Chapter 8
Sadira
On the mornings that I didn’t leave the cottage soon enough to escape my parent’s notice, my mother would arrange for a tutor to come and give me private lessons.
This meant I made sure to be outside early.
Every morning, I slipped through the kitchen and Cook would tut at me before quietly handing me a packed breakfast wrapped in cloth and tied in a careful knot—after making sure no one else was around to see.
With one finger pressed to her lips in a shush, she shooed me out the kitchen door to go play.
If I were ever caught with my contraband picnic-breakfast I would have to lie and say it was stolen.
I still missed Nan. She’d always eaten her breakfasts with me in my rooms, but even alone I was still freer outside the house than in.
Since it wasn’t time to meet Lorn yet, I usually spent the early mornings exploring the little deer trails I found through the trees and nibbling on my breakfast biscuits and apples while seeing where they went.
One trail quickly became my favorite. It led to an area along the shoreline that I’d never been to before and ended on a tiny sandy beach that was flanked by large rock formations on each side.
They gave the little inlet a closed-in, cozy feeling.
One rock formation had a smooth ledge at the bottom that I could sit on with my drawing pad and I’d sketch pictures of the little family of sea otters that sometimes played in the water nearby, and the other rock had a large overhang that waves had washed the sand out from underneath that made a small cave with a soft sand bottom.
The waves were quieter here and the air felt damp and cool without the wind, set back into the rocks as it was.
I liked the little spot so much that when I found Lorn again, I drew a map of the shoreline for him with a stick in the sand so that he could find it, and we met up there later with a picnic lunch.
I stepped out onto the rocky ledge with another meal graciously provided by Cook and spread the cloth neatly on the flat rock to set out my sandwich of thinly sliced meat and cheese on dense bread, with a dish of deep purple grapes.
Lorn was very happy with how shaded the little hidden beach was when he arrived, because the tall rocks on the sides blocked out the sun, and I noticed he didn’t have to squint as much here when he was above the water.
He swam right up to the ledge and set down a large, empty oyster half-shell, before dropping a handful of black shells—clams, I thought—into the oyster ‘bowl’, and then, with a straight face, slapped down a long cylindrical piece of olive-brown kelp that tapered at the end.
It looked just like the long whips people would use to drive the drakes and the wyverns that pulled their carts in the city.
I blinked at the items he’d brought, which was often my reaction when he hauled up his random bits and bobs, until I realized… “Is that your lunch?”
The way his wide grin popped across his face told me he’d been holding it back, and he laughed hard enough to show his dagger teeth as he picked up the kelp and flopped it back and forth.
He finally nodded at me while fighting to regain his composure, using a claw to slice through the kelp.
It popped open with a quiet ‘donk’ sound that made us both laugh.
The inside was hollow, and he gave it a perfunctory inspection before slicing it into thin rings and placing each one into his mouth as he sliced it off.
They sounded crunchy. He gave me a cheeky grin while he chewed, and I realized I was staring at him as he ate.
“Sorry,” I said with another laugh, picking up my sandwich. I’d never really considered what a merman might eat day-to-day.
He sliced off another ring of seaweed and held it out to me, letting it dangle from the tip of his claw, so I passed my sandwich to my other hand and gently took it from him.
“You just… you eat it just like this? You don’t cook it?” I asked, which was a silly question, because I’d just watched him do exactly that. He didn’t even bother to nod at me, simply raised an eyebrow instead.
“Right,” I said, taking a nibble of the plant so as not to offend him. It was bold and briny with a slightly sour note, and the texture was crisp and crunchy. It was interesting! I put the rest of the ring in my mouth and chewed, and he nodded approvingly.
Lorn released the water from his gills and took in air before asking, “What is cook?”
I was ready with a trickle of my fledgling healing magic, reaching out to touch his neck without a second thought now, the prickle of heat leaving my arm and through my fingers.
He leaned into my touch as if this interaction between us had always been a part of our routine, swallowing convulsively to soothe his aching throat before taking another bite of kelp.
“Oh,” I responded to his question. Yeah, I guess he didn’t cook his food.
So then I had to explain that we heat our food over fire—which he still seemed to have a difficult time understanding the concept of—to make it hot and make it safe to eat.
He stared at me skeptically while crunching on his briny kelp rings, likely trying to decide if I were teasing him by making something up again. I’d only done that a few times.
In the spirit of reciprocation, I tore off the corner of my bread and passed it to him, and he took it with an even more doubtful expression than I had when taking the seaweed.
