Adaira was waiting for Jack on the shore. The air was cold, but the moonlight was generous, guiding him down the rocky path to meet her on the coast, his harp tucked beneath his arm. She was pacing on the sand—the only indication that she was anxious—and she had braided her hair, to keep the wind from toying with it. He couldn’t discern her expression until he was almost upon her.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
He nodded despite the worry that nagged him. He drew his harp from its skin and settled on a damp rock. A small crab scuttled between his boots, and a few dead jellyfish lay scattered like purple blossoms. He positioned his harp on his lap, propping it against his left shoulder, just above his swift-beating heart. From the corner of his eye, he could see Adaira standing tall and rigid. The starlight illuminated her.
She doesn’t seem real, but neither does this moment, Jack thought, with a tremor in his hands. He was about to play Lorna’s ballad and draw forth the spirits of the sea. And it almost felt as if the ground beneath him quaked, just slightly, and as if the tide grew softer as its foam reached for his boots. As if the wind caressed his face, and even the reflection of the moon gleamed a little brighter in the rock pools. All of it—air and water and earth and fire—seemed expectant and waiting for him to worship them.
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?”
“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.”
“Neither did I.”
Adaira fell quiet. Her back was still pressed against his, and he felt her draw a deep breath.
“Jack? Could you play my mum’s ballad to summon the spirits of the earth?”
He went rigid. “Your mum composed a ballad for earth?”
“Yes.”
“And what of fire and wind?”
“She never composed music for them. At least, not to mine or my father’s knowledge.”
Jack was silent. He stared at the foaming water surrounding them, at the harp in his hands, at the bloodstain on his plaid. He didn’t know how to tell Adaira what he was feeling—about his overwhelming sense of wonder, fear, intensity, and agony. To play for the spirits, to have been found worthy. To sense the power that hid in his hands and his voice. Even now, the lingering heat of magic still coursed through him.
It was a dangerous feeling. He wondered how quickly his vitality would wane.
It was also apparent that Alastair had failed to inform Adaira of the cost. Or perhaps Adaira simply didn’t know. She didn’t know her mother’s health had been stolen, bit by bit, every time she played for the folk. Lorna’s untimely death had come from an accident five years ago. A fall from a horse, not a slow wasting sickness fueled by wielding magic. But her fate—had she lived out her years singing for the spirits—now hung like a constellation in the sky, and Jack could read it clearly.
To be the Bard of the East was an honor, but it came with a terrible cost. And Jack didn’t know if he was strong enough to pay it.
“The folk have to know where the lasses are, which spirit is offended and hiding them,” Adaira said, speaking her thoughts aloud. “They see nearly everything. The answers must rest with them. And if the water spirits have had their mouths sealed from speaking truth … we need to summon and speak to the others. But what do you think?”
“I think that’s our next step,” Jack agreed. He didn’t say out loud what he and Adaira had both realized, although he knew she was thinking it too. If the earth spirits couldn’t help them, he would have to compose a ballad for wind. He had no idea what that would do to him. “I’ll need time to study your mum’s music.”
I’ll need time to recover from this.
“Come to the castle later today,” she said. “And I will give it to you.”
They sat in companionable silence for a while longer on the rock, until the moon had started to set and the tides had calmed.
Adaira eventually slipped into the water and swam around the rock to look up at him. “Are you going to sit there all night, bard?”
He tensed, hearing the mirth in her voice. “I don’t think it’s wise to swim in the sea at night.” He nearly added that this was not just a mainland opinion, for the ocean was never safe. But Jack suppressed those words, thinking Adaira would wield anything mainland against him.
“So do you plan to sit there all night?” she asked.
“Until the tide goes down, yes,” said Jack.
“Which is at dawn, you know.”
He ignored her and the taunting invitation to join her in the water, holding his harp close. His gaze wandered up to the sky, seeking to read the time. But from the corner of his eye, he watched her as she continued to bob in the waves, waiting for him. And then she was gone, vanishing beneath the dark surface. Jack’s full attention returned to where she had been wading.
He waited for her to resurface, watching the mesmerizing roll of the sea. But Adaira remained beneath the water, and Jack panicked.
“Adaira,” he called to her, but the wind stole her name right from his mouth. “Adaira!”
There was no answer, no sign of her anywhere. Soon, his eyes ached from peeling the darkness and from the glimmer of waves. Half of him knew she was toying with him, but half of him was terrified a spirit had come to claim her and was holding her down beneath the surface.
He jumped into the water, one arm holding the instrument tight to his chest, the other searching frantically for her. His hand cut through the cold whirl of the tide. He knew as soon as their fingers entwined that she had been waiting for him, lurking like a patient predator. She had known he would come after her, and as he broke the surface with her, he was relieved and angry and a tiny bit amused.
He said nothing at first. The water dripped from his hair, and he glared when she smiled, when she laughed. His traitorous heart skipped at the sound.
“Go on,” he said. “Take delight in my surrender.”
“You should be thanking me. I just saved you from a long night perched on a rock.” She slipped her fingers from his and splashed him in the face as she swam away.
Jack reached to snag her ankle, but Adaira evaded him. He couldn’t catch her. She swam just ahead of him, leading him to the coastal path. After a moment, she turned to glide backwards, beholding his face.
“You’ve grown slow in the water, Jack.”
He said nothing, because the music for the spirits had drained him. Let her blame his weak swimming on the mainland.
He followed her to where the path cut up through the rocks. Adaira pulled herself from the sea, elegant despite her drenched clothes. Jack remained in the water, waiting for her to turn and look at him.
He extended his hand; he didn’t know if he was strong enough to climb out without her assistance. “Are you going to help me up?”
Adaira unwound her matted braid and laughed again. “Do you think I was born yesterday?”
She gave him a terrible idea. He almost smiled.
“Then will you at least take my harp? It’s going to warp now, after all this time in the water.” He held up his instrument, and Adaira studied it. Jack concealed his glee as she reached forward to take hold of his harp.
As soon as her fingers closed over the frame, he pulled. Adaira let out a shriek as she tumbled into the sea, just over his head. He couldn’t resist it; a broad grin spread across his face as Adaira spluttered to the surface.
“You will soon pay for that,” she said, wiping the water from her eyes. “Old menace.”
“I have no doubt,” he replied in a droll tone. “What will it be, heiress? Tar and feathers? The stocks? My firstborn son?”
She stared at him a moment, pearls of water on her long lashes. The sea lapped at their shoulders, and Jack could feel her fingers brush his as they both waded in the roll of the waves.
“I can think of something far worse.” But she smiled when she said it, and he had never seen such a smile on her face before. Or maybe he had once, long ago when they were children.
She was making him remember those old days. Days spent in the sea and the caves. Nights spent roaming the wild places, the thistle patches and the glens and the rocks on the coast. She was making him remember what it felt like to belong on the isle. To belong to the east.
She wanted him to stay and play for their clan, and Jack was beginning to think that maybe he should seize that opportunity, even if it stole his health, song by song.
Just for a year. A full passing of seasons. Long enough to see her rise as laird.
He drew a tendril of golden algae from her hair and begrudgingly acknowledged it then.
He disliked her a little less than he had yesterday.
And that could only bring him trouble.
