Page 8 of The Naiad's Lover

Sayan pushed my wet hair back off my face, then did the same to himself. I admired the bunch of his gleaming biceps and he gave me a smouldering look but didn’t follow it up with his usual kisses or fondling.

Instead, he set about teaching me as earnestly as any of my schoolmasters had a lifetime ago.

2

We trudged in silence up the narrow track through the trees to the cabin.

I was right.

The problem was definitely that Sayan himself had never actually learned to swim.

His ease in the water was as much a part of him as the beat of his immortal heart. To me, it was utterly foreign. Not just in terms of knowledge, either—while our bodies might look similar from the outside, we weren’t built the same.

Sayan was an ancient being, born to last the full span of Time itself.

I, on the other hand, was a man. Born to quietly wear out as the decades passed, my time in this world already set with my first breath.

I was fortunate enough to be more or less as fit and healthy as I had been in my thirties, but the flexibility of my youth was long gone.

Sayan’s flexibility, on the other hand, was a sight to behold. In my bed, it was dazzling. In the water, it was something else.

In the water, he moved like smoke, like light, as if he was one with the currents.

As if he couldn’t even imagine things like creaky knee joints, or stiff shoulders, or a neck with a crick in it from sleeping too hard in the wrong position.

Our muscles didn’t work the same.

Our buoyancy wasn’t the same.

Our willingness to be bobbing about in a frigid lake for hours on end wasn’t the same.

“Perhaps I should ask someone else to teach me,” I said as we made our way through the cheerful mix of ash, oak, birch and hazel that grew on the fringes of the old pine forest.

Sayan whirled to face me with a sound of absolute outrage.

“Let me explain,” I said.

“No!”

“I could ask Henrik Berglund to give me lessons. Or his nephew, Mikko Jonasson.”

I was confident that both men knew how to swim, having been born and raised in the small town of Laskeld that hugged the lake.

“I willdrownthem if they try.”

“That’s not very polite,” I said mildly, hiding my amusement. “And you would not.”

“I would! You know I would! You have heard the stories?—”

I glanced up at him. “Those stories weren’t about you.”

Before Sayan had claimed the lake as his own, it was held by a nix, who certainly would—and did—drown many people. Enough that the memories had echoed down through the generations to this very day.

My sweet naiad didn’t have it in him to hurt a single creature alive.

Apart, I amended, from the many fish he delighted to catch and bring to me.

He scowled.

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