4621, 463rd Cycle of the Year of the Dragon
Month of Cerdana

      She was tall for a seven-year-old and skinny, the slight awkwardness of early youth apparent in her movements despite her agility in climbing the rocks.

      She took another deep breath of the northwest wind, its taste sweet but cold in her lungs with none of the warmth of spring. But the sun felt hot and this was the first day of the month of Cerdana. Elise had seen ardethin and crocuses blooming amid the roots of the sparse, wind-twisted trees on the inland slopes of the hills, and the sea folk had come. The day before the cove had been empty of all but rocks and shingle. Today a village of neat, round sharkskin homes covered the shore.

      Elise had known they would be there, sensing their arrival as she had each year since the age of four. She had slipped out of the house early to escape her grandmother's eye, but she had taken the time to fill a basket with a pot of butter, two jugs of milk and a handful of candies made from the honey of Mother Adun's bees.

      She hesitated at the top of the hill, looking down at the camp. Her grandmother had forbidden her to visit the sea folk this year. The old woman had said she had grown too big to play with primitives and romp in the waves as though she were a naked savage herself. But Elise did not care if Pela was a primitive. She was her best friend.

      She sighed, her pleasure in the morning dimming. The sea folk only stayed on Adun for three months in the spring and early summer. Being lonely the rest of the year was hard enough. She would visit Pela and the others while they camped in the cove, and accept whatever her grandmother, Moira Adun, who had been Mother Adun to everyone in the Outer Islands of Ilwheirlane for more than thirty years before Elise had been born, meted out as punishment, even a spanking with her grandmother's silver-backed hairbrush. After all, the old woman had never objected to her friendship with the sea folk children in the past. What made this year different?

      She bunched up her skirt and petticoats and scrambled down the slope to the edge of the village, then picked her way across the strip of shingle lining the shore to where the waves lapped her bare feet. She rarely remembered to wear the leather shoes her grandmother had bought for her on the mainland and her feet were thickly callused, accustomed to the feel of the stones, but the water felt cold.

      Despite the early hour, Elise knew from other years that most of the young men and women of the wiga would already have left to go hunting. Only a few of the remaining sea folk were about: a fat old man repairing the lines between a float and a lobster pot; a heavyset woman watching two chubby children playing in the waves at the water's edge; and another, younger woman laying out strips of raw, salted fish on a board to dry in the sun. Their lack of clothing always startled Elise on her first visit of the year, as she inevitably forgot in the months between that the sea folk went naked except on ceremonial occasions. Clothes, after all, were a handicap for shape-changers. She studied the line of skin teepees, then went to the largest and most beautifully decorated. Outside it, she called out a greeting in Eskh.

      Á tall, heavy woman emerged, naked except for a leather apron. She frowned at the sight of Elise, but greeted her politely, "Good day, youngling. How may I help you?"

      "Good day, Imra Sharkbiter. I came to play with Pela, the daughter of Tarle and Renala Farswimmer, if they're still with the wiga?" Elise lifted her basket. "I brought gifts."

      Imra's face relaxed and she nodded. "I remember you now. You've grown, young Adun, or I would have recognized you right away. If you come back before you leave, I have a gift you can take to your grandmother for me."

      Elise swallowed. She couldn't explain; the sea folk would never allow her to play with their children if they knew her grandmother had forbidden it. She couldn't refuse to take the gift either. Maybe she could get Joady, the handyman, to give it to her grandmother. She forced a smile. "I'd be happy to."

      Imra's head tilted and Elise felt herself being examined, but Imra only said, "You want the third caurak from this one, the one painted like a debarrá. Have you brought us milk again? Incal's so fond of it."

      Elise pulled out one of the jugs of milk and handed it over, relieved at the change of subject. "I remembered." She grinned. "He told me he was going to have to learn to milk a whale when the wiga left here. Did he try?"

      Imrá laughed. "Get on with you."

      Elise skipped down the line of cauraks to the one painted in the brown and orange markings of the debarra, the entry looking like the rounded mouth of the great, deep sea fish. Larger than the other teepees, the home of the wiga's chief hunter was second only to Incaì Sharkbiter's. Again, Elise called out a greeting in Eskh.

