FF (August 2012) Catt Kingsgrave - One Saved to the Sea

In the Orkney Islands, mothers tell their children of the selkies, seals who can shed their skins and dance on land. They also tell that whoever holds a selkie girl's skin can trap her for a wife. From the lighthouse where she was raised, Mairead has watched the selkie girls secretly since she was small. She longs to leave the home that has never really been hers and join them. She could never have guessed that a limping selkie girl has been watching her too, nor what wildness the shapeshifter would draw her into. Their paths collide when most of the men including Mairead's brothers have been called to war, the village idiot decides to catch himself a wife, and Mairead is the only one who can stop him.

Drawing on myth and history, Catt Kingsgrave writes a tale of the clash of the modern age with magic, of loss and searching, a tale that will sweep you away to a past that never was, and into a sapphic love story just this side of impossible.

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Sample

The oar sliced the air with a whirring noise, and clipped the side of Durn Helzie's skull neatly. Not a killing blow, but it was enough to spin the man like a top and sling the gray pelt from his fingers as he measured his length on the mossy stones of the holm. Mairead put herself between him and his prize, kicking the skin well behind her just to be sure.
Around the seaward edge of the holm, seals were diving from every stone, speckled gray and honking in alarm at the sudden intrusion in their basking night. In only a few seconds, the tiny islet was empty of all but herself and Helzie, who was curled up tight as a limpet, clutching his head and cursing her soundly.
"You mind your tongue, Durn Helzie," she snarled at him in the very voice that had always reminded his sort at school that she'd three older brothers and a very protective Da waiting on her displeasure. "You've no business out here but for thieving, and we both know it!"
"You cow, you bloody cow!" he spat, making as if to rise until she brandished the oar again. "This were no business of yours--"
"And isn't it my business when you come poaching on Meur lands then?"
"Poaching!"
"Aye," she said, choking short her grip on the oar so she could stoop to catch up the sealskin one-handed. "There's other names for it too, but as I'm a lady, I'll refrain."
"You, a lady?" He spat and grimaced. "It's you're a--"
"It's I'm well prepared to soften that skull of yours again if you come at me, and I'll thank you to remember that," she called over the crash as the sea battered the holm, filling the air with salt spray and the promise of a turning tide. "You're drunk, you're poaching, and you're trespassing. I won't have you insulting me into the bargain. Now up you get. Back to the trink and off our land before the tide comes in, or see if my Da and his gun don't have something to say about it."
He snickered, then yelped as she sliced the air just above his head, so close the oar snagged in his fair curls. "Augh, you're as mad as he is, you wretched cow!"
"Furious," she agreed. "Now march!"
He did stand, and carefully, holding one hand against his head while the other crept toward the pocket of his mac. Mairead hefted the oar again, and he thought better of it, though bitterly. "Aye, I'll go," he said, "but not without what's rightful mine."
Mairead shook her head, clutched oar and pelt tight in her fists. "You're taking away only what you brought, Helzie. Nothing else here belongs to you by any right."
"That skin's mine," he said, taking a single, wobbly step. "I won it square--"
"You wasn't born wearing it," Mairead replied, "and her that was will be wanting it back again." He took another step, teetered again, and clutched his head, but even in the moonlight Mairead did not miss that canny look in his eye. She was not surprised when he sprang at her, arms wide to tackle her down.
Her second swing at his head was not quite so polite as the first had been. This time when Helzie spun and dropped, he lay crumpled where he'd fallen, panting and moaning as the spite leaked out of him along with his ale. "Been robbed..." he mumbled against the lichens as his eyes rolled closed.
"That, I'll allow," she answered, "though you've had it coming for years." Then she turned and left him there.
The moon was full and high, fat and silver in a sky dark and clear of cloud--a rare night indeed in the Orkneys, which saw cloudless skies a bare handful of times in any given year. The moon offered light aplenty for Mairead to search the holm for the seal girl, and return her skin.
She knew which it had been--the freckled hide had one hind fin slightly ragged, as though torn in some fight, and one of the seal girls always danced with the ghost of a limp when they all came ashore on the holm. It was easy to pick her out among the whirl of flashing limbs by the way her moves did not quite match, and so it was she whom Mairead usually watched, hid in a crevice of rock above the steep path from the trink.
The moonlight revealed no soft curve of white skin on the river-mouth island; no trembling whorl of wood-dark hair in the shadows of sea-carved stone. Mairead quickly crossed the holm, peering into every crack of stone she could find, knowing there could never have been an extra skin among the seal folk, knowing that her limping girl must surely be hiding somewhere close by.
But soon she had to admit defeat. There were not many places to truly hide on the narrow spit of stone. The sea was relentless, and polished all it could not swallow down to smooth humps of rock where only weed and lichens could cling. Even the sandy beach on the lee side, where she dug cockles in the summer, was empty and white as a shell beneath the moon, marred only with the beached rowboat that must have brought Helzie down from the fisheries upstream. She climbed back to the top of the holm one last time, soft-footed as she could go, just in case the girl might have crept out of hiding while she'd been below.
And there she was, perched on the seaward edge of the holm, looking beautiful and forlorn with her dark hair carving waves down the soft curve of her shoulders. She made no sound, did not shiver or moan, but Mairead felt sure her lovely girl was weeping. And before she thought better of it, she found herself drawing the silky pelt from beneath her coat, and calling soft, "It's all right, I've got it right here--"
In a flash of white skin and dark, startled eyes, the selkie girl was gone, over the side and into the thrashing sea below without so much as a squeak of alarm. Mairead rushed to the edge, stared down the thrust of stone, twenty feet or more into the water, but the moonlight helped her pick out no human shape against the foam.
"Come back," Mairead called to the restless wind, knowing it useless. "You can have it back, I don't want it, I promise..."
She was disappointed to get no reply, but she couldn't say she was surprised.

