Chapter Text
Prologue
Once upon a time there was a war that ravaged a large part of the world. It wasn't a war fought with swords, or men vying for territory, or a king's crusade to serve the will of a higher being. It was a new kind of war, with bomb scares, ghost trains that are never spoken of and fathers who never return. Éliane was eight years old when this great war began. She was eleven when she had to flee her country to escape death.
Together with her aunt and uncle, she boarded a ship invaded by shadows. No matter where she looked, pale-faced men and women, their eyes worried, their faces sallow with hunger, skirted the walls with the stealth of spectres. Ghosts, Éliane learned, are first and foremost human.
For the first few hours, the passengers shut themselves away in their cabins, as if made of a material too frail to withstand the spray. Her mother would have told her they were perhaps afraid of unravelling in the moonlight, but Éliane had seen some of them, at the moment of departure, casting glances far back, dreading fictitious pursuers in the boat's wake who might render their flight pointless. Most didn't yet realize they were leaving their homeland, perhaps forever. Like her own family, many had been caught by surprise.
Despite Cousin Rose's cries, Aunt Élise denied them permission to bid farewell to the Breton coast. So Éliane wisely sat down on the rickety bunk she'd been assigned and closed her eyes, imagining very vividly that she was up there on the deck, still seeing the beach and its heather. By morning, Uncle David managed to convince Aunt Élise to let the children out.
"It's not safe! They'll get seasick,” his wife tried to protest. "And what are they going to do on deck, do you think? If they were caught..."
Éliane loved the sea.
The country she'd left behind was full of noise - crash, fury, defeat, collapse, terror, big words that adults spoke in hushed tones but which rang in her little girl's ears like a curse. The vast, clear sea provided nothing but silence, a quietude of iodized sea foam, broken only by the purr of the engine and the plaintive mewing of seabirds.
After a few days, she asked Tante Élise if they would see any whales. Aunt Élise tried to smile, then gave up.
"I don't know", she replied. "If you're lucky, maybe."
Her rimmed eyes showed they no longer believed in fortune. But Éliane believed that whales existed. Unlike luck, whales were organic beings: her encyclopedia even said they were hunted, somewhere on the globe. She hoped they didn't have to kill whales. If she happened to spot one, she silently promised herself, she'd keep it a secret. So she'd lean on the rail for hours, staring wordlessly out at the dark sea, searching for a fin. On the sly, Uncle David lent her a copy of Moby-Dick.
If she saw a whale, Eliane corrected herself, she might tell Uncle David.
The passengers breathed a sigh of relief when the captain announced that they were now heading for the second half of the journey. They were still on the high seas, of course, but they were unerringly approaching the American coast. So far, no one had noticed they had been holding their breath. Footsteps grew less hushed on deck. A shy smile lit up Tante Élise's face. Someone played an accordeon tune, then fell silent, as if fearful of exhausting its sound. The note remained in the children's memories like a treasure.
And just as they were in the middle of the Atlantic, a storm arose.
The storm was not an ordinary one, because despite the shaking of the hull, the hooting of the wind and the merciless singing of the waves, everyone fell asleep, even the pilot in the engine room. A thick mist invaded the deck, and Éliane let go of her aunt's hand - who was sitting on a bench outside and whose head had wobbled before sliding onto her shoulder.
Only Cousin Rose, two-and-a-half-year-old Jacob, the dozen or so other children who didn't speak their language and herself remained perfectly awake.
Fae magic can be powerful, but children sometimes have the power to escape it: until a given age, they still belong a little to the fantasy realm. Some faes sense this, which is why they like to feed on children.
The one they found on deck didn't eat them, partly because it looked their age, which meant it wanted to appear harmless, and partly because it would have been unable to do so.
Éliane, who was the eldest of all the toddlers still standing - sixteen-year-old Margot must already have passed the age of childhood, for she had followed Tante Élise into her slumber - took charge. She didn't care that there was, lying naked in front of her, a strange boy with hair longer than a girl's, foamy skin and phosphorescent eyes. She asked Rose to bring her the bottle of brandy that Uncle David kept hidden in the inside pocket of his suitcase.
Éliane had already treated minor wounds, like the scratches her cousin had gotten when she was learning to walk. Once, because her mother had gone to the grocery store around the corner, she even took care of the nail her father had hammered into his finger while preparing the crib for Little Brother's imminent arrival.
