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By a divine instinct, men's minds mistrust
Ensuing danger; as, by proof,
We see the waters swell before a boisterous storm.
- William Shakespeare, Richard III
March, 1994
“Annie, I need you to sit down."
She blinks, the colour draining from her cheeks. “What did they say?”
Annie had offered to get me to a fae healer, but I'd insisted on going to human doctors. I'm human, my sickness would be a mortal thing, and reminders of her connections to Faerie, however tenuous, prick at my anxieties. I get ever older, while Annie hasn't aged a day since I'd first kissed her by the sea. The Roane blood in her veins might not have given her transformation and the freedom of the depths, but it's given her as much immortality as a changeling can claim.
And now, I have reason to fear my body has already failed me.
She stands there, refusing to sit, and her gaze feels oddly heavy, like the sea itself is waiting for me to speak.
I wet my lips. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“Lizzy, tell me.”
I don't want to, but the words tumble from my lips. "Something's wrong. I've either got cancer, or..." I've already gone through the past two months in my head, trying to think of a time when someone could have had sex with me without my remembering. I'm not sure which would be worse. We'd had a few wild nights and I'd overdone it more than once, but Annie had been there every time. She never loses her wits, even when she drinks. I trust her to have gotten me home safely. "It has to be cancer."
Annie's eyes widen. She steps closer, silent for a moment. I know she'll take care of me, she'd never be one of those people who leaves a sick partner. She was so patient that time I had the flu. And that's exactly what I'm scared of, being sick and old and dying, a burden weighing her down. I've seen too many friends leave the same way, and the thought of suffering that same indignity sparks primal terror within me.
I'm mortal. I'm going to die one day, I know that, but I'd rather it be quick. Withering away, losing my autonomy in slivers, that would be the cruellest way to go.
"How can they be sure? Don't their tests take time?"
"They told me I was pregnant." I laugh unsteadily. "I said I couldn't be. They didn't believe me, apparently they hear that a lot, but I wouldn't leave until they told me what else it could be. Apparently there's some rare form of cancer that can cause a positive test."
Annie blinks. "Have they tested you for it?"
"They want me to have an ultrasound first. They won't believe me."
I expect her to join me in condemning the medical establishment. Instead, her gaze goes distant. I realise she's looking at my stomach, as if she can tell that way. "Not you too!" I snap, and she freezes.
She looks up, meeting my eyes. Her face is completely blank, so neutral that even I can’t read her.
Finally, she says, "You're not dying, Liz. You're not ill."
"You can tell?" She sounds so certain that it soothes that particular terror, but I can't relax. Because if it's not a disease, what does that leave?
"I can See it."
"It?" I ask, my voice reduced to a whisper, because I know what she must mean.
"You're pregnant," she says, voice thick with an emotion I can't name.
"Okay," I say slowly. "Okay. How could this have happened?"
"You tell me, Liz." Her pretty green eyes are cold, cold as the sea in a storm.
The nerves and shock curdle into fear in my stomach, and I want to scream. Doctors and nurses I can deal with, but how can Annie doubt me? "I haven't betrayed you, if that's what you're asking," I say. "How can you think that of me?"
"What am I meant to think?"
"That someone did something when I was too out of it to remember?" My voice catches. "That's the only explanation."
Annie looks alarmed for a moment. "No," she says quickly. "No one took advantage of you. I'm sure of it."
"Why?"
She hesitates. "It's a changeling. I would have noticed if anyone we were with was Fae."
"A changeling?" I stare at her. "You're sure?"
"I See her," she says, very quietly.
Her. I breathe slowly. All of a sudden, the thing that is apparently growing inside me feels less like a parasite, something I want cut out, because it wasn't put there by a malevolent stranger, born of violation. Annie is my only link to Faerie. The only thing that makes any kind of sense is that it's hers. Ours.
I smile. This is still crazy, I still don't know what we're going to do- we were hardly planning on starting a family- but I can't help the relief. A magic pregnancy is a hell of an improvement over the explanations I'd come up with. "Then it's yours, Annie. Can't you see that?"
She turns her face away. "I'm hardly the only fae in the city."
"You're the only one I know," I say, grabbing her arm. Her moods can be tempestuous sometimes, but this is too important to let her go away and sulk about. "I haven't slept with anyone but you since the Mill Rose Inn. Look at me, Annie. Look at me and call me a liar."
She looks at me with her shining green-glass eyes and says the simple words that shatter my heart. "I don't believe you."
