Chapter Two Idris #2
“To what do I owe the pleasure of a conference?” I ask cheerily. Music for the next dance echoes down the hallway. Not a jig, but there might be another after this one.
Father clasps his hands behind his back and studies the floor, his jaw tight. Something in his seriousness makes me shiver again.
“Has something happened?” I swallow. When had I last seen Abram? Not for nearly half an hour now. He isn’t one to get into scrapes, but … “Is Abram all right?”
“What? Yes.” Father waves aside the question. “Do you remember when I told you there would be an … event on your eighteenth birthday?”
I cock my head and glance toward the door. “Er, yes? We … are at it?”
“No, not a party.” Father scratches his beard like he does when he’s irritated with me. “Something else. I wanted to tell you more, but …”
His gaze strays to the clock behind me. I look over my shoulder. Five minutes to midnight.
“I thought,” Father continues, “perhaps, coming this far—you might be spared. However, I don’t know what kind of distance they will travel. But if you’re asked, I want you to say no.”
I blink, my attention back on him. “Huh?”
He shakes his head. He won’t look at me now. “I can’t reveal more. But it has been this way for a long time now. Simply say ‘no’ and return to the party.”
“I don’t …”
The second hand thrums behind me. Has it grown louder? Father nudges me toward a door that leads outside.
“Go for a walk,” he says. “If they have come this far, they will find you. They won’t harm you if you say no. Return as soon as it’s done.”
I take a slow step toward the door. “I don’t understand. Who—”
“It’s better to wait outside.” He nudges me again. “If you are in the ballroom, they will make a spectacle of it.”
His prodding is now nearly a push, so I step outside. The temperature drops perilously.
“I hope you meet no one tonight,” Father says, his hand on the door’s latch, “but if you must—I won’t have it be in front of all these people.”
He shuts the door before I can speak. I’m in the gardens, though I know it more by the smell of leaves than the shadowy shapes of bushes. Candles in glass jars have been placed along a paved path, but they barely do anything against the night.
Out here, only fragments of the loudest or highest notes of music drift through the dark. I hesitate, perplexed, then reach toward the door. I’m not prone to fevers, but even I know better than to stand in a frosted garden with sweat still drying on my back.
The clock inside the library begins to strike midnight, and my hand stops just above the latch. An unexpected dread holds me there. Each clang of the bell thuds in beat with my heart, louder and louder. Ten … eleven … twelve …
“Oh, he brought you out here,” says a voice behind me. “Pity.”
I turn. The air has grown thick and heavy, so that I can only move with effort.
A young man stands behind me. He is exactly my height, with youthful features—perhaps only fifteen.
In the faint candlelight and against his dark skin, his eyes shine unnaturally bright, the glowing orange of a harvest moon.
“Um,” is my astute reply.
“Yes, quite.” He sighs and waves away his disappointment.
“Well, I see the promise has been kept: You have been warned but given no details. Your father plays close to the breaking of his word. However, I will not hold this to his account.” His uncanny eyes flick over me, becoming calculating and curious. “Or, rather, yours.”
“You know my father?” I ask, crossing my arms for warmth. My breath mists in the air.
“I’ve known all the men of your family, back to your great-great-grandfather.”
The young man’s words make no cloud. He smiles with gleaming teeth.
I open and close my mouth. Not a single wrinkle mars his face, but the telling tilt of his chin makes me suddenly feel I am a boy standing before a mountain.
This man isn’t young—he is ageless. My mind runs through the shanties, folktales, pub gossip.
Stories of magical beings. They stretch back even further than the times of my great-great-grandfather Mervyn and his impossible tasks.
There is a very slight point to the tip of this stranger’s ears. His clothes have a scaly glimmer to them in the faint light. When a gust of wind hits us, the salt-sweet tang of the North Sea rolls off him as if I stood now on its jagged shores.
The sea-dwellers. Tide-walkers. Hidden Folk.
“You’re catching on now. Good.” The man—the Hidden One—places one hand over his chest. “You may call me Speir. I have come with a tale and a question. You must listen to both and give an answer.”
I open my mouth to speak, but Speir reaches toward my lips.
Rather than touch me, he gathers the frozen mist of my breath from the air.
It wisps after his fingers like spiderweb, and he paints it into a circle between us.
My frozen breath turns solid. A mirror. Frost shoots across the surface, reflecting my face in a thousand splintered duplicates.
