The Merrow's Red Cap

• Chapter 1 The Theft at Dunmore Head
• Chapter 2 Cold Pebbles, Heavy Legs
• Chapter 3 The Fisherman's Hearth
• Chapter 4 Whispers in the Salty Air
• Chapter 5 The Fading Song of the Tides
• Chapter 6 Tracks in the Grey Sand
• Chapter 7 A Stranger in the Shingle
• Chapter 8 Saltwater and Bitterness
• Chapter 9 The Cliffs of Moher
• Chapter 10 Dreams of Coral and Pearl
• Chapter 11 The Tinker’s Warning
• Chapter 12 Dry Earth and Heavy Breath
• Chapter 13 The Harbor of Broken Nets
• Chapter 14 The Mermaid's Lament
• Chapter 15 Shadows Along the Strand
• Chapter 16 A Drowning of Memories
• Chapter 17 The Fair of Ballyvaughan
• Chapter 18 Iron, Rowan, and Sea-Foam
• Chapter 19 The Collector of Sunken Things
• Chapter 20 Forgetting the Deep
• Chapter 21 The Storm on the Horizon
• Chapter 22 Under the Sea-Warden's Eye
• Chapter 23 The Thief Revealed
• Chapter 24 Blood on the Barnacles
• Chapter 25 The Crimson Thread
• Chapter 26 Return to the Abyss

A sensible creature does not leave his skin, his soul, or his hat lying about where land-dwellers can reach them. Tadhg knew the proverbs as well as any bull-seal basking on the Skelligs, and he had recited them often enough to the reckless young sprats who thought splashing after curraghs was sport. A man from the hills would sell his own grandmother for an iron nail, the old elders said below the breakers, and he would steal the foam off a wave if he could figure a way to dry it in the peat smoke.

Yet the morning was sweet, and the sun had broken through the grey Dingle mist with an uncommon, buttery warmth that made a fool of even an ancient sea-dweller.

The basalt ledge below the cliffs of Dunmore Head was sheltered from the rough southwester that tore at the Blasket Sound. It was a smooth shelf, black as wet coal, upholstered with a thick pelt of bladderwrack that held the sun’s heat like a hearthstone. Tadhg had hauled himself out of the surf just after dawn, his greenish scales shedding the brine in long, glistening sheets, his lungs rejoicing in the bitter, clean scent of crushed kelp and gannet dung.

To enjoy the air properly, an honest merrow had to shed the cohuleen druith. It was a miserable thing to bake under that scarlet cap when the sun stood high; the red wool—if wool it was, spun as it was from the crimson sea-moss that grew only in the deep sunless trenches—had a magic so thick and heavy that it pressed upon the brow like an iron band. Without it, the world became instantly sharper. His gills closed tight along his neck, the webbing between his long fingers shrank until his hands looked nearly like the clumsy paws of a blacksmith, and his twin tails fused, shuddered, and parted into a pair of pale, pale legs that smelled strongly of cod liver and river mud.

He had set the cap on a flat plinth of sandstone, three cubits from his elbow, tucked beneath an overhanging fringe of sea-pink so the gulls would not mistake the scarlet thread for stranded bait. It was safe enough, or so five hundred years of peace had led him to believe.

Tadhg stretched his long, salt-whitened limbs and laid his chin upon his folded forearms. Out in the sound, a minke whale breached, blowing a puff of silver steam into the pale blue morning, and the sight was so thoroughly agreeable that Tadhg closed his eyes. The surf beat a steady, heavy pulse against the rock: three thumps, a hiss, and the rattling sigh of loose gravel being dragged back down the gully. It was a rhythm that could coax a stone to slumber.

He woke not to a noise, but to a silence where a scent ought to have been.

The sea-spray was there, certainly, and the sulfurous rot of exposed tangles. But cutting across them was an offensive, foreign stink—the reek of stale mutton tallow, sour sheep’s wool that had never met the sea, and the harsh, burnt tang of dried turf.

Tadhg’s eyes snapped open. His pupils, wide and dark as mussels, contracted to narrow vertical slits in the midday glare.

His hand darted sideways by pure instinct, fingers clawing toward the patch of thrift beneath the stone ledge. His knuckles struck bare, dry sandstone.

