Page 73 of Tidal Creatures

“So don’t touch me.”

“I think I have to.” The admission is small. “I also think that if I don’t manifest, it’s easier for the people who made me to catch me and take me back again, and I don’t want to be taken back. But I don’t want to be someone else, either. I want to be me, whatever that means.”

“Only one way to find out, but it’s not something you can take back if you don’t like what happens.”

“Really? There’s no way for someone to say ‘I don’t like this, I don’t want it, I’ll let it go’?”

Artemis hesitates. Finally, she says, “Some of the manifestations can do that. I know the big Seasons can voluntarily step aside, and since there’s only one crown per season per continent, they sever themselves from their seasons when they do that, and they die. But if they’re born with the potential to seize a season—incarnates—and there’s not a coronation during their lifetimes, they live their whole lives and die without ever manifesting. They live human. It’s only if a coronation is called that they start to manifest, and after that process begins, they can’t live without the season that sustains them. If they refuse the crown, they die. If they don’t win the crown, they die. There is no other way out.”

“And for gods?”

“If I’d said to Anna ‘I’m Artemis, goddess of the hunt and the moon, and I want you to be my mortal vessel and let me walk with you in the world,’ and she’d said ‘no, thank you,’ I would have stayed a seed. I wouldn’t have sprouted, and she would have lived her whole life with the potential to be me, but never become me. Now, she’s stuck with me for the rest of her life. I couldn’t leave if I wanted to.”

“What about me?” There’s a challenge in Kelpie’s tongue. “I never invited anyone in.”

“I don’t think you had to.”

Kelpie blinks, then turns her face away. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that, in your case, I don’t think there was anyone for you to talk to. The alchemists made a perfect, empty vessel, and they made it so perfect that you couldn’t stay out. They invited you into something you didn’t have the capacity to refuse, and they put all the power into it that the universe wasn’t offering. So you went in. You got comfortable. And when you woke up, they gave you a name and told you that you belonged to them. They invented a Kelpie for you to be. Or maybe she was real, once, and they used pieces of her when they made you. I don’t know. I don’t think anyone can know. But you never invited anyone in because you are the person knocking at the door. You are the seed, and you’re already growing, whether or not you become manifest, whatever manifestation means for you. It’s not like the stories we have ascribe a lot of powers to the Hind.”

“She soothes Artemis when the hunt goes badly; she can enter sacred spaces without frightening the game already there, and allows all the hunt to follow without fear of failure. And she’s supposed to be associated in some way with healing waters, but that always seemed a little weird to me, since Artemis isn’t a healer.”

“No, but you wash the wounds you incur while hunting, and if the Hind washes her wounds, it would make sense for it to gradually develop the ability to make the water more potent, or at least cleaner.” Artemis looks at her carefully. “Are you really afraid there’ll be a second voice in your head if you take my hand? Or are you afraid there won’t be?”

“I want to be real,” says Kelpie, a hitch in her voice. “I want to exist like everyone else exists, and to stay. Is it bad, that I want to be a real person?”

“You seem pretty real to me. You can talk, and say confusing things, and come with us tonight to access the everything and find out how Aske died. Does it really matter whether you have a person inside you even when you’re not the Hind?”

“I don’t know.” Kelpie looks at Artemis’s hands, hanging relaxed and nonthreatening at the other woman’s sides. “I’m scared that I’ll find out it matters a lot, and then it’ll be too late to take it back.”

“Be brave,” says Artemis. “You were brave when you ran away from the alchemists, and you were brave when you came into that kitchen, and spoke to me. So be brave now. Be brave enough to find out who you really are.”

Kelpie says nothing. Just steps a little closer, hooves thudding dully against the wood, and takes her hand.

Silence follows.