"But—" I choke on the words, on the edge of bursting into tears and refusing to allow that indignity. It'd be like I was trying to manipulate my way into winning the argument, and I'm not, I'm telling the truth, and I don't know why it's suddenly so hard to control my feelings.
Annie’s face is stone as she stares at me, implacable. She’s never hid herself from me so completely, before I’ve seen her cry, smile, laugh. I’ve seen her thoughts and desires play across her face in the glint of an eye or the curl of a smile. I’m trapped with a stranger, the mysterious stranger who joined me on a beach years ago when I was young and innocent and hurting.
“Get out," she says. “You have choices to make and paths to walk that I want no part of, Liz.”
“That isn’t fair,” I snap. "She has to be yours."
“How? It has been quite some time since I was schooled, but I’m sure I would have heard if the base truths of biology had changed.”
“Magic! It must be!”
“I’m a Roane changeling, Liz. What magic could that be?” There’s something of a challenge in her eyes, like there’s a right answer to this, if only I can find it. Like she wants this too, deep down, if I can only convince her that it’s possible.
“I don’t know,” I admit, looking down. “I just know it has to be. People can turn into prophetic seals, trees can be people, so can lakes! Why is it so hard to believe that two women could make a child?"
“Don’t make this harder than it needs to be,” she says quietly. “Love needs trust. How could we ever trust each other after this?”
“I could,” I say, my voice drained to a whisper. “I would. Of course this would be a shock to anyone. You just need to let me prove it.”
She closes her eyes for a long moment and I think, I hope, she’s calming down, changing her mind. But then she opens them again, staring at me with her brows narrowed into hard, accusing lines. “Get out, Liz. This is my home. You were here at my sufferance and you no longer have it.”
I’m walking to the door before I even realise I’ve moved, pushed away by the force of her words, the coldness in her voice.
I stumble through our corridor, our porch, out through the doorway, the front door closing behind me.
I thought this place was ours, our home. I never realised Annie saw it so differently, as a place that belonged first to her, that she had every right to kick me out of. We've been together longer than many married couples, surely we'd be married by now if either world allowed it. We were partners. How can she treat me like I'm just some girl was dating?
But she has. She’s kicked me out. I’m alone and pregnant and she’s kicked me out and my story is so unlikely and ridiculous. Who’s going to believe me if the woman I trusted most in all the world doesn’t?
I’m going to be the girl who cheated on her girlfriend. The bisexual slut who couldn’t keep her legs shut. Annie thinks I’m that. And I didn’t and it’s not fair and–
I break down, collapsing in on myself, falling to my knees as I burst into tears. I cry like I haven’t since my parents passed me over for a skin, great big sobs that shake my whole body, and I wish I was that girl again, a girl who had lost her first love, the sea, but was ignorant of mortal love. Being passed over, I lost something I’d wanted but never had. I’d had Annie and now I’ve lost her, and I don’t even have myself to curse. It wasn't anything I did.
The door opens with a sigh. I don’t move, don’t even look up, but I don’t pull away when she crouches behind me, embracing me, burying her nose in my hair.
I don’t understand. I know this isn’t forgiveness because she whispers, “I don’t wish you ill, Liz.”
My tongue is numb in my mouth and my tears continue to fall, even as she strokes my hair in that soft, slow way that had always soothed me before.
“Promise me you’ll go back to your parents.”
“Why? Why not to this father that you say exists?” I finally manage, the words bitter on my tongue.
“Because I want you to be safe.”
“I want you,” I wail, not caring how high and childish my voice sounds. “I want you to believe me.”
“Don’t be stubborn, Liz,” she murmurs. She presses a handful of paper into my hand, curling my fist around it. “For the fare. Go home and be safe.”
For a moment, cradled in her arms, I smell the sea so strongly that she must be doing magic. The few times she’s done it in my presence, it’s always smelled brightly and brilliantly like the sea, but I don’t know enough about Roane magic to guess at what she’s cast. It calms me all the same, and when she finally lets me go, I find myself starting the long journey home.
I’m the prodigal daughter, home in disgrace. My dear cousins think they’re kind about their gossip, think it’s out my earshot, but they’re not as quiet as they believe. I hear them talking about poor cousin Annie, all alone again. How the Roane deserve more respect than that. Judging the non-existent father, skirting his duties, or debating whether or not I even know how to contact him.
I’ve stopped protesting my innocence. Even my mother’s tired of it. But one night, my father knocks on my door, giving me time to compose myself and pretend I wasn’t busy crying. I wipe the tears from my face and sit up, gathering what’s left of my pride. “Come in.”
