And so Carys said, “I haven’t forgotten. Be ready to go when I get back from the shore.”

  * * *

  When Carys awoke, Eurion was already up and outside the cottage. She heard the sound of digging, and knew he was burying the sand otter that had slept beneath his ear last night. It would turn to sand and sea-burr before long anyway, but she wasn’t surprised when she glanced out the window and saw that he was, indeed, burying it.

  Whatever sadness he might have felt at its death, by the time Carys left the cottage, Eurion was at his sword exercises; making long, quiet sweeps with the sword, moving as if with the breeze and grass. His eyes were peaceful, a small smile lingering on his lips, and Carys knew that whatever else Eurion was, he was familiar and comfortable with a sword.

  He turned a brilliant, dreamy smile on her as she passed, but didn’t speak; and Carys, appreciating the fact, nodded at him as she passed by. It would probably be too much to expect the same kind of silence from him on the way to the village, but it was nice to know he could occasionally see her without feeling the insatiable urge to speak something.

  Eurion was outside the cottage again when she came back from the shore, his eyes bright and anticipatory; he leapt to his feet with a whoop when he saw her and came running to meet her.

  “You can use some of that energy to load the cart,” Carys told him, feeling as though she was as old as Enfys. “I take it you’re happy for the chance to see the market.”

  “Yes, Lady!” Eurion said happily, swinging seaweed bundles into the cart with surprising accuracy and a great deal more energy than Carys herself felt. “We’ll go straight away, won’t we?”

  Carys, thinking with dread of the inevitable meeting with Aled that might thereby be made evitable, agreed, “Straight away.”

  Though she managed to prevent Eurion from taking over the shafts of the cart, she couldn’t, she found, prevent him from pushing enthusiastically from behind. So enthusiastically did he push, as a matter of fact, that Carys found herself with very little need to pull, and once again at a loss for anything to do other than steer the cart.

  They made such good time in this way that Carys could see kites from the market wafting in the air fully an hour before she would usually arrive at the village. She glanced over her shoulder briefly; Eurion was panting a little, and his face was dusky with effort, but his eyes brightened at the sight of the kites.

  Nor did those eyes grow any less bright as Carys steered her cart through the winding market, Eurion dancing forward to walk beside her, his head turning left and right.

  When they arrived at Carys’ patch of flattened grass, he asked hopefully, “Will we see the market, Lady? I saw turtles over there, and there are kites flying—”

  “Run along,” Carys told him. She saw the glitter in his eyes as he watched the kites, and wondered how long it would be before he talked one of the children into letting him have a turn at flying one. “You don’t need to be here.”

  “No, but we should go together,” Eurion said, his mouth falling a little. “You should walk with me and show me all the stores and buy me nice things to eat.”

  Carys shook out her cloth sign briskly, then drew out the boards she used to make a trestle table. “I’ve no time for wandering the market. I’ve seaweed to sell. You can look with your eyes and perhaps there will be money for sweet things afterward.”

  “What rubbish,” said Enfys, popping up unexpectedly beside the cart. “The peddlers won’t be in for another hour. It’s not like you to arrive so early, Carys! If you’ve arrived early, you should at least go around the market and see the stalls.”

  As usual, thought Carys, irritated, Enfys was turning up exactly where she wasn’t expected, and putting her crooked old nose into things that didn’t concern her.

  Eurion beamed at Enfys. “You’re less grizzled than you look,” he said. “I thought you were quite dried up, but you’re nice after all.”

  “What a cheek!” decried Enfys, but she was grinning. “Take your basket, Carys; go around the market and eat sweet things for once.”

  Enfys knew perfectly well that there was a time when Carys had wandered the market and eaten the sweet things; she also knew that Carys wasn’t inclined to do so any longer.

  “Someone should mind the stall,” she said coldly. “I’ll not leave the seaweed unattended just because the traders haven’t arrived yet.”

  “Oh well, I’m not minding my stall today,” Enfys said, astonishing Carys completely. “I’ll watch it for an hour. Bring me back something tasty!”