So, although she winced in disgust when she saw the ripped leg of the abyss-eyed boy, she didn't hesitate to stoop to his level and pour the entire contents of Uncle David's bottle over his wound. Disinfecting was of the utmost importance, her father had taught her after the nail incident. It allowed the cut to rid itself of microbes, which Éliane imagined as invisible little tigers devouring the body from within, and thus avoid sepsis. She still didn't know what sepsis was, and her father was no longer there to answer her questions, but she guessed it was a peril far more lethal than microbes.
The boy didn't cry out. That was surprising, because even his father had let out a complaint of pain when she'd put alcohol over the bleeding hole the nail had left in his finger. He didn't scream, he just squinted his green eyes, so bright that Éliane couldn't look away, and grabbed her hand to squeeze it tight.
It was when he clenched his jaw that Éliane noticed that he had sharp teeth. She wanted to be scared, and maybe she should have been, but she'd seen monsters before, real ones, and she knew they had human faces, and uniforms, and they killed stars. She just stared into the creature's eyes, asked Rose to get a shirt from Uncle David's suitcase, and closed her hand over the boy's.
Then she waited.
The mist didn't lift. Aunt Elise continued to sleep on her bench. The children ate canned food when night fell and Éliane settled the strange boy on her bunk in the little cabin that usually sheltered the four of them - Aunt Élise, Uncle Daniel, Cousin Rose and herself. She found another flask of alcohol in the jacket of a Dutch passenger and dug out bandages from a first-aid kit.
The boy didn't thank her. Nor did he introduce himself. Without blinking, he stared at her with his irises glinting like headlights.
Éliane passed the time by telling him, in a grave tone, about her childhood playing on the beach in Finistère, about her missing father, about her dead brother and their mother, gone with him. She spoke of whales and monsters and showed him the yellow star, cut out of cloth, that she kept carefully in her pocket.
It was unfair, she told him, to be condemned to die because her grandparents' God was called Elohim while she called hers Jesus Christ. But, she added after a brief consideration, it was just as unfair to be judged unworthy of living for carrying Elohim in your heart. The boy said nothing. The green of his gaze burned like Saint John's Day fires on the wave, with a faint irony that revealed it seemed to him just as derisory to worship Jesus Christ as Adonai.
Éliane read him Moby-Dick late into the night.
"I don't like that Captain Ahab", the boy finally said.
He was speaking for the first time. Éliane nodded because she agreed.
"Where do you come from?" she asked a little later, after finishing the second chapter, her throat dry from talking and her eyes heavy with sleep. "Why is everyone asleep? What happened to you? Why is your hair so long, your eyes so green and your skin so white? What are you?"
"You ask a lot of questions", observed the boy. "But since you've patiently read me your book, pick one and I'll answer it."
Éliane thought carefully. She didn't really want to know what he was, with his magical mist, his sharp smile and his skin so pale she could almost see the blue of his veins through it.
"How old are you?" she finally questioned him, because he reminded her of the maritime apparitions in the children's stories her mother read to her.
It was the boy's turn to plunge into silent contemplation. After a while, he answered truthfully:
"I am very old. I have forgotten."
Eliane nodded again. It was the answer she had imagined.
"As old as the ocean?" she dared.
"Well, maybe."
"That's a lot", she said because she once read that the oceans had formed on Earth millions of years before.
She resumed reading, but not for long because when she woke up, Moby-Dick was still in her hands and she didn't remember finishing the seventh chapter. By some magic influence, the boy's leg was healed. Éliane followed him outside. He walked merrily along the deck, then, arriving at the point of the liner, he bowed courteously to her.
"You saved my life", he said. "I will not forget it. What do you want in return?"
Perhaps he'd expected her to ask for wealth, success, immortality, or any other wish a fae attributes to a human and is risky to make. But Éliane had seen monsters take away her father, death take away her mother. She wouldn't fall into the trap set by the hungry eyes of the boy who wasn't one.
"A life for a life", she replied. "If one day I call on you for help, you will answer."
"A life for a life", he agreed, and then smiled. "You have my word."
As he dropped into the sea, Éliane swore she saw whales, dolphins and orcas waiting for him in the depths. The mist broke and the adults emerged from their deep sleep. They couldn't remember anything, not even that they'd slept.
It appeared they had drifted to the Canadian shores.
"I can't explain it", said the captain, with concern. "The engines must have gone haywire."
The answer was satisfying to all but the children. Rose babbled about a boy with long hair like a girl's, foamy skin and phosphorescent eyes. Éliane remained silent. Uncle David grumbled about the disappearance of his brandy until he saw the outline of New York shrouded in fog. Aunt Elise learned to laugh again.
Éliane would meet again, years later, the fae she saved on the liner. He would no longer looked like a child, and he would have a name. He would paid his debt. And he would do so much more.