Chapter 9
Lorn
Sadira was about as adept in the water as I was on land.
We spent much of our time together in the margin between our worlds—the frothy surf, or the very shallow cove, sometimes on the rocks or sandy beach right on the edge of the water.
But my world could be fatal to her much more quickly than her world would be for me.
Even the deeper parts of the cove where she couldn’t touch bottom made me nervous for her when we played together in the water, and now she wanted me to take her to another beach that entailed passing through the crosscurrent outside the mouth of the jetty.
There was a short period a few times a day when the chaotic dance of the many tides caused by our two moons made the current wash back the other direction.
She might be able to swim across it herself when that happened, but I couldn’t predict the timing accurately and it wasn’t worth the risk.
I decided it would be safest for me to simply hold on to her and brute-force our way through the powerful currents to get to the other beach.
When I approached her cove, I usually swam along the bottom to get under the current, since the water was calmer there, but I knew she could never hold her breath that long.
I’d swum through the crosscurrent a few times before.
Just never while trying to keep another person afloat.
The waves in Sadira’s cove were gentle, and she was already waiting for me when I arrived, just finishing eating the strangely sweet, crunchy apples she often used to break her fast. The soft, sunshine yellow of her tightly fitted outfit she called her “swimming suit” always set off the dark color of her bare arms and legs so beautifully.
She abandoned the last of her fruit to the loud gulls that hovered nearby and splashed out into the water with a smile on her face.
The warmer water was much more inviting to her now that the summer had passed its zenith.
“You said you’d take me swimming,” she said happily as she joined me, both a reminder and an accusation, as far as I could tell. As if I could have forgotten.
I rolled my eyes at her but couldn’t help the grin that spread across my face in response.
Giving her a single nod in affirmation, I motioned her farther out into the water with me and then watched her slowly paddle along beside me, amused by her excitement to do something I did every day: swim.
We swam alongside each other in the quiet cove—or at least as quiet as the rolling waves and squabbling gulls can be—until I knew she couldn’t touch the bottom any longer.
The currents didn’t start until beyond the jetty, but my nerves still made me go in front of her to make sure it wasn’t too strong yet.
I stopped her at the end of the rocks before she reached the rougher waters.
As we paused before crossing, I realized my heart was already racing just thinking about taking her out into the crosscurrent.
I would never let anything bad happen to her, but even the mere chance of it made me desperately uneasy, so I motioned for her hand.
At first, I took it in my own, before changing my mind and gripping her wrist while gently tugging her closer to me.
I didn’t want to risk her grip not being strong enough to hold on to me.
Her expression told me she was nervous, too, but at least her focus was on the swiftly moving water and not my grip on her.
She wasn’t afraid of me. I released the water from my gills and filled my lungs with the hot, dry air that would allow me to speak the mouth-words she could understand.
I needed to make something very clear before we continued.
“Sadira,” I said, wanting her full attention.
The pain of speaking made me choke as my throat convulsed, but her attention had snapped to me the moment I spoke and her hand was on my throat in an instant.
The familiar warm sensation swept down my vocal cords and wiped away the worst of the pain.
I took a deep breath in relief, grateful for whatever magic she contained that allowed me to communicate like this with her.
Resting my palm on the back of her hand to keep it against my throat and holding her other wrist carefully in my other hand, I studied her apprehensive expression before continuing.
“No alone,” I said with emphasis, unsure how to phrase exactly what I meant to say in her language.
I removed my hand from the one she kept on my neck and pointed to the current outside of the jetty to make myself clearer.
The waves on the surface looked deceptively calm, like all the others along the shore here, but beneath the surface, the currents were strong enough to pull her out into the open ocean in a blink.
“No swim alone,” I tried again, pointing as I spoke.
The last thing I wanted was for her to gain some confidence in the water with me today and end up pulled underwater without me nearby to help.
Her magic flowed into my throat as her gaze darted across my face, disquiet and concern written across her wide blue eyes and delicate features.
Her cheeks and tiny, turned-up nose had a smattering of adorable freckles after all the time we’d spent in the sun this summer.
Had I thought the flatness of her teeth strange?
She was pretty, I decided, just as she nodded at me and whispered, “Okay, I won’t. ” She understood.
I turned and led her out into the current, and it jerked her away from me immediately, my tight grip on her wrist the only thing that kept us together.
Quickly pulling her to my side, I held her close and wrapped my arm around her so that the flow could not pull her away again.
She wrapped her arms around my shoulders and neck, clutching at me more tightly than the octopus that had once attacked me in my youth.
Her skin was so much softer and thinner than mine, I realized as I held her like this.
It was no wonder the colder water was so much more objectionable to her.
Even having her touch my throat with her fingertips was technically forbidden, or at least incredibly frowned upon, because mermen bonded to our mates so much more quickly with physical contact.
Having her pressed against me like this was a far worse infraction, and yet when I pulled back just enough to check her expression, she tightened her arms and clutched me harder.
There was fear in her eyes, and I couldn’t find it in me to object.
I adjusted my grip so that she was more secure and then turned our bodies to point us on a diagonal path into the current and pumped my tail.
“Safe,” I told her gently, before we were even free of the current, patting her back to comfort her.
I would never let anything happen to her.
But Sadira’s muscles didn’t relax until we finally made it to the calmer waters of the bay, and when she tried to release her grip she had a hard time letting go.
“Where are we?” she asked breathlessly, shaking out her arm muscles when I delivered her to the tidal flats where the knife-clams lived.
