of Shoals have plenty of it, light that refracts off the salt-swept rocks and old whitewashed houses. Light that clinks its way over the waves like so much dropped and dented silverware.
It will hurt your eyes to look, on those bright summer days. You’ll sit on the rocks until the spray dries and strings salt beads in your hair, but the brightness will eventually hurt.
Be careful. That not-blue of the deepest water will call to you, a seeming balm for your stinging eyes. But it will surprise you.
It’s the shallow water you really want, what the Old Shoalers call the inbetween. It’s that space between light and blue, land and sea, where the water is sometimes warm. The little fish swim there.
Once you’re safe in the inbetween, you’ll wonder why you’d ever dare to broach the deep, with its hidden teeth and tentacles. You’ll reject the white sun and dry salt above. For a while.
It’s the colors that will make you stray. They sing to you, the not-blue and the searing light, and no matter how tightly you tie yourself to the inbetween, eventually you will break free.
No one swims only in the shallow water.
one
Tales
“NO one is happy in the inbetween,” said Gemm. “Not even selkies.”
Wind moaned in at them through the windows. Gemm quieted, letting the weather have its interruption.
Her grandchildren stared at her, wide-eyed, mugs of tea growing cold in their hands. It didn’t occur to Noah that he was far too old for these stories.
Well, that wasn’t really true. The thought occurred to him—but in his father’s voice instead of his own, as too many of his thoughts tended to do. Gotta stop that.
He glanced at his sister, Lo, seated next to him at Gemm’s kitchen table. She was still wrapped in the story, her face open with wonder. She pushed aside a black length of hair that had fallen over her eyes. Noah wondered if she felt too old for fairy tales, too. These days, Lo seemed to think she was too old for everything.
Noah tapped the si
de of his mug. He hadn’t come to the Isles of Shoals to listen to fairy tales. He had an internship at the Marine Science Research Center on nearby Appledore Island, and starting tomorrow he’d work long hours there until he left for college in August. If he did well, this internship would be his first real step toward becoming a marine biologist—something Noah had wanted since the first time his father took him fishing.
He remembered staring into the green water, watching a bluefish glint out of the murk and flash and fight as his father pulled it into the boat. The fish had been almost as big as five-year-old Noah, and he’d thought it was a monster, all metal-bright scales and spiked fins.
Noah loved that monster. He was desperate to know what else lurked and slept and waited in the water, and he knew he’d spend the rest of his life trying to find out.
That’s why I’m out here in the middle of nowhere this summer, anyway, he thought. He was choosing this dream over every other consideration, something he’d done many times before—maybe too many times. Noah remembered all the nights he’d stayed up studying, all the dances he’d skipped, all the time he’d spent alone—so much that he didn’t even mind, really, being alone. He kind of preferred it.
He’d worked so hard just to get here. Starting tomorrow, he’d work even harder. He told himself he’d earned the chance to feel childish once in a while, to listen to a fairy tale without overanalyzing everything. He tried to slip back into the rhythm of Gemm’s story.
“The land calls to the selkies, sings to them, promises of new knowledge and new joy. It whispers to them, and they cannot avoid its call.” Gemm poured a thin stream of milk into her tea. Clouds bloomed in the dark liquid.
Noah closed his eyes and breathed in the ocean smell that filled his grandmother’s cottage. The beating, shuddering wind outside led him deeper into the tale.
“They swim to the rocks and the beaches, and they shed their seal forms. They look like people, then. Humans.”
The pale woman sitting beside Gemm—Maebh, she’d said her name was—took in a deep breath. The corner of her mouth twitched.
“Selkies need the land as we need the deep ocean,” said Gemm. “They need it for its danger and its mystery. They come to the beaches and they sing. They sing to the ocean and the sky.”
“Like sirens?” Lo asked. Noah knew she’d read the Odyssey in freshman English that year. He remembered reading it himself, but he preferred the part with Scylla and Charybdis, the two monsters on either side of your boat, with hardly any way to go between them.
“A bit like sirens,” Gemm said, smiling. “Their songs are very beautiful. But unlike sirens, selkies don’t mean you any harm with their songs. They don’t sing to seduce or to kill. Their songs have nothing to do with anyone but themselves. They sing for the simple joy of it, and because of that, I imagine their songs are more beautiful than those of any siren.”
Maebh and Lo both smiled at that.
Noah couldn’t help staring at Maebh for a moment. It wasn’t just that her skin was almost paler than white, as if she hadn’t seen sunlight in years. He thought she must be about thirty, but something about her—the way she moved?—seemed much older.
Maebh’s round dark eyes flicked toward his, and Noah lowered his gaze, embarrassed.
“In this story,” Gemm said meaningfully, as if she knew Noah hadn’t been paying attention, “there is a young fisherman, the handsomest in his village. Many women noticed him, wanted him—even loved him. But he never loved any of them back. Some said his true love drowned when they were children. Others said he was simply too proud, thought himself too special for any of the village women.
“He enjoyed his life, his fishing, but he wasn’t satisfied. He often wandered the beaches at night, so handsome, but empty around the eyes. He brought a satchel with him to collect shells and sea glass and the like, but none of those things made him happy for long. He was looking for something—anything—that would satisfy him.”