He’s never been a very demonstrative person, though I’ve never doubted his love for me. He sits next to me and puts an arm on my shoulder in an awkward attempt at comfort.
“I’m sorry,” I mumble.
“What for?”
“Being an embarrassment. Disappointing you.”
“Liz, love,” he says softly, and I hate myself because I want it to be Annie comforting me, whispering Lizzie, my love. “You could never be that. I’m glad you came back to us.”
I take a shuddering breath and trust that he won’t judge me. Or at least, that he’ll do so more quietly than the others. “Should I get rid of it?”
“What?”
“It’s still early enough. I checked.”
He’s silent for a long moment, long enough that I think he’s about to change suddenly like Annie and push me away, call me a horrible person and leave me with nowhere left to call home.
“Strange, impossible things like this are blessings,” he says, taking uncharacteristic care with every word. “To repudiate a blessing could bring bad luck.”
I blink at him with sudden hope. “You believe me?”
“Of course.” He squeezes my shoulder. “My Liz doesn’t lie.”
I manage a smile.
“The child is wanted, if you want it. The gossip will go out with the tide, soon enough. Everyone will help with the baby, like any child of the clan. Your mother and I can’t wait to meet our grandchild.”
I bite my lip. “They won’t… talk about it, when they're old enough to hear?”
“No one here will blame the child for the sins of the parent, real or imagined,” he says. And then he laughs and laughs, the sound so darkly bitter that I don’t dare ask what the joke is.
I keep it. Even as I sicken, becoming so weak and tired that often I can barely leave my bed, crippled by a hunger that never seems sated. The medications the human doctors give are no help, and Father struggles to find a healer who will attend upon a human, but he doesn’t give up.
When he finally brings one home, it’s an old changeling woman, no doubt moved by my father’s dramatised telling of my condition. I can’t tell what her heritage is and it seems rude to ask, so I plaster on a polite smile. “Hello. I appreciate you coming.”
Though her wrinkled face and greying hair betray her age, she moves to me with ease. “It’s no trouble, dear,” she says, her voice hoarse, cracked and, bizarrely, Scottish. “I like to be useful.”
“Do you know what’s wrong with me?”
“I have a guess.” She takes out a flask and measures out a dose. “Drink this. The sickness should ease.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“It’ll do you no harm.”
It would be rude to question her further, though I’m still not convinced of her skill. I swallow the potion and force myself to keep it down, though the taste is rancid.
I squeeze my eyes shut, bearing the taste and the sudden chill it’s brought me, and by the time I open my eyes, the bone-deep tiredness is lifting. I have a sudden spike of energy, of wholeness.
“Oh,” I manage, blinking. “I didn't expect it to work that quickly.”
“Aye, that’s magic for you,” she says, unimpressed. She looks to my father. “I’ll bring you a dose weekly.”
“We owe you a debt,” he says, with deep gratitude.
She stiffens. “No. This is free.”
“Why?” I ask, though I get the impression it wouldn’t be worth debating it with her.
“Because no other healer would touch you for the crime of being mortal. I can’t be doing with that.”
Father hesitates. “If this is cured with magic… Is the source…?”
“Fae children take too much from human mothers. If the bairn is mortal, then it’s a wee hungry blighter. Where is the father?”
I look away. “Not interested.”
She makes a noise of sympathy. “What a prick.” I must still look dejected because she adds, “You deserve someone better.”
After that, a weekly dose of the awful potion keeps the worst of the exhaustion at bay, but I start to ache for the sea. Not my usual wistful wanderlust. It burns brighter and deeper, a hole in my heart, and I beg my parents or cousins to help me to the beach every single day.
Sitting on the sand, staring at the waves, there my body is finally at peace with itself.
I stroke my belly, now plump with child- my child- and watch the tide go out. You want the sea, I think. I don’t know if I can give it to you. Annie had barely half the sea to give and I have none. You’ll be like me, yearning for it all your life, and I don’t even have a skin to pass down. Is it right, having you when I can’t be certain to give you what you’re born for?
I must say it aloud one time, because my mother is there and she hesitates. “You’ll have mine,” she says. “And you will pass it down in turn. Once the child is born, you can have mine.”
I know the birth will be painful. I know it's dangerous. Mother tells me that humans who birth changelings without the aid of magical healing often die in the process. I guess that's why we're only meant to date Selkies or humans, but no one told me that when I'd started dating Annie. Granted, it wouldn't have seemed relevant, since we didn't appear to be at any risk of pregnancy.
