Between Me And The Sea

I always thought it would be a wave that would take me down. Down beneath the water. And when I saw the restless waters, I knew it would be soon. I have never been struck hard with the illness of fear, but then it was a potent and deadly as plague. It was a burden, like the top of a casket, prepared to keep me down and under. It was not infectious, because no one else looked away and considered leaving the shore.

“It is not like you to not eat,” Eiluned said to me. “All of this worry, it must be a terrible burden for humans. You should forget it. Haven’t you had all the saving you could want in one life?” She touched my cheek, as though it were still dark and warty, or as though I was still a child, though I hadn’t been for a long time. “You are the safest you could be here.” She laughed, which sounded like waves rippling and made me think of silver foil, and of the currents that spin under the water.

Eiluned looked exactly like a moonchild, which is what many of her kind looked like. They were all cut from the same cloth, made to look like the moon beneath the water. Her hair was more silvery than her skin, but they both made her luminous sometimes. Her kind were all moon-tinted, but I had seen them curl up in riverbeds, and their skin changed quickly enough I can’t tell that I could not tell if they were lurking or if they had truly gone.

The other faeries didn’t seem to care that I’d been left behind when the town moved. They weren’t very happy about it, either. They preferred the children with moondust hair and starlight eyes. I was as colourful as dirt, and my face had never looked innocently adolescent. It wasn’t just age that made me ugly to them. Their strange faces twisted with something like disgust when Eiluned tugged me into the water and combed my hair wet, or when she touched her finger to the space between my dark brows, or when she bit my fingertips. She liked to touch me, like I was a phenomenon that never lost its novelty.

I begged her just once to make me beautiful, when I understood faerie magic but was not appropriately afraid of enchantment yet. “Every other child that’s still here has hair like golden wheat and eyes like summer sky.” I opened my eyes wide, in case she had forgotten that they were only as lovely as flint. “Can’t you glamour me? Please?”

Eiluned grinned. She said, “A stór, you are already much prettier than you could be. You have never seen a corpse, no? You are much prettier than any corpse, I promise.”

Eiluned had dragged me out of the sea the night it had dragged me out. I had been tempted to let it, for a minute, when I realized my parents had left me in their haste to leave the town. It was only when the water took my breath away that I discovered I would rather live. It was poor timing, as I was clawing at the pebbled ground beneath a wave as it wrenched me away toward the horizon. Then Eiluned had plucked me from the water and kissed my salty cheek and told me I was too charming to let drown. I had thought for a while that I was charming. I had later learned that she had mistaken me for a charm, or something the water offered up to her, and she had reached for me because she would never refuse a gift from the ocean.

“Maybe they would dislike me less,” I said. I had seen the work of glamours. I had seen the small, weak glamours that turned wildflower to roses and pebbles to diamonds, and I had seen the glamours that transformed fish into dragons and trees into towers. “Maybe I would be better suited to live with them if I looked differently.”

Eiluned regarded me for a moment. Sometimes I was fiercely reminded of the differences between faerie and human faces; I could not tell at all what she was thinking. “It is interesting that you consider yourself to be the one they dislike.”

Eiluned took me swimming in the sea much later. And later after that, a body washed up onto the shore. There had been some kind of accident; I could see bone where there should have been hair. The bone was the same colour as Eiluned’s hair. The faeries turned the body over and looked at its swollen face. Then they set to work digging.

Later that day, the rest of the disaster arrived. The faeries danced around the wreckage of the ship as the sea pushed it onto the sand. They pranced around the bodies that followed. They looked particularly wild, and toothful, like wolves or foxes, as they knocked heels and toes against waterlogged limbed and faces. I’d seen them dance before and I would have turned away except that they very quickly began to dig.

Eiluned was not among the diggers. She drifted away from them, up the sand, and found me. She was out of breath with excitement, for dancing never tired her. I watched over her shoulder as the faeries turned over wet sand, and then the deeper, heavier sand of the beach, with their fingers.

I could see the shapes and sizes of the holes before they were finished digging. I asked her, “Why are they burying the dead on the shore?”

Eiluned walked her fingertips across my shoulders. My neck prickled as if from the cold. “Those that die at sea must be buried at sea. Or else the sea comes to claim them. Would you like to help?”

I shook my head. “I don’t like to see them dead,” I said. I watched the faeries’ quick fingers. “I think they might bury me one day. One day I might die in the water, and you will not be here. They would love to bury me.”

Eiluned stroked my ear, then my collarbone, then the part in my hair. “They will not bury you here. The sea already tried to have you and it does not. It’s not your place to die. And they have no interest in burying you otherwise. Do not worry.”

She raked her nails across one of my shoulders as she spun away. She danced between the piles of sand and the holes in the sand and left me to watch the faeries pile the bodies beneath the sand. I wondered where the boat had come from and if anyone would come here looking for it. No humans had returned to the town since the faeries moved in, and I did not know if a ship full of men would be enough to endow the previous human inhabitants with the courage to return.

