“You should be more careful,” he said.

  “Mind your own business,” Carys retorted. She heard the harshness to her own voice, the cold, rough cutting edge of the rocky seashore, but didn’t try to soften it. Eurion should already know something of the cruelty of the sea; just as Carys knew better than to love things that came out of the sea, Eurion ought to know better than to be trying to strike up a friendship with those who stayed too close to the seashore.

  Eurion’s brown eyes looked across at her reproachfully. “It is my business,” he said. “You didn’t have anyone to come back to before, so maybe you forgot to be careful. You should be more careful now. What will I do if you don’t come home?”

  “If I don’t come home, you must go to Enfys,” Carys said briefly. “Don’t stay here by the shore.”

  “Why shouldn’t I stay here? The cottage is such a long way from the shore, besides, and— What’s on the shore? What bit you?”

  “I was careless,” Carys said again. “There are rocks on the shore—rocks, and seals, and other animals. They’re not tame.”

  “If I came out on the rocks with you—”

  “You’re not to come out on the rocky shore.”

  “Yes, you said that before. But I’m getting better now, and I should do something to help if I’m going to eat your food.”

  “What did I tell you last time?” Carys demanded. She had already seen the heaviness of Eurion’s eyelids and the way his arms wrapped around his legs to stop them falling to the side, not to mention the sinking of his shoulders. Drawing her cart had worn him out more than he was willing to admit.

  Now, those shoulders temporarily squared. “Yes, but I’m better now—”

  Carys stood abruptly, scooping up the bowls. Her voice as cold as a winter sylph across the sea, she asked again, “What did I tell you last time?”

  He gave her his most sparkling smile. “You said that anything that washes up on the shore is yours. So now I’m yours.”

  “Not that.”

  Eurion made a face, his shoulders dropping. Into the fire, he answered sullenly, “You said you’d kick me out if I come down to the rocky shore.”

  “Yes,” Carys said, drawing out her wash-bowl from beneath the table. “Go to bed before you fall asleep beside the fire.”

  He went without complaining this time, but after the covers had rustled and grown silent, he said, “I keep having bad dreams, Lady.”

  Carys paused by the half full water bucket. “What dreams?”

  “I don’t remember. Will you sleep next to the bed again tonight?”

  “No,” said Carys; but when he was asleep and snoring faintly, and she was freshly washed and clean, it seemed too hot to sleep by the fire. She settled herself by the bed instead, and as she did so, Eurion turned in his sleep, one hand dropping from the side of the bed. Carys turned her back on that one dangling hand and went to sleep.

  * * *

  When Carys came back from the shore the next day, the water barrel was full to the brim, and the bed was made. She threw a look at the fire as she came in, but it was still leaping well enough that she didn’t need to tend to it. Instead, she swept the hearth and the rest of the house, slightly at a loss. She had always tended to all those small things every two or three days, and it left an odd, empty space in the day that she didn’t quite know what to do with.

  Eurion had been outside in the cool sunshine when she returned, too, doing some form of slow, careful exercise with the sword she had taken from the selkies. Carys didn’t like to go back outside and ask him what he was playing at, since it seemed certain that would bring on a flood of words she didn’t particularly wish to fend off. She would ask him later exactly what he thought he was doing by exercising when he was still supposed to be recuperating.

  Besides, she thought, glancing up through the window every now and then as she prepared their midday meal, although he certainly wasn’t moving quickly, he didn’t seem to be tiring quickly, either. Perhaps the exercise would build his strength again. In any case, she would have no excuse not to take him with her to market day next week, and that was something of an annoyance.

  The selkies had given her no trouble at all that day—they usually were a little quieter after they’d caused mischief, and although they would have killed her in the fun of the moment, they usually thought better of such things after they’d done them. Carys was at the same time an enemy and the only human friend they had. They were odd, unchancy things like that.