  Carys surprised herself by laughing but stopped abruptly, aware of Eurion’s fascinated eyes upon her.

  “Lady, I didn’t know you could look like that!” he said earnestly.

  “Yes, yes!” Carys said hastily, towing him away from the attentive Enfys by the yoke of his shirt. “Everybody laughs once in a while, after all.”

  “Yes, but when you do it—”

  “I thought you wanted to see the market,” Carys said, very firmly. She had intended to find suitable playfellows for Eurion, and this particular conversation wasn’t tending to that resolve. She would have to buy a few things at a stall or two, and try to introduce him naturally.

  “Carys?”

  Carys stopped short just before she walked into Aled, her fingers still grasping Eurion’s shirt. She hadn’t seen him standing there, with a furrow between his brows, until he spoke.

  She released Eurion and nodded. “Aled.”

  “You’re earlier than usual,” he said, making Carys very aware that he was just now coming out to meet her as he always did. She had completely forgotten.

  Eurion subjected him to a swift look up and down and demanded, “Who’s this old man?”

  “Carys?” Aled went slightly stiff. “Do you know this boy?”

  Carys boxed Eurion’s ear. “Don’t be rude to my friends.”

  “What? Because I was rude to Enfys? But Lady! She took my shirt off that time!”

  “Aled is also my friend,” Carys said, refraining from mentioning that she had also taken off Eurion’s shirt. Unlike Enfys, Aled would probably become pained, and Carys preferred not to deal with a pained Aled. She had neither the patience nor the skills to soothe him.

  Eurion’s face looked distinctly unimpressed. “What, him? Lady, you should have young friends!”

  “Aled is barely ten years older than I am,” Carys said. “And I don’t ask permission for my friendships. Aled, this is Eurion. I took him out of the sea a week or two ago.”

  “You’re the puppy?” Aled said, the blankness of his tone an indicator of how much taken aback he was. To Carys, he said, “I thought he was younger.”

  “He’s young enough,” Carys said, frowning. Particularly this afternoon, Eurion was very young. “Go and play with the others at the kite stand, Eurion.”

  Eurion, belying the brightness she’d seen in his eyes when he caught sight of the kites, scowled and said, “I don’t play with those things. They’re for children. I want to see the market with you.”

  “Then you’ll have to carry my basket,” said Carys ruthlessly. None of the village boys would be seen dead carrying their mother’s or sister’s baskets—market day was women’s work.

  “All right!” said Eurion cheerfully. He snatched the basket from Carys’ fingers, bereaving both her and Aled of words, and started off down toward the market again, tugging Carys along by her sleeve.

  She was too surprised to do anything but allow herself to be pulled along; Aled too surprised to make more than a faint, startled protest that was snatched away by the wind.

  “I’ll carry all your things,” Eurion said, beaming back at her. “But you have to buy me something nice to eat.”

  “We’ll see how the seaweed sells,” Carys said dampeningly. That was nonsense, of course; her seaweed always sold. If it had been normal seaweed it would have sold regardless, but the seaweed gathered from selkie shores still had the faintest trace of magic running through it. Her crop was useful for more than those things in which seaweed was typically useful, and it was not only in pearls that Carys took her pay from the sea.

  * * *

  Walking the market with Eurion was more entertaining than Carys would have expected. He was certainly a pretty thing, but she didn’t think she had realised how pretty he was until she saw the way the eyes of all the younger female stall-holders followed him as they walked. Even some of the older women smiled appreciatively at the sight of him, and Eurion, evidently enchanted with the attention he was receiving, smiled back at all and sundry.

  A little peacock, thought Carys, smiling to herself.

  She introduced him to the blacksmith and the blacksmith’s very pretty daughter, took a little longer than necessary picking over the vegetables at her usual stall so that he could be drawn into the chatter between the young people at the next stall, and under his sparkling, eager eyes, agreed to bring him to the supper and dance that evening after the markets began to wind down.

