Selkie, p.8
Selkie, page 8
Seeing Flora again, even in such a tempestuous state, felt as if a splinter had been drawn out from beneath Quinn’s skin. She came a little closer still, the waves pushing her toward one of the docked boats. She could make a noise to get Flora’s attention so she wouldn’t startle her.
What would Quinn do if Flora ran from her like the keeper had?
The thought didn’t fill Quinn with dread so much as an anticipated disappointment. Her daughter was clever, and Oliver seemed to have realized the truth about Quinn with just a few clues, so she had to believe Flora would know her. If she saw Quinn and decided to run, Quinn could not blame her.
Still, she wanted to give Flora the chance to decide. But what would she do if Flora didn’t run? Quinn was no good to her daughter as a seal, not unless Flora was able to become one as well. On the shore, the rain from Quinn’s storm soaked Flora’s dress until it clung to her like a second skin.
A piece of the selkie, for a pelt for their love. Her mother’s voice echoed through Quinn’s head like thunder rumbling in the distance. A part of a story she had once told Quinn, forgotten until just now.
A piece of the selkie, Quinn thought. How much of herself would she have to give for Flora to be able to make a choice?
But even as the faded memory of her mother’s story came together, Quinn heard a sharp intake of breath above her. Twisting in the water, Quinn looked around wildly and felt a heavy stone drop in her stomach. She had lingered, indecisive, for too long. The tide had pushed her right up next to Owen’s boat, and Owen himself was leaning over the edge and staring straight at her.
He recognized her. Quinn was frozen, her instinct stalling out at the sight of the man who had kept her trapped for so long. Owen had dark circles under his eyes, and his shirt was as unkempt as Flora’s dress, but the startled look on his face hardened in a split second. Quinn remembered that Owen had kept her trapped on land long after he realized she had proven a useless wife and a regretful mother because he had feared what she would do to him if she ever returned to the water. How he feared that in this moment, Quinn could drown him.
The sky rumbled above Owen, and his face paled. Because he knew there was more to fear about Quinn than her teeth. He was not merely afraid of what she could physically do to cause him harm; he was afraid of what her anger could summon. And Quinn had summoned this storm.
She had realized her influence over the weather a short time after Owen had stolen her pelt. Fraught emotions could whip up a battering rainstorm like the one that had swept over the docks in a matter of moments. Quinn had never known she held this power until she came to live on land, perhaps because she had never felt so frightened and alone, so full of terrifying emotions, before she had come onshore. The first few storms that surged over the sea and coincided with her breakdowns in frustration seemed to be nothing more than chance. But when it continued to happen, Quinn started to pay attention. She would cry and watch as a cloud abruptly appeared in the sky and rain dropped over the town. She would feel rage, then instantaneously track a swirling storm sweep in from the ocean, nearly sinking the boats that had set out in fair weather.
Quinn had thought she was fighting on land alone, but the ocean listened, answering her call.
Owen had realized what she was capable of, too, though it had taken a little longer. She didn’t need to say anything. He would come home after escaping sudden storms to find her raging in the house often enough to put the pieces together. He had looked at her with fear in his eyes.
When Quinn had given birth to Flora, a massive storm had blown over the town and nearly carried off every boat with it.
The storm that was currently assaulting the town had fed off of Quinn’s anger at the wives and her own guilt over abandoning her children. Owen’s appearance above her deepened that well of emotion, and he instantly recognized what she had done. He disappeared into the belly of the boat for one moment and then quickly reappeared, this time hefting a long fishing spear.
The sight of the spear sent an electric shock through Quinn’s body, and she flipped in the water and dove, her tail making a frothing wave in her rush.
Quinn had regained her speed, but Owen had spent more than half his life on the water with his eyes on his prey. There was a splash above her and Quinn gasped when she felt her tail pierced by the starburst point of the spear. The line pulled tight, and Quinn struggled like mad as she was pulled back toward Owen’s boat. Small clouds of red blood bloomed from the wound as she twisted.
Quinn had lost her breath when the spear pierced her and felt herself weakening against Owen’s strength. Quinn let a jerking tug bring her back to the surface and sucked in a breath, her eyes rolling as she tried to see if any other fishermen had come to Owen’s aid. But it was still just Owen, yanking on the rope, his jaw set. He hadn’t called out for help.
Was he still trying to keep Quinn’s true form a secret? How was he going to explain why he had speared and captured a seal, and what was he even going to do with her once he got her out of the water? Owen couldn’t make her take off her pelt. Only she could remove it.
Quinn was panting as she struggled, but her mind started to clear of the panic that had overcome her when she first saw Owen. She tensed her body and whipped around like a spinning dolphin. The movement made the spear tip tear into her tail fin, but she bit back a bark of pain and kept going until she felt the spear begin to slip out of the wound.
Owen had stopped trying to reel her in and was holding on to the rope with everything he had. She wouldn’t let him trap her again.
Quinn summoned every ounce of strength she had worked to regain in the past weeks and dove down, as if she would go straight through the ocean floor. With a great snap, the metal spear tip broke off from the wooden handle. The point was still lodged in Quinn’s tail, but she darted away as quickly as she could, trailing blood behind her.
