She felt her breath catch. The drop was high and deep and she felt suddenly afraid, even though she hadn’t before. But she took a breath and steadied herself, and let her gaze wander over the surface of the blue-black sea.
As she watched, something broke the surface of the water. She narrowed her eyes; perhaps it was a rock sitting under the water. Though she loved the sea, and her beach at Abercolme, she had always been terrified of deep water – both its power, of the storms that occasionally lashed Abercolme, and what was in it; of mysterious, leviathan-like beings that roamed in the deep oceans, in the dark. Beaches were in-between places, liminal, where water met earth. The deep water was something else.
As Faye watched, a black head emerged from the waves, followed by a large, black-scaled body.
The kelpie rose out of the sea; Faye stood on the edge of the cliff and watched it, her heart beating wildly. Here was her fear made flesh, a creature of darkness, emerging from the impenetrable black water. Scotland was full of myths of them: a black or white horse creature that drowned anyone who climbed on its back. They were said to reside around lochs and rivers, especially at night or at dusk. Like all Scottish children she hadbeen told to beware of them, but had taken it for a cautionary tale to stop children drowning in dangerous water.
The kelpie pulled itself out of the water and stood on the short beach beneath her. She had always imagined kelpies to be very like horses, but its eyes regarded her like marbles of the same blue-black water it had emerged from. It had the head and torso of a vast horse, but its hindquarters were like a long black sea serpent.
It crawled up the cliff towards her; instinctively, she drew back. Dread and panic overcame her and she began to run back towards the castle, but it followed.
When she reached the castle walls, Faye closed her eyes and tried to catch her breath. There was nowhere to go, and her lungs heaved with the effort of running. She tried to quiet herself, to tell herself that there was nothing to fear here, but she was lying to herself.
She sensed the kelpie approaching, and squeezed her eyes tight like a child would, hoping that the monster might disappear, her back pressed into the wall of the castle, her arms over her face. Even after all her experiences in Murias, even knowing that she was half faerie herself, her longstanding fear of the deep ocean and what lay within it almost overcame her. She cried out ‘No, no, no, please,’ but the kelpie approached her, closer, closer.
No, I won’t be afraid. Faye reached down into herself, remembering the ancestors who had appeared to her in the golden cup of Murias. Remembering their gifts, their wounds, their magics, she appealed to them for help, and something came.
The trinket Moddie had given her. As her mother had given her the kelpie charm in spirit, and in the ritual of the cup, her gift had remained in spirit. There wasn’t a physical charm around her neck when she was in the human world, but it appeared on asilver chain as soon as she appeared in Murias. It was Moddie’s gift to her: a charm that protected her from Finn, a kelpie because of the tattoo that reared up his chest and neck.
But this creature was also a kelpie. Surely, it would protect her from that, too.
She opened her eyes, heart beating manically, her right hand formed into a fist around the charm, her heart aflame with will.Leave me!the words were on her tongue, but the kelpie merely licked her hand, like a dog would.
Faye jumped, pulling her hand away.
The kelpie sat next to her, head bowed slightly; it made no move to get any closer.
She watched it fearfully, expecting it to pounce, to move suddenly, to attack her. Yet, it sat next to her peacefully, panting slightly.
She held the charm, watching it. Nothing happened.
Cautiously, feeling her panic subside slightly, Faye laid her palm on the kelpie’s nose, ready to pull her hand away at the smallest hint of danger. Instead, she was overwhelmed by a sense of power. The kelpie’s energy was pure water, and Faye felt the joyful rush of a waterfall mixed with the furthest, darkest depths of the ocean; it was at once the brightness of a stream in a sun-dappled woodland and the insurmountable grey wall of a tsunami.
Faye looked into the kelpie’s unblinking stare and felt her fear melt away as it returned her gaze with its ageless seawater-and-glass eyes. Without thinking, she climbed up onto its black scaly back, and, as if it knew she would, it stretched up into the sky, and then dived back under the black water.
Faye gulped in one last breath of air and went under willingly with the kelpie, just as Grainne Morgan had with the fae that had come to her aid. And, under the water, she released the last of her fear – fear of taking up space, of being herself, and ofcoming into her full power– in one long, ragged scream that the seawater swallowed as if it had never existed.
Faye felt the faerie part and the human part of her merge, and was filled with the power of both worlds. She plunged down into the deep darkness on the back of the kelpie, and found that she could breathe here, too, and she was filled with a wild exultation. She screamed again, but this time with unfettered joy, and the kelpie under her roared a jangling, unearthly rumble that made the rock shake and pulled all the other water elementals behind them in its wake.
And when she finally returned to Levantiana, the faerie queen opened the door made of glistening shell. And Faye Morgan, who had gone below the waves and returned alive, slid off the black kelpie and strode back into Murias with a piece of pink crystal in one pocket and three rose petals folded securely inside a single black kelpie’s scale in the other.
32
‘Where’ve ye been, Faye? It’s been three days and nae word.’ Annie waved her spare shop keys in her friend’s face. ‘Just as well I had these, eh?’
Faye went to the kitchen to make herself a tea. In Levantiana’s chamber she had walked in the rose-scented air; she had dived into the blue-and-black sea on the back of a kelpie and felt nothing but comfortable. She knew that she was getting stronger, finding the transition between the worlds easier now that she was embracing her power and learning from Levantiana.
‘I rang and texted, but there was no answer, I thought ye’d just left. Packed up and gone on holiday or something.’
‘Oh…Yes, I was ill again.’ Faye grasped at the easy excuse. ‘I’m so sorry, Annie. I was so out of it. Hallucinating.’ It wasn’t even that much of a lie. She’d been in the faerie kingdom, the most hallucinatory of places. She checked her phone; there was a text from Rav and a missed call.Please, Faye. I want to talk. I miss you.
She wanted to reply; her fingers hovered over the screen. But if she wanted to keep Rav safe, she couldn’t see him – at least, until she had enough power to stand against Finn if she had to.
She pushed the phone away, picking up her tea instead and gulping it down in one go.
Annie watched her warily. ‘Looks like ye haven’t eaten for a few days, either, sweetheart.’
Faye opened the cupboard where they kept the biscuits and took out a packet of digestives and two cereal bars. She was ravenous. Faye tried to mask her shock that she had been gone for three days, and was making tea to buy herself some time to invent an explanation. She knew time was elastic in the faerie realm, but it seemed it had passed even faster in the Crystal Castle. Levantiana had asked her nothing when she had returned, merely nodding when Faye had requested some time at home.
