Fealltair
I hope you’re grateful for this, Glen said.
I bowed at the waist and dipped my palm forward. Yes, very.
I had to call in a favour with half a dozen rivers to find a corridor.
As I said, grateful. We were speaking in movement, not because either of us felt especially loyal to our first language that day, but because the wind and rain would have drowned out our words.
When we reached the Sands of Evie, I let panic get the better of me and seized Glen by the shoulder, putting a finger to my lips. You swore them to secrecy?
He arched an eyebrow, then pushed my hand off. What do you take me for? Of course I did.
Orkney was a long way from London, but only a corridor away for any magical being curious enough to follow us if they heard even the faintest rumour on the wind of our meeting with Fealltair.
He was already waiting for us on the beach, so immovable against the rough weather that he might as well have been a sea stack.
As we approached, his huge dark eyes alighted on me; the only thing that could upstage them was his formidable moustache.
Had he not been the only person around for miles, we might easily have mistaken him for an ordinary mortal man in a raincoat the colour of toffee.
I did not want to cause offence by addressing him as Fealltair, the only name his former Selkie clan used for him, if they deigned to speak of him at all. But when I tried to gesture that I wished to learn his chosen name, he shook his head and raised a large, webbed hand.
‘My fluency’s not what it was,’ he shouted over the wind and crashing waves. ‘Lost most of it when I broke with that part of myself.’
‘That is fine by us,’ Glen shouted back, encouraging me to sit beside the former Selkie. I was glad he remembered the appropriate etiquette – even if they are in exile, one must never obstruct a Selkie’s view of the sea.
‘What is your name, friend of the waves?’ I asked, grimacing as wet sand caught on my eyelashes. I could have ordered the wind to leave us be, but if I wanted this meeting kept secret, it was best not to annoy it.
‘Sam.’ He smiled, bringing out the deep lines in his brown face. ‘So, what on earth brings the Prince of the Silver Realm to the far reaches of our glittering isles?’
I fleetingly registered the icy touch of a wave as it broke close to us. He looked so at ease that I could only assume he had not lost the insulation of his seal side entirely. ‘I have a… that is, I wanted to ask… I hoped you might—’
‘That I might have some advice about forsaking everything for true love?’
‘I would not put it like that.’
The wind whistled above our heads, as if issuing a challenge. ‘Then how would you put it, your grace?’
The more he turned towards me, the less sure I felt about venturing here. His eyes still had the shine of a seal’s, framed by dark, pronounced circles. His face was round, yet hollow, like a half-eaten apple left in the open.
‘You broke with your glamour for someone you loved,’ I said.
Sam nodded, looking neither sad nor especially happy. ‘Someone I love to this day. We have been together on Orkney for two years now.’
‘Where is he?’ Glen asked, looking around the deserted beach as if there was anywhere for a mortal to eavesdrop.
I shared his visible regret that we had not made it a condition of the meeting that Sam’s lover also be present.
It would have been helpful to know how such a drastic choice affected both partners.
‘At home with the dogs. He knows I’ve gone out, but not where.’ As if reading the question in my expression, he added, ‘He doesn’t know about my past.’
What a thing to say. The thought that one’s eternal present could be swept neatly into a cupboard named “the past” was enough to make me dizzy.
But he was also telling me that his partner, the most important person in his world, did not know this cupboard even existed.
I had not been prepared for that. I had taken it for granted that this radical pariah would advise me on how to share my secret with Trix, completely, unconditionally, at last.
‘How can that be?’ Glen asked. He shuffled across the sand and pulled his hood tighter over his head. ‘You mean he never witnessed you transform? Never saw you emerge or dive?’
‘He thinks this is a quirk of DNA, and these’ – Sam pointed to his webbed fingers, then his eyes – ‘I was careful never to let him see me when I didn’t want him to.’ He turned his attention back to me. ‘I presume you are taking your own measures.’
‘I never said I was in the same predicament as—’
‘Prince Meadowfrost. You are not meeting with me out of scientific curiosity,’ Sam said with an indulgent smile. ‘I know that desperate look in your eyes. I felt it many times myself. The pull of two worlds. Obligation and aspiration. Past and future. Regret and hope.’
‘But why keep it secret even now? Surely your kin – your former kin – know who he is. The man for whom you renounced everything.’
‘Of course they know. But they’re no longer responsible for me. What I do or who I do it with is beyond their interests. No one’s bothered about a lowly servant-class Selkie anyway… ah. Of course. It would be even trickier for you. You have my sympathy, Prince.’
‘Please stop calling me that. I did not choose the title. I did not choose any of this.’ I rubbed my temples under my hood.
‘No one chooses to fall in love, just as no one chooses to fall when they’re walking.