Maebh stiffened in her chair. Her large round hands twisted together in her lap.
Gemm continued her story, unaware. “Once, just on the cusp of autumn, the young fisherman wandered on the beach very late into the night, and he heard something. It was a sort of music that trickled through the air, low and sweet and eerie. He started to run, rushing over the rocky shoreline, careening around boulders and tide pools, hunting the source of that beautiful sound.
“He tripped and fell onto a patch of sand. Blood trickled down a gash in his cheek, and his hands stung with scrapes. But the pain in his body was already fading away, borne out to sea by the wonderful songs he heard. He had found the source of the music.”
A slow, reluctant tear slipped down Maebh’s cheek.
Now Noah’s mother’s voice came into his head. Your grandmother’s selfish, remember, she’d whispered to him, just before she and his father had left the island that afternoon. She’s always lost in her own world, and she’ll pay no attention to yours. And then she had hugged him, just a little too tight, and walked out the door in her cloud of department store perfume.
Noah hadn’t really believed her. After all, Gemm had agreed to let Lo and him live with her for the summer—she couldn’t offer that much and be so very selfish. But now, seeing her rush on with a story that clearly upset her friend, Noah wondered. He watched Gemm while she spoke, willing her to look back at him.
“The music came from a group of people standing on the shore. They looked like no people the fisherman had ever seen—certainly no one from his village. A tall, elderly woman led the singing, and the others—there were perhaps two dozen—danced or waded in the surf or lounged on the rocks and sang to the moon that loomed above them, pale as their skin.
“It was one of these last that caught the fisherman’s eye. She sat on a boulder in the shallows, a small distance away from her companions. She was folded in on herself, resting her chin on her hands, and her hands on her knees. She sang in a clear, true alto that vibrated with some matching sound, some answering call, inside the fisherman himself.
“He realized he had forgotten to stand back up after his fall. He pushed himself quietly to his feet, hoping the singers wouldn’t notice him. But then he saw, down by his shoes, the thing that had tripped him. It wasn’t a rock, as he had assumed, but something soft, yielding under his touch. It glimmered a little in the moonlight, like velvet—though the fisherman was too poor to have ever seen real velvet.
“Once he held it in his hands, he recognized it: a sealskin, but larger and darker and finer than any the fisherman had seen before. He knew it must belong to a selkie. In that moment he knew who the singers were, and he knew what he must do.”
Maebh covered her mouth, but they all heard her choked sob.
Gemm stood and took Maebh’s hands in hers. She crouched down before her, so that their eyes were level. For a moment, they simply looked at each other. Then Gemm gently touched her hands to Maebh’s cheeks and brought their foreheads together—a gesture so intimate, it made Noah look away.
His eyes settled on the photos that almost entirely covered the far wall. Their gold-painted frames glowed against the drab whitewash. A picture of Noah on the day he was born hung there, as well as the blurry photo of Lo that the Chinese orphanage had sent over a few months before her adoption. A formal portrait from their parents’ wedding held a prominent spot, too. There were a few bigger frames around the edges that displayed yellowing pages cut from old magazines. They were clothing advertisements featuring a much younger Gemm. Noah had forgotten that she used to be a model.
Gemm looked beautiful in every one, but blank somehow, as if she’d been whitewashed too. There was something hollow in her brightest smiles. Noah thought about how she looked now: strong and weathered, present, happy. He preferred this Gemm, the Gemm he knew.
Noah turned back when he heard the squeak of Maebh’s chair.
“I must leave now,” she said in her faint, unplaceable accent. “It was wonderful to meet you, children. Goo
dbye.”
Noah nodded at her politely and returned her goodbye. “It was nice to meet you, too,” he said, even though he really thought she was a little strange to sit so quietly all evening and then cry at a fairy tale.
“Goodbye, Maebh,” Lo said, rising from her chair. She shook the older woman’s hand, and just for that moment, Noah thought she looked like a grown woman too.
Then Lo turned to Gemm and asked, “You are going to finish the story, aren’t you?” Maebh winced a little, and the grown-up spell was broken. Lo was his bumbling little sister again.
Gemm glanced at her friend and smiled sadly. “It’s getting late,” she said. “I’ll just show Maebh out.”
Arm in arm, they walked outside.
A gust of wind rushed through the open door and whistled over Noah and Lo. They found a warmer spot on the old pink couch by the stairs.
“How can it still be cold in June?” Lo asked.
Noah laughed and tossed her the nubby blanket that hung over the couch’s worn armrest. Their dad probably would have made a crack about Lo being insulated against the cold. She had been such a skinny baby, he’d say. Was New Hampshire really so much colder than China that she had to get fat just to keep warm?
Noah tried to push down the anger that rose in his chest whenever he thought about his father and Lo. It was one more reason he was glad he could take them both away from their parents for the summer.
Lo had a still, sad look on her face, and Noah guessed she was remembering their dad’s “jokes” too.
He cleared his throat. “I’m hungry.” His back popped as he stood and stretched. He heard the door open again.
“I’ve got just the remedy,” Gemm said, pushing the door closed behind her. She didn’t lock it—but then, thought Noah, why would she need to? Hers was the only house on the island.
She pulled a bag of chocolate chip cookies from the cupboard. Noah pretended he didn’t see Lo close her eyes.
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