He lunged upward, tumbling awkwardly across the weed, his unpracticed knees barking against the black rock with a crack that sent a sharp shock of red pain up his spine. Merrows did not have knees worth speaking of while in the deep green water; they were soft, folding hinges used only for perching on rocks, and they were profoundly stupid joints that took offense at the slightest knock.

"Thief," Tadhg hissed. The air felt thin and dry in his throat, tasting of nothing at all. He had no voice for shouting—only the wet, clacking clicks of the merrow tongue and a rough, croaking burr he had picked up from listening to hooker crews swearing at their staysails.

Thirty feet above him, scrambled halfway up the treacherous sheep-path that scored the face of the headland, was a man.

He was not a grand man. He did not look like the great princes of Munster who used to ride down to the foam with gold bands on their wrists to parley with the deep-kings, nor did he look like the tall, grim Spaniards whose galleons had rotted into Tadhg’s front parlor three lifetimes ago. He was a small, bent creature in an unbleached flannel vest that had turned the color of ditch-water, with trousers tied at the calves with twists of dried sedge. He had red hair of his own, though it was a dirty, rusty sort of red, like an old anchor left to rust in a ditch.

Under his arm, tucked firmly into his armpit as though it were a cabbage he had snatched from a neighbor’s furrow, was the cohuleen druith.

The scarlet cloth caught the sunlight, gleaming with the unmistakable, oily luster of pure enchantment. Even from thirty paces down, Tadhg could see the little silver bell that hung from the peak of the cap trembling, though the thief’s dirty elbow was muffled around it so it could not ring.

"Hoy!" Tadhg managed. It came out as a harsh, coughing croak, like a cormorant choking on a gurnard. "Leave that! Put it down, you dry-gutted ape!"

The man stopped, boots skittering on the loose slate. He turned his head just enough to show a profile like a blunt iron spade—a broken nose, a bristling chin that hadn’t seen a razor since the last saint’s day, and small, pale eyes set deep beneath greasy brows. When he saw Tadhg standing below, naked as an eel and wobbling on two new, pale legs, the man did not scream. He did not drop the cap and fall to his knees to pray to Saint Brendan or the Virgin.

He simply grinned, a tight, yellow squint of triumph that showed he had known precisely what he was hunting.

"The luck of the house," the thief muttered. His voice was cracked and thin, the sound of boots scraping on dry lime. "Old Colm said the red cap keeps the herring in the cove. He said the red cap keeps the rot out of the spuds."

"The red cap will drown your seed and your breed, you sheep-dipping son of a ditch!" Tadhg roared, finding the land-speech with an effort that felt like spitting gravel. "Drop it on the grass and go, and I won’t take the marrow from your shins for cod-bait!"

The thief did not even answer. He spat into the thrift, shifted the red thing higher into his greasy ribs, and set his face to the cliff. He climbed like a goat, his cracked leather boots finding purchases in crevices so narrow that only a lizard ought to have trusted them.

Tadhg threw himself at the base of the rock.

In the sea, he was eight feet of muscle, tallow, and silver-green speed, able to turn within his own length and snap the spine of a dogfish before the brute could turn its yellow eye. On land, he was an absurdity. The bones of his hips felt loose, like an ill-pegged oar in a rowlock. His toes, webbed slightly at the base, caught on every clump of plantain and every loose chip of shale. He scrambled up the first ten feet on all fours, tearing his fingernails down to the quick against the grey slate, cursing with every salt-blessed oath known from the Fastnet to the Stags of Broadhaven.

"Wait, damn you!" he gasped.

The climb was sheer madness. Dunmore Head does not slope gently down to the water to invite visitors; it drops like an axe-blade into the Atlantic, five hundred feet of black, rotten shale and wind-battered turf that crumbles under the weight of a crow. Tadhg was twenty feet up when the first stone slipped under his bare heel.

He slid. The slate scraped the pale skin from his shins and chest, leaving bright red tracks that stung with the vicious, dry bite of the air. He caught a tussock of sea-grass with both hands and hung there, his chest heaving, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped gull.

Above him, the thief reached the green brim where the rock gave way to the high pasture. The small man pulled himself over the lip with an ease born of forty years of chasing stray yearlings along the cliffs. He stood against the white cloud, his figure small and dark, silhouetted like an ugly wooden stake.

