Page 50 of Whispers of the Starlit Sea
“No?”
“Exactly. And magic is the same. It’s a tool.”
“You speak of it as if it’s real — as if it's still here.”
“You wouldn’t be asking me about magic if you didn’t think you had seen it.”
He hesitated, risking a glance toward Sorcha’s room. But he wasn’t ready for that conversation. Not yet.
“The storms. They’re not natural. I think something is causing them, but I don’t know where to look.
“Hmm…I might have something that could help.” Elsbeth set aside her drying cloth and disappeared down the hall.
He couldn’t stop his thoughts from drifting to Sorcha once more. Knowing she was a mermaid answered so many questions he’d had: where she had come from, how she had ended up on the beach — without any clothing no less, why she didn’t understand his language.
Her confused face at their meeting flooded his mind. The way she had struggled to walk.
“I found it,” Elsbeth said, returning with a heavy book in her hands. She set it on the table and opened the stained leather cover.
He dried his hands and joined her, peering over her thin shoulder at the yellowing pages. The first page she opened to had a charcoal drawing of a great winged creature, which resembled a horned lizard. Opposite, another serpent-like creature was labeled “beithir.”
“I thought this was a book of magic, not mythical beings?” he asked, flipping forward a few pages before stopping at a sketch of a horse leaping from a pond. An anchor, fashioned from a piece of copper wire, hammered and twisted with care, marked the page.
“And you think these beings couldn’t exist without magic?”
“Fair,” he said, shuddering at the kelpie. Like most children, he’d been warned to return home before dusk lest the horse-like wraith emerge from the swamps and devour him. He wasn’t sure how he felt about the possibility of such creatures being real.
The bell from the front room rang, signaling the arrival of a guest. Elsbeth left him with the book as she hurried through the swinging door to greet the newcomer.
Arick flipped a few more pages, skimming the information jotted down beside the sketches. The artist had a hauntingly surreal style, exaggerating the features of many of his subjects. The rendering of the caoineag, a banshee who reportedly lived in the high country, was particularly grotesque with an elongated nose and dark shadows curling from her cape.
The next spread of pages had two vastly different images with the same label: Bean Nighe. The first was an old hag, with scraggly long hair and webbed feet, her hand raised as a wave crashed behind her. The second depicted a beautiful young woman with the ocean lapping at her ankles. An unsettled feeling came over him as he read that “the sea hag may signal death by singing a lament.” Echoes of a half-remembered lullaby swirled through his head.
He turned the page again, and sucked in air as his eyes fell on the new sets of sketches. Human shapes, yet their lower halves were fused together in a long tail resembling a mackerel. Tiny notes in a fluid hand surrounded the merfolk. He skimmed them.
Human voices are as the call of the siren to the mer. Upon hearing a human speak, a mer would be compelled to follow until that human did cease to speak or the mer was stranded on land, where they would perish as like any fish.
A shudder ran through him. No wonder the imprisoned merfolk shouted any time a human spoke near them.
How had all this information been lost in only a hundred years? Surely the castle library had similar notes that the man in charge of the merfolk would have had access to?
His eyes drifted farther down the page, past another line of spidery scrawl.
Curse of the Bond.
What was that? He leaned down to decipher the text.
A slender hand appeared, and a rose-tipped finger tapped the scaled beings.
He looked up to see Sorcha. She gave him a trepidatious smile, her eyes wide. She tapped her finger against her sternum, then pointed to the drawing again.
“Sorcha…under water...people.” She moved her hands as she spoke the unfamiliar words.
He’d been right. She was a mermaid. He smiled at her, reaching across the table to take her hand in his. She hesitated, searching his face before accepting.
“I want to know everything about you,” he told her, hoping she could hear the sincerity in his voice. With her hand still in his, he looked down at the page again, reading the few lines under the header he’d seen before Sorcha arrived.
The last line had him squeezing her hand tighter as he forgot how to breathe.