      Renala Farswimmer recognized her immediately. "Good day, little Adun. Come in. You're in time to share our breakfast. Pela isn't even out of bed yet." A tall, buxom woman, she wore her long, black hair in a braid that reached past her hips.

      Elise grinned and slipped through the entry, sniffing the aromas of hot fat and baking bread. "Mmm. I am hungry. I remember your cooking."

      Renala smiled. "We have smoked debarra and shad roe this morning, with a loaf fresh from the baking oven. It's good to be living on land again. The sea has its own delights, but I miss the foods of the land." She bent down to tend an iron skillet on a grid over the fire in the center of the skin house, beneath an opening where smoke could escape. "Which reminds me," she added, "Pela has talked of nothing but meldarcanin for weeks. Did you bring her any?"

      "No honey cakes, but I brought candies for Pela and milk and butter for you."

      "Wicked child, you remember all our weaknesses," Renala said, laughing as she accepted the gifts. "Pela, wake up! Elise Adun has come to visit. Get your sleepy head up out of bed."

      Elise saw a pile of skins stir on the sleeping platform. Pela's black-haired head poked up from the middle. "Did you bring meldarcanin?" she asked, rubbing her eyes.

      "No, but I brought honey candies. Will they do?"

      Pela grimaced and sat up. "Today I will control my sorrow, if you bring meldarcanin tomorrow," she intoned in one of the rhyming chants the sea folk loved.

      Elise shook her head. Pela had always been quick at rhyming, while Elise could never think of any. "How can you do that when you're not even awake?"

      "I don't know. I think that way sometimes," Pela said, standing up and coming over to Elise to look in the basket. She had grown as much as Elise over the past year and they were almost the same height, but like most of the sea folk Pela was plump. She took one of the candies, unwrapped it, and stuck it in her mouth. Her face contorted in an expression of ecstasy. Ummm. Every year I think I remember how good candies are, but when I taste them, they're always better than I remembered."

      Elise laughed. The islanders never seemed to enjoy anything, but the sea folk savored every moment, every sensation.

      When they finished breakfast, Pela said, "I'm supposed to meet Errin to dig egastin this morning, but if you help we'll have time to ride a few waves."

      "Ugh! Who wants to eat sand worms?"

      "My father," Pela said, grimacing.

      Renala laughed. "Tarle likes them poached in milk. He must have expected you to come today."

      "Errin Yar is still with the wiga?" Elise asked. "He told me last year he was going back to Sussey to live on the land like his mother."

      "He went back," Renala said, her tone disapproving. "He spent five months there, but then he came back to the wiga as he does every year. He doesn't get on any better with his mother's relations on land than with his father's second wife here, so they divide up his year, five months with the wiga and five ashore going to school like the landborn."

      "Come on," Pelá said, starting for the door. "I told Errin I'd meet him at Huler's Beach. We'd better go now, or we won't have time for surfing."

      Elise saw no sign of Errin when they arrived at the beach, but Pela pointed at the water. **Wretched beast. He's started to surf without us,** Pela thought in the mind-speech she and Errin had taught Elise when Elise had been four. They were careful not to use it with Elise in front of adults, but among themselves it had become natural.

      Elise looked out over the water and saw a small dolphin leap beyond the point where the waves started to curl. **Errin,** she thought.

      He sensed her call. She felt the tingle of his awareness link with hers and the strange twisting feeling in his mind as he shape-changed back from dolphin to boy. Then, as though he had just become aware that they were linked, his mind closed to her. She swallowed, feeling rejected. Mind speech was just a superficial exchange of information. A mind link went deeper. After Errin had taught her to link the previous summer, and up until just before he left, they had spent most of their time together in linkage. She had missed that intimacy.

      He rode the next wave in, gaining his feet at just the right moment to avoid getting scraped by the sand. He looked taller than Elise remembered him, and thinner, too thin for an ingvalar. She could make out the outline of each of the ribs in his lean, angular torso and his shoulders were bony. She wondered how he managed not to freeze in the icy water.