  His eyes bright and luminous, Eurion said, “Are you really going to dance, Lady?”

  “No,” Carys said. “But everyone else will be, so you should enjoy yourself.”

  “I’d enjoy myself more,” Eurion said persuasively, “if you danced with me.”

  Carys gave a short, dry laugh. “You wouldn’t. I can’t dance.”

  It wasn’t so much that she couldn’t dance; it was that she hadn’t danced in more than ten years, and those dances that were performed now were not much like those she had once danced.

  “I’ll teach you!” Eurion said confidently.

  “Will you?” Carys’ voice was even drier. “How will you do that when you can’t even remember if you can dance?”

  But after Aled had paid her stall his usual visit to offer her food beneath Eurion’s scowling gaze, after the rag peddler passed her with an apologetic shrug, after the seaweed was sold, Eurion pranced at her side all the way to the supper hall, confident both in his ability to dance and to make Carys dance also.

  Carys remained obdurate, settling herself on one of the benches closest to the door, and since Eurion was quickly drawn away by a small crowd mostly consisting of young ladies, she was soon left in peace.

  That peace was ruined a little later by the arrival of Aled, who brought with him a plate of food from the supper table to share and didn’t seem inclined to get up when Carys didn’t choose to avail herself of any of that food.

  Instead, he broke the silence once in a while with a remark on the lightness of the evening, or the busyness of the market earlier, or even a question of how she was enjoying the music.

  It irritated Carys because she knew it wasn’t what he really wanted to say; nor would he come to the point for quite some time yet. Her irritation led to her to answer each attempt with merely a nod or a single syllable, and they had lapsed into silence long before Eurion returned, flushed and happy, with a plate of food.

  “I got you some things, Lady!” he said. “But I didn’t know what you liked, so I got you lots.”

  “Carys is provided for,” Aled said, eyeing him with dislike. “Share them with your partner.”

  “Did you fetch a plate for me?” asked Miss Allen, one of the young ladies Carys had pushed Eurion toward earlier. She caught Eurion’s arm and sparkled up at him. “How lovely! You got all the things I love best!”

  “Lady,” began Eurion, very solemnly, but Carys didn’t let him finish.

  “I don’t need anything to eat,” she said. She had not eaten any of Aled’s food, and she would not eat from Eurion’s plate, either. In fact, she still had a paper-wrapped sweet Aled had pushed into her hand earlier, and when she next passed the supper table, she would leave it there with the other leftovers.

  Eurion’s eyes fell on that sweet, and she saw them darken, his expression as close to sullen as she had yet seen it.

  “Do let’s dance, Eurion,” said Miss Allen. “Don’t bother Carys—she and Aled can talk for hours. They don’t want us here.”

  And Eurion, his eyes still reproachful, allowed himself to be led away by that small, white hand on his sleeve.

  Carys saw him dancing with Miss Allen later, and smiled faintly. He was very determinedly cheerful, and Miss Allen certainly sparkled with mirth as they went through the figures of a country waltz, but Carys caught those golden-brown eyes looking in her direction more than once and turned her own eyes away from the dance floor.

  It wouldn’t take long for the youth and beauty of a Miss Allen to teach the young Eurion that there were nicer things to be had than the dried dourness of a Carys, no matter how angelic he declared her to be.

  He appeared to be so much more genuinely cheerful later when the younger people decided to take a walk on the cliffs, that Carys felt herself safe to follow them at a slower walk with Aled. It was pleasant to escape the noise and confinement of the dance floor, with its mingled smells of greasy food and sweaty dancers, and Carys had found herself tired of it long before she was able to escape it.

  To her relief, Aled seemed content to walk in silence, and they covered the distance from the village to the cliffside in a pleasant, companionable quietness. It wasn’t until she found they had lagged quite some distance behind the others that she had any inkling he was about to bring up what he hadn’t been able to bring up in the dancing hall.

  She would have forestalled it if she could—perhaps tried to walk on again with