Chapter Eleven Kit #2
But even when we come out of the sheltered harbor, the boat remains remarkably steady.
Almost like we are on a separate, still water.
My nausea doesn’t rise. Cautiously, I relax my grip and look around.
There is no moon tonight, not with this cloud cover, and sea spray and rain lash me in turn. Yet the boat hardly rocks.
A shiver runs down my back. Enchantment.
Despite the lack of light, I can make out Idris’s face a little better now that we’re sitting across from each other with only a thin mast between us.
He is pale as a corpse. His hair is dark and matted to his forehead with sweat, despite the cold.
His eyes are fixed on some distant sight, glassy like a man mad with fever.
He stares right past me. I wave my hand in front of his face.
He blinks, though his eyes don’t follow my movement.
“Idris?” I try again. “Are you there?”
He blinks again. A flicker of recognition crosses his face. But then the wind fills the sail, and his hands are busy correcting our route. Whatever started to wake in him has gone again, his body rigid in attention to some invisible order.
I poke his knee, just to see if he’ll do anything. He doesn’t react.
I swallow. I’m out at sea with someone who doesn’t seem to be in his body at all.
The boat shifts suddenly, caught in a new current, and I grab the sides once more. I can see whitecaps on the waves around us, but we continue as smoothly as the gentlest of canters. Smoother even than a carriage. Waves slap the hull, and the boat creaks, but otherwise it is unnervingly silent.
A splash. I look to my left but resist the impulse to lean over the side.
Catharine has told me enough stories about creatures waiting to drag a person overboard.
I stare at what I can see without getting nearer the water, and it takes another few minutes before I make out a slick movement rising and falling through the waves.
The next time it surfaces, two huge eyes as dark as ebony observe me. A seal.
Soon we are surrounded by them—I count at least six, but their rising and diving in the darkness makes it difficult to be sure.
I cannot tell how long we have been at sea when a shadow darker than the sky looms ahead of us.
Cliffs rise from the water, steep and impossibly high.
The sea thunders against the rocks, and the white foam of the breaking waves is startlingly bright in the murk of black on black.
Idris turns the tiller and aligns the boat straight at the cliffs.
“Um,” I blurt. “Idris?”
He shows no sign of hearing me. We pass a rock jutting through the water, its sides slick and tip sharp. One of the seals jumps up on it and flops forward inelegantly. A moaning, wailing sound fills the air—the seal singing.
The cliffs grow closer, stretching far above us. I tighten my grip on the boat. “Idris!”
He gazes past me with no show of concern. No awareness whatsoever. Every swell throws us closer to the rocks.
I am about to lurch for the tiller when he speaks.
“Open!” Idris calls, voice hoarse and loud after his long silence. “Open, black cliff, and let the young prince in and out with his boat and his hound.”
Swiftly, I add to Idris’s command, “And his lady before him!”
A crack loud enough to split the air sounds behind me.
I spin, gaping as the cliff rends itself apart.
A gap glimmering with distant light opens, small but growing larger.
Larger but still impossibly small against the face of the cliff.
In the faint light, I see rocks like jagged daggers slicing the water to shreds.
More seals hop up on these sharp perches and take up the wailing song.
The noise is almost unbearable—the breaking rocks like a landside, the waves like thunder, and the wailing like the loudest funeral mourning.
True hunkers lower in the hull of the boat, ears pinned back.
The gap in the cliff is still opening, but our boat hasn’t slowed in the slightest. If anything, we seem to be moving faster.
I hold my breath, waiting for a shift in the water to crash us into any of the thousand dangers around us.
But the boat sails calmly forward, serenely steady in the midst of whirlpools and a screaming sea.
Then we are at an entrance. Rocks splinter and fall above us. I shut my eyes, tight, waiting for falling stone to smash and sink us. I can swim, but I learned in the calm lochs of my home; this wild water would overpower me in moments.
