Of course he was right. Hammer and nails and a bit of effort, that’s what they needed. Luckily, she knew someone who had plenty of tools—she’d witnessed him fixing a chimney, after all. “Larran has a hammer.”
“You’re proposing visiting him again?”
She thought back to the merhorse ride. She hadn’t realized until Bryn’s reaction that it had been a special privilege. Surely if he liked her enough to let her ride, he’d let her borrow a few tools. “I’ll trade him some tomatoes for use of them,” she decided. The merhorse Sian would like that.
“Yesterday town, and today Larran. Before long, you’ll be throwing parties.”
Kiela shuddered dramatically. She’d only ever been to one party that she’d enjoyed: after she’d won her job at the Great Library of Alyssium, all the junior librarians had been invited into the North Reading Room and told that, to celebrate, they could spend three hours reading whatever they wanted and then they could take a slice of cake with them when they left whenever they wanted and without a word to anyone. That had been bliss. “No parties. Want to come with me? You haven’t gotten to see much of the island, and he already knows about you.” Besides, if Caz came, she wouldn’t have to do all the talking. As she’d just witnessed at Bryn’s bakery, she wasn’t very good at asking for help.
He considered it. “What do merhorses eat?”
“Exclusively tomatoes,” Kiela said. “Never anything green.”
“You don’t actually know that.”
“Larran won’t feed you to his merhorses. You know, the original name for a merhorse was ‘hippocampus,’ but that fell out of favor because it’s the same word as a part of the brain. Also, it sounds too much like hippopotamus, which isn’t a similar animal at all.” She had never seen a hippopotamus, though she’d read about them. “Did you know that hippopotami secrete a red oil that keeps their skin dry and protects them from the sun?”
“I don’t think that’s relevant.”
“No, but it’s interesting.”
He considered the matter a moment longer. “All right. I’ll come.”
She picked a half-dozen tomatoes, wondered if that would be enough, and then, after fetching an old-but-sturdy basket, gathered a half-dozen more. If wood and nails were more expensive than a dozen tomatoes, then she could offer him jam when it was ready.I wish I could offer a spell to help his merhorses.She remembered the sadness in his voice when he talked about the lack of foals . . . But she couldn’t promise that before she knew if it was possible. It was bound to be a much more complex spell than accelerated plant growth.
Jam shelves first. Magic later.
Before she could reconsider embarking on yet another social encounter, she strode out the door. Caz kept pace beside her. He seemed to enjoy the stroll through the woods—she knew this because he kept muttering words like “marvelous” and “delightful” and “bucolic.” When they emerged into the light, she lifted her face to feel the full morning sun. The breeze off the sea tasted as fresh as an iced tea, and the waves broke in tiny crests, as if they were playing with one another. In the distance, she saw the merhorses leaping through the waves. As they went down the cliff stairs, she hoped Larran was home and not out with his herd.
As Caz hopped from rock to rock close to the cliff, Kiela walked down the beach toward the little yellow house. Shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand, she watched the merhorses play in the waves off the shore. She hoped she could find a spell that could help them thrive again. The emperor had been beyond selfish to recall his sorcerers from the outer islands. Tobin and the revolutionaries were right—the world had become unbalanced, and it wasn’t fair. Against all of that, her idea of a jam shop that offered a few little homespun remedies seemed very small. Why bother when the world’s problems were so large?
Because it’s what I can do.
And maybe . . . I can find a way to help.
At the very least, she could supply her friendly neighbor with tomatoes.
She spotted Larran at the end of the stone pier, combing tangles out of the mane of one of his merhorses. Caz took a look at the water bashing up against the rocks and volunteered, “I’ll wait for you here.”
Kiela didn’t blame him, given his fear of plant-eating sea creatures, but why wasshenervous? She’d talked with Larran several times already and had found him annoyingly nice. Was it because now she knew he didn’t let just anyone ride his merhorses? She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. She wasn’t used to anyone spending any extra attention on her.
Seeing her, Larran waved. “Be careful!” he called. The wind tried to swallow his voice, but he boomed through it. “The ocean’s freezing today! You don’t want to fall in!”
Carrying the basket of tomatoes, she walked, slowly and carefully, out on the stone pier. She was wearing shoes with a rough sole, which was far more practical for scampering over rocks and up and down stairs than the soft slipper-like shoes she’d always worn in the library, as well as a pair of pants she’d brought with her and a blouse that had been her mother’s, embroidered with apple blossoms on the sleeves. She’d found herself wearing more and more of her mother’s old clothes—they fit the weather better, with the morning chill and the afternoon sun and the sea breeze. And they fit the person Kiela was becoming better. Every time she put on an island blouse or skirt or pair of shoes, she felt more like a Caltreyan and less like a citygirl. She’d looked in a mirror this morning and seen it wasn’t just the clothes that made her different either: a sprinkle of magenta freckles had developed across the bridge of her nose. She’d had the freckles when she was a child, and the sun in the garden had coaxed them out. She liked seeing them again.
As she approached the end of the pier, the merhorse Larran was combing reared back and snorted. Kiela recognized the beautiful gold skin and metallic gold scales. “Hi, Sian, remember me?”
Sian’s nostrils flared, and her deep blue eyes fixed on the basket.
“If you wait just a moment, I have a treat for—” Kiela told the merhorse.
But the merhorse didn’t want to wait any fraction of a moment. Smelling the tomatoes, she lunged out of the water toward the basket. Sea foam sprayed around her as her neck shot forward. Startled, Kiela took a step backward—onto the slick edge of a rock.
Her foot slipped.
She lost her balance.
And for an instant, it felt as if the world froze—she saw the sky, Larran’s horrified face, the wild horse-fish . . . As she fell backward, Sian’s teeth clamped down hard on the fabric of her shirt. She was yanked forward. The basket flew into the air, and the dozen tomatoes arched up into the cresting waves. She tumbled onto the back of the merhorse and then over, into the water.