When she was a dozen meters from the docks, Quinn relented to her straining lungs and surfaced for a gasp of air. She looked over her shoulder to see if Owen had unmoored his boat to chase her down, but it was still tied to the dock. He was in the same spot at the edge of his boat, holding the useless rope in his hands and staring out at the water.
Past Owen’s boat, Quinn could also see that Flora was rooted to the spot on the beach and was staring out into the ocean. She would have seen everything from where she stood. She would have seen Quinn, and seen Owen spear her, and seen their struggle.
Well, Quinn thought with grim satisfaction, let him explain that to her.
If Owen hadn’t said anything about Quinn being a selkie to their children yet, he didn’t have much of a choice now. Flora would ask questions. She would tell Evie and Oliver what she had seen.
Owen and Flora watched the sea for a few more moments, rain soaking their clothes, and Quinn watched them back. Then, Flora must have said something, because Owen turned toward her and put his back to the water.
Knowing that Owen wasn’t going to try to chase her down, Quinn gave Flora and the beach one last fleeting look. Any hopes of approaching Flora were dashed, so she pushed her mother’s story from her mind and turned her attention to the spear tip still lodged in her tail. There was no way for her to pull it out while she was a seal. Trying to catch the hooked end on something would only make it worse. She would have to leave it in until she had human hands again.
Quinn caught her breath for one moment and then began swimming toward the island. She stayed right at the surface since her progress with the spear still embedded in her was so slow, and she worried about trying to dive with her injured tail. The rain pelted down, and she blinked against the onslaught. She passed one boat as she swam away from the town, but luckily the fishermen aboard were eager to make it to the dock and get out of the storm and were not scouring the water for her dark, round head. They passed right by each other without incident.
The keepers’ boat was long gone. Quinn couldn’t even see it on the darkening horizon.
The ragged skin surrounding the spear tip stung in the salt water. The muscles around her fin seized whenever she moved them, and Quinn could feel her energy fading fast as the adrenaline from Owen’s attack dried up.
Still, with kilometers of open water ahead and a town full of humans behind her, Quinn had no choice but to keep moving. Blinking through the rain and the sharp pain brought by every movement, Quinn swam slowly toward the island.
Chapter Six
THEN
QUINN WAS SEARCHING THROUGH Owen’s things when someone knocked at the front door. Sweaters and pants were gutted from the dresser she’d been digging through looking for her pelt, and she sat back on her heels at the noise. Owen wouldn’t have knocked. It was his house. But in the two months since he’d trapped Quinn on land and introduced her to the town as his wife, they had never had a visitor.
Leaving the mess as it was, Quinn stood and went to the door.
One of the fishermen’s wives stood on the step. Quinn had met a few of them when Owen brought her to the market, when she’d still been uncertain in the heavy human clothes and overwhelmed by the number of people flooding the town’s crowded center square. She remembered Owen introducing her as his wife and the women’s short, polite greetings, which she’d returned with blank stares. The wives’ faces had quickly closed off after that. Owen had pulled her away before they could say anything else.
She’d been to town a few more times since then, and each time she seemed to make her reputation worse and worse. A man had bumped into her, and she’d snarled at him. Two women had tried to chat with her at the produce stall, and she’d ignored them until they went away muttering things she couldn’t hear. An older couple had stopped her on the street to ask how she was finding married life, and she’d been honest. But her honesty hadn’t been what they wanted to hear.
Later, Owen had explained what expectations the town would have for her as his wife. He told the town that she was a woman from the small farming village he had grown up in, brought to him to be his wife when her parents could no longer support her. Her coarse manners were the fault of being raised in such an isolated community, and she would adapt to her wifely duties soon, or so Owen claimed. Quinn didn’t understand why she had to pretend to like the life she was trapped in, but she did begin to pick up on the human customs that got her through each interaction without ending in disaster.
That still didn’t explain why one of the fishermen’s wives was at her door.
“Hello,” the woman said after a long moment in which Quinn realized she should have offered a greeting.
“’Lo,” Quinn murmured. She did not invite the wife inside.
“I was wondering,” the woman said daintily, “if you’d like to join me and a few other wives in town for tea?”
“I would not,” Quinn told her.
The wife blinked, the weak smile on her face slipping at Quinn’s frankness. She wrestled it back up.
“Oh, come,” she said with a little laugh. “Surely a few chores could wait? We’ll have tea and some of Kate’s scones, and you can finally meet some of the other women in town.”
Quinn didn’t like tea. Quinn didn’t like the other wives. She didn’t want to ingrain herself into this town any more than she’d already been forced to, and she especially didn’t want to waste time she could be using to look for her pelt while Owen was away.
But her searches so far had turned up nothing, and as much as Quinn dreaded it, the odds of her being trapped on land with these humans for a significant amount of time looked ever more likely. Wouldn’t it be easier if she had a few friendly faces to rely on?
Quinn stepped forward, and the wife took a hurried pace back so that she was one step below Quinn on the stairs, looking up.
