The inner words did nothing. They were as empty as the page in front of her.
The letter swam in her vision and a drop of water hit the page, the ink blurring where it fell. She folded the letter carefully and placed it in the pocket of her clóca.
That night, for the first time, she wrote no letter at all.
7
The Changeling
T
HE moans and warbles echoed like the sounds of wraiths. Meriel blinked away sleep, reluctantly throwing back the covers on her bed and padding toward the window. Outside, the horns of a crescent moon tore holes in scudding clouds. Earlier that evening, the mage-lights had come, shimmering curtains of brilliant, multicolored light, but now the sky was dark, the clouds silver-white with stars salting the blackness between them. A low fog blanketed the knees of the mountain a few hundred yards down from the White Keep, masking the sea and lending a plaintive, desperate tone to the cries of the blue seals.
She wanted to see them. Their calls pulled at her.
Quickly, she threw on her léine and a heavy clóca, then slipped sandals over her feet. She shuffled out of her bedroom and into the common parlor she and Faoil shared, careful to make as little noise as possible. She could hear Faoil’s heavy, slow breathing, and moved quickly across to the door, grimacing a bit as the hinges creaked. She peered out into the hall: no one there. Sliding out of her room, she closed the door behind her.
Footsteps . . .
Meriel hurried back inside, leaving the door open a crack. She saw Bráthair Owaine Geraghty turn the corner of the hallway, an odd look twisting his face as he came toward her room. Meriel closed the door fully; she heard him approach and stop just outside the door. At the bottom of the door, she could see his flickering torchlit shadow as he stood there; she could hear his breathing. It seemed that he waited there for long minutes, though it might have only been a few seconds. She was afraid he would knock, or try to open the door and find her there. She wondered why he was there, where none of the male cloudmages should have been this time of night; she wondered what would happen if she called out in alarm and Siúr O’hAllmhurain saw Owaine there in the dormitory. Then the shadow moved and his footsteps receded. She waited for several breaths after she could no longer hear him, then glanced out again.
He was gone.
Siúr O’hAllmhurain’s room was placed at the end of the corridor, where it met the stairs leading to the Common Hall between the two wings of the dormitories. Siúr O’hAllmhurain was snoring again: she had been with the other cloudmages earlier, filling her clochmion with the power of the mage-lights, and was no doubt exhausted. Meriel moved quickly past the door and down the stairs.
The Low Tower butted against the western end of the Common Hall, and she moved through the archway into the musty, narrow staircase, taking it down to the small door at ground level.
Meriel placed her hand flat on the door above the handle. “Oscail,” Meriel whispered:
open.
The simple ward-word worked; the door seemed to shudder once in its frame and the inner bolt sprang back. She pushed it forward, and stepped out into the ivy-clad alcove in which it was set. The cold night air made her blink; the grass was wet under her feet. She ran quickly toward the trail leading down to the water, toward the sound of the seals.
The fog made it difficult to see and she stumbled and nearly fell more than once, but finally broke through the bottom of the cloud before she reached the beach. The blues were there, waiting for her, their black eyes watching her, the moon striking sapphire highlights from ebon fur. The bull, hauled out on a rock fifty yards from the shore, roared immediately at her; a cow alongside him warbled a long string of musical notes.
A lightness moved to her left, and Meriel turned her head. A naked human form took a step toward her. She recognized him immediately: the long, damp hair the color of night, eyes so penetrating and black that they seemed almost pupil-less, the beard flowing into a mat of ebony curls on his chest, the tautness of his belly, the . . .
Meriel took a step away. “Stay back,” she told him. “Who are you?”
He tilted his head, as if puzzled by the sounds she made. He smiled at her. He spoke, and the words were like the sounds she might make trying to imitate the language of the Saimhóir—decidedly a changeling then, a Saimhóir who could briefly take on human form. For a moment, she held her breath, just staring at him. He held out his hand, as if he wanted her to come toward him, and with the gesture, she saw that his right arm—and indeed, much of his body under the masking hair—was mottled with swirling curliques of scars.
Exactly as her mam’s arm was marked . . .
Is he a cloudmage, then?