He paused for a second. He looked down into the gulf, pulled the red cap from under his arm, and stuffed it deliberately down the front of his flannel shirt, patting his belly as though he had just swallowed a fat trout.

"You’ve a long walk before you, Master Fish," the thief called down. The wind blew his words away, but the shape of his mouth was unmistakable. Then he turned his back and vanished over the ridge.

Tadhg let his forehead drop against the damp earth of the tussock.

The earth smelled vile. It smelled of worms, of old dry roots, of the dust of things that had died and stayed dead instead of dissolving clean into the green brine. It had no buoyancy. It did not support a man; it resisted him, bruised him, dragged him down by the weight of his own meat.

Far below, the sea was calling him. The tide was turning, sliding off the basalt shelf with a long, inviting suck, leaving the brown weed to trail like hair in the current. He could drop now. A fall of thirty feet into the deep pool beside the rocks would not kill him; he would hit the water, the cold green embrace would fold around him, his gills would drink deep of the bitter brine, and the miserable heat of the sun would be quenched.

He could go home.

He let go of the grass with one hand and reached toward the surf.

Then he stopped.

Without the cohuleen, he could enter the water, yes. He could sink to the bottom like an old anchor. But he would not swim. Without the red thread, the magic would not wake; the seal-pelt would not knit to his thighs; his lungs would not remember how to draw the sweet sea-breath from the salt. He would drown. A merrow without his cap was nothing more than a two-legged vagrant who smelled of the shore, condemned to rot on the dirt or choke in the deep.

Worse, he could feel it already—a faint, terrifying prickle at the back of his neck, like the drying of a wet leaf in a summer draft.

A merrow out of the sea begins to unlearn. It starts with the names of the currents—the great cold river that runs from the north, the sweet warm tongue that licks up from the south—and then it steals the words of the songs that keep the drift-nets full. If he stayed on this rock until the moon changed, he would look at the waves and see only water, cold and wet and deep, and wonder why he had ever wished to jump into it.

"Not today," Tadhg rasped to the empty air. His voice was cracking, drying out like an old skate on a pier-head. "Not for a fellow that smells of ewe-grease."

He dragged his other hand up and found a handhold in the grey stone. It was an iron-colored rib of rock, sharp as a broken crock, but it held. He pulled his right foot up, placed the soft, white arch of his sole onto a sharp notch of quartz, and stood.

The pain was considerable, but anger was better than grease for oiling the joints.

He climbed. He did not look down at the clean green floor of the sound, nor out toward the Great Blasket where the seals were singing their noon-song on the white strand. He looked only at the brown moss, the grey slate, and the dirty sheep-droppings that marked the track of the man who had robbed him.

When his hand finally reached the soft, warm turf of the summit, the sun had passed its peak and was leaning toward the west. Tadhg hauled his belly over the ledge, tumbled onto the grass, and lay there panting, his limbs shaking with a strange, hollow weakness that he had never felt in the five centuries he had ruled the kelp-forests below.

The world up here was huge, flat, and horribly bright.

To the west lay the ocean, vast and blue-black, wrinkled like the skin on boiled milk. But to the east, the green earth rolled away in endless, terrifying ridges—hills that did not move, stone walls that divided the grass into little squares like salt-pans, and far off, where the mountain of Mount Eagle reared its purple head against the sky, a thin smudge of blue smoke rose straight up into the air.

Smoke meant fire. Fire meant a roof. A roof meant a man who owned a shovel and a flannel shirt.

Tadhg dragged himself up onto his knees. His pale feet were covered in black crusts of dried blood and earth, and his skin was already turning the dry, scaly pink of a boiled lobster from the sun. He looked down at his long, webbed toes, tried to wiggle them, and groaned.

"Two legs," he muttered, testing the weight of the words on his dry tongue. "Two miserable, dry wooden sticks."

He stood, rocked back on his heels, and nearly fell over into a patch of gorse. He caught his balance with a lurch that made his guts heave.

Then, setting his face toward the blue smoke and turning his back on the wide Atlantic, the merrow took his first step into Ireland.

The grass on the high headland felt like needles under his soles. In the sea, green things yielded; an eel-grass meadow swayed with the tide, caressing the flank with cool, slimy grace, parting before the belly and closing softly in the wake. The land’s grass was dry, stubborn, and bristled with tiny, biting daggers of gorse that seemed deliberately aimed at the tender skin between a creature’s toes.