      **Pela said I could join you,** Elise thought, raising her chin when he stared at her as they walked up to him. He was three years older, and she had thought near the end of the previous summer that she must have done something to displease him, but she couldn't think what it could have been to have kept him angry with her until now.

      "Then I guess you can." He used words instead of mind-speech, his voice gruff, but he smiled. His eyes were a mixture of green, blue and gold, reminding her of the sea when the sun first catches it after a storm.

      Three hours later, Elise tip-toed through the kitchen of her home into the hall. She had to get upstairs before her grandmother saw her clothes. She hated to think what her punishment would be if the old woman caught her with her dress wrinkled and sandy and her petticoats wet from being used as towels after body surfing. It would be something worse than the hairbrush, she felt sure.

      "She went down to the shore today, even after I forbade her."

      Elise froze at the sound of her grandmother's voice coming from the parlor. Why would the old woman be downstairs at this time of day? And how did she know where Elise had been?

      "Aye. I saw her go."

      Her father, as well! Elise swallowed and flattened herself against the wall. She would never make it past the parlor entry with the two of them there. They knew where she had gone, anyway. Maybe she should just go in and confess and take her punishment. With her father present, how bad could it be?

      "Did you talk to her?"

      Elise hesitated. Mother Adun was using her bossy voice, the voice she used to make Elise's father and others do things they didn't want to do. Not a good time for a confession. Maybe, if she could get up to her room without them seeing her, she could make them think they'd been wrong about where she had been.

      "I tried, but...."

      "But you haven't."

      Elise pictured her grandmother's position from the sound of her voice. The old woman was in the wing chair near the fireplace, sitting with her back as straight as a ship's mast, her gnarled fingers resting on the antimacassars on the arms. She always sat there when she gave people orders, Elise thought resentfully. And when she sat there, she could see the entryway and the bottom of the staircase without even turning her head.

      "She'll take na harm from tha sea folk," Elise's father said. "You know that. She's safer wi' them than she would be alone, swimming about tha rocks." Gruff, but musical, Brennan had the soft drawl of the islanders that Elise loved, but she got punished when her voice slipped into the same accent. Her father's voice broke off and she heard his boots on the wooden floor as he walked over to the window.

      "As her mother took no harm."

      Moira's voice was sharp and Elise wondered what she meant. Anitra Adun, Elise's mother, had died when Elise was very young, but her death had nothing to do with the sea folk. She had slipped on the rocks at the top of a cliff during an autumn storm.

      The silence in the parlor lasted for several moments before Brennan protested, "Elise just turned seven. The sea folk dinna seduce children." Elise could almost see him, slow and steady, bracing himself against the lash of her grandmother's tongue. She sometimes wondered why Moira had allowed her mother to marry him, when the old woman seemed to hold him in such contempt.

      "If she plays with them now, she'll play with them later. The ingvalarin count a woman grown when she has her first flow."

      "Even that's years away," he said.

      "Not so many, Brennan Reeve. Three or four years, five at the most. She's like her mother; she'll ripen young."

      With her father by the window, Elise pictured her grandmother turned to face him. She flattened her body to the floor and peeked through the entryway. She had given up all thought of letting them know of her presence, but she wanted to see them. They were discussing her, after all.

      "It's not just her playing with the sea folk that's worrying you," Brennan said, turning back to face the old woman. "There's been something to do with Elise eating at you ever since that wizard came to visit. What did he tell you, Moira? Don't you think I have tha right to know?"

      "He only confirmed what I've suspected for years, that Elise has wizard talent. She's tried to conceal it, but she's learned mind-speech from the sea folk. He wants me to send her to the mainland for training."

      Elise gasped and pulled her head back from the entryway, putting her hands over her mouth. Had they heard her? Brennan's boots clumped across the wooden floor. She held her breath, but the sound of his footsteps changed as he crossed onto the rug near where her grandmother sat.

      "You told him no, didn't you?" His voice sounded harsh, angry. Elise couldn't remember his ever using that tone before with her grandmother.