  Nor did they give Carys any trouble the next day. They gave so little trouble, in fact, and the shore was so relatively clear, that she was able to do a quick sweep and find a few pieces of bric-a-brac that might have come from a ship lost at sea or the next town across. Even so, she was back a good hour or two earlier than she would normally have been, and Eurion wasn’t yet exercising himself and his new sword out in front of the cottage.

  All unsuspecting, Carys wheeled her lighter-than-usual handcart silently into its place beside the cottage and went straight in to fetch a drink of water from the water barrel. The first sight that met her eyes was Eurion, crouched in front of the fire with a plethora of dishes and other items around him and nearly every drawer and cupboard around the cottage open.

  A single, searing thought burned through Carys’ mind. Had he been searching the cottage? Had he found the hidden seal?

  She crossed the room in two strides, while the guilty-faced Eurion was still attempting to stand, and boxed his ears thoroughly. Eurion went over like a newly-birthed lamb in a high wind, his new health notwithstanding.

  “Ow! Lady, why?”

  “What are you doing with my things?” demanded Carys.

  “I was trying to help!” Eurion protested. “These things were dirty and you don’t like dirty things, so I was cleaning them.”

  Carys stared at him in bewilderment. Taking advantage of that silence, Eurion smiled hopefully up at her.

  “I didn’t break any of them,” he added, holding up a periwinkle blue teacup.

  The same burning anger seared right to Carys’ heart. This time she controlled it enough not to seize Eurion by the throat, but she yanked the blue teacup from his hand without regard to his instinctive “ow!”

  “Don’t touch my things, or I’ll box your ears again,” she said, her voice as icy as the waves on the rocks. “And if you touch any of the blue tea things, I’ll throw you back into the sea.”

  Eurion’s face fell. “I wanted—I was trying to help.”

  “Don’t help!” Carys retorted, more sharply than she’d meant to. “I don’t need help. Outside. Exercise yourself.”

  “Everybody needs help,” said Eurion, hanging on the door to watch her put the crockery back away. His young face was solemn.

  “I don’t,” Carys reiterated. “So don’t touch things you’ve no business touching.”

  “Even the people who don’t need help need to ask sometimes,” Eurion said. “That’s the important thing.”

  “Is it,” Carys said, unimpressed. “Well, I didn’t ask for it, I don’t need it, and I don’t want it. Outside! Don’t come back in until I call you for your food.”

  Chapter Six

  Eurion was so much better by the end of the week that Carys took over her bed once again, and left him to sleep by the fire in her place.

  His recovery meant relief from listening for his breathing and checking his forehead every time she came back from the rocky shore, but it brought with it certain new inconveniences.

  Eurion, it turned out, was either an early riser or a light sleeper. For the last three days of that week, he woke with Carys, sitting up despite her low-voiced encouragement for him to go back to sleep; and on the fourth morning he had begun his now-daily sword exercise outside the cottage by the time Carys left to go to the shore.

  After five days of this, Carys found herself putting the kettle on as soon as she got up, without really thinking about it. Eurion had been watching her with his arms wrapped around his knees, but at that he climbed to his feet and fetched out the teacups, careful not to touch the blue ones.

  “Isn’t it lucky, Lady?” he said, crouching by the fire to watch the kettle. He looked up briefly to smile at her. “I must be used to getting up early.”

  “Very lucky,” Carys agreed, a little dryly.

  Eurion gave a delighted chuckle. “You’re always so mean,” he said. “But you’ll love me in the end.”

  More dryly still, Carys asked, “Will I?”

  “I’m like a creaky floorboard,” Eurion said, still smiling happily up at her. “Or a bit of carpet that’s torn. You keep stumbling over it or hearing it squeak and it’s annoying, but one day it’s part of your life and you don’t remember what the house was like without it.”

  “Why did you fetch two teacups?” Carys asked, without answering to the nonsense. “I’ve work to do. The tea is by the window; you should know how to make it by now.”

  She left Eurion protesting that it was too early for her to be leaving just yet, and went out to the comparative peace of the selkies and seashore. The selkies might try to call to her if she was late in leaving, but at least she could stuff her ears with seaweed to avoid the sound of their voices.