Tadhg took three paces, swayed violently, and fell on his face.

The earth here was hard, uncompromising turf, tasting of soot and sheep droppings where it pressed against his lips. He lay still for a moment, waiting for a swell to lift him up, to cushion his ribs and buoy his shoulders. No swell came. The dirt remained completely motionless beneath his belly, dense and indifferent as an anchor-stone.

"A curse on two-footed beasts," he growled into the clover. "A curse on their grandmothers, and on the timber they cut to make their cradles."

He had to get up. Standing was an absurdity of balance, a trick of shifting his liver and intestines over two spindly stilts that had no fins to trim his heading. He rolled onto his hip, pushed with hands that felt thick and clumsy without their usual translucent web-sheaths, and forced the joints of his knees to lock.

The air was getting colder as the afternoon wore on. Without the cohuleen, his skin had begun to dry into a coarse, parchment-like hide that caught the wind like an ungreased sail. He was completely naked, a fact that had never once bothered him when conversing with basking sharks or lounging among the kelp ribbons of the Sound, but up here in the dry gale, it was acutely uncomfortable. The wind blew right through his ribs, drying his flesh until it seemed his very marrow was shrinking into a withered reed.

Down along the cliff-edge, a goat path meandered toward the lower ground. It was packed with grey limestone shingle, sharp as chipped flint, and scattered with tiny, round pebbles that rolled viciously underfoot.

He took the path because the gorse bushes to either side were impenetrable walls of gold and spines. Each step was a minor catastrophe. His toes, long and pale with slight remnants of skin connecting the knuckles, curled instinctively to grip the stone as though clinging to a surge-swept reef. But the loose gravel betrayed him at every stride, skittering away with dry, rattling clicks that grated against his ears.

Clack-clack-rattle. It sounded like broken shells being ground in a mortar.

A hundred yards down the path, Tadhg halted, gasping for breath that tasted terribly thin. His lungs were doing the work that his gills had managed without a thought for five centuries. Breathing air was like drinking water through a hollow straw; you had to keep pulling, drawing the barren stuff into your chest until your ribs ached, and even then, your blood felt starved, missing the rich, cold salt that made a merrow’s thoughts run swift and deep.

He looked down at his right foot. A jagged tooth of slate had sheared the side of his heel, and a thick, dark drop of blood was welling up from the cut. It was not the thin, pinkish fluid of land-men, nor the bright crimson of the thief’s dirty cap; it was deep and purplish-black, like the dye of a cuttlefish.

He touched it with his thumb. It was warm. That was the most unnatural thing of all—the heat of it. Inside his own hide, he was cooking, burning up with a sluggish, dry warmth that felt entirely foreign.

"Cold pebbles," he muttered, grinding his teeth together. "Nothing but cold pebbles and dust."

Away to the northeast, where the land bent down to form the hollow arm of Slea Head, the ground leveled out into rough, stony paddocks bounded by drystone dykes. Men had piled those rocks up, stone by stone, creating mazes of walls that served no purpose Tadhg could comprehend, except perhaps to keep themselves from looking at the wide water. In the middle of one of those squares, near a patch of blackened, withered vegetation that smelled faintly of rotten starch, stood a small stone hovel. It looked like an upturned curragh built out of field stones and caulked with mud.

From its low chimney of sods rose that same thin, insolent plume of blue smoke he had seen from the cliff edge.

A gull drifted overhead, tilting its wings against the updraft from the surf below. Tadhg looked up, his dark pupils narrowing, and let out a short, guttural whistle from the back of his palate—the common hail of the shore-feeders, a sound he had used ten thousand times to bargain for scraps of herring-gut.

The bird dipped its white head, eyed him with a pale, bead-like yellow eye, and let out a dry, indifferent scream: Klee-ar!

It did not veer down. It did not circle to see what manner of strange fish had crawled up on the shale. To the gull, he was merely another land-ape trudging through the dirt, perhaps a shepherd looking for a cast ewe, smelling of nothing that could be eaten.

The bird’s indifference stung Tadhg far more than the sharp slate under his feet.

It begins, he thought, and a cold shudder ran down the spine of his back, entirely distinct from the chill of the wind.

