Areinnye turned her back on Ed and swam away, as if not caring what he said. “You take strange sides, Slayer,” the sperm said at last, cold-voiced. “The humans hunt those of your Mastery as relentlessly as they hunt us.”
“I take no sides, Areinnye,” Ed said, still following her. “Not with whales, or fish, or humans, or any other Power in the Sea or above it. Wizard that you are, you should know that.” He was beginning to circle her now. “And if I sing this Song, it is for the same reason that I have sung a hundred others: for the sake of my Mastery — and because I am pleased to sing. You had best put your distress aside and deal with the business we have come to discuss, lest something worse befall you.”
Areinnye turned slowly back toward the group. “Well, if you’ve come to administer me the Oath,” Areinnye said to S’reee, “you might as well get on with it. I was in the midst of hunting when you interrupted me.”
“Softly,” S’reee said. “Your power is a byword all throughout these parts; I want it in the Song. But we’re not so short of wizards that I’ll include one who’ll bring the High and Dry down on us. Choose, and tell me whether you can truthfully sing and leave your anger behind.”
Areinnye cruised slowly through the group, making no sound but the small ticking noises the sperm uses to navigate. “Seeing that the human who sings with us sings for the Sea’s sake,” she said at last, in that tight, flat voice, “I am content. But my heart is bitter in me for my calf’s loss, and I cannot forget that easily. Let the humans remember that, and keep their distance.”
“If that is well for you two—“ Kit and Nita both flicked tails in agreement. Well enough, then,” said S’reee. “Areinnye t’Hwio-dheii, those who gather to sing that Song that is the Sea’s shame and the Sea’s glory desire you to be of their company. Say, for my hearing, whether you consent to that Song.”
“I consent…” Areinnye sang her way through the responses with slow care, and Nita began to relax slightly. The sperm’s voice was beautiful, as pleasant as Kit’s, when she wasn’t angry. Yet she couldn’t help but catch a couple of Areinnye’s glances at Ed — as if she knew that she was being watched for her responses and would be watched in the future.
Then the third Question was asked, and Areinnye’s song scaled up in the high notes of final affirmation, a sound of tearing, chilly beauty. “Let me wander forever amid the broken and the lost, sooner than I shall refuse the Song,” Areinnye sang, “or what it brings about for the good of those who live.” But there was a faint note of scorn in the last phrase, as if the singer already counted herself among the lost and broken; and the notes on “those who live” twisted down the scale into a bitter diminuendo of pain that said life was a curse.
Now it was S’reee’s turn to look dubious; but it was too late.
“Well,” the sperm said, “when is the Foregathering? And where?”
“Tomorrow dawn,” said S’reee, “in the waters off the Hook. Will you be on time?”
“Yes,” Areinnye said. “So farewell.” And she turned tail and swam off.
Kit flicked a glance at Ed and said quietly to Nita, “Boy, that was a close one. If those two got started fighting…”
“It would not be anything like ‘close,’ “ Ed said. ‘
“Okay, great,” Kit said in mild annoyance, “she couldn’t kill you. But isn’t it just possible she might hurt you a little?”
“She would regret it if she did,” Ed said. “Blood in the water will call in some sharks, true. But their Master’s blood in the water will call them all in, whether they smell it or not… every shark for thousands of lengths around. That is my magic, you see. And whatever the Master-Shark might be fighting when his people arrived would shortly not be there at all, except as rags and scraps for fingerlings to eat.”
Nita and Kit and S’reee looked at each other.
“Why do we need Areinnye in the first place?” Nita said to S’reee. “Is she really that good a wizard?”
Turning, S’reee began to swim back the way they had come, through the now-darkening water. Hotshot paced her; and silently, pale in the dimness, Ed brought up the rear. “Yes,” S’reee said. “In fact, by rights, she should have been Ae’mhnuu’s apprentice, not I.”
Kit looked at her in surprise. “Why wasn’t she?”
S’reee made a little moan of annoyance. “I don’t know,” she said. “Areinnye is a much more powerful wizard than I am — even Ae’mhnuu agreed with me about that. Yet he refused her request to study with him, not just once but several times. And now this business with her calf—“ S’reee blew a few huge bubbles out her blowhole, making an unsettled noise. “Well, we’ll make it work out.”
“That shall yet be seen,” Ed said from behind them.
The Moon was high when Nita and Kit came out of the water close to the jetty and went looking for their clothes. Kit spent a while gazing longingly up at the silver-golden disc, while Nita dressed. “We’re really gonna get killed now, aren’t we?” he said, so quietly that Nita could hardly hear him.
“Uh-huh.” Nita sat down on the sand and stared out at the waves while Kit went hunting for his bathing suit and windbreaker.
“Whaddaya think they’ll do?” Kit said.
Nita shook her head. “No idea.”
Kit came up beside her, adjusting his windbreaker. “You think they’re gonna send me home?”
“They might,” she said.
They toiled up the last dune before home and looked down toward the little rough road that ran past the house. All the upstairs lights were on. The downstairs ones were dark; evidently Dairine had been sent to bed.
“Neets—“ Kit said. “What’re you gonna do?”
“I’m sworn, Kit. I’m in the Song. I have to be there.”
“You mean you’re going to—“
“Don’t,” she said, in genuine pain. She didn’t want him to say it, to think it, any more than she wanted to think it herself. And to tell the absolute truth, she wasn’t sure of what she was going to do about the Song yet.
“They don’t need me for the Song,” Kit said.
“It doesn’t look that way.”
“Yeah.” He was quiet a moment. “Look — if somehow I can get you off the hook, get your folks to think this is all my fault somehow, so that you can still go out…”
“No,” Nita said, scandalized. “Anyway, they’d never buy it. I promised my mom I’d be back on time last time — and blew it. Then I snuck out today. They know it’s me as much as you. I’m just gonna have to face the music.”
“With what?” Kit said.
“I don’t know.” The thought of treating her parents as enemies made her feel as if the bottom had fallen out of the Universe.
The one good thing, she thought, is that by tomorrow, tonight will be over.
I hope.
“C’mon,” she said. Together they went home.
The house was deadly still when they stepped in, and the screen door closing behind them seemed loud enough to be heard for miles around. The kitchen was dark; light flowed into it from the living room, the subdued illumination of a couple of table lamps. There was no sound of TV, even though Nita knew her dad’s passion for late movies; no music, despite her mom’s fondness for classics and symphonic rock at any hour of day or night.
Nita’s mouth felt dry as beach sand. She stopped where she was, tried to swallow, looked at Kit. He looked back, punched her lightly in the arm, then pushed past her and walked into the living room.
For the rest of her life, Nita thought, she would remember the way that room looked and felt when she walked in. The living room needed a new paint job, its rug was threadbare in places, and the walls were hung with bargain-basement seascapes, wide-eyed children of almost terminal cuteness, and, in one corner, something her dad called the Piece of Resistance — a garish matador done in day-glow paint on black velvet.