Chapter 5
Sadira
I took every chance I could to sneak away to the beach throughout the summer.
It felt important to keep my new friend a secret.
My parents had always vocally disapproved of me interacting with children who “weren’t like us”—who didn’t look like us or belong to the families that moved in my parents’ circles.
My mother even had a relative who fit that description entirely, except that he’d married a mostly human woman before I was born.
She still shunned them even though he seemed very wealthy and magically powerful, having some kind of important job working for the government in the defense department—exactly the type of person she would usually gravitate to.
There was something about my friend’s innocence that I wanted to protect from my parents’ judgement and disapproval, and I was afraid they would forbid me from visiting him altogether.
He probably wouldn’t understand what they were saying, but I would, and it would hurt me.
He was so curious and enthusiastic about everything around him.
The thought of anyone damaging the inquisitive nature that was so obviously a deep part of him grieved me.
Even now, many weeks after we’d first met, as we lay side by side in the surf and the waves rolled over his body and halfway up mine, he showed me a tarnished candlestick he’d found somewhere.
I found myself using my hands as I spoke to help explain to him what fire was, wondering how much he could understand.
“It burns,” I tried again. “These hold flames that are dangerous, and we can’t touch the fire.
It makes light.” I pointed at the sun. “Like that, but smaller.”
He squinted at the sun and then at me with a small head tilt.
“Do you understand?” I asked, smiling at his skeptical expression.
He blinked at me in the morning light and began to give a slow nod, but then hesitated and held up his thumb and forefinger very close to each other.
“A little?” I guessed, and he nodded again. “How do you understand the common tongue if you can’t speak it?” I asked, curious.
He gestured at the shore in answer, but I didn’t understand.
I realized that if he could understand me, I could tell him my name. “I’m Sadira,” I said, placing my flat hand on my chest. “That’s my name, Sadira.” My smile felt a little brittle and sad this time because I wished I could know his name too.
He blinked at me a few more times, like he was processing what I’d said, and then it looked as though he tested the shape of my name on his lips, but no sound came out at all.
A slow smile blossomed on his face, becoming so warm it changed his whole countenance.
His joy shone through his eyes as he regarded me, and my own smile became more genuine in response.
But then he opened and closed his mouth silently a few times as frustration overtook his features.
I sat quietly, listening to the waves wash over us as he stared at me for a beat, wondering what concerned him as his pale grey eyes drifted across my face, before he seemed to come to some kind of decision.
Pushing himself up from the sand, he sat up, hauling his torso out of the waves from where he lay beside me.
His chest contracted as water gushed out of the slits in his neck in a distressing way—they were gills, I supposed—and then the pink membranes clamped shut against the sides of his neck, as he heaved a deep, rasping breath that sounded like a wet sack inflating.
“Lorn.”
I was so distracted by the alarming things he’d done with his body to push all the water out that I nearly missed what he said.
His voice was scratchy and quiet, and difficult to understand, but he spoke.
A tight grimace crossed his face and he reached to clasp a hand around his throat, and I realized I was staring at him with my mouth hanging open.
I quickly clamped it shut.
“Your name is Lorn?” I asked, practically shouting, and then clapped my hand over my mouth and glanced toward the path that led to my summer house to make sure no one had overheard.
He nodded, and I lowered my hand—and my voice.
“How can you speak? Why haven’t you spoken to me before?
” A million questions fought with each other to tumble out as my heart warred between elation—my friend could speak!
He told me his name!—and wounded feelings—was I not worth speaking to before?
—that were all instantly silenced by the next word out of his mouth.
“Hurt,” he said, and I realized that the grimace on his face was pain.
“It hurts when you speak?” I asked, instantly feeling sick to my stomach at the misery on his face.
He nodded, and then croaked out, “When young, it hurt,” and then his throat muscles started convulsing.
“Then stop! Don’t speak.” I almost lifted my hands toward him, my instinct to cover his mouth like I had my own, to protect him from the pain he was inflicting on himself, but I clenched them into fists in my lap.
My heart pounded in my chest, and I battled the innate need I felt to put my palms on his neck.
My fingers itched to touch him somewhere, anywhere, but I didn’t want to scare him or embarrass myself.
I had an incredibly miniscule magical aptitude towards healing.
It was my only magical inclination at all, but it didn’t really work.
It was only a feeling I got in my hands sometimes when someone around me was in pain.
I’d never been able to heal so much as a paper cut.
My school assessor said that sometimes people’s abilities with magic increased during puberty, but I wasn’t finding that to be the case for me.
At least, not yet.
My father had been very clear that I shouldn’t bother trying, anyway. ”No child of mine will work with her hands, Sadira. We never undertake anything as crass as that.”
“Please, don’t talk,” I begged him, watching in horror as a tear leaked from his eye. “You don’t need to. We got along just fine this whole summer with only me talking.” He’d told me his name—Lorn. At least I had that. It felt like a gift. “I’ll speak for both of us,” I assured him.
And I did.
