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?”
“No,” Adaira said. “I seek your wisdom and insight, Lady of the Sea.”
“About a mortal matter, I presume?”
“Yes.”
Jack didn’t move as he listened to Adaira describe the troubling events. She spoke of the missing children and told Ream there was no trace of where the girls might be, if they still lived. She spoke of the third girl who had vanished the day before after playing on the shore with her siblings. There was no suspicion in her voice, nothing that betrayed Adaira’s belief that the folk of the tides were at fault.
“And what do we have to do with mortal children?” Ream questioned. “Your lives on land are far more amusing to us than beneath the water in our domain, where your skin prunes and you must remain in a bubble to survive.”
So they had held mortals below at some point, Jack thought with a flash of alarm.
Adaira took a step closer to the water, unafraid. She held out her palms and said, “You dwell in the sea, a vast place that surrounds our isle. Have you seen nothing then? Did you not witness Annabel Ranald and Eliza Elliott disappearing? Did you not see Catriona Mitchell walk along the coast yesterday?”
The spirits began to exchange glances with one another. A few of them grumbled and shifted in the water, but no one answered. They waited for Ream to speak for them.
“If we saw or did anything, heiress, we cannot speak of it.”
“Why is that?” Adaira’s voice was cold. Her anger was rising.
“Because our mouths have been sealed from speaking truth,” Ream replied, and her words were even more blurred than before, as if her tongue were caught. “You will have to seek your answers from those who are higher than us.”
Jack rose, stiffly. At last, he drew the gaze of Ream, and she looked at him with her iridescent eyes.
“Who is higher than you?” he asked. He didn’t know there was a hierarchy among the spirits. His mind began to spin, wondering how he could summon anything else from the water.
“Look around and above you, bard,” Ream said to him. “We are only greater than fire.” She set her gaze on Adaira again and struggled to say, “Beware, mortal woman. Beware of blood in the water.”
The spirits hissed in agreement, and the tide returned with vengeance. The ocean rushed forward, the tide pushing the waves far higher than it had before, and the spirits melted into the foam. Jack had no time to move, to reach for Adaira, as the waves swallowed them whole.
It’s happening, he thought, clutching his harp, as he frantically kicked to find the surface. The spirits are going to drown us.
He felt fingers in his hair, a painful yank. He opened his eyes, expecting to dimly see Ream smiling with her pinprick cache of teeth, ready to drown him. But it was only Adaira. She took hold of his arm and guided him up to the surface.
As they clambered up the Kelpie Rock, they had to fight the draw of the tide before the waves pulled them both under again. It was a narrow, uncomfortable rock; they had no choice but to sit back to back, shivering from the cold, and wait for the tide to recede.
Jack remained silent as he picked threads of algae from his harp strings. But he was inwardly overcome, astounded at what he and Adaira had done. At the power of Lorna’s ballad to summon all the spirits of the sea—the folk he had once heard about in the legends of his childhood. Faceless phantoms and mystical beings that rarely revealed themselves to mortals … he and Adaira had just beheld them. Conversed with them.
Summoned them.
He struggled to hold his rapture in check, but Adaira laughed and Jack couldn’t resist smiling.
“I can’t believe we just did that,” she said. “You, actually. Not me. I did nothing but stand there.”
“You spoke with them,” Jack argued. “Something I could hardly find the wits to do.”
“Aye. But still … it was different from what I expected.” She shuddered, as if struck with both horror and excitement. “You did well, bard.”
Jack snorted, but her compliment seeped into him. He was about to reply when he felt a strange ache in his head, just behind his eyes. He closed them, pressed the heel of his palm to his throbbing lids. The pain flickered like lightning, coursing down his arms to his fingertips. He gritted his teeth against it and hoped Adaira couldn’t hear him gasp as the discomfort found a resting place in his bones.
He tried to breathe, deep and slow, but his nose was dripping now.
He touched the bow of his lips; his fingers came away with a dark, wet stain. His nose was bleeding, and his hand trembled as he pressed a corner of his wet plaid to it, hoping to staunch the flow.
“Jack? Did you hear me?” Adaira was saying.
“Mm.” He suddenly didn’t want her to know. He didn’t want her to know he was in agony, that he was bleeding. But the truth hit him like an axe: playing for the spirits required him to spin magic with his craft. It was devastating to realize this was how his mother felt after completing an enchanted plaid.
“She made it sound as if the spirits want nothing to do with our children in their realm,” Adaira was saying. “But I struggle to believe such a claim.”
“Then we must ask ourselves what mortal children can do for them in the world beyond ours,” Jack said. “Surely the spirits have uses for us, even if it is only to entertain them.”
“Yes,” Adaira said in a distant tone. “What do you think Ream meant about others being higher than them?”
Jack swallowed. He could taste a clot of blood, and he cleared his throat. “Who can guess? We should have known the spirits wouldn’t speak plainly.” As if they heard him, a wave broke hard on the rock and splashed him in the face. “Thank you for that,” he muttered, irritated.
The bleeding was easing. So was the strain behind his eyes, but the pain lingered in his hands. He flexed his stiff fingers, full of worry.
Adaira herself was lost in thought. Eventually, she said, “I think she meant that the spirits of earth and air are above the water. I never realized that.”