Chapter 7
Lorn
Nine Months Earlier
When I was younger, I’d enjoyed working as a group to do our morning chores together.
We would talk and joke as we worked side by side, but as I’d gotten older I’d begun to value how quickly I could get things done when I worked alone.
That left more time for me to play and explore and search for my treasures.
But then the oldest boys in the shoal had grown up and left to be taken as mates by sirens from the surrounding waters, which left me as the eldest child, and since it was most efficient for the adults to work quickly, I was the one tasked with working with the younger boys.
While it did usually make chores take longer, at least Elias was nearly as efficient as I was, and Leo learned quickly… most of the time.
This morning I was digging for clams with the other two boys.
Our fathers and grandfathers were busy hunting urchins that ate our kelp roots, sharpening knives, making rope—all the daily chores that are needed by the shoal.
The merlings, Amata and Marlen, were gathering algae together for the snails.
We all keep an eye on the youngest ones as a community, either giving them jobs near an adult who can watch them while they work or assigning them a job in an area we know is safe so that they can learn to contribute to the community and grow in independence.
The areas where they work and play are generally safe, and we are watchful for any predators or dangers when they are in areas that we feel might not be as safe. The ocean is rife with dangers.
While I was gathering black clams with Elias and Leo, the littlest ones were in the quarry nearby, floating bundles of algae into the crevices where we kept them for storage.
I could hear them giggling and chattering to one another as they worked, probably distracted by petting the snails in their pens.
Nobody expected their chores to get done quickly.
I had half a mind on the little ones and half a mind on keeping the clams from slicing my hands open, but then I heard a whine—something that didn’t sound right.
It made the hair on the back of my neck and the spikes on the back of my arms stand up.
“What was that?” I asked the others, my clam falling from my fingers and wriggling away into the sediment unnoticed.
“I don’t kn—” one of them started to respond, but I was already gone, speeding as fast as I could toward the quarry.
With my heart hammering in my chest, I crested the rise to find something that will probably be burned into my memory every time I close my eyes for the rest of my life.
Instead of two giant snails in the quarry, there were three.
The third was a towering snail that matched the others in size, but unlike our colorful, bright-eyed livestock, it was the jet-black color of squid ink.
It wasn’t a giant snail at all. It was a kelpie, disguised as a harmless creature so it could trick an unsuspecting victim into coming closer.
In the quarry below was a nightmare made flesh, something we’d all heard stories of as warnings from the elders but I’d never seen with my own eyes.
Amata, one of the two youngest children, swam toward me frantically, panicking and crying for help.
Marlen hung limply, slowly being absorbed into the side of the black ‘snail,’ a handful of algae scattered beneath him as if he’d been trying to feed it.
His arm dangled below him with an outstretched hand like he was still reaching for the algae.
Black ooze extended from the side of the creature like a tentacle and enveloped his body, covering his face and torso with more long finger-like projections that speared up into his gills.
I shot over the edge of the cliff like I’d exploded out of a ship’s cannon, plummeting into the depths below as I propelled myself faster than I’d ever swam before, and I hit the kelpie in a fury of spines and venom, claws and desperation.
There was no time to go for help. I didn’t even know if Elias or Leo had followed me.
I just threw myself into the creature’s destruction more fiercely than anything I’d ever done in my life.
Venom poured out of the spines that lined the backs of my arms, and I slammed them into the kelpie, puncturing it over and over again as I clawed at the tendrils of inky blackness that pushed into Marlen’s gills.
That was the biggest threat to him at the moment.
The tendrils began to retreat as I gulped down water and fought with all my strength.
Finally, enough of him was freed that I could grab his arm and tail and wrench his little body free from the side of the kelpie.
Just as I got him into my arms I heard the whistling voices of Elias and Leo as they cried out in shock at the mouth of the quarry.
“Get Amata! Take him to his father immediately” I yelled to Elias, turning to see both of the bigger boys frozen in fear at the top of the rock face as I moved to put distance between us and the kelpie.
“Elias, now!” I screamed, and he snapped into action, cutting a short path to the still panicking merling and scooping him up into his arms.
Amata wailed in Elias’ arms the whole way home to the dense kelp stands where we live and Leo gave the warning call that we use as an alarm to signal that there are dangerous predators in the area, which kept me from needing to actively watch either of them to make sure they were still with me.
I wrapped Marlen’s unconscious body in my own arms, ignored the painful pounding of my heart, and focused on getting him to safety as fast as I could.
The two elders moved faster than I remembered them being capable of, one gathering Marlen from my grip and listening to our garbled recitation of what had happened before swimming off to call the rest of the shoal.
The other took Amata and ushered us out toward the open water and away from our home.
Once the whole group of us made it into the open ocean, they led us to a neighboring merrow community.
When we arrived, a hunting party fifteen-men strong—my own father included—went back to kill the kelpie.
I wasn’t allowed to join, and no one was allowed to return home until the kelpie was found and destroyed.
It took two long weeks before they returned victorious because of how crafty it was.
The kelpie was killed and its body disposed of in a yawning chasm in the ocean floor several leagues away, to keep it from fouling the waters where we lived.
The creatures that lived deep in the chasm would feast on the deadfall for years, the elders said.
When our shoal had finally returned home, my landwalker was gone.
I wasn’t able to find her anywhere, though I returned to the cove every day, watching and waiting.
I called to her with her song—even daring to crawl from the water to the edge of the path that snaked through the large trees when the sun was low one evening.
There was no sign of her though. Her buried box remained untouched.
All the treasures that we’d spent the summer gathering sat unmoved from their position each day.
But still… I waited, hoping that she would return.
I wondered if perhaps she had traveled early to a winter territory the way that my people did when food became scarce.
Maybe she would return to me when there was more food.
Or maybe her people were nomadic like some of the other merrow cultures were, and she would never return—I would have only the memory of her.
I tried to parse through my memories of all the many things she told me over the summer about her life and how her family lived, but I hadn’t always been able to understand her mouth-words, even though I had tried very hard. I just didn’t know.
So, I continued to watch the cove, and I thought about her often, and every time I found an object I thought she might like, I brought it to her box and placed it inside.
It helped a little with the ache that lingered in my chest when I thought of her and made me feel a connection to her in a small way.
Eventually, when the elders decided it was necessary to move to our wintering waters, I didn’t want to go.
Because what if she returned while we were gone?
But the whole shoal moves as a group—even our giant snails come with us, by trapping large bubbles of air in their shells so that they can float and allowing themselves to be pulled along by their harnesses for the entire distance of our winter migration.
After much fin dragging on my part and making my displeasure known, I was finally convinced of the elders’ wisdom, but I felt itchy in my skin the farther south we traveled.
We rode the current that flows along the coast to shelter with other shoals of merrow in the southern communities where daylight doesn’t wane as much and food continues to be plentiful throughout the winter.
The solstice celebrations took place while we were there, as they do every year with so many of us in one place.
Sirens moved about in quiet packs, giggling together as they scouted the new arrivals for potential mates.
Those mermen interested in being mated—and claimed with a crown of coral—joined in the festivities in hopes of catching the eye of a pretty siren.
But Elias’s curiosity about the sirens nearly got him in trouble this year when he ventured too close to the merry-making, and his dad tasked me with helping to keep a close eye on him for the rest of our time here.
Not that any siren would be interested in claiming a child for a mate, of course.
We weren’t even allowed to join the festivities until we were of age, but an accidental bonding wasn’t completely unheard of, and it would have made him absolutely miserable.