  That afternoon, the firewood by the cottage was stacked much higher than usual when Carys got back. She had been conscious of the need to replenish it, but the last few days had been rather harder work than usual on the shore, and she had known she would need to gather more that afternoon.

  Had Aled visited? He did so occasionally, bringing with him a decent load of firewood or a piece of meat; and although Carys had never encouraged him to come back, he always seemed to return sporadically in spite of that.

  Uneasily, she left the seaweed where it was and went into the cottage, where she was ambushed at the door by a “Lady!” and Eurion’s thin arms wrapping around her. Half prepared for it, Carys kept one arm free and boxed his ears.

  Eurion of last week would have tottered a bit at the blow; Eurion this week merely swayed back with it and grinned at her anyway.

  “Lady, look what I found!”

  “Has there been a visitor?” Carys asked, ignoring the glossy, live thing that Eurion was trying to push under her nose.

  Eurion’s arm dropped. “A visitor?” he asked, in surprise. “No. Were you expecting someone?”

  “No,” Carys said, and went back outside to stack the seaweed.

  Eurion came with her, tucking the glossy animal down the front of his shirt, and when he started to unload the seaweed from her cart with her, Carys didn’t bother to expostulate. She was simply grateful not to have to deal with a surprised and confused Aled.

  For a slender boy with thin arms, he didn’t seem to have any trouble with the seaweed bundles—nor, Carys noticed, in being able to talk while he worked without becoming out of breath.

  “If you weren’t expecting a visitor, why did you ask about one?”

  “Did you gather firewood?”

  His eyes wary, Eurion nodded.

  “I’m not angry,” Carys said, straightening the stack of seaweed he had made. It didn’t really need straightening, but it was an uneasy, unfamiliar feeling to have someone helping her, and the smallest irregularities grated on her. “I’m curious. Did you not get tired?”

  “I think lying in bed was bad for me,” Eurion said cheerfully. “I feel much better now that I’m up! I walked along the cliff up there a bit and gathered driftwood from the sandy part of the beach further down.”

  “I see,” murmured Carys.

  “You only said to stay off the rocky shore,” said Eurion, with a touch of anxiety, “so you won’t kick me out, will you, Lady?”

  “The sandy beach is safe,” Carys said, without thinking. She added, “You’re not forbidden to go there, I mean. Not like the rocky shore. If it’s sand, you can go there.”

  Eurion looked pleased. “There’s lots of wood down there—lots of seaweed, too. Why don’t you collect it from there? Is it because it has different magic in it?”

  “Something like that,” said Carys. It was true, insofar as it went; but it wasn’t the most important reason. “Why did you go to the cliffs?”

  “So I could watch you picking up seaweed,” Eurion said readily. “I can see the whole rocky bit from up there.”

  He smiled up at Carys’ astonished face, and asked, “Did you ask about a visitor because of the firewood?”

  Still taken aback, Carys only nodded.

  “What, have you got someone who fetches firewood for you? But I can do that, Lady! Look how high it’s stacked; you don’t need anyone else to fetch it for you.”

  “Do you still see the sparkle in the sand?” asked Carys; in part to forestall more protestations of the same kind, and in part because she thought it useful to know.

  Magic users tended to be drawn to the sandy seashore more than any other part of the beach. Like the seaweed on the rocky shore, the sand was threaded through with magic, bright and inviting. There was firewood aplenty up in the hills behind her cottage, where trees cropped up after the first sandy ridge, but the fact that Eurion had chosen to wander the sandy beach for driftwood instead seemed to confirm that he was a magic user.

  “That?” Eurion’s voice wasn’t particularly interested. “I always see that. It’s just magic.”

  At least he remembered as much now: he’d been confused enough by it at first. Eurion was almost certainly a magic user from birth; drawn to magic but so used to seeing it and using it that it wasn’t something that excited him anymore. Very likely, then, thought Carys, that Eurion was high-born rather than low. If Eppan families were anything like the Sunderland ones, those who were poor and gifted had no choice about whether or not they used their gift. Only the rich could afford to neglect and think little of their gift.