Then my image fades, and instead there is a man with the same dark and curling hair as me turning from a forge. Red light cuts his features into sharp angles, but I recognize the arc of his nose and the line of his jaw. He looks like my father. Like Abram.
Like me.
Part of me wants to pull back, to turn my gaze away from the magic, but curiosity holds me in place. How do I know this man in the vision—and how does Speir?
In the image before me, the man lifts something from the fire and strikes it with a hammer.
The sudden sparks and crash make me flinch.
I feel the sound deep inside me, behind my eyes, as if I were remembering rather than hearing.
The scene seems to surround me, and the heat of the fire raises the hairs on my arms.
“You’ll not change your mind?” the man says over his shoulder.
A woman’s voice answers, “You have a bonny face but a rancid soul, Mervyn Walker.”
A bolt of cold surprise goes through me. Mervyn Walker—my great-great-grandfather.
She hisses, “You will rue this day.”
“Oh?” He adjusts his lump of blazing iron. “And when will I rue it, little dancer?”
“In the time of your sons, and their sons.” I cannot see her, but it’s as if we’re the same person, inhabiting the same space.
“That doesn’t seem like my problem.” Mervyn examines his work. The iron lump pulses golden-white with heat. He holds it with long tongs. “My problem is much more immediate, and you’ve set me behind.”
“I have only said ‘no,’“ she replies. Though her voice stays even, I feel her pounding heart in my chest. Something pricks through the air. I think it is the heat of the furnace turning everything to fire. “Perhaps the next time you need a wife in a hurry, you will not begin with violence.”
“I have harmed no one.” With his spare hand, he lifts a silver seal skin from the ground and shakes it in front of her. Her pulse in mine quickens with a longing so strong it sears. “I took what you left unguarded, and you are the one who does not honor the old ways.”
“The old ways?” she hisses between gritted teeth.
She draws herself up, straightening like a queen on the rickety board.
“Let us see whom the old ways honor. I curse you, you and every son you sire, and every son he sires. All you do to me will be etched in their blood. One day the cost will be paid, and I will reclaim my dancing days.”
Mervyn’s expression is unconcerned as she speaks.
But with her last word, a gust of wind hits the forge with such force the building shakes.
A window shatters, and the cold, salty air floods in like a riptide, stealing all light and warmth from the room.
Mervyn falters, his face white. It strikes me that he is young—only twenty, maybe.
Her life stretches centuries, back before the first man set foot on her islands. Mervyn is a child to her. A dangerous, cruel child.
“Selfish fool,” she sneers. “But see here, I will give your children something you haven’t given me. Not because you deserve mercy, but because I am not a filthy thief.” She spits on the ground. “They will have a choice.”
Mervyn’s expression hardens. In the pale light, he looks nearly corpselike.
“Give me back my skin,” she says. “Save your descendants.”
“As I said before”—Mervyn tosses the skin onto the dirty floor—”that doesn’t sound like my problem.”
She whispers a word even I cannot hear. White mist swirls around Mervyn.
He steps back, closer to the forge, but she sees him involuntarily inhale, and she knows.
The curse has set. A moment later, the red glow of the fire returns.
The room is a normal forge again, albeit colder for the broken window.
Mervyn shakes his shoulders the way a dog might shrug off rain. With a final look over his work, he pulls it from the fire. Heat ripples in the air around the lump of iron. He kneels, and I see her feet—bare and small—her legs bound at the knee.
“I made my claim fairly,” he says. “For all you say men take, do note that I am not forcing your hand.”
She says nothing. The twinge of discomfort has morphed into a radiating pain, like sparks sizzling across her skin. It isn’t from the heat, I realize. It’s from the iron.
The Hidden Folk cannot stand the touch of iron.
Mervyn watches her closely. “Very well. Don’t marry me, then. But you won’t be going back under the sea either.”
The metal has cooled to a livid orange, and he takes it with a gloved hand. It isn’t just a lump. It’s a boot.
Horror sweats down my back, and I try to pull my consciousness free. I don’t want to see anymore. But I’m tied to the woman as true as she’s tied to the table. “Let me go,” I try to say, but her voice shouts it.
He slips the glowing boot over her left foot. She screams, and I scream, and our foot chars and the skin peels and the pain blisters and pops and—
And there is something in her lost now, something that pulled like the tides and roared in her blood like the sea. There is too much hurt to name it.