A Winding Wave of Magic

45. The Shape of a Wave

45

THE SHAPE OF A WAVE

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

— GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, HEARTbrEAK HOUSE

“ I can’t do it!”

My throat burned. It was the seventh time that morning alone I’d shouted that particular phrase, and probably the twentieth time I’d wanted to run up to my bedroom and slam the door like a grouchy teenager. It was exactly like when my mother had tried to teach me to darn a sock or when Gran taught me to build a saining fire properly. The only difference was that at the time, I was thirteen, not twenty-nine.

Which is to say, things weren’t going well.

I’d done everything just as Caitlin had instructed. No saining. No fires except to cook. No gloves. Nothing to cleanse the space of my mind. I walked around the cottage barefoot, letting whatever memories or other Sights pass through my mind however they pleased—and it wasn’t always pleasant. But the only thing I learned about my own mind in a week was that I was apparently quick to temper.

The first day, I’d nearly been swallowed by the constant murmuring, swirling visions of Gran in her youth.

The second, utter chaos as every visitor of the house, animal who had roamed the land, or anyone else seemed to emerge from each nook and cranny.

And since then…silence.

I awoke on the third morning feeling as plain as I ever had. And sad. And angry. So, so angry.

That was the first morning I’d burnt my eggs and threw the skillet. It didn’t break any glass that morning…but by the fifth day, I’d lost two windows.

Caitlin and Robbie materialized the day after and informed me that my retreat was over. Robbie was able to mend the windows with a quick spell, but my frustration was harder to fix. I returned to Connolly Cottage to find Jonathan gone and a simple dinner of turbot soup with samphire and rye bread. I was tersely instructed that I would stay at Gran’s cottage, but I would come to the big house during the day to work on my craft and sup with the family.

The irony of being forced into solitude only after I stopped craving it for the first time in my life hadn’t escaped me, but I agreed nonetheless.

“Balance,” Caitlin said as she packed me a box of herbal teas she grew and dried herself. “Balance is what you’ll need. Mark my words.”

And so we tried. In the month since arriving on the island, I had settled into a consistent regimen. My dawn patrol surf—a habit that made all the Connollys nervous—was followed by farm chores with Robbie while he lectured me on fae history. It was the best part of my day, mostly because I wasn’t a complete novice—the majority of the stories he told were the foundations for the Celtic lore I had studied.

From there, things generally went downhill.

Twice a week I met Jock at the cultural center for Irish lessons, which I practiced with the Connollys in the evenings. Although I could read and write old, middle, and modern Irish with near fluency, my speech left much to be desired.

“ Bád , not bata !” Enda had crowed yesterday. “You just said there are a lot of sticks in the harbor, not boats.”

The girls liked to tally how many mistakes I made. So far, my record for a single dinner was fifty-seven.

After Irish lessons, Caitlin and I did chores. The Connollys were as big on the old ways, as Jonathan claimed, but their decision to eschew many modern conveniences like vacuum cleaners or steam mops wasn’t out of nostalgia. Both Caitlin and Robbie believed that a physical connection with the world’s elements, established through the most mundane activities, was necessary to connect with magic. So, the land was plowed using the wood loy Irish farmers had used since the potato famines, every scrap of food in the house was made from scratch, and the sweaters Caitlin sold to tourists were all knit by hand from wool sheared from the flock of sheep they raised on the north side of the property.

All the while, Caitlin tried to teach me to strengthen and control my abilities. The strength was there; depth, I had in spades. After a month, I was now consistently practicing all three forms of clairvoyance—all I had to do was think of the type, and its particular brand of visions would come rushing in, with a single touch of an object, place, or person.

Control was a different story.

“Come now, Cassandra, focus . I’m going to try to sneak in again, and all you have to do is imagine a door, a boundary surrounding your mind, and lock it. Put the napkin down. I told you before, no gloves, not even the ones you make yourself.” Caitlin rapped her knuckles on the tabletop while the twins took a break from weeding the front garden to peek in through an open window.

“I told you, it’s not working. I. Can’t. Do. It.”

“Try again.”

