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Istil zipped over and grabbed my wrists. “Yes,” he said, nodding furiously up at me. “I need to learn how to swim.”
“It’s late. Perhaps we can learn tomorrow—”
“Tomorrow?” he said, and his face looked like I’d just told him the world was going to end.
“Is it that urgent?” I asked.
Istil wandered across the room like a wounded dragon retreating to his forest den and prodded listlessly at a frond.
“I need to be in the water,” he said. “I really, really need to be in the water, Ari. I don’t know why, but I do.”
He stared at me from within the dense foliage. The plants stooped gloomily towards him. I suddenly realized what was going on.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I know it sounds crazy.”
“You’re not crazy,” I said. “It’s your nesting impulses. The sea is calling to you, just like the forest did. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say the baby is calling out for those things.”
“She’s very needy, isn’t she?” he said.
I smiled and extended my hand to him. “Let’s go,” I said.
The shore was a short distance from our house, and Istil followed me into the shallows, the calm waves lapping at our legs as we waded to our waists.
“What is it?” he asked me.
I shook my head. “Nothing,” I said, but realized that he knew it wasn’t nothing, and that I wasn’t fooling him.
My first instinct was to diminish and hide the way I felt. That was always how it’d been. My father had been the same, because “emotion had no place in a healer’s toolkit.”
“It’s magical,” I said, forcing the words from my mouth.
“Magical?” he said, with a curious look.
The light linen robe clung to his skin as the water wrapped around his belly, which gave me the impression of the sea touching the shoreline that was his body.
“The way you look right now,” I said. “I wish you could see what I’m seeing.”
“Tell me.”
“The forest and the ocean,” I said, placing my hand on the side of his belly. “The confluence of two life-giving forces, right here in front of me.”
“Ari, are you crying?”
I blinked and looked away. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d shed tears, but it came on so suddenly I didn’t even realize it until my eyes were brimming over. Seeing Istil bathed in evening sunlight with the sparkling blue waters of home surrounding him, and knowing our baby was right there with us—everything was flowing out and I was battling to get that sluice gate shut. I felt like one of Makoa’s carvings, stiff like a pillar of wood as I struggled not to lose full control.
“It’s just beautiful, dammit,” I grunted and plunged myself beneath the water. At least that way it wouldn’t be so obvious.
When I resurfaced, I was in my dragon form.
“Climb on,” I said.
I swam to my secret hideaway in the mangrove forest, the perfect place to learn how to swim. When we arrived, Istil seemed to lack all hesitation he’d had about the water before. He waded into the lagoon and floated in the water, treading gracefully on his back with his stomach above the surface.
“You’re a natural,” I said. “I don’t need to teach you anything.”
“It feels like I’ve done this before,” he said with amazement.
“Turn onto your stomach and swim to me,” I said, and he did it with ease.
