Chapter 7 #2
Between being in a place I didn’t want to be, with festivities I wanted nothing to do with and wouldn’t be allowed to join even if I had, and then being tasked with minding a boy merely a year younger than me—who blushed every time he caught a distant glimpse of a siren—I’d been beside myself with relief when we finally began the long migration home.
The return journey was always the hardest part without the assistance of the currents that carried us on the way down, but fortunately we ate well enough at the wintering waters to be able to store up enough energy for the migration.
I was at the front of the shoal each day, taking turns pulling snails and anything else I could do to help move the group along quickly, careful to never utter a single complaint about the way my muscles ached the way the other boys did, lest the elders think we needed to stop more often for rests than we already were.
I was disappointed but not surprised to find Sadira’s heavy box untouched and her beach unmarred by prints from her feet, but at least we were home. We’d only been gone for a single cycle of the moons’ phases since the winter solstice passed.
But I would wait four more cycles of our moons for her to come back.
Present Day
My landwalker had returned.
I’d spent the entire winter season not knowing if she would ever come back, and when I heard the drifting, quiet notes of her song from a distance, I thought for sure I was hallucinating.
I’d frozen in place, listening in shock for several beats.
It was like my brain was unable to make sense of what I was hearing, before I finally understood and raced to the cove as fast as I could go.
And she was here! My shock at hearing her song this morning was rivaled only by my relief at seeing her face again.
In my haste, I’d apparently made the mistake of allowing the other boys to see where I went, and now they had followed me and seen my landwalker.
This annoyed me for multiple reasons, but mostly because they had interrupted my time with her by telling me they ‘needed’ me.
This seemed doubtful, but I was feeling strangely territorial about her toward the other boys, so I joined them in order to lead them away from her cove.
I didn’t want to share my landwalker with anyone, but especially not with them.
“What do you need?” I asked the younger boys as I passed through the mouth of the jetty to join them. “I’ve already finished my work for the day.”
“Were you trading with her?” Elias asked, confusion coloring his tone.
“No,” I answered, and left it at that. I brought her items often, and she gave me things sometimes too—like the shiny metal ‘botternyfe’ that she said she found in a ‘droor’—but it wasn’t specifically a trade. They were gifts.
“You shouldn’t be talking to her,” Leo, the youngest, said to me. He floated next to Elias and clutched his whalebone spear, something his father had gotten for trade at the wintering waters and he’d kept it close ever since. He still seemed to be looking for kelpies around every rock.
Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted the marbled grouper swimming back and forth at the outcropping of rocks where it lived, trying to catch my attention.
“I can talk to whoever I want,” I replied to Leo absently, so happy to see her again that, despite my annoyance at their interruption, I couldn’t even muster the proper frustration at Leo pretending to be my father.
I was used to the people in my shoal always trying to mind their neighbor’s business.
“What if you bond to her?” he asked, gesturing animatedly. “Tell him, Elias!” he demanded of the other boy. “What if Marcus found out?” he asked, referring to my dad as he turned to me again.
“He already knows. He’s fine with it,” I lied.
Well, kind of. He knew of what he exasperatedly called “my obsession” with watching for Sadira to return.
He didn’t really approve, and he didn’t know I spoke to her with mouth-words or how much time I spent with her, but he was mostly just worried about me like any parent would be, I suspected.
But he simply shook his head and asked me if I was going to stare at the landwalkers again when I finished with my tasks each day.
Elias shrugged uncomfortably, his cheeks flushing immediately—probably remembering his reactions to the sirens he’d seen at the wintering waters.
“She’s not a siren,” he said, looking back toward the cove where they’d seen Sadira.
“Can we even bond to people who aren’t merrow?
I don’t know how that works. And Lorn’s not even of age yet.
I don’t know, Leo,” he repeated. He shrugged again, clearly not wanting to be put in the middle of it.
“But she was touching him,” Leo protested, either shocked or outraged, I couldn’t tell.
Maybe both. But yeah, my dad obviously didn’t know I’d let her touch me.
Her singular touch had soothed away every ounce of pain that speaking to her had caused me, sometimes even as soon as I felt it.
I was still amazed. Nothing that the sea witch had on his shelves worked that fast. But I couldn’t tell Leo that because then he would know that it hurt me to talk to her, and I couldn’t fault his reaction.
The way mermen bonded to our mates was a biological reaction meant to keep us with our offspring until their mothers were finished nursing, and just because I hadn’t reached the arbitrary age that my people had decided was appropriate for that bonding to occur didn’t mean it couldn’t happen.
Physical contact, we’d always been warned, accelerated that process.
But she’d only been healing my injured vocal cords… somehow. Surely that was harmless.
And we were still just children.
Leo clutched his spear tighter, clearly torn and wanting to argue with me about it some more, but I spotted the grouper trying to catch my attention again.