It simply happens, and by the time you’ve realised, it’s too late to do anything.
You’ve just got to try and land as safely, and comfortably, as possible.
’ Sam raised his hand before I could interject.
‘I don’t know the particulars of your situation, and it’s probably for the best that I don’t.
The Silver nobility aren’t exactly renowned for their forgiveness, or their hospitality to outsiders. ’
‘But your advice, if we’re to understand it,’ said Glen, ‘is that the mortal can never know.’
‘I speak only for myself. Mortals this far north in the isles are much more attuned to the realm of things unseen than folks on the mainland. If I told him who I am… rather, who I used to be, he might have reason to fear me where he had none before. Who knows what the rest of the community would do. Chase me back into the sea, probably.’ Sam rotated his legs out from under him and stretched them, crossed at the ankle like the tail he once had.
‘No, that is a secret I intend to take to my grave. If I have one. That’s still something of a wait-and-see. ’
‘What do you mean?’ I blinked away the rain and grit, trying not to be frightened of my own words. ‘I thought that when you broke with your glamour, you also broke with your immortality. That you are no longer tied to eternity.’
The gesture for “mortal” is a palm rapidly opening and closing, then shutting into a tight fist. A heart beating until, one day, it does not.
‘There are no guarantees on that front,’ Sam said with a shrug. ‘I broke with my glamour in full readiness to break with eternity too, but where have all those spare years gone? Even eternity must go somewhere, once it’s given up.’
‘Gone?’ Glen repeated. ‘How can eternity “go” anywhere?’
‘My spellcasting was always basic at best, but you’d be surprised how easy it is, with enough resolve, to scoop up the years you want to gift your beloved’ – he took up a handful of wet sand and slowly let the wind take it from him – ‘and make it so that they live a long life. I gave Duncan fifty years of good health to see him through. If I got the balance right, we will both live to eighty, and live well. And he need never put it down to anything but random good luck.’
‘I could gift my years to her?’ I said, looking over my shoulder as if Trix might be there. My fear, of watching her suffer in old age while I never changed, seemed to drift away.
I was glad that we had met Sam by the sea. There was more space for my thoughts to breathe here than I could ever have in the Silver Realm.
‘I am not the architect of the universe,’ he said.
‘I know little more than you do. All I can tell you is what I went through. When I broke with my glamour, it was brutal, I cannot lie about that. I can’t sing the way I used to.
I feel pain the way mortals do, in my bones and joints and tissues, all the places I never had to think about in my old form. ’
I tried to picture a long thread unspooling, destined to go on forever, until a blade cuts through. Suddenly, it is a finite thing.
‘I think about it sometimes, when I can’t sleep,’ Sam continued. ‘I only hope that if there was energy to spare when I broke with my glamour, it went somewhere useful, like a child who was otherwise on the verge of death. Or to the lone survivor of a disaster. A small, anonymous miracle.’
‘I hope that for you, too.’
‘Well, we’re only two years in.’ Sam pointed to his lined face and shrugged. ‘Meet with me again a decade from now, and we’ll see if I’m ageing as a mortal should.’
There was no silence to be had in weather like this, but the meeting had clearly come to its conclusion. Glen tentatively rose, brushing sand off his knees. But – although I was afraid to learn the answer – I had one more question.
‘Was it the right decision?’
Sam stared out at the horizon for so long that I wondered if he had simply tired of our presence. Then, he took a great lungful of sea air and sighed.
‘I don’t know. Even we—’ He caught himself and laughed sharply. ‘Even magical beings cannot live two lives at the same time. All I know is that a life without Duncan, without the sunlight he casts wherever he goes, would be unbearable.’ He glanced at me. ‘That should help you decide.’
I nodded, my words lost to the wind.
‘Thank you for your time, and discretion.’ Glen nudged me to stand. ‘Your payment—’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Sam said. ‘I’m not tied to that economy anymore, remember? Please keep your blessings and enchanted knick-knacks for another day. I’ve no need of them.’
‘Very well.’
‘What is your name?’
I waited for Glen to answer, before noticing that the question was directed at me.
Sam cast an arm behind him, taking in Orkney and everything south of it. Your name out here. His first language had not left him completely.
‘Aleksander.’
He smiled and, at last, stood. He lacked the grace I would expect from a Selkie; perhaps that had been another part of the trade-off when he broke with his glamour.
What would Duncan have made of that? If…
when… if I broke with mine, would I lose the ease with which I leapt and spun? Would I still be able to dance?
‘It is not an easy decision,’ Sam acknowledged, reading my face. He shook my hand, his skin shiny with rain, yet as warm as if he’d been sitting in front of a hearth. ‘There is no map that can tell you which path to take, Aleksander. Only luck, and stubbornness. Maybe a little foolishness, too.’