      "I said I'd think about it." Moira's voice was cold. Hearing it, Elise shivered.

      "You'd sell your own granddaughter to wizards? You must be mad, old woman. You may be the authority on these islands, but I've called her my daughter for too many years to let you send her away to such a fate as that."

      "Don't be a fool," Moirá said. "I have no intention of selling her, as you put it. She's my heir."

      "Then why didn't you tell the wizard that? Wizards are chancy folk to keep dangling, even for you."

      "What do you think they do with children, anyway? Eat them?"

      Elise cowered in the hall. She had never heard either her father or her grandmother so angry.

      "I don't know that I'd put even that past them," Brennan said. "I've heard of worse things done in Ravaar before they wiped most of themselves out with the Bane."

      Elise's grandmother sighed. "There are no followers of Rav in Ilwheirlane. The wizards of the Varfarin are honorable people, dedicated to Jehan, the second branch of his priesthood. I took training from one myself in my youth. How do you think I learned my healing skills?"

      "I thought you trained with the kindred of Maera." Brennan sounded shaken and Elise dared to peek through the entry again. Stand up to her for once, Da, she thought. Don't let her send me away. But deep down she knew it was hopeless. No one defied Mother Adun, least of all her father who had only been one of her grandmother's tenant farmers before her mother married him.

      "It's true I trained at the Sanctuary of Maera in Clutha," Moira said, "but the Varfarin used to have a wizard teaching there. They've always worked closely with both the kindred of Maera and the ajaren, or players, of Jehan."

      "Why can't you teach Elise what she needs to know?" He had his back to the fireplace and rocked back and forth from his heels to his toes.

      "Because I'm old and my talent's weak." She turned in her chair to face him. "I summoned the wizard who came here. I wanted her tested. She needs to learn a healer's skill, if she learns nothing else."

      "So why can't they send a wizard to train her here?"

      "Times are hard these days. The were-folk's raiding increases every year. Even when I trained at Clutha, there were others learning with me. The Varfarin can't spare a wizard for each child that needs training, unless the child has the talent to be a great wizard and is going to continue the training the whole way. Even if Elise has that level of talent, the last thing I want to do is ask the Varfarin to put that kind of an investment into her. Then I'd never get her back."

      "So you do recognize the danger," Brennan said. "Once they have Elise away from here, who's to say what they'll do with her? Wizards have made monsters out of children in the past."

      Moira sighed. "I can't deny that there have been evil wizards and mad ones. There may even be some left today. But I've never heard of any crime proven against a wizard of the Varfarin. They are sworn to Jehan."

      "That may be. But where there's power such as wizards wield, who's to say where the end of it is. Power can twist the mind."

      "Power twists the minds of those who seek it, if those who seek it aren't twisted to begin with. Most of us find it only a burden." She sighed again, and Elise heard an unusual note of tiredness in her voice. "But I wouldn't, in any case, send Elise to be raised by a wizard. They know nothing of the sea, or these islands, and she's my heir."

      "Then why..."

      "No! Not to a wizard," Moira Adun continued, ignoring Brennan's interruption, "but I'd send her to Enole Lehar in Bria. He's my cousin, my uncle's grandson. I wrote to him when I heard there was a wizard living in the town. He's agreed to take her, if I decide to send her. There's a day school, too. The Wizard Derwen himself is staying there while he trains another child. The wizard who came here, he said Derwen would be glad to train Elise as well. She could visit us each fall, when the ingvalarin have gone south."

      "It all comes back to your fear of the sea folk." Brennan glared at Moira. "Tell me you'd be sending her away, if it weren't for that?"

      "Don't I have reason to fear them?"

      "Because she runs off to play with them when they camp on the shore?" he asked impatiently. "Of course she plays with them. The sea folk children are the only children she sees. She's lonely."

      "You think I don't know that?" Elise flinched at the anger in her grandmother's voice. "All the more reason to send her to the mainland where there are other, human children for her to play with."

      "If you send her away, you'll lose her. We'll both lose her. Once the wizards take her, you'll never get her back."