  Eurion stacked the last bundle of seaweed, and leaned on the pile. “Do you know, Lady, from the cliffs it looks like you’re dancing along the shore. Do you dance here in Sunderland? I think I can dance.”

  “I don’t dance,” Carys said shortly, leaving him to put the cart in its proper place. She opened the cottage door, grateful that the selkies hadn’t come out until after she’d left the rocky shore. She might have otherwise had to explain a lot more to Eurion. “There are dances in the village after dark on market day, but I don’t attend them.”

  “But you’re so light and slender!” Eurion said persuasively. “And you’re not very much taller than me, so I think—”

  “Wipe your feet.”

  Eurion wiped his feet, and appeared to think better of what he was going to say. Instead, he said, “The kettle is already hanging, Lady. I thought you might like a cup of tea. You should change your things, too; your dress is damp.”

  “I don’t need tea!” Carys said, in exasperation. She would have made tea herself, as a matter of course, but it irritated her to find that Eurion had pre-empted her with the kettle. “And I’ll warm in front of the fire! Look to yourself.”

  Eurion laughed, his eyes crinkling. “All right, Lady,” he said. “But I’ll make myself tea.”

  Carys didn’t reply. She warmed herself by the fire as she had always done, her clothes warming and separating from her chilled skin. Eurion came and took the kettle, and busied himself by the table, his shirt rippling as the small animal he’d put there woke and scrabbled around to find its way out.

  Eurion giggled and pulled it out again, allowing it to explore the tabletop as he poured.

  “You shouldn’t make pets of sand otters,” Carys said. She knew the shape and the sheen of that glossy pelt: the combined work of nature and the magic-laced seashore, sand otters fairly swam through the dunes below the cliffs everywhere. “It’ll be dead by tomorrow morning. They only live for a day before they die.”

  “I know,” said Eurion, without seeming to notice that he knew something from his previous life. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t love it. Look! It wants to stay with me.”

  The sand otter made a blunt chipchip noise at him and clambered up his arm to grab his ear in its tiny paws.

  “I can keep it, can’t I? If it’s going to die tomorrow, it should have a nice evening, shouldn’t it?”

  “You can keep it,” Carys said, with the smallest edge of a curve to her lips. She couldn’t object to anyone else taking in dying things, after all. She had made something of a habit of it herself.

  “It’s market day again tomorrow,” Eurion said, passing her a cup of tea.

  Carys took it without meaning to, dismayed by the reminder of market day, and with it the remembrance of her agreement to take Eurion with her. She could see the same remembrance of it glittering brightly in his eyes.

  Anxiously, Eurion said, “You haven’t forgotten your promise, Lady, have you?”

  Her first urge was to deny that she had made any such promise; she had, in fact, only said that she would think about it. Upon further consideration, it struck Carys that there were several good outcomes from taking him with her. She would have to put up with more questions and the unfamiliar sound of his voice cutting over the gulls and wind, but there were certainly advantages. Eurion from the first had had the tendency to be too affectionate, and that tendency had grown with time rather than lessened.

  Carys’ initial thought was that this was because he thought her too much older than himself to be seen as a woman; her second that he had come from a family with many daughters. She was beginning to doubt the first, but the second would explain the ease with which he carried himself around her, despite the difference in their ages. It didn’t, however, explain his consistency in smiling at her with the brightness of the sun and moon, his determination to greet her in the most physical way possible every time she returned to the cottage—almost like the puppy she had styled him to Aled!—or, more particularly, his swiftly growing propensity to attempt what Carys could only assume to be flirting with her.

  Aled aside, it had been a long time since Carys had been faced with any such behaviour. Certainly Eurion was young enough to be forming attachments easily. It was evidently incumbent upon her to introduce Eurion to the kind of young society where he could fall wildly in love with a young girl his own age instead of fancying himself pleased with Carys.

 

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