“I’ll come,” Quinn told her.
“Oh! Oh, good.” The wife smiled widely. “Dressed like that?”
Quinn frowned at her clothes, a short-sleeved dress and apron with the skirt tucked up so that she could walk freely. It was a warm day.
“Like this,” Quinn told her. She didn’t need a shawl when the weather was fine. The wife’s smile twitched, but she nodded and held out her elbow for Quinn. She had seen the women walking around town linked at the crook of the arm. She had even seen devoted husbands and wives walk in such a way, but it looked completely asinine to Quinn. Wasn’t it harder to walk weighed down by another?
But this was something the wife seemed to insist on. Quinn reluctantly put her arm through the loop and suppressed a grimace when the wife clamped down on her tightly.
They walked down the road to a house much larger and grander than Owen’s. The few people they passed on the street had odd expressions on their faces, but they didn’t call out to the pair.
The wife ushered Quinn into the house without knocking and showed her through dimly lit hallways until they entered a wide sitting room. A dozen or so other women were already there, and they all went quiet the moment Quinn arrived.
She froze in the doorway. A creeping feeling of alarm tugged at the back of her neck, the same feeling she’d have when a predator was circling the herd.
“Come sit,” an older woman told her. The wife who’d brought Quinn melted into the crowd.
She recognized a few of the women, though she didn’t know their names. Her first month on land, all she’d thought about was getting her pelt back. She hadn’t wanted to know the names of the humans that lived here.
Some of the women were openly staring at her. A few had their eyes on their cups, sitting stiffly amongst the others. How often did they gather like this?
“Sit!” the old woman commanded. Quinn frowned at her.
“No manners at all,” one of the wives whispered to another, though it carried easily across the room. “You’d think she was raised by animals.”
Skin prickling, Quinn walked slowly to the only open seat, which was isolated from the others by at least a meter on either side. She perched cautiously on the chair and attempted to mimic the way the other women were sitting, their legs tucked in and spines straight. There was no way she could know what to do to meet the humans’ expectations, but she had best try to blend in. They didn’t know what she was, and she wanted to keep it that way.
No one offered her tea.
“You have been Owen’s wife for nearly two months, and still we know nearly nothing about you,” the older woman began. “This is a small town. You are either a part of it, or a hindrance to it.”
Quinn’s heart sank. Her tentative hope in finding a friendly face among the wives was dashed as she looked around the room. She had not been invited to tea for the women to get to know her better. She had been invited to a confrontation meant to humiliate and temper her.
Even as she faced down what felt like every woman in town, Quinn’s fear morphed into indignation. She bared her teeth like the animal they expected her to be.
“I never wanted to be a part of this town,” Quinn spat.
A few wives gasped at her tone, others shaking their heads as if they’d known she was a lost cause all along.
“As Owen’s wife,” the old woman began, but Quinn let out a harsh laugh.
“I’d sooner be his wife than a fish would seek comfort from a shark.”
The old woman’s mouth was agape, and the wives behind her looked equally alarmed. One woman was looking at Quinn with eerie clarity, as if she’d recognized something in Quinn’s ire, but offered no help.
“Have you no shame?” a different wife asked Quinn.
“I’ve nothing at all,” Quinn told her honestly.
“You are wrong,” the old woman quavered. “You have beauty, for which is the only reason I could understand Owen seeking a wife in you, and you have cruelty, which you wield without care. You do not wish to be part of this town? Fine. We will ensure you never find a place in it.”
She turned from Quinn and faced the rest of the wives.
“Any who dare offer her kindness or help before she makes amends will receive the same treatment,” she warned them. The younger wives wilted under her gaze. A pair of the older ones were already whispering fervently to each other, seeming to relish Quinn’s humiliation. She recognized her neighbor near the back of the room, looking down on Quinn with disdain.
Quinn stood. She felt the rage building in her chest, lapping at the edges, and felt as though she were about to burst apart. The matriarch called out to her, but she couldn’t hear anything over the rushing in her ears as she left the house. The previously sunny summer sky had darkened with quick-moving clouds. A warm rain showered down. Quinn marched away from the house and was nearly at Owen’s door when she finally let her own tears mix with the rain on her face.
She had been foolish to hope for forgiveness from the humans. They were too selfish, too involved in their own assumptions about who Quinn was to see what she really needed. Quinn had to find her pelt and escape this town as soon as she could. Once she did, she hoped she never saw a human ever again.
Chapter Seven
NOW
QUINN FELT AS IF she had been swimming for hours, with each second marked by a twinge from her tail, when she finally spotted the lighthouse. The beacon had been lit and was swinging through the evening rain, flashing over Quinn like a spotlight.
As the island rose higher into the sky the closer she swam, Quinn grimaced at the thought of hauling herself onto the small, rocky ledge she had been sleeping in these past weeks. There was no room for her to move around and deal with the spear tip in the side of the cliff.
Quinn would have an easier time dragging herself up onto the beach. She’d seen for herself that the keepers rarely came down to the water, and it would be a relief to be up and away from the sea. Quinn headed toward the small, rocky beach where she had once slept with her herd.