Eyes shut, I attempted once more to feel the “shape” of my mind, as she called it. It had nothing to do with the brain. Each person’s shape was unique to them. The mind was like an ancient house with too many secret passages and windows to count. I had to find them and shut them all. But I couldn’t find the front door.

Though I was starting to be able to sense Caitlin’s eavesdropping at increasingly subtle levels, I still had absolutely no way of stopping her. Maybe her mind was as neat and solid as the cottage she cared for so diligently, but mine seemed to have no boundaries, as fluid and moving as the ocean outside.

Goddess, I wanted to jump in.

“Well, you can’t right now,” Caitlin said sharply. Her chair leg screeched on the floor as she got up. The sun was visible through the window now, which meant it was time for her to start preparing the bread for tomorrow. “Maybe you shouldn’t at all until you can make a shield so basic, the babies could do it by the time they were seven. Maybe your beloved waves will motivate you properly since apparently, I cannot.”

“It’s not about motivation,” I said through my teeth. It’s about ability. Won’t and can’t are two different things—and it’s not my will that’s the problem.

“For the last time, don’t say ’can’t. In your thoughts or aloud.”

Caitlin, I had learned, was as irritated by negative self-talk as I was about burned eggs. Her voice only sharpened slightly, but suddenly she was pounding shredded cabbage in a thick wooden bowl like it had spat her in the face.

But I wasn’t saying that. I hadn’t thought I can’t ?—

“Don’t lie either. You were practically shouting it inside that thick head of yours.” She shook her head as she continued bashing the cabbage. “How many times do I have to tell you that self-fulfilling prophecy is real? We know better than most just how much everything we do is in the mind. Try again.”

Stifling a heavy sigh, I closed my eyes to practice one of the visualization techniques Caitlin had taught me. Her theory was that my gloves weren’t anything more than a placebo effect—a way for my mind to perceive a barrier when there wasn’t one. Now she was asking me instead to build said barriers with my mind.

Just as I had before, I imagined a number—three—then attempted to build an imaginary wall around it. Screw that , I thought. Make it a fortress, complete with turrets and walls and guards with crossbows designed for bossy Irish housewives.

A snort from Caitlin told me she could already See what I was thinking. I wasn’t sure I cared. And then I felt her subtle yet strong presence sifting through the rest of my thoughts—some I hadn’t even put words to. My brain felt fuller, somehow, when she was there, but even then it was difficult.

“Three,” she said shortly.

I groaned and set my head on the table, eager to ease the pounding through my temples. A few images of the girls making cookies danced in front of my closed eyes. They giggled, and though I knew the memory wasn’t actually laughing at me , I sat up anyway. “I’m telling you, this isn’t working. It’s been a month, and I’m still no better than a colander. That took you five seconds.”

“You just need to relax,” Caitlin grabbed an onion from the dry goods basket near the door and started chopping. “You’re holding on too tight. The fortress was a nice idea, but too many holes, I think. Forget the fancy weapons. Focus on the stone. How heavy it is. How strong.”

“Maybe I’m too old. You said this should have started when I was a child, not a twenty-nine-year-old crone.”

Caitlin snorted and said something in Irish that I was pretty sure translated to “stubborn gobshite.”

“How am I supposed to be a proper shield if I can’t keep a damn thing out?” I shoved a stack of napkins on the table causing the tower to topple over. “I can’t even hide a stupid number, let alone the biggest secret in the fae world.”

Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes. This had been happening more too. Instead of getting stronger, I was getting weaker, turning into a sieve that thoughts and tears and everything else could get through in a moment.

I’d never be able to do what Gran asked of me. Everything she had worked so hard in her life to protect was as good as gone.

“Hush,” Caitlin said, setting her knife and the now-chopped onions aside. “As long as you believe that about yourself, you’re right. You’ll never make any progress.” She glanced at the big clock in the foyer. “It’s nearly four. Take a break,we’ll try again with the girls after dinner. They’re always happy to be guinea pigs.”

Two squeaks from the garden outside the window confirmed her assumption, but it didn’t make me feel better. Her pity couldn’t have been clearer, and I didn’t have to touch her to know she had the same doubts I had.

My chair leg screeched as I stood up suddenly. “I’m going for a surf.”

I was out the door before she could tell me, as she always did, to be careful of the seals.