* * * *

"Ow, mind me head, woman!"
"Quit your bleating, or I'll make you ride in the back," Mairead grumbled, wrestling the old truck square on the coast road again. "You'd deserve it if I did."
Eager as she was to be rid of Helzie's company, there was only so fast she dared drive on the hilly, pitted track from the lighthouse promontory down to Ramphollow. The slant of the setting moon made shadows tricksy things, and her father's old truck could only handle so much punishment. Breaking an axle out here would only prolong the torment. The dinghy in the back scraped and bashed about the bed with its oars, but made less aggravating noise than her passenger.
"And now you'd crush me to death under a boat as well?" He shook his head, and shot her a snide look from under the plaster on his brow. "It's a cold welcome you are, Mairead Meur, and no mistake. Small wonder no man on the island will have you."
I have every man I want, she thought angrily, swerving to hit a rut square on and jounce the man into the ceiling again, and that's none of them! But aloud, she offered only, "It's a piece of luck for me that all the men on the island worth having have gone off to do their rightful duty then, isn't it, Durn Helzie?"
"Here then," he said, voice taking on the wheedling tone of excuses not even he believed, "Me asthma's--"
"Your asthma didn't stop you sneaking out to the holm and raiding my lobster pots in a stolen boat by moonlight, I notice," she said, gearing down to take the rising ground. Ahead, the Freystane split the moon disk like a knife thrust up from the hill crest. Not far now, thank God.
"Lobster pots!"
"Aye, seeing as how you'd no other business out on our land in the dark of night."
"I had!" he spat, going red in the dashboard glow as the great standing stone's shadow painted the road black around them. "I had and you know it, you cow! You'd no right to interfere, and I'll see you pay--"
She stomped the brakes, setting the truck's back end wobbling about madly on the gravel. Durn's threats evaporated into a wheezing screech, and he grabbed the dash in both hands as they slid to a stop at the crest of the hill. The truck's headlamps blazed square at lichen-stained granite from an arm's length away, until dust billowed up to soften the glare.
"Get out," Mairead said in the ringing, dust settling, metal pinging silence that followed. "Get out of my truck, Durn Helzie," she said when at first he didn't move, "I've had enough of your company for the night."
He blinked. "You'd set me out in the middle of nowhere, just for spite?"
"Two miles from the Freystane to your sister's pub," she clipped, glaring at the headlamp splash on the stone. "You're not too drunk nor too ill to walk that far."
"But..." he set his hand to the latch, but didn't pull it. "My boat. How--"
"That's never your boat, and we both know it," she rounded on him, crowding him into the door with a merciless pointing finger. "I saw Jane Embry's name engraved on the oarlocks. She'd no more give you leave to take it than I'd invite you to Sunday supper!" The wind gusted from the sea, clearing the dust from the air, and making the great stone keen softly above them. Helzie glanced up at it, swallowing hard. "Now get out," Mairead said again. "I'll take it back to her place, and if you take care not to vex me further, I might even not tell her, or Ben Skerrien, who it was that nicked it in the first place!"
Invoking the constabulary was, apparently, the key. Durn popped the door and slithered out onto the road quick as an eel, looking sour and spiteful between the headlamps and the setting moon. "This en't over," he said.
"Oh, it is," Mairead assured him. "Because you've gone and scared them off now. The seals'll not come back to the holm now they know the likes of you are lurking around to make off with one of their own. Not for a dozen years or more!"
"There's one that'll have to," he said, teeth flashing. "I got her skin--"
"And I threw it back into the sea, where it belongs," she lied, hoping he was too drunk or too angry to spot the flawed logic. The Freystane sang again in the shocked silence that followed.
Then, "You didn't! You bloody cow!" Face purpling with rage, Durn lurched forward, but Mairead leaned over and hooked the door out of his reach with a bang.
"So you go on and tell the old uncles down the tavern that you went hunting for an old wivey's tale down the Selkeness holm, and that I went and stole your luck," she cried, heart banging at her breast. "You just try it, and see if they believe it better than any other of your tales. All Ramphollow knows you for a liar, a lofter, and a sot who stays home while better men go off to war."
Then she keyed the engine to life with a roar, cranked the wheel, and drove the man from the road in a spray of gravel that was not half so spiteful as she really felt.