Day by day, as we lolled in the surf and watched the seagulls soaring overhead, I told him about my parents—about their suffocating expectations, her career as a dignitary for the government, his job as a bank owner—and our house in the city that was never my home, because I went to boarding school like all the other children our age—at least the ones from families who could afford it.
Sometimes I envied the ones who couldn’t afford it, because at least they got to live with their families, but my parents said that wasn’t respectable and that my future depended on the schooling I received.
I told him about how we came to the cottage here at Belas Shores so my parents could escape the stifling heat in the city each summer, and how it was my favorite place to be.
I’d always enjoyed the fact that I got to be with my family here, even if Nan was the one who actually tended to my caring, but as I’d grown up, it had felt like my presence here was more of an annoyance than an actual part of the family.
It was probably just because I wasn’t used to being with them anymore and I needed to try harder to connect with them.
At least I could always count on Nan to appear relieved when I came home on breaks, even if I suspected it was because she wasn’t expected to perform as many domestic duties as the other servants, so she could attend to my needs.
I never knew how much Lorn understood of what I told him, but he appeared to listen to every word and watched me carefully as I spoke.
It was nice having someone who listened so closely to what I had to say.
He seemed especially interested when I told him about my collection of sea glass from this very beach and how the purple bits were my favorites.
I had a small box of pieces I’d found over the years, but I loved it enough that I kept it at school with me, where I really lived, and carried any new ones I found back with me on the train when I returned to school after our summer break.
We didn’t meet every day, but we did most days.
And sometimes, it seemed like he had even been waiting for me, as he surfaced in the water as soon as I stepped on to the beach.
He was still very skittish, always darting away into the waves at any noise from the treeline behind us, but at least in my presence he relaxed a bit, settling into the sand a little closer to where I sat or staying near me when I swam in the cove.
He always had odd bits and bobs with him when he came, some relic from a lost ship maybe—but more likely trash that had been dumped off a dock—for me to explain to him during his visits.
Old fishing lures or a smoking pipe, corkscrews or a ruined book.
One of my new favorite pastimes became asking him to demonstrate what he thought the objects were used for before I explained them.
I laughed uncontrollably when he began to comb his hair with the tines of a fork with the utmost self-assurance.
I brought him dusty old junk from the house for his collections—mismatched dishes and long unused paperweights that I thought no one would miss—and he delighted in every one.
One day I dug an old chest out of a storage room and drug it inch by inch down the path to the beach, and we buried it under the hedges at the edge of the sand.
It was the perfect place to store our treasures.
My entire life had become salt and sand and warm ocean breezes and a smiling boy named Lorn who had a fish tail instead of legs, and I loved every moment.
A week before I was due to return to school, Lorn stopped showing up.
I searched the cove and even the waters beyond the jetty.
I hummed for him beneath the water like I had at the beginning of summer until my throat became raw.
I checked our chest on the beach every day, frustrated to find it untouched.
Nan knew I was unhappy about returning to school, as I always was this time of year, but she was baffled by how distraught I was every evening when she called me home for dinner.
I’d lost track of time and hadn’t told him I needed to leave again, and I didn’t even know if he was well.
Or alive. There was no way to explain my desperation to check the beach one last time on the morning we left, or why the tears poured down my face as she loaded me onto the train to school, my guilt at leaving without saying goodbye to Lorn so thick in my throat it choked me.
By the time I arrived at the station in the capital city where my school was, I tried to be resigned to the fact that I might never see Lorn again.
I wasn’t. My heart was broken. The school staff came to collect us with their usual false cheer, shuffling us along as a group of kids grumpy to be returning from summer vacation, and completely missed my watery-eyed misery.
We received our room assignments and our class schedules and were expected to quickly settle into our normal routine.
One day bled into another and my guilty torment gentled into a simmering background anxiety that was never far away.
Fear and worry followed me to dinner each evening and settled on me like a cloak in my bed each night.
I felt sick to my stomach every time I thought of him.
Teachers called on me in class and I had no answers to give them, my mind far away on an empty beach, worried about a boy I hadn’t said goodbye to.
What if he didn’t know I had to leave again?
What if something had happened to him? I thought of all the stories of sea monsters and horrible things out there in the open sea.
I’d been assigned a new roommate this year named Aleda, who was new to the school.
I tried to help introduce her to people who would benefit her, show her the quiet places to study, and point out which cooks would let her sneak snacks outside of mealtimes.
She surprised me by sharing notes with me when I’d been too distracted in class to take them myself and reminding me to eat when I’d spent too much of my free time staring out the window lost in my thoughts.
After several months, I confided my distress to her, and we discussed the possibilities of what could have made him disappear endlessly.
She was as close to a friend as I had found at school—not like Lorn, but she was an ally who didn’t begrudge my grief or mock my worry, and I decided that was just as important in some ways.
I’d always been amicable with the other children at school, but the social posturing began early among the elvish and made trusting others a difficult endeavor among the pupils I attended with.
It was an incredibly lonely time, made so much worse by not knowing what had become of the smiling boy with the fish tail.
Nine months passed before my parents brought me back to the summer house again.