It was only a few days later when the faeries dug a new grave. It was inland, between an ash and a hazel tree. I made a chain of grasses strung through the tops of acorn cups as I watched. I tried to imagine being put inside such a grave. Even in my fantasy, in which I was a corpse, I possessed the sight to watched dirt fall all around me and turn my vision dark. I possessed the ability to feel the sensation of many small tubers and rocks and sediment on my skin. At night, when I could not stop seeing the yawning mouth of the grave, I woke. It would be several more hours before the men came. I shook off the dream and wiped the cobwebs from my mind. My fingernails were dirty, as though I’d been the one digging. I reached out and touched Eiluned’s hair. “Eiluned.”

She was never far from me at night, though I do not think she ever slept. Eiluned turned over, and as she did, several stars winked, and a bird flew out from beneath the tangle of her hair on the ground, and new birds swooped down to investigate the insides of her elbows. Eiluned shook them off and waved them away. She dipped her fingers in the dewy grass and sucked them clean. “Do you not need sleep anymore?” she asked, and tapped my face, under my eye. “If you are truly afraid of the water, we can sleep even farther from it.”

I could hear the tide, and though it sounded aggressive, I was not frightened. The beach was a ways away, and now it seemed to me the water would have an even harder time reaching us over the many graves that had been dug and filled. “I’m not afraid,” I said. “I have something for you. I wanted to give it to you.” I showed her the crown of acorns and grasses. It was irregular, but anything would sit well on her perfectly shaped head. The acorns would not get lost in her hair, which is what I had been afraid of.

Eiluned crooned as she seized the crown. She donned it and brushed the sleek blades of grass. She looked at her fingers after, as though they may be cut from it. She looked very well in the crown. “What good is wheat-golden hair and sky-blue eyes when none of them have such finery?” she said. “They will all envy me. If you make yourself one, they may envy you too.”

“Do not tease me,” I said, which was the same as telling her not to breathe. She smiled at my foolishness, before I stole the smile with my lips.

She still smiled. “I hope you have more sense than your kind. There is nowhere you can take me where I could be your wife. When I am not near the sea, I am not as you see me here. If you planned to leave. I cannot.”

“I don’t want to leave,” I replied. I wanted to kiss her again; kissing was too new so far to be frightened of it.

“Then you will not,” Eiluned said. She kissed me next, and now I knew that she tasted like salt, as salty as the sea.

The men came and were not quiet at all about it. Their horses’ hooves beat thunder into the ground. They passed the grave and rode close to the beach. “Are they looking for the wreck?” I whispered to Eiluned.

She said, “They are not looking for their men. They know exactly where they are.”

I stood up and followed the horsemen down the street. Somehow, none of them had fallen into the grave on the land. Eiluned walked even farther, toward the water, and a few faeries trailed after her. They did not seem to care about the horsemen. The horsemen looked familiar. I had been sure I did not remember any of the people that had once lived here with me, but perhaps I was wrong. One of them saw a pile of wet wood the faeries had dragged up from the sand and had been turning into animals and insects and anything else to interest them. He spoke loudly; every other man turned to him. His voice sounded to me like he was used to shouting over wind. “They are still here. But not for long. It is clear we are still meant to be here.”

Several of his companions cheered. They sounded too few to fight the faeries back, but they had iron in their armour and faces drawn by loss. They turned their horses around, with their backs to the water, and talked of their right to their own dead as they walked back into town.

Eiluned stepped onto the sand and fiddled with the acorn crown, which sat crookedly on her head. I stood in the surf to fix it for her and tried to ignore the faeries around me. “I will cherish this until I die,” Eiluned said, very seriously.

“Are they here to take back the town?” I asked.

“They do want it back,” Eiluned said. “But it is too late. It is ours.”

The horsemen stayed, somewhere in the town, while the faeries and Eiluned prepared. The faeries brought the children away from the shore, and up high. Other faeries went to help dig the hole in the ground, circling the horsemen, who were too blind to see they had been surrounded. The faeries took up a song, and it was not merry at all, not like many of their songs I had heard before. Though I had heard this song before. I had heard laments when the people left the town.

“A stór,” Eiluned said, stepping back into the water. It licked her knees, then the tops of her thighs. She could not feel it, though she looked like a bedraggled child, and should have been cold. The faeries half-circled her. Eiluned pulled me close and kissed and bit my fingertips. “They will listen to you. You must keep them between me and the sea.”

The faeries did not take me away while they drowned her. She did not fight, but they held her down anyway. It took much longer than it would take a human, but the sea filled her up. I followed the faeries as they circled the horsemen and put Eiluned into the grave in the earth. She blinked as they threw dirt on her, and I could think only of the cold, gritty sensation of it in her eyes.

I was filled with too much horror at first to hear the sea rumbling. Then, for the first time, a faerie touched me. I was shocked into looking at him, and listening.

“You must find high ground,” he said, as the ocean crept up the shore, searching for Eiluned.

I could hear the horsemen, between the growing waves and Eiluned’s grave. They were laughing, and they would until the ocean pulled them out with Eiluned.

“She is not yours anymore,” the faerie said. So I let Eiluned go to the sea.

Art by Adam S. Doyle

Text by Lucie MacAulay