I feel the air change as we pass into the opening—suddenly humid, close, and warm. I crack an eye open and gasp.
It isn’t so much a cave as an archway. As we come free of the low ceiling, the walls suddenly open without anything to obscure the sky.
And the sky itself is no longer covered over by clouds.
Stars glimmer, more than I’ve ever seen in my life, and while I gawk upward a shimmer of bright green wisps lazily across them.
“The dancers,” I breathe. Lights that color the northern nights. I’ve heard of them, but had never seen them myself.
Reluctantly, I pull my gaze back down. Steep cliffs rise on either side of our small boat, but the water is calm here. It gurgles softly, like a cooing child. Ahead of us, white sands glow on a peaceful shore. Beyond the shore is another cave, where silver light shines.
Idris grounds the boat on the sand and splashes out into the water, pushing it farther up onto dry ground.
As soon as he stops, I climb out with True.
The temperature has warmed, and I have a ridiculous desire to pull off my boots and sink my feet into the fine sand.
Heat radiates from it, as if it’s been baked in the hot summer sun.
Idris strides toward the second cave. His walk is familiar, and I realize he moves like himself, even though he is in a dream.
There’s something disconcerting about it.
I wish he moved like a sleepwalker, that there was something odd in his gait.
Instead, it’s as if he were still there, conscious, even though I know he isn’t.
I spare one last glance at the sky. Pink and blue wisps tangle together and fade.
I only promised the king I would keep watch, that I would find out where the entrance was.
And I have done that—though I’m not sure I could trace it on a map.
I could stay here, in the balmy sand, and watch the lights and wait.
A strand of spectral music drifts out of the second cave. When I turn, Idris has already disappeared inside, but True waits on the threshold. The dog wags his tail slowly as if to encourage me to follow.
I take a deep breath. I haven’t come just to keep watch. I need to find answers.
Slowly, I step out of the starlight and into the strange silver glow. True wags his tail more fiercely and joins me, keeping pace at my ankle. His presence reassures me, but my heart still beats erratically.
The ground slopes down gently as I move step by step.
I stay close to the wall on the right, trailing my hand along it, while True remains at my left.
The light grows brighter, the music louder, and as the space beyond comes into view I nearly forget to breathe.
I stop at the edge, pressed to the stone, and stare.
The underground chamber is larger than our dancing hall at the castle—maybe larger than the castle itself.
I lift my gaze. There is no ceiling, just a vast sky filled with an enormous moon.
I’ve never seen it in so much detail, not even at harvest time when it rose large and orange over the horizon.
Staring at it now, I can make out craters and mountains, patches of bright white and mild silver.
A heady, dizzy feeling sends me off balance, and I press my hand harder onto the wall.
It is a dark, smooth stone, polished as if by a thousand tides over a thousand years.
Limpet shells cling to the surface, glowing white, yellow, and orange.
When I look across the hall to the far walls, I see the limpets are stars.
There are stories in the constellations they form, but I cannot read them.
Then, as I watch, a bright-green light glimmers across one wall.
It melds into vivid cranberry, then purple, spreading all the way across the perimeter just like the northern lights did across the sky outside.
When it reaches me, the color is a cool mist that passes over my skin and fades, only for the colors to begin again at another point.
I pull my gaze from the surroundings to the people. The Hidden Folk seem to be made up of three different sorts, though they all mingle together in their dance. I search my mind for the sea folk Catharine has read about and make my best guess as to which is which: mermaids, finfolk, and selkies.
Mermaids are the tallest, with long legs instead of tails.
Their hair color ranges from emerald green to wildfire red.
They decorate their heads with scarves of seaweed or hairbands of seashells.
Their skin color is similar to a human palette.
I could easily imagine them lounging on sun-burned rocks, waiting for a sailor to lure.
They wear dresses with petticoats clasped just under their chests and a skirt that clings to their hips before it flares out around their knees.
I don’t see any mermen among them, but then I can’t remember stories of male merfolk.