Jack played a scale on his harp, his fingers stiff at first. A memory rose, unbidden, a memory made on the mainland. He had been sitting in an alcove of the Bardic University with Gwyn, his first love, at his side watching his every move, her hair tickling his arm and smelling of roses. She had been scolding him for creating such sad songs, and he didn’t tell her that he felt the most alive when he played for sorrow. Now it was strange how that moment felt old and bleached by the sun, as if it had happened in the life of another man, not Jack Tamerlaine’s.
Knowing he couldn’t play this strange music with such reservations and distractions, he strove to find a calming place within himself. To remember and fall back into a time when he was a boy and Cadence was all he had known. When he had loved the sea and the hills and the mountains, the caves and the heather and the rivers. A time when he had yearned to behold a spirit, face-to-face.
His fingers grew nimble, and Lorna’s notes began to trickle into the air, metallic beneath his nails. He could hardly contain the splendor of them anymore, and he played and felt as if he were not flesh and blood and bone but made by the sea foam, as if he had emerged one night from the ocean, from all the haunted deep places where man had never roamed but where spirits glided and drank and moved like breath.
He sang up the spirits of the sea, the timeless beings that belonged to the cold depths. He sang them up to the surface, to the moonlight, with Lorna’s ballad. He watched the tide cease, just as it had done the night when he returned to Cadence. He watched eyes gleam from beneath the water like golden coins; he watched webbed fingers and toes drift beneath the shallow ripples. The spirits manifested into their physical forms; they came with barbed fins and tentacles, with hair like spilled ink, with gills and iridescent scales and endless rows of teeth. They rose from the water and gathered close about him, as if he had called them home.
Jack saw Adaira take a step closer to him, her fear like a net. He almost missed a note; she was dividing his attention, even though she was a glimmer at the corner of his eye. She took another step closer, as if she thought he would be swept away, and he turned his head slightly to keep her in his sight. Because she was his only reminder that he was mortal and man, no matter what this music made him feel, that he wasn’t a creature of the waters … as he suddenly yearned to be.
Adaira, he wanted to say to her, interjecting her name between the notes her mother had woven and spun. Adaira …
The spirits felt his attention shift from them to her. The woman with hair like moonlight, the woman made of sharp beauty.
Now that they beheld her, they seemed unable to forget her. Not even Jack’s music could draw their attention away, and his heart began to falter.
“It is her,” one of the spirits said in a waterlogged voice. “It is, it is her.”
They must think Adaira is Lorna, Jack thought. He was nearly to the last stanza, his hands were trembling, and his voice had turned ragged on the edges. How long had he been playing? The moon was lower, and the spirits refused to remove their scrutiny from Adaira.
Look at me, his fingers played between the notes he plucked. Give your attention to me.
Instantly, all the glimmering eyes returned to him. Ah, yes, they seemed to say. The mortal man still plays for us. They listened and softened once more as Jack crooned at them. All of the spirits in their manifest forms adored him.
Save for one.
It was the one spirit out of the dripping horde whose form most resembled a human woman. She stood thin and reedy on two legs in the heart of the gathering, the water lapping at her barnacled knees. Her skin was pale with a sheen of pearl, and her hair, like kelp, fell long and thick to clothe her body. Her face was angular, but she had an upturned nose, a mouth like a hook, and two eyes that were iridescent as oyster shells. She held a fishing spear in one hand, and her fingernails were long and black. She could almost pass for a human. But there were elements of her that exposed her as a spirit. Gills fluttered in her neck, and patches of golden scales adorned her skin. Traces of her magic that she couldn’t disguise.
It was Lady Ream of the Sea. The one who had threatened to sink the fisherman’s boat, who had darted past Jack and laughed with the tide when he had swum to the shore.
Jack studied the spirit, marveling, but Ream paid him no heed. She stared at Adaira.
The song reached its end.
For a moment, all was silent. The spirits wanted more; he could sense it. And yet he felt empty, sucked dry to his bones.
“Why have you summoned us?” Ream asked Adaira. Her voice was muted, warbled. It would sound clear and crisp beneath the water, Jack suspected. “Do you seek to ensnare and bind us with the mortal man’s song?”