He tried to recall the sound of the deep current that ran beneath the Blaskets, the great southward drift that smelled of the ice-fields and carried the fat salmon down from the north in the dark of the year. He remembered the name of it—An t-Srutha Fuair—but the sensation of it, the way it lifted a creature’s belly and took the weight off the shoulders, was slipping away like sea-foam through a wicker basket. In its place was only the grinding friction of his hip-sockets and the heavy, pulling ache of the earth beneath his soles.

Gravity. The land had a grip like a dogfish with locked jaws; it would not let go, dragging down his arms, his chin, his very eyelids, forcing him to plant one clumsy heel after another into the flinty grit.

He hobbled on, following the trail of the red-haired thief.

The thief had left signs that any half-blind seal could have tracked through the fog. Here, a heel-mark dug deep into a patch of soft moss; there, a tuft of grey wool torn from his flannel coat on the thorns of a briar; and ahead, lying directly in the center of the gravel path, a small, square plug of dark leaf, wet and chewed, that smelled overpoweringly of burnt leaves and molasses.

Tadhg bent down, picked up the plug of tobacco between two fingers, and sniffed it. It made his nostrils flare and set off a violent, hacking cough that shook his entire ribcage. He threw the vile thing into the ditch.

"Foul-mouthed creature," he wheezed, wiping his mouth with the back of his forearm. "He chews weeds that would poison a dog-whelk."

The slope grew gentler as he approached the lower ground, but the going did not become easier. The loose pebbles gave way to a track of trampled, dried mud, cut with deep, ruts left by heavy wooden cartwheels. The ridges of the ruts were baked hard as brick by the midday sun, their crests catching the arches of his bare feet and threatening to turn his ankles at every stride.

He began to notice other smells now, drifting on the offshore breeze that came down from Mount Eagle. The reek was complicated and sickening: the sour musk of cattle standing in their own manure; the sharp, vinegar tang of fermenting silage; the bitter, dry charcoal dust of the hearths; and the unmistakable, stale oil of salted fish that had hung too long in the chimney rafters.

To a merrow who had known only the pristine chill of the green water and the wild, clean brine of the gales, the land smelled of decay. Everything here was dying slowly, turning brown, rotting into dust, or being burned to ash. Nothing was clean. Nothing dissolved back into the great mother of waters; it merely sat on the earth, heaping up in grey, crusty mounds of waste.

A low stone wall, five feet high and built of rounded granite boulders without a grain of mortar, blocked the path where it entered the fields.

Tadhg reached the wall and leaned his chest against the top stones. They were warm from the sun, but their texture was rough as a shark’s hide, scraping his pale skin through the fine layer of salt-dust that covered him. He looked over into the lane beyond.

The lane was sunken, cut deep into the hillside by centuries of rain and iron-shod hooves. It was lined on both sides with high, earthen banks smothered in stinging nettles and tangled brambles bearing small, unripe green berries.

On the other side of the lane, leaning against a wooden hurdle that kept a dozen scrawny sheep from straying into the ditch, was an old man.

He was not the thief. This man was much older, bent almost double, leaning on an ash stick with an elbow that looked like a knot in a pine plank. He wore a brimless hat of ragged brown felt, pulled down low over ears that stuck out like dried cabbage leaves, and a frieze coat that had been patched with pieces of sailcloth until it was impossible to tell what color it had originally been.

He was watching Tadhg with the calm, watery blue eyes of a man who has seen many things come up out of the sea or down from the mountains, and had decided long ago that none of them were his business unless they had money in their pockets.

Tadhg stared at him. His merrow blood, cooling and thickening in the dry air, urged him to drop behind the wall, to belly down into the grass like an otter until the land-creature passed. But he had no gills to hide in the sea-foam now; he was as dry and conspicuous as a stranded porpoise, and his knees were shaking so hard that he could not have crouched if he tried.

The old man spat into the nettles. It was a slow, deliberate act that seemed to require a great deal of thought.

"God save you," the old man said.

The words were Irish, the old dialect of West Kerry, thick with the guttural rolls of the coast, but to Tadhg’s ears, they sounded clattery and thin, like dry sticks breaking in the surf. Yet he understood them. He had heard them often enough when hovering in the shadow of the lobster-pots off the Blaskets, listening to the men in the curraghs muttering over their ropes.