      "That's a chance I must take." The old woman frowned. "I can't arrange a marriage for her until she turns eighteen but I'll do it quickly enough then. She may come back. She's a good child and she loves the sea."

      "No." Brennan turned away and began to pace the room. "I'll not have her turned into a monster because of your fears." Elise ducked back behind the wall.

      "She'll not be a monster. I admit wizardry's not what I want for her. But you're showing your ignorance, Brennan, when you speak of it the way you do. Humankind needs wizards, and there are few enough of them as it is. If she has as strong a talent as the wizard who tested her says, that ought to be reason enough to send her." The old woman paused. "But you're right, I'd have been too selfish to consider that, if it weren't for the rest of it. There's too much of the sea in Elise's blood. I see it pulling her."

      "Even if that be true, she's only seven. She's safe for years yet. Wait until she's older."

      "That won't work. The older she gets, the harder the training is to start. The Varfarin rarely takes children over five. Derwen's never taken a child over ten. She'll be nearly eight when she reaches Bria now, if I wait until the end of summer."

      "So you'll give her up. What good is that going to do you?"

      "I may lose her. But she'll have babes, and they won't be of the sea. One of them can inherit. A baby born far from the shore, a baby who won't have played with the sea folk, won't feel the pull of the waves. The chain will be broken."

      "You hate them so much?"

      "Hate them?" Moirá laughed, a high, cackling laugh that cut through Elise's shock and forced her to peek into the sitting room again. "Yes, I hate them. Hate them and love them, how can I help it? I'm Adun of Adun. Their blood runs in me, too." She paused. Then she continued, her voice steady and cold, laying bare the iron will that Elise had watched people bow to all her life, not just on Adun but on all the surrounding islands. "I watched the sea folk destroy my daughter. I won't stand by and let the same happen to Elise."

      Elise pulled her head back carefully, wanting to cover her ears and pretend she had never heard what her grandmother had said, but the words, like the sound of her grandmother's laughter, echoed inside her head. She crawled across the hall to the kitchen and slipped out of the house. Then, heedless of the chill wind on her damp dress, she fled.

      The sea folk had killed her mother and her grandmother was going to send her away. Her grandmother would never let her see her friends again. Yet, how could sea folk be her friends, if they had killed her mother? She ran, half blinded by tears, for the hills.

      Errin found her late that afternoon with the sun sinking through a haze of multi-colored clouds. The curlews cried mournfully flying home to their nests on the cliff beneath her feet. His father, Lothar Yar, had urged him to look for her.

      "You're better than the rest of us at climbing these hills. You get more practice," Lothar had said, and though the words had stung, Errin had absolved him of malice. After all, his differences from the others of the wiga hurt his father as much as himself.

      "Someone needs to go after the child," Lothar had continued, "You're older, and you relate better to the way the landborn think than the rest of us."

      Errin had flinched again, but Incal Sharkbiter, the chief, had agreed. And their arguments had not included the best argument of all, that he could mind-link with her, because that was still a secret known only to himself and Pela. So Errin had set out to look for Elise. She had not been hard to find, perched on the top of the highest hill on the island, but it had taken a stiff climb to reach her.

      "Your grandmother's worried about you," he said, being careful to use ordinary speech. He had been seven when he helped Pela teach Elise mind speech, wanting to show off. Last summer, when he had shown her how to mind link, he had been nine and should have known better, but he had still felt the desire to show off in front of her. He forgot the danger, until he felt how the link could deepen, how he could lose control over it. He had shied away then and, when he admitted what he had done to his teacher in Sussey, the Wizard Delanan had warned him again of the harm a linkage could cause. So now he was cautious.

      "She sent for you to come home and we had to tell the messenger you'd left hours ago." He sat down near Elise on the rough ground a meter back from the precipice. Accustomed to the support of water around him, heights made him nervous, had done since his first time on land at the age of three when he had tripped and fallen with only air to catch him.

      Elise eyed him. The wariness of her expression chilled Errin. This morning she had looked at him with admiration, despite her disappointment at what she interpreted as a rebuff.

      "Why are you dressed?" she demanded.