I laughed. “It’s just bread,” I reassured him, but he squinted at me from the corner of his eye and set his seaweed ‘tube’ down to poke at the bread with his other hand.
“You eat it like this,” I explained, and took a bite of my sandwich, chewing and swallowing so he could see it was like any other food.
He still seemed dubious but tapped it against his lower lip and then his tongue, scrunching his features like it was terrible. He actually wiped his tongue off with the back of his hand and then made a face like I’d tricked him, which made me laugh even harder.
“It’s bread!” I said again. “We eat it at almost every meal. You don’t like bread?” I took another bite to show him I wasn’t tricking him.
Lorn watched me out of the corner of his eye as he then took the bread and dunked it in the ocean, all while maintaining eye contact as he popped the whole bite into his mouth and chewed with a grimace.
A huge grin spread across his face as I howled about how of course it was gross now, since he’d ruined it by soaking it in seawater.
I got to hear a real laugh from him this time, with actual air in his lungs, and then he simply said, “Too dry,” before taking another grinning bite of his kelp.
I was so dazzled by the sound of his laughter and the feel of his throat skin moving under my fingers as he laughed when I touched him again that I forgot to eat again until he offered me one of his clams. The shell was shiny and black with smooth ridges along the length of it, but I didn’t know how to open it.
He held his hand out for me to return it and then pressed a claw into the seam of the shell, cracking it open with a quick, practiced twist of his wrist, barely glancing at it as if he did it every day.
I picked up one myself to see if I could do what he had done, but I had no clue how he’d managed to do that.
He gave me the opened clam, so I returned his closed one.
I stared at the little pink muscle on the half shell, a little afraid of it.
I’d eaten lots of cooked clams in chowders and steamed dishes, but never raw.
He was watching me though, and held up a newly opened clam of his own, tapped his shell against mine the way the grownups sometimes do with their glasses when they propose a toast, and then lifted his shell to his lips and poured its contents into his mouth as though drinking from a cup.
I mimicked his motion, pouring the clam into my mouth, and tried not to think about the texture too much.
It was very different from a cooked one, both the taste and the texture.
It carried the same briny punch that the kelp had, but there was a sweetness too, with a hint of a fishy aftertaste.
The texture was firmer than its cooked version, which was the opposite of what I had expected.
“I like it,” I said, sounding as surprised as I felt, and he passed me another one.
He didn’t want any more of my bread though, and when I offered, he dodged away from it with another laugh and made a ‘yuck’ face.
I smiled at him, already plotting what else I could ‘trick’ him into eating.
But then I thought better of it, knowing he could probably prank me far worse.
Picnic lunches became a regular occurrence for us, sharing food and learning about how the other ate without many words.
He brought all kinds of different foods with him, from fish to tiny octopuses to different kinds of seaweed and algae—always raw and fresh.
But no matter what he brought, he tried to bring me a few of the little black clams I’d decided tasted like heaven.
He opened them dutifully with his long claws, but one day I decided I was going to try to open them myself.
Since I did not come so equipped, I resorted to smashing them open with rocks, causing Lorn to laugh so uproariously that he choked on seawater and then quickly took the rest of the clams from me to slice open himself.
I shared my food with him too, noticing he was intrigued by the fresh fruit, with a preference for the very tart or sour ones.
All breads and baked goods were an immediate no.
Vegetables were tolerable if they were thoroughly doused in seawater first—Lorn liked his salt.
I tried to sneak him some raw meat one day, but Cook was having none of it and cooked meats only got a lukewarm reaction from him.
Overall he was very brave and tried almost everything I brought him—as long as it wasn’t bread.
I’d never met anyone who didn’t have at least a little bit of a sweet tooth, but unless it was the very mild sweetness found in fish meat or clams, he was entirely uninterested.
Cookies may as well have been garbage. Ice cream?
Poison. He stared in abject horror one day as I laughingly licked the remaining ice cream from my spoon, far more interested in the spoon itself than the food it carried.
One day he brought a very thin, flat clam that I enjoyed almost as much as the black ones, and he tried to explain to me that unlike the black ones, these were clams I could find on the shore and he could show me how.
But even with miming and the few words he could speak, I couldn’t understand the map that he drew in the sand of our hidden beach.
I really wanted to find clams with him, because it seemed just like a real treasure hunt, but for food.
So after thinking about it for a moment, he told me he would take me swimming tomorrow.