Tadhg tried to work his mouth. His tongue felt like a dried sole that had been salted and left in a loft.

"The... man," he croaked, the sound coming from his throat like the screech of an unoiled rowlock. "The man with the red hair."

The old man shifted his weight from one foot to the other. His ash stick sank two inches into the damp earth beside the nettles. He looked Tadhg up and down, taking in the pale, hairless skin, the dried crusts of cuttlefish-black blood upon the shins, the webbed spaces between the toes, and the complete lack of a shirt, trousers, or boots. If he was surprised, he did not allow his face to acknowledge it; on this coast, men often came ashore from wrecks in various states of disrepair, and if this one was somewhat greener about the gills than usual, it was likely the work of the Spanish blood or the falling sickness.

"Red hair, is it?" the old man said, his voice whistling through three yellow teeth that were the only tenants left in his jaw. "There’s red hair enough between here and Ventry to stuff a mattress. You’d be speaking of young Liam from the cove, or maybe the tinker that came through yesterday with the solder-iron?"

"He has no iron," Tadhg said, leaning harder against the stone wall to stop his knees from buckling. The weight of his own head was becoming immense. His neck muscles, unaccustomed to holding up a skull that was not floating in salt water, were throbbing with a dull, throaty ache. "He has a shirt the color of pond-weed. And he took... he took what was mine."

The old man’s eyebrows twitched, just once, under the rim of his ragged felt hat.

"Ah," he murmured. "The flannel coat. That would be Padraig Ban. Padraig of the gully. A hard man to lose an oar to, if you’re a stranger."

"He took my cap," Tadhg said.

He had not meant to speak the word aloud. The word cap felt foolish, small, trivial. It sounded like something a child dropped in the road or a girl traded at a patterns-day. It did not sound like the red mantle of the sea, the knot of scarlet sea-moss that held the memories of the sunken galleons, the songs of the right-whales, and the paths through the cold green dark where no land-dweller could follow.

The old man did not laugh. He stopped leaning on his stick, his rheumy eyes narrowing as he peered through the dusty afternoon light at Tadhg’s throat. There, along the sides of the merrow’s neck, the fine, purplish slits of his gills were visible—closed tight, sealed with a pale, dried mucus, looking like nothing so much as old sword-scars or the gills of an overgrown skate.

The old man took his brimless hat off, turned it once in his cracked, earth-blackened hands, and put it back on.

"A cap," the old man said softly. "Aye. A red thing, maybe? With a small bit of silver on the point of it?"

"Where is his hearth?" Tadhg demanded. He gripped the top stones of the wall with fingers that were beginning to lose their supple strength, turning stiff and hook-like in the cold wind. "Where has he carried it?"

The old man pointed his ash stick down the sunken lane, toward the cluster of low stone roofs that huddled together near the lip of the lower cliffs, where the land fell away into a narrow, rocky cove. Smoke was rising from the nearest chimney, thick and oily, smelling of damp turf that had been cut from a sour bog.

"He lives down where the weed-cutters put their kelp-kilns," the old man said. He was not looking at Tadhg’s eyes now; he was looking at the ground, his voice dropping into that cautious, rhythmic cadence that country folk use when they are talking about things that might bring an easterly gale before the hay is carried. "He went by half an hour ago, stepping like a stag with two calves. He had his fist inside his breast, holding something tight against his heart, and he was whistling an air I haven't heard played since my grandfather was a boy."

"He has no right to it," Tadhg hissed. "It belongs to the deep."

"A man who finds a thing on the dry stone thinks he owns it," the old man said simply. He did not move, but his ash stick dug a little deeper into the mud. "And Padraig Ban is a man who wouldn't give a drop of ditch-water to a dying dog unless he could sell the hide afterward. If you’re going down to that hearth, stranger, you’d best find yourself some trousers. It’s a bitter cold evening coming off the Brandon range, and a man without wool on him will find his legs turn to lard before the moon is over the Blaskets."

Tadhg did not understand what trousers had to do with anything. In the sea, a man was his skin, his flesh, his bone; he needed no sheep’s cast-offs to face the cold that came down from the Greenland ice. But as the sun dipped behind the dark shoulder of Mount Eagle, casting a long, blue shadow across the stone fields, the truth of the old man’s words struck him with sudden, brutal force.