The water was starting to warm a bit—not so much that I didn’t have to wear a wetsuit, but at least it was topping fifty degrees now. My toes didn’t numb in less than thirty minutes anymore, and I could almost manage the early summer swells without a hood. Even when the surf was nothing but close-out after close-out, it was still the only place I felt competent. Where I still felt like myself.

It was also the only place where loneliness didn’t eat me alive.

From where I sat on the board, waiting for a new set, I could see the two cottages that had become my whole universe. The Connollys’ was neat and ordered; the wildest things about it were the white and purple puffs of garlic and chive scapes waving from Caitlin’s garden. To the left, despite Caitlin’s and my work cleaning everything out, the old yard in front of Gran’s house was still overrun by lichens, wildflowers, and grasses, tall and bright with sundrenched ends the color of new straw. Chaotic and colorful, just like my Sight could be.

Robbie said the land could be arable again with some work, but I’d have to wait until next spring. It was a casual comment, but one of many that intimidated me more than I could say. That the Connollys expected me to live here for the foreseeable future. That they expected me to survive on the land, like they did. That they expected progress, in one form or another.

I whirled my legs in the water to turn back to the horizon. Several seals popped above the surface, cocking their heads in greeting. I raised a hand, and one barked before diving headfirst beneath the waves.

“Well, that’s all good for you, but what about me?” I said to the flattened water.

As if in response, the water swelled. A new set rolling in just for me and my new friends.

The water was bright and smooth—a far cry from the oft-windy conditions. I popped up on the board, basking in the beauty of what was shaping into one of the best waves I’d caught in years. I swept down to the base, back up to the lip, and down with a sharp cut-back, adrenaline rising with each maneuver. A deep shadow appeared inside the gray-blue water, out of which popped the shiny black head of a seal.

“Watch out!” the seal snapped in deep, solid Irish.

And then, the voice belonged to a man. Not a seal who could easily duck away from my board, but a fully grown human.

“What the—” I bent my knees to cut away, but tipped into the barrel.

The man and I collided, and the wave rolled over us, snapping my leash and my board as it caught the reef. A few seconds later, I managed to grab hold of the two pieces of foam, fiberglass, and resin before the last wave washed me toward the shore in a tangle of whitewash and kelp. There, I climbed onto a nearby slab of limestone, hurled my broken surfboard to the ground, and sucked in a few desperate lungfuls of air.

“Oi!”

I swung around, still breathing heavily and spitting seaweed, to find a man naked from the waist up the water. He looked to be somewhere around my age, with hair the same jet black, bright as an oil slick against his ruddy skin. His eyes were dark and shining, and his skin, wet from the ocean, carried a similar sheen and flashed dangerously. He was swimming alone and shockingly naked in fifty-five-degree water. He was also very, very angry.

His accent was even thicker than Caitlin’s, and he started yelling at me again in Irish before I could respond. Even with my conversational fluency, I could hardly understand the dialect.

“Sorry, my Irish isn’t great,” I said after my breath returned.

The man rattled off a few more words that sounded distinctly curse-worthy, then snapped, “I said, you need to watch where you’re feckin’ going!”

I rubbed my eyes and glared. Now that we were back in my native language and I was breathing normally, my own sense of surf etiquette flared. “I’m pretty sure you dropped in on me, man.”

“Jaysus, and she’s an American,” he shouted, splashing the water before releasing another stream of Irish. “Your bleedin’ board nearly broke my head!”

He did in fact have an egg-sized lump swelling on his forehead. I was about to apologize when I remembered that he had swum into the wave when I was already on it, breaking the only surfboard I had and making me swallow half the Atlantic in the process. Worse swimmers might have gotten twisted in the kelp too. More than one person had died that way where I’d grown up.

“Listen, man,” I bristled. “I’m sorry I tagged you, but I was already on that wave when you dropped in on me. You shouldn’t have been bodysurfing so close, and now I’m out a board too!”

“Maybe I was there first,” he shot back, splashing some more water. “I didn’t drop in on no one!”

I wasn’t about to be told about the universal rules of surfing by a naked loon. Especially one with such a terrible attitude. “Dude. It was my wave. I was on it. That’s freaking rule number one—internationally known, asshole.”

