“Hello, Silky.” Jerusha whistled a now-familiar singsong melody, crouched down, holding out her arms as Silky swam toward her. The young mer pushed her neck through the space between the worn railings on the pier, pressing her face against Jerusha’s and crooning softly as Jerusha embraced her. The dense softness of the merling’s fur was like thick velvet, whether wet or dry, with a clean, fresh smell of the sea always clinging to it.
Miroe kneeled down beside her. Jerusha gave up her place to him reluctantly as Silky gave him a wet, thorough nuzzling, her bristling whiskers scraping against his mustache until he laughed. The merling looked back and forth between them, still crooning in contentment, and Jerusha caught fragments of songs in her humming that they had sung to her when she was still small enough to hold in their arms.
She had long since grown too large to hold that way, even though mers matured at least as slowly as human beings. But she still depended on them as if she were their own child; still made the long, arduous trek up the hillside to their home each evening; still slept in a pile of pillows at the foot of the bedroom stairs she could no longer climb. She had filled a void in their lives at least as profound as the one they had filled in hers. They had become her family … because her presence in their lives had made them a family, taught them how to share themselves with her, with each other. Jerusha knew that one day Silky would not make the climb to the house; someday she would leave them, and return to the sea for good—as was only right, she told herself for the thousandth time. As any human child would one day do …
Silky could have left them long before now. A colony of mers had ventured into this harbor several years ago, and had found one of their own already here, in strange symbiosis. She would not leave and so they had stayed, taking up semi-permanent residence in the inlet farther north along the plantation’s shore, where once a Winter colony had lived. They had accepted Silky into their extended family, and she was learning to sing their individual skein of the mersong. She spent more and more time with them; but her ties to her adopted family were still stronger than the ties of blood, to Jerusha’s profound relief. Eventually the colony had seemed to comprehend that, and welcomed the humans who put on diving gear and recording equipment and intruded on their hidden world.
But someday it would not be enough for her, and that was how it should be. There were few enough mer colonies left by the end of Winter; they had been fortunate that one had decided to visit this shore. These waters had been empty of anything but memories for far too long, until these mers, swimming north from the Summer islands, had changed things for the better.
And now the offworlders were coming bock, to change everything for the worse. The thought was suddenly there in her mind, as it was at least once every day, to make her feel cold and afraid. She touched her face, touching the years, their mark upon her; rubbing her forehead as if she could brush the lines away like cobwebs. The Hegemony that she had turned her back on was coming back, and BZ Gundhalinu was coming back in charge, or so he had told Moon… and she had no idea what that would mean, for any of them.
Ariele came back to them, crouching down by the merling, making whistles and trills. Jerusha pushed the future and the past out of her thoughts for one more day, watching Ariele in fond amazement; the girl was a natural mime, and could imitate the sound of mersong better than anyone Jerusha had ever heard attempt it. But more than that, she had an instinctive sensitivity to the way other creatures viewed the world. She sensed their fears, their pleasures and interests, in a way that was almost uncanny.
Jerusha had been struck by it from the time Ariele was a child, watching her with orphaned Silky, her gentleness and her rapt attention, the way she would not be separated from the merling night or day after they had found her, until they were sure she would survive. She spent as much time out here as anyone would permit her to, among the mers, in the sea.
“The mers saved your mother from drowning, once,” Miroe said, looking at Ariele, and out across the water. “Though I don’t say it as a promise that you’d be so lucky.”
Ariele looked up at him. “You mean back in the islands? Did she fall off a boat?” She gave an odd laugh.
“No… not exactly. The techrunners who took her offworld were shot down by the Hegemony, trying to reach my plantation. They crashed at sea. The mere found your mother, and kept her from drowning until I could reach her.”
“Really?” Ariele sat back, lanky and sun-freckled, pulling her knees up. Jerusha was struck suddenly by the memory of the girl’s mother, not much older at the time than her daughter was now; she realized how much more strongly Miroe must remember that other girl, as he stood looking down into the face of Moon’s daughter. “Uncle Miroe, were you a techrunner?” Her eyes brightened. “I thought you knew my mother because of Aunt Jerusha. Was it exciting—?”
“Your mother never told you?” he asked, mildly incredulous.
She shrugged. “I don’t know … all she ever talks about is how she has to do things because she’s a sibyl, and she’s not like Arienrhod. … I don’t like to hear about that.” She looked away, her face furrowing with something darker than impatience. “And Da hates to talk about the old days.” She tossed her head. Silky pressed her chin against Ariele’s bare foot, and slid back into the water with a trill of farewell.
“Well, in fact I was involved with technmners, and that’s how I met Jerusha. She nearly arrested me … but I charmed her out of it.” Miroe glanced up at Jerusha, and she met his smile with a laugh of pleasant disbelief. “Well, how else would you explain it?” he said. “You had me dead to rights.” He looked back at Ariele. “I’d given your mother a ride when she decided to set out to find your father, who’d gone to Carbuncle. I was on my way to buy embargoed goods, and there was a little mixup, and your mother got taken to Kharemough instead of Carbuncle.…”
He shook his head, as other memories filled his mind. “She got back again because the sibyl network wanted it to happen, as near as I can tell, but the Hegemony nearly had the last laugh on us after all. Only the mers saved her. But she couldn’t save them from Arienrhod … that’s partly why what she does is so important to her now. She wants to make sure that when the Hegemony comes back, they won’t be able to slaughter the mers again.”
“You mean like Arienrhod did?” Ariele said, her voice both sullen and grudgingly fascinated.
“Arienrhod wasn’t that simple,” Jerusha murmured.
“Anenrhod is dead!” Ariele said, pulling herself to her feet in sudden anger. “Years and years ago, before I was born! Why does everyone have to keep talking about her—?” She looked out across the water.
“Because she’s still alive, for us, in us … even in you,” Miroe said flatly. “You have to understand that. She made us what we are. She did everything she could to break us, to destroy us—Jerusha and me, because we were responsible for your mother being taken away from her … your mother and your father because they both defied her. She nearly destroyed Jerusha’s career, and she killed the mers who lived on this plantation, to get at me…. She ordered the Winters to throw your mother into the Pit, she tried to take your father with her when she drowned—”
“Da?” Ariele looked back at him suddenly. “But I thought it was Starbuck they drowned with her, the offworlder who killed the mere.”
“It was,” Jerusha said abruptly, putting a hand on Miroe’s arm. “He did.”
Ariele looked at her, and at Miroe’s tense, closed face, half frowning. “Da said he used to play his flute at the Snow Queen’s court.” Yes,” Jerusha said, “that’s right.”