The cold was different here. In the ocean, the cold was a great, heavy blanket of salt water, thick and clean and silent, that wrapped around you until your heart slowed to a steady, patient thrum. Here, the cold was thin, sharp, and hungry. It ate through his pale hide like brine through an open wound. His teeth began to clatter against each other with a dry, wooden rattle that he could not control.

"The hearth," Tadhg said again. His vision was beginning to blur at the edges, a grey mist creeping in from the sides of his eyes that had nothing to do with sea-fog. It was the land-blindness, the terrible drying of the humors that happens when a sea-dweller spends too many hours breathing the air of horses and sheep.

"Follow the track," the old man said, turning his back slightly, as though he had already said more than an honest tenant ought to say to a naked apparition with scars on its neck. "When you smell the grease of the skate-oil, you'll be at his door. But mind the dog. Padraig has an iron-mouthed terrier that has no love for fish."

Tadhg did not thank him. Merrows do not thank men for pointing the way down a track that should never have existed in the first place.

He hauled his legs over the drystone wall. It was a miserable, sprawling business; his foot caught on the top boulder, knocking it loose with a heavy thud into the lane below, and he came down hard on his hands and knees in the mud. The mud was cold, foul, and full of sharp fragments of cattle-horn and flint. It coated his belly and thighs in a greasy grey paste that felt like the bottom of a stagnant oyster bed.

He struggled to his feet, swaying like a top-heavy curragh in a beam sea.

His legs felt ten times heavier now than they had on the high ledge of Dunmore Head. Every step was an agony of stone-bruises and strained tendons. His shins, which had never carried more weight than the sweep of a caudal fin against a swell, seemed to be bowing outward under the monstrous, dragging load of his own meat.

Cold pebbles, he thought, as the gravel of the lane bit into his soles again. Cold pebbles and iron earth.

Behind him, the old man did not watch him go. He was already leaning back on his ash stick, his pale eyes fixed on the sheep in the clover, as though a creature with gills and black blood had never stumbled down from the sea to trouble the peace of the afternoon.

The lane wound down toward the cove. As Tadhg limped onward, dragging his bruised feet through the nettles that left white, fiery blisters across his thighs, the sun finally slipped into the Atlantic.

A great wash of orange and dull purple spread across the western sky, lighting the tops of the breakers on the Blasket Sound with a brief, bloody glare. Down in the water, he knew, the herring-shoals would be rising to the surface now, their millions of silver bellies flashing in the dusk as they fed on the night-crustaceans. The seals would be slipping off their rocks to hunt, sleek and quick and silent, moving through the cold green dark without a thought for stone or mud.

He stopped for a second, leaning his shoulder against the earthen bank, his breath coming in dry, rattling wheezes.

He tried to sing. It was an old song, three notes only, that the merrows used to call the drift-nets away from the rocks when the young men from Dunquin were setting them in the twilight. He opened his mouth, shaped his tongue against the roof of his palate, and pushed the air from his lungs.

No song came.

Only a dry, whistling croak, like the wind blowing through a chink in a stone wall.

The air had stolen the notes. The dry dust had dried up the brine in his throat, and the music that had belonged to the ocean since the days when the great elk walked the hills was gone, replaced by the stupid, clacking land-tongue of men who ate porridge and died in the dirt.

A cold drop of water hit his nose.

Tadhg looked up, hoping for the salt mist of the spray, but it was only rain—thin, grey, miserable land-rain, tasting of nothing at all, falling from the heavy clouds that had gathered over Mount Eagle. It did not cool his skin; it only made the dirt on his chest turn to a thin, greasy smear.

Down in the hollow of the cove, the light from a small, square window flickered through the gloom. It was a dull, smoky yellow, the light of a tallow dip burning in a dark room.

Below it, the sea was pounding on the shingle with a heavy, hollow roar—hush-ah, hush-ah, hush-ah—the voice of the tide that knew him, the voice of the mother that had sustained him for five hundred years. But between him and that clean, deep dark stood forty perches of gravel, a stone wall, and a low door made of unpainted larch planks, barred from within against the wind and the night.

Tadhg set his teeth, wiped the cold rain from his brow with an arm that felt like lead, and dragged his heavy, bleeding legs down the last turn of the lane.