Another thick splash and a stream of rude-sounding Irish flew at me, but it, like the rest, was too fast and idiomatic for my academic understanding. With a last cold, steely glare, the man disappeared again under the water and started swimming back out into the waves.

“Hey!” I called out from the shore. “It’s not safe to be out there by yourself!”

I raised my hand against the sun as I scanned the water, looking for the rogue swimmer. A hand darted up from somewhere out in the surf, but he was keeping a strong pace up the coast, soon too far for me to see.

The sun was setting as I carried the pieces of my board back to Gran’s cottage, where I found Bronagh waiting on the stoop.

“Hi,” I said shortly, leaning the pieces against the house. I was in no mood to chat. Or demonstrate my bad Irish for her entertainment.

“They can break?” She peered curiously at the board remnants.

“Sometimes, yeah. Pain in the rear, too.” Something occurred to me. “Why, can you fix it?”

She shook her head, causing her hair to rustle into her face before she pushed it out of her eyes. “Not yet. I don’t know the spells for that sort of work, nor do I have the skill.”

I shrugged. “Then I’ll have to take the ferry to the mainland. I think there’s a surf shop in Lahinch.”

“Mam won’t be pleased with you missing a day,” Bronagh noted, not even bothering to hide her glee. She had never quite warmed to me—I suspected it had something to do with her crush on Jonathan.

“She’ll be less pleased if I can’t get in the water.”

“Who was that man you were talking to?”

I sat down on the stone stoop next to her to pull off my booties and my gloves. “Just some black-haired jackass—er, I mean jerk—who dropped in on my wave. Swimming naked too. Guy’s a complete psycho.”

Bronagh mouthed “psycho” to herself. “He had black hair? Like yours?”

I shrugged. “I guess so. It was all wet.”

She shivered. “Probably a murúch . You should watch out for them. Mam says there’s not so many as there once was, most of them having gone to the mainland to chase girls. But they always come back in the summer.” She looked up at me,with something approaching admiration mixed with her usual brooding stare. “Mam says you’re crazy to go into the ocean, but Dad says you’re part murúch yourself, so you can’t help it. Is it true? Can you turn into a seal?”

I shook my head. “My grandfather was a shifter, but I’ve never grown whiskers or a tail. Otherwise, I wouldn’t need this, would I?” I pulled the cord of my wetsuit zipper down my back, allowing me to tug the tight wet sleeves over my shoulders and arms so I could bare my skin to the last rays of sun.

“Mmm,” Bronagh said in an excellent imitation of her mother. “Mam sent me here with dinner for you and said you should take the night to yourself. She also said to tell you that tomorrow’s lesson will start an hour earlier since she must bake the week’s bread.”

I grimaced. Caitlin only told me to take time off when she was as frustrated as I was. And I was no idiot. What she meant was to “go back to basics” and figure my head out some more.

I smiled through my teeth and nodded.

“Do you think they’ll ever actually help? The lessons, that is?”

I thought of the water that seemed to move through my veins, but also of the fact that no one knew anything about what to do with it beyond mythological hints. After all, how could you train an oracle when there was only one per generation?

I forced myself to maintain a placid expression. Who knew if Bronagh had the same kind of X-ray vision as Jonathan and her father, but I didn’t need to make my fears that much easier for her to See.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I hope so.”

“Mam says you just need to find the shape of your mind, but I think she’s wrong.”

“Oh? Why’s that?”

She scooted a bit away as if to avoid any accidental touch. “I See you,” she said. “Your energy. And even when you’re not trying to See things, it’s a bit…well, it sort of looks like a frayed blanket, all torn at the edges, with bits and pieces flying in and out of you. It’s hard to tell where you stop and the world begins. And when you try to See or block Mam, it’s even worse.” Fear reflected in the girl’s deep gray eyes. “It’s like…whatever it is you’re Seeing…it’s like those things could swallow you up, and you’d be gone forever.”

We stared at each other for a moment, and it wasn’t until I looked away, suddenly chilled for a reason that had nothing to do with the surf, that she stood up.

“Maybe you have no shape,” she said. “Maybe you need to look for something else to keep yourself together. I’m scared you might blow away.”