He was ‘dancing’ now, swimming quickly back and forth, obviously trying to direct my attention to the lunch he knew I would give him.
I’d created a monster. Now that he saw I had noticed him, he swam to the ledge beneath his rocks where his prey liked to hide, but he had grown too big to reach them.
“Give me your spear,” I said to Leo, realizing he’d still been talking and I’d ignored whatever he had just said. It was just as well. I held out my hand and waited.
He handed over the weapon without argument—finally—and followed me to the outcropping with Elias trailing behind him, which caused the grouper to shy away.
The big fish and I had become something like friends over the past year as it grew used to my coming and going through the jetty mouth when I brought my many trinkets for Sadira’s box in the hopes that she would return, but his familiarity with me didn’t extend to my companions.
I didn’t need to look under the rock ledge to feel the electrical impulses that the urchin it wanted was giving off, and the sensory receptors on my lips could taste it in the water anyway, but I peeked under the rock ledge he had indicated and spotted the urchin it wanted.
Stabbing it through with a quick thrust of the spear, I then dragged it free from its hiding place before sliding it carefully from the end of the spear and tossing it to the grouper.
Many fish near our homes had learned over time that we would share our catches with them, and it wasn’t uncommon for them to show us where food was hiding in the hopes that they could score a bite.
Groupers were particularly quick to grow comfortable with us.
“That fish is rotund,” Elias muttered as I returned the spear to Leo. “What have you been feeding it?”
“He is quite thick, isn’t he?” I admitted with a laugh. “Maybe, if I feed him enough, he will grow very fast and I can ride him into battle.”
“You should name him Chunk,” Elias suggested dryly. He’d been the one to name the giant snail sisters, Teeny and Tiny.
“Chunk is not a dignified name. Sir Chunk is much better,” I stated playfully, earning a full-bellied laugh and a shoulder shove from Elias.
“Are you guys done?” Leo cut in with a frown before we could start a full-blown wrestling match. “I swam all the way out here for a reason. Your dad said you’d help, Lorn. Come on,” he said. His frustration clearly showed as he began to swim away, expecting us to follow him.
“I did ask you what you needed when I swam up, Leo,” I reminded him with an admittedly exasperated tone as I swam to catch up, Elias trailing behind.
“I can’t get the algae bundles to float right!” he complained angrily as he swam.
“What do you mean, ‘You can’t get them to float right’?
” I stopped in frustrated confusion for a beat and then had to hurry to catch up again.
“You put an air bladder in the bundle and either it floats or it doesn’t.
If it doesn't, you add more air bladders.” I turned back to Elias.
“Why couldn’t you help him with this?” If they were making this up as an excuse to get me away from Sadira I was going to be irate.
“He didn’t tell me what he needed!” Elias practically shouted, which was uncharacteristic for him. “He just said he was looking for you!”
“I’m going to hold both your gills shut,” I grumbled.
This wasn’t a difficult task. I’d spent all morning reinforcing the spiked fencing we used to keep the giant snails inside their quarry home after Bubbles—who I’d now nicknamed Bubbles the Destroyer—had managed to push down several lengths of fencing, all while fending off curious snail tentacles because they wanted to touch everything I did with their feelers.
That was a difficult job, which was why they made me do it, since I was the oldest of our shoal’s children.
Gathering algae was so easy it had always been assigned to the merlings until the kelpie hurt Marlen last year.
It hadn’t been reassigned to Leo because it was hard.
“See? Look!” Leo said with sharp frustration, interrupting my thoughts. “It floats too much!” His spines bristled angrily as he gestured wildly at a bundle of algae that bobbed at the surface, its tether dangling below it uselessly.
“So put less air bladders in it,” I said, the ‘you goober’ at the end being unspoken, but my clipped notes made it clear it belonged there.
“There’s only one air bladder in it!” he shouted, throwing his hands up in the water, spear and all.
“Then you put a weight in it,” Elias responded with a sigh. “How has he not been tasked with this before?” he asked me.
“What weight!?” Leo shouted in response.
“Ocean’s depths,” Elias muttered, throwing his head back in annoyance. “I’ll show him where they are, Lorn. Sorry about coming to get you.”
I sighed and let Elias deal with Leo’s frustrated shouting. Sometimes I suspected he pretended like he didn’t know how to do things just so he could get out of doing them. This was probably his way of protesting being assigned merling work.
A roundish bit of sea glass on the ocean floor caught my attention, and I reached to pick it up before I swam away.
It was just the clear kind, not the purple that Sadira loved so much, but I would still take it to her just in case.
It had taken all winter for me to find the bits of purple sea glass that she said were her favorite ones, and now it was simply a habit to watch for them wherever I went.
I took it and headed straight for her heavy box, my frustration with my companions already dismissed and my heart feeling lighter than it had in months. She was home.