* * * *

It was nearly four by the time Mairead made it back to the lighthouse. The sea wind was freshening up in anticipation of the coming dawn, but the night was still clear and fine when she pulled the old truck into the shed and turned its engine off.
She sat for a moment and faced the truth head-on, letting the smells of salted wood, diesel, and despair settle around her in the gloom. She'd never see the seals again. Her seals, for hadn't she gone to watch them dance in human skin every fine moon-graced night since she'd turned sixteen? Hadn't she guarded their secret, breathed no wondering word, and led no following eye to their private spot? Not even her brothers, who'd seen through her every ruse, had ever learned this one that she had loved all these furtive years. The seals gone now, and she'd told Helzie the truth of it; they would never come back to the holm to dance again.
Damn the man for his greed!
She wrenched the door open, jammed the keys over the visor, and then kicked it closed with all the savagery she could muster. It wasn't as satisfying as she'd hoped--the anger was giving way now, realization setting in.
What need to comb the almanacs in search of clear weather now? Why bother to hold her breath when the moon swelled, to hope that the clouds might lift and call them in to shore just one more time before the winter? Why augur the storms and calms in the passage of sea-birds, fish, or beetles now that a clear night would bring her nothing more than stars? What would she look forward to now her one bit of magic in a gray-sky island life was at an end?
Or nearly at an end, anyhow.
A velvet tickle beneath her shirt reminded her as she turned up the path to the lighthouse proper. The lame girl's pelt, her private lie, and the secret she hardly dared consider. She would find a way to give it back somehow, as she'd promised herself out upon the holm. She'd realized then and there that she daren't just throw it into the sea. The tide would have swept the precious pelt inland up the river mouth, and into the hatchery nets. Or worse, all the way to the shipyard. The poor girl would never find it then.
Mairead shivered at the thought of that dark-eyed selkie girl shackled to some sooty dockside welder with knuckles like conkers and a temper to match. No. Never, if she could help it. Never.
She slipped two fingers beneath her coat, wormed them between buttons of her oversized shirt, and stroked the dense, silky pelt for a moment. "Come and find it," she said aloud to the wind scraping in from the sea. "Come find me. I'll keep it safe till you do." Then the light flashed round overhead, reminding her of her duties, and with a sigh Mairead squared her shoulders and headed for the lighthouse's kitchen door.
She was overdue for the fuel check by about two hours, but the reserve tank held enough to see the light through till dawn. She flipped the shunt and topped off the main tank all the same. She checked temperature gauges, then rested her head against the shaft housing to listen to the rumbling heartbeat of the engine that kept the light sweeping sunwise over the sea. It was steady, as measured as the soberest drummer; there was no grind of dust in the gears, no counterpoint tick of metal heating too fast, no squeal of dry shafts rubbing. The turning engine snored along peacefully, and after a moment or two longer than her reassurance strictly needed, Mairead pulled herself away from its lulling song and climbed the stairs into the house proper.
The bulkhead door shut out the engine's song, but the vibrations, as always, carried through the kitchen floor, chiming two glasses in the open cupboard until she nudged them apart on her way to the parlor stairs. At the landing, she paused by the window to watch until the light's sweeping beam caught the painted side of the Ursilla Meur, still moored off the jetty, her masts stepped, her sails neatly tied, and her rescue boats tenting the decks with strong-sloping keels to the sky. Just as Deen, Tam, and Jean had set her before they'd left the islands for war; waiting faithful as a dog for her man to come at need or whim and lead her from shore.
Mairead turned from the window and went to check the man hadn't died while she'd been out.
"Da?" she called as she opened the bedroom door, letting him hear her voice and go on sleeping, rather than wake