I didn’t know how to answer her question—we were here—but she didn’t seem to expect an answer as she stared at the unique beach in awe.
The silty beach stretched on and on from the edge of the water at low tide, and the smell of the ocean was especially strong here, with thick, rope-like kelp washed up in small piles all over the flats.
Little ripples decorated the surface of the sand just like miniature ocean waves, and tiny, long-legged shorebirds raced to and fro as the waves rolled in.
I’d only seen landwalkers here digging for clams on rare occasions, and my people only harvested on the flats during the highest tides.
“It goes on forever,” Sadira breathed, and it really did look that way with the low reeds blurring the line where the wet, silty flats turned into firmer ground.
“Where are the clams?” she asked, immediately refocusing on the task at hand as usual.
She turned to look at me as she pulled herself from the waves with her pale, wet hair sticking to her shoulders and back.
I smiled at her and pointed toward her feet.
She frowned at me. “Do I just start digging randomly?” She dropped to her knees and began digging into the sand with her hands.
I laughed and swatted at her hands. That was a good way to get a bristle worm embedded in her fingers.
Or worse, if she actually managed to find one of the sharp-edged clams. Scanning the sand around us, I found one of the telltale divots in the sediment that showed where a knife-clam had dug in.
I scooted closer to be able to show her the circular mark in the sand but stopped her once again from digging with her hands.
These particular clams had such a sharp, cutting edge on them that they could slice you to the bone before you even realized what had happened.
It was something many merlings—myself included—had unfortunately learned the hard way.
“Sharp,” I told her emphatically. “Bleed.”
Every time I spoke now, she reached out to deliver magic into me without hesitation. I tried to keep my speech to a minimum because her magic was a gift, and I could tell that giving it up caused her to tire. But speaking also hurt, even if that pain was quickly removed.
“What?” she asked with a laugh. “You said we were going to dig for them! What if I use a stick? Or a shell?” Her excitement was palpable and so amusing.
I pointed out a decently sized conch shell lying farther up the beach, clearly empty from the battered state of it.
She ran to collect it for us and turned it over in her hands to study it as she returned.
Her next errand was going to be a little more complicated.
I held up two fingers, and the “game of charades” as she called it, began.
“Two things,” she said, dropping to her knees next to where I lay in the surf, our game now familiar and comfortable.
I nodded and pointed to the tide pools farther up the beach and then made a scooping motion in the ocean water with the conch before handing it back to her.
“You want water from that pool?”
I nodded in affirmation.
“Because… that water is different than this water?” she asked with mildly entertained sarcasm.
I tried to hide my grin at her tone, nodded again, and then held up my two fingers a second time.
“Second thing,” she said.
I gestured to the clumps of reeds that dotted the far side of the beach, beyond the tide pools, and held up some of my fingers before pretending to ‘pluck’ one.
“You want the plant?”
Close enough.
“Got it.” She took off at a jog and quickly scooped some water from the isolated pool but then spilled it when she tried to set the conch down to collect the reed stem.
There was a considerable amount of growling and fussing and angry shouting as she tried to pull the entire plant up by its very deep and well-connected roots, and I had my face in my hands to try to hide my laughter by the time she finally broke off one of the stems and refilled her shell from the pool.
“That was difficult!” she grumped as she stomped back with her items, which only served to make me lose myself to laughter completely.
Reeds were tenacious plants, growing from thick rhizomes that joined whole networks of their clumping stems together.
Watching her attack the stubborn plant with all the effectiveness of a furious seahorse was a memory that would stay with me for a long time.
I did try to make myself look properly contrite as she returned, but achieving proper contrition while laughing uncontrollably was difficult.
When we gather reed stems, we simply slice through the base of the one with a claw, and she didn’t have any.
But it never crossed my mind that she might try to pull up the entire plant.
My landwalker was so helpless that even an ornery shore plant had nearly bested her.
It hadn’t though. She had returned with a single stem, victorious. I tried so hard to fight back my grin.
After huffily handing me the conch and her hard-won stem, she threw herself down onto the sand in a pique, fully prepared to pout about it for several more minutes.
I patted the back of her hand to console her and finally managed to gain control of my mirth.
She refused to remove her glare from the reed stem I held in my claws, so I decided to show her what to do with it.
After stripping the leaves away and trimming it to an appropriate length, I dipped the bottom of the hollow reed into the water she’d brought.
I placed my finger over the top of the stem to create a vacuum and then shoved the stem deep into the sand where the knife-clam was hiding.
Tides only reached those far pools when the moons aligned to pull the water all the way across the flats, which didn’t happen every day, so the water there had time to evaporate.
This created pools of higher salinity than the ocean water it originally came from.
Removing my finger from the top of the stem released the excess salt into the burrow, and after a few seconds of waiting, the clam pushed up to the surface, eager to escape the irritating fluid.
Her excited exclamation was too fast for me to follow, but it was clear that all was forgiven. I opened and cleaned the first clam for her while she scuttled about on the beach like a delighted little sand crab, searching for more divots like the one I’d shown her.
It was hard to tell how many we collected, because we ate them as fast as we found them, and their empty shells washed away beneath the surface of the water.
But eventually, the sun rose high enough to feel uncomfortable on my skin and the brightness began to make my head throb.
I delivered her back through the current with a full tummy and a smile on her face and a promise to meet her at our secret beach tomorrow.
I stopped to give Sir Chunk a pat and toss him a treat on my way home, wondering what he’d thought of me passing over his home carrying a landwalker in my arms. Thankfully, he was the only one around to notice.