That leaves me entirely at the mercy of the strange fae midwife. (I've forgotten her name, it was long and hard to pronounce and it feels too rude to ask again). She had done well by me for several months, but I still don't understand why she's helping me. She's refused money, favors, debt. What if she's busy, when I go into labor?
My anxieties reach a crescendo when my waters break on Samhain. What if she's busy with festivities and my father can't even reach her?
But I needn't have questioned her work ethic- she arrives so quickly that I wonder distantly if she's the teleporting kind of fae, the Tuatha de Dannan.
"Hello, Elizabeth," she says in greeting. She never calls me Liz, though I have offered her the informality.
"Hi," I manage, gritting my teeth against the ache in my abdomen. "This sucks."
Her face creases in sympathy. "I know. But don't start pushing yet. You'll know when it's time."
She's right. It takes hours of waiting, but when the contractions start, it's impossible to hold back. Each push feels like it's ripping me open. The pain in my abdomen is searing, like everything inside is on fire, while there's an army's worth of stabbing pain coming from my uterus. I try to scream, but nothing comes out.
"Breathe," whispers the midwife. "Breathe in and out."
There's authority in her voice, the kind that comes with age, and my body listens, remembering what it is to breathe.
Another push wrecks my body and I scream this time, my hand tightening around my mother's. She squeezes my hand back. "You're doing good, baby," she says.
The comfort is short-lived. The pain is unending and everything blurs- time, my thoughts, my vision. At some point, I realise with a start that my mother is gone. There's only the midwife and the sea-salt crackle of her magic.
I try to ask why, but another contraction hits. This one feels like my uterus itself is trying to escape my body, and I can't think through the pain.
She strokes my hair through it, whispering words of encouragement and reminding me to breathe. If I were in my right mind, it would feel like an overstep, coming from a stranger, but in the moment I'm just grateful for the comforting rhythm of her fingers.
The next one is worse than all the others, a stabbing kind of pain that's moved lower down, and I feel a head pushing through my cervix.
The world disappears. I don't know where I am. Everything is hazy and disjointed, and I don't understand why I'm not in the sea. I should be surrounded by water, pulling my baby out from between my flippers, biting through the sac with my sharp teeth. I should already be holding them by now, floating on the water and grooming their fur.
I can even smell it, the scent of sea and shore, bright and real around me. I hear the most beautiful sound: a scream that isn't mine. I can't feel my body anymore and I try to open my eyes, but there's the sensation of liquid slipping down my throat, and the world bleeds away.
When I wake, my parents are there and my baby isn't. I want to hold her. I don't know where it comes from, but I'm suddenly sure they're a her. She should already be with me, or at least safe in my parents' arms. She must be so small; she needs me.
But then I register the grim expressions of my parents and my insides freeze.
"Where...?"
"Liz," my mother says, and her voice is too soft, too sad. "I'm so sorry."
"No," I say, fighting to sit up, ignoring the weakness and aches of my body. "No, I heard her. Where is she?"
"She couldn't breathe," my father says quietly.
"But I heard her."
Mother reaches out to hug me, but I pull away. "Where is she?" I repeat, more forcefully.
Father walks to the cot and picks up my baby, bringing her to me. She's small and chubby and perfect, except for how she's so horribly still and silent. Her skin is so pale. Her chest isn't moving.
I knew what they were trying to tell me, but I still let out a shocked sob, shaking my head, rejecting this reality. Maybe I'm still dreaming. This is a nightmare I could still wake up from.
My baby has wisps of dark brown hair, the blue eyes that so many human babies are born with, and utterly round, utterly human ears. "She's human?" I whisper. Have I actually gone insane? Did I cheat and lose all memory of it, somehow? But no, even Annie had said the baby was a changeling.
"The night haunts came," Father says gently. "She said her ears were sharper before. Her eyes were greener."
I stare at him, realising that the thing in his arms isn't my baby. She's already gone. I didn't even get to see her.
I cry out again, but this time the tears don't stop.
A year passes. Lilianne is still dead. I don't know if I'd have named her that if she had lived- it's a different thing to saddle a living child with a name that hides a stubborn claim to their parentage within it. But Lilianne will never face the scrutiny of the clan, Lilianne will never meet Annie, Lilianne will never hear the rumours of her birth. Lilianne will never get to do anything at all.
The clan does their best to help me in my grief, my transgressions forgiven. I don't have the energy to convince anyone of what my dead baby's green eyes and sharp ears proved- it doesn't help that no one but the midwife even saw them, it's still shaky as evidence goes.