      He grinned, relieved, and looked down at his worn gray corduroy pants and brown sandals. "My skin isn't hardened to these rocks the way yours is. I need to protect myself to climb them." His eyes went back to her face and he saw traces of tears. "Why did you come here?"

      She sniffed and swallowed. "This is where my mother died."

      Errin grimaced. "You come here often?"

      She shook her head. "I never thought about it until today. It's pretty here and you can see so far. I don't remember her much."

      "Why did you think about it today?"

      "My grandmother said the sea folk killed her." Elise picked up a stone and tossed it out into the air beyond her feet.

      Errin watched it fall out of sight. He couldn't hear it land over the sound of the surf on the rocks at the foot of the cliff, but after a time she turned back to him. He didn't know what to say. What she had said was impossible, unreal. Finally, he managed, "Your grandmother really said that? She actually told you an ingvalar killed your mother?"

      Elise looked away. "She didn't say it to me. She said it to Da, but I overheard."

      "I don't believe it."

      Elise stiffened. "She's Adun of Adun. She never lies."

      "Then you misunderstood what she said."

      Elise shook her head. "I didn't." She squinched up her face, remembering. "She said, 'I watched the sea folk destroy my daughter.' And my mother died here, on these rocks." She stared at him defiantly.

      Errin sighed. He was ten. He knew the songs and the stories of the ingvalarin, and, because of his mixed background, he knew them from the point of view of both the sea and the land. But Elise was only seven and had grown up in near isolation. How could he explain? "You don't understand," he said finally. "You're too young. There's a difference between destroying someone and killing them."

      "My mother died."

      He glanced toward the cliff. "You're not afraid that I'd push you, are you?"

      She looked startled. "Of course not!"

      He nodded. "Ingvalarin don't fight wars, and we don't kill larin, or even malarin, humans. You know that. But sometimes we do hurt people, not physically and not because we mean to, but because that's the way we are. Do you see?"

      She shook her head, her eyes fixed on him, glowing in the reflected light of the sunset like two pieces of amber caught in firelight. He wanted to link with her, show her what he meant, yet he knew this would be the worst time of all to do so, with both of them under the stress of strong emotions. He swallowed and forced himself to use words. "Sometimes when people get hurt, and they think they can't deal with the hurt, they decide they don't want to live."

      "You're saying my Ma killed herself, that she jumped off the cliff?"

      He looked away. "I don't know. I don't know what happened to your mother, but that's another thing your grandmother's words might have meant. There are probably other meanings, too. I don't know what's true, but nor do you."

      She sniffed and her eyes narrowed as though she were calculating something in her head. Finally she said, "It was autumn when she fell. I remember. A cruel, cold day, with the fog so close I could scarce see my hand at the end of my arm. I overheard when the fishermen came to tell Mother Adun and I ran outside to find her, but I never got farther than the barn." She swallowed.

      "So they had to hunt for you that day, too." Errin felt sad. "You've got long ears for a child."

      Her chin rose. "They didn't hunt for me. Da was in the barn. He took care of me. He told me that at least I'd always have him."

      Errin shrugged. "Then your mother's death could have been an accident, with the weather that bad. Even your grandmother can't know for sure."

      Elise looked up at him and nodded grudgingly. "Your people never come here that time of year." Then she started to cry again. "But she's going to send me away. She never changes her mind once it's made up. And then I won't even have Da. She doesn't want me to play with you any more so she's sending me to the mainland to go to school and be taught by wizards."

      He studied her. "You have talent or you couldn't have learned mind speech. Have you been tested?"

      Her eyes widened and she turned to him, wiping her face. "Wizards don't scare you?"

      He shook his head. "Of course not. Why should they?"

      She bit her lip. "Da says wizards do horrible things to children, turn them into monsters."

      He grinned. "Can you see your grandmother standing by while anyone turned you into a monster?"

      Her lips formed an 'O' of surprise and then turned up into a smile. "Oh no! She'd have their hides..."

      "Tacked to the yardarm," he finished. Their eyes met and they burst out laughing.

      He walked her home under the fading salmon and pink glory of the sunset sky.