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Astrid Dane is not a complicated person.
There is her brother: good. There is hunger: bad. There is pain: a fact, like the moon or the sun. It goes, then it comes back. Though she can’t summon the moon or the sun (yet), but she can use pain against others. It’s a nice change. When you’re nine there isn’t much you can control in your life.
There are things that she and Athos can eat or hurt: good. There are things that want to eat or hurt them: bad, and to be moved to the first category as soon as possible. If not, avoided. She prefers the first option.
Sitting on the beach and crying does not further either of those goals. She’s cross with herself for that. But she’s hungry, and colder than usual, and a gang of older children just stole the loaf and two eggs she’d stolen from a shopkeeper, and she hasn’t been able to get any other food, and her knees are scraped, and her lip and cheekbone are swelling up. She knows pain. It’s stupid to cry over it. But she’s tired and out of ideas, and her brother has been sick for three days.
She sniffles and wipes her nose. It’s Athos who adores the sea and its treasures, not her. But maybe she can find a trinket to sell -
Something is watching her from the water.
Everything seems to happen so slowly. She grabs for a stone, lurches to her feet, cocks her arm - the gray and black thing in the water rears up -
- and spits a large fish out at her feet.
There is a single, very short moment of stunned stillness.
Instinct takes over. She lunges forward with the stone and beats the fish over the head until it is dead, dead, safe. Then she hauls it back in both arms to her place among the rocks, panting.
If ever a seal could look baffled, a little disturbed, and pitying all at once, this one does. Astrid squats on her haunches, still hugging the fish to her chest, and stares back at him.
He is the least hungry-looking thing she has ever seen. Twelve feet long, solid with muscle. Teeth - many teeth, the smallest the size of her thumb. No one hurts him. Not the biggest thing in the sea, not even the biggest monster, but plainly the most dangerous.
Eyes as black as magic.
The seal - the selkie, it can be nothing else - lifts his head and sniffs, narrow nostrils widening and flattening. That strangely expressive seal face seems to be waiting for something. Not expecting it, exactly, but curious if it will come. Astrid clutches the fish tighter. He can’t have it back.
The only use for thank you she has ever known is to wheedle and look cute so gullible adults will give her more of what she wants. It does not occur to her to use it now.
The edges of the selkie’s black lips seem to turn up in a smile. He clicks once, twice. Then without a splash or a ripple, he’s gone.
Astrid sits and stares at the empty sea, trying to process it.
He could have easily swallowed her whole, and yet he brought her food. No one not a Dane has ever helped her before. She loses her heart a little. Not in so many words, but there it is.
Astrid Dane is not a complicated person, but she knows how to reconfigure her worldview when needed. She doesn’t do it much - has not done it since her mother died - but she can do it.
There is her brother: hers. There is hunger: hers. There is pain: hers to endure and to inflict. One day when she is bigger and stronger she will only inflict it.
There is the selkie. He will be hers.