Annie's still gone. I flip back and forth between imagining her return. Sometimes, most of the time, I imagine how I would shut the door in her face, refuse to give her the time of the day. There's nothing she can do to make up for not being there for me when I needed her so badly. She missed our daughter's birth. She missed her death.
But sometimes, I imagine forgiving her. Of going back to our old life and pretending I could still trust her love. Pathetic of me, I know. But without her, without our daughter, I have nothing. Oh, I have my parents, and I love them well enough, but I'm nearly forty, I'm not meant to be back in the nest. I have my cousins, but they still treat me like the youth I was when I left, not the woman I am. Or was. I don't have a direction in life, a purpose. I don't have the sea.
When my mother offers me her skin, I'm taken aback. It's so close to the deadline that I was sure they'd both decided against passing theirs. What would possess them to wait so long, running down the clock until time's almost up? This year has been... difficult, to say the least. Maybe this could have raised my spirits when I was lost in the worst of it.
But I remind the part of myself that is still a bitter teenager waiting on the shore that passing a skin is the hardest thing for a Selkie to do. They always either move inland, away from all they knew, or...
It'll be different for my mother, I tell myself. She has more than the sea. She has me and my father. She'll stay for us.
My father anchors the boat. My mother helps me step out into the water and we walk past the tideline, where she sits and pulls me down beside her.
I glance back to where my father stands, just out of earshot. "Isn't he...?"
"I've lived to pass my skin to the heir of my choosing, Elizabeth. I must tell you what I am asking of you myself." Her mouth twists. "Oh, sweetheart, I'm sorry. I tried to be strong, for your sake; I tried to let you go. But I can't sit by and watch you grow old. I'm so sorry. I'm weak."
I blink at her, uncomprehending. "Mom?"
She takes a deep breath. "Elizabeth Ryan, you are here to make your choice. Will you join the Selkies in the sea, or will you live human for the length and breadth of your days, however long or short those days may be?"
"I already told you—"
She continues like she hadn't heard me. "Before you choose, you must understand where we come from; why our skins are limited in number, why there are no other races like us in Faerie. To become a link in the chain that binds us, you must first be forged. Do you understand?"
"No," I say, honestly.
"Neither did I," she says. "Elizabeth, haven't you ever wondered what happened to the Roane?"
She tells me.
I stare at her throughout her explanation, too shocked to speak. We wear the skins of dead Roane in order to use their magic? How could Faerie allow something so horrible? But ah, Faerie hadn't done it: the sea-witch had, when she saw her children slaughtered. The Roane had been born of her bloodline, and in her fury and her grief, she cursed the descendants of those who killed them. She created the Selkies, not as a gift, but as a punishment.
When the tale is finished, everything feels strange, like the world has been broken and put back together badly.
My mother unwinds the sealskin belt from around her waist, offering it to me. "Will you swim in the deep waters? Will you be a sister to your people, and keep them ever in your heart?"
I think of my dead baby, her green Roane eyes that I'd never even gotten to see. Her death is cruel enough, even if it's only the unthinking cruelty of nature. If someone had slaughtered her for the sake of her skin, if I had lost her for someone else's greed, because someone had wanted to live forever, to be forever young...
The skin in my mother's hands is suddenly repulsive.
I shake my head.
My mother's eyes go wide in alarm. "If you say no, your mortal life still ends tonight."
The threat is implicit in her words. My only choice is whether I wrap myself in a dead Roane's skin, or whether my mother would be forced by tradition to murder me.
I wish I’d never begged her for the sea and all its poisoned riches, but I had, and I'm stuck with my choices.
The sea-witch had dozens of children, once. They were adults and teenagers and children, with their own personalities and pasts and dreams, not tiny bundles of potential, and they all died at once, in blood and pain and violence. I can't imagine what her grief felt like, but I think I know the shape of it.
I open my mouth to say no. No thank you, I don't want to wear the skin of an ancient murder victim, a relative of my dead child and only love.
No sound comes out. My mouth is moving, but it's like my voice is gone. I guess survival instinct is hard to fight.
"Lizzie, please," my mother says. "Don't make me bury my daughter."
I look into her eyes, seal-dark and horror-struck. I realise, distantly, that if I live, if I take the skin, I'll see my mother as she was born, and she might have the eyes of a stranger.
The water laps at my feet, cold and unforgiving. If I say no, my mother will have to drown me. My father will have to watch.
I can't do that to them. I know how cruel it would be.
I swallow, wetting my lips. This time, when I open my mouth, my voice is there. "I will."
With shaking hands, I reach out to take the skin.