“What’s your name?” she asked again. She tapped herself on the chest. “I’m Meriel. Meriel.”
“Meriel,” he echoed, the name sounding strangely liquid with his voice. He touched his own chest. His hands were large and long-fingered, and bits of sand clung sparkling to the flesh. The cold air didn’t seem to bother him at all, nor the icy water that lapped around his ankles. “Dhegli,” he said. He reached forward, laughing, and his hand caught her forearm. He pulled at her, dragging her toward the water.
“No!” Meriel cried out in alarm, but he was stronger than she was and the sand and rocks were slippery under her feet. “No!” A wave crashed in, soaking her to the waist, her clothing was at once sodden and impossibly heavy. The coldness of the water took her breath away and she tasted salt. Dhegli’s hand was still on her, pulling her farther into the deepening water and the next wave crashed over her head, the swift undertow taking her from her feet. He pulled at her, taking her down, and she flailed in panic, eyes wide despite the sting of the salt water. Her lungs cried for air, and she fought not to take the next breath. She felt something snap within her, an audible crackling that seemed to radiate throughout her body and within her mind as well.
She was no longer being held. She kicked instinctively for the surface, thrashing in the clothing that dragged her down, but the clóca and léine slipped easily away from her. She still needed to take a breath of air, but the feeling was no longer quite so urgent and the water seemed warm as bathwater. The water was as bright in the waning moon as if it were sunlight, and the dappled surface of the ocean rushed toward her at impossible speed. She broke out of the waves with a gasp that was a moan, sliding high above the water. And as she glanced down . . .
... the body she saw was not hers, but that of a blue seal. Her body sense shifted; she floated easily on the surface of the rolling water, flippered arms and fluked tail moving easily, naturally. Another seal’s head broached the foam near her, utter black eyes glittering. The muzzle twitched; blue highlights sparked in wet fur. He snorted, the nostrils flaring. “Dhegli,” he said, unmistakably. “Meriel.”
“No!” Meriel tried say again, but her voice was strange and different and the word came out more as a mewl of protest. Dhegli vanished underwater with a ducking motion and a quick flip of his tail. He emerged a few breaths later: watching her, his head bobbing questioningly. “Meriel,” he said, and went under again.
Meriel took a breath. It all felt so . . . normal. She could sense the shifting water; she could feel the vibrations along her body as Dhegli swam around her, along with the smaller movements of fish nearby. She took another breath, deeper this time. She went under once more, this time of her own volition.
She found herself in another world, one she hadn’t suspected existed. The water supported her, cradled her, and she flew through it as a bird might fly through air. Waves of moonlight swayed as bright as shafts of dusty sun, through which fish fluttered in shifting schools. There were sounds, too: the thunder of the waves on the rocks of Inishfeirm, the grumble of sand being shifted by the tides, the song of a whale far out in the Westering Sea, the chittering of shellfish and lobsters. She could sense the subtle changes in salinity and temperature and pressure.
In the wonder, the fear and panic left her for the moment and the tenseness in this new body relaxed. She felt the presence of Dhegli before she saw him, rolling lazily back to front to back as he fluttered past her, nipping her fin as he passed. She barked in surprise and chased after him; he increased his speed, angling down to slide and twist among waving strands of kelp and the outthrust arms of rocks. Suddenly they were flying upward along a length of mussel-encrusted granite and flopping out of the water onto the angled slope of a rock. As Meriel hauled herself out of the water, pulling herself awkwardly up with her stubby flippers, Dhegli waddled toward her, touching Meriel muzzle to muzzle. His black-blue fur was marked with the same pattern of scars as his arm had been. A voice spoke in her head, though her ears heard nothing, and he spoke in her own language.
“You are Jenna’s pup.”
Meriel gasped (the sound more a snort) and pulled away, and the voice in her head vanished. The feeling of panic returned. Meriel tried to speak but her words were garbled and nearly unintelligible, and Dhegli lowered his muzzle to Meriel again. Meriel felt that the touch was somehow less and yet more intimate than it might have been had they been in human form.
“Hush, young land-cousin,”
the voice said.
“You are safe here, for the moment. Think of what you wish to say; don’t speak it.”
“How is it that you’re talking to me? How do I understand you?”
A sound that might have been laughter rang in Meriel’s head.
“Because I swallowed the Great Salmon that was birthed in the mage-light. You don’t recognize my name, but Garrentha, who held Bradán an Chumhacht before me, was the milk-mother of my milk-mother. Do you know the name Garrentha?”
Meriel started to speak. Dhegli snorted wetly, and Meriel thought the words instead.
“My mam told me a little of her. Garrentha was at Dún Kiil, wasn’t she?”
“Aye. At the shallow waters between the arms of rock, when the stone-walkers came from the Winter Home with their stones of lightning. Your mam swam with us, too.”
“She did . . . ?”
The words
felt
true, and with them Meriel realized how little she did know of her mam, how much like strangers they seemed.
“But she never told me.”
“Perhaps because she didn’t know if the blood would run true within you. It’s rare that it does. Garrentha could not change, nor my milk-mother, yet I can.”
Deghli paused, his muzzle leaving Meriel’s as he glanced about him. The bull grunted on a nearby rock, his heavy, jowled neck lifting, and Meriel sensed a change within the blue seal, a darkening shift in mood. The muzzle came back down, shot with blue highlights.
“I came here for a reason, landcousin. Bradán an Chumhacht, the Salmon of Light which lives within me, sent me here as it sent Thraisha-the-First and then Garrentha to your mam. You’re in danger—those who would hurt Jenna will try to hurt her through you.”
Meriel nearly slipped back into the water, breaking contact with Dhegli before wriggling her body closer again.
“What kind of danger?”
she asked.
“And from whom?”
“For that, I don’t have an answer,”
he responded.
“I have only glimpses of a stone-walker far away. I see strings from his hand leading to others, and they do his bidding. I see one of those strings leading here, very close to you, and I see the stone-walker who holds the string ready to pull it.”
“That doesn’t help me,”
Meriel answered. This was the way her mam talked, all innuendo and suspicion; this was the fear and paranoia that had kept her hidden away and protected all her life and she was tired of it. She wondered whether her mam had sent Dhegli to her, another little trick to keep her confined.
“And what if I
am
in danger? Why should
you
care at all?”
“I don’t know that either. But yet I do care.”
Dhegli pulled back from her. He raised his muzzle and moaned toward the bull, who called back. Two of the cows slid from the waves onto the rock alongside the bull, and Dhegli’s head brushed her flank once more.
“It’s time to go back,”
Dhegli told her and he was gone in a moment, sliding into the water with a wriggle. She followed him more slowly, her new body rejoicing instinctively at the gliding embrace of the sea. It was with reluctance that she followed him out of the waves that crashed on the tiny beach, that she dragged herself out of the foam and brine onto the pebbles. Dhegli was already there and his head lay on top of her back.
“Just think of your true form,”
his voice whispered.
“Imagine yourself as you were. . . .”
She felt more than saw the change. One moment, she was a Saimhóir; the next the world was cold around her and she was sprawled naked on the wet shingle, her red hair dark with the water and clinging in curled strings to her face and back. Dhegli lay there also alongside her: in human form. Meriel rolled away from him, pushing herself up into a sitting position, one arm across her breasts, her legs pressed tightly together. He lifted himself slowly from the sandy rocks. He stretched his scarred hand out toward Meriel. She shrank away but her back struck the slick, hard curve of a boulder and she was unable to retreat farther. His hand touched her shoulder, strong fingers curling around her upper arm, his face very close to her. His lips opened slightly, the breeze off the water snatching away the mist of his breath.
This touch was different. This touch frightened her more than anything she’d yet experienced this night, intimate and dangerous.
“Come to me again,”
his dark voice whispered in her head, even though his mouth didn’t move.
“Tomorrow night. We’ll swim together again.”
Meriel shivered. She gave him no answer.
“The dead things you stone-walkers wear are there, on that rock. The others of my family brought them here . . .”
He pointed to one of the rocks, where her léine and clóca were piled up, water dripping from the ends of the cloth. His hand left her arm, and she half crawled, half ran toward the clothing, pulling the clóca around her without feeling the cold, soaked cloth. When she turned around, Dhegli was gone.