So for the first time, the Selkies of Sul Skerry found themselves looking at the end of life as they had known it, and they were afraid.
Then came Peter Scott, drawn by their distress, and in a position to do something about it. In London there were plenty of young women who would have given their souls for a husband, any husband, with or without a Registry License or the posting of banns, any escape from the life of grinding poverty and endless humiliation that was the lot of a girl who no longer had “virtue” to protect. There were girls whose greatest ambition was to have three good meals, a roof, and a bed, with a man who wouldn’t beat her or force her to do anything she didn’t want to do. How he had found ten honest, clean-hearted ones among the gin-soaked floozies was a tale in itself, but he had, and brought them here, where the Selkies had built them a tiny enclave of stout stone cottages with magic and strong, brown hands on the site of a fishing village long abandoned.
With Selkie gold, Peter had bought glass windows, sturdy, well-built furnishings, and all the homely comforts these young women had dreamed of as they walked the filthy streets of Cheapside or Whitechapel. Alice and Annie, Mabel and Marie, Sara, Sophie, Delia, Maryanne, Stella, and Nan had moved into their cottages. They’d been properly courted and won, and married after the fashion of the Selkie, and it was enough and more than enough for them, who had dreamed only of a roof that didn’t leak, a bed with more than a threadbare blanket, and not an entire cozy home of their very own and the means to keep it. There were no relatives or neighbors to ask awkward questions, and if the babies weren’t in the parish register, that didn’t much matter, since the fathers would be taking them off to sea as soon as they could swim.
Literally.
And in the meanwhile, they had sweet babies who never cried and never had tantrums, who suckled with the greatest of gusto and fell asleep like puppies when they were done with playing. A Selkie baby was a perfect baby in every respect, thanks to the magic that made them so. Unlike changelings, who made the lives of their “mothers” a misery until the poor things died, a Selkie babe made their lives a joy. The Selkie husbands took care not to bless their wives with new babies until after the current one was weaned and toddling, but that didn’t mean that the gentle pleasures of the bedchamber were neglected until that time either.
And if the fathers had no job, they still brought income to their landward wives in the form of Selkie gold, the ancient gold pieces the Selkie had scavenged from wrecks since the time of the tin traders. It was Peter who took the gold away, converted it to proper shillings and sovereigns and good paper notes, and brought it back for the wives to spend to maintain their households. There was a donkey and cart that belonged to this tiny village of ten cottages, and the wives took it in turn to go to the village for a day of shopping—and once each year, each woman got a railroad ticket in the mail to take her into the nearest city, where she could satisfy whatever desires were left unfulfilled by the village shops and market stalls.
So, Ian, is your Alice still bonny in your eyes? Peter asked, with a grin.
“More bonny than ever, and another bairn coming,” the Selkie replied happily. “That’s the fourth, and never a scold from the lass for puttin’ her in the family way!”
The Selkie were nothing if not plain-spoken, a trait which rather endeared them to Peter.
I’m glad you’re in a good mood, Ian, Peter said, sobering. I need the usual favor from you.
Ian laughed. “After all you’ve done? You could ask the usual a thousand times over, and still not be repaid. Come on, then.”
He shrugged the sealskin over his shoulders, just as an ordinary man would shrug on a coat—and then, there was no man standing there in the moonlight, but a great bull seal, strong-shouldered and in the prime of life. The seal cast a look over its back at Peter, barked once, and plunged down the slope into the water.
Peter followed; and once in the dark water, the seal began to shimmer as if coated with some phosphorescent chemical; as it swam, trickles of power ran along it like the trails of bubbles that followed ordinary seals. Ian was not just moving through the water with Peter following in his wake; he moved through the world of water and stone cottages and the rugged Scottish coastline into the world of Water and Ocean and Sul Skerry. The sea brightened and lightened; the seal glowed with an inner luminescence as it plunged down and down, never needing now to come to the surface for a breath. The medium that the seal knifed through became less liquid and more—something else—and the seal’s sides heaved as it breathed in that substance, as easily as air. And then, ahead of them, in deeps that glowed pearl and silver, stood a shimmering city built of light and mother-of-pearl and shivering glass and things more strange and wonderful than any of these, and the seal did not so much swim anymore as fly. Peter could have come here on his own, but not easily, and not quickly. The way to Sul Skerry was perilous and sternly guarded. Humans came here sometimes, rarely—beloved husbands or wives, plucked from the shore or the sea, taken in the midst of terrible storms in such a fashion that those ashore would think them lost to the waves and mourn them as dead. They could come here, but they could never leave again, for to come to Sul Skerry in the flesh meant that the flesh was changed forever—and unless there was Selkie blood in one’s veins, it could not be changed back again.
Peter moved alongside Ian, who blew a burst of radiant bubbles at him in seal fashion. They dove through the shadow gate of Sul Skerry side by side, flew upward to a landing platform of crystal and silver, and alighted like a pair of sea birds—and now the seal was a man of sorts again, as he was in Sul Skerry, a creature of light and shadow and only a little more substantial than Peter’s spirit form.
Ian waved at him to follow, and raced up a set of stairs the exact shade of the inside of a conch shell but glowing and translucent, to a bell tower of something like spun glass, but full of liquid light. He rang the bell, which thrummed like a giant harpstring, sending its tones through Peter, and making the tower shiver.
Within moments, a host of creatures, male and female, surrounded them; like Ian, their forms shifted and changed from one moment to the next, flowing like water sculptures as their moods shifted. In some way that Peter had not yet fathomed, they had already learned why he had called them even before they arrived. Perhaps it was something in the bell that told them; perhaps Ian communicated it to them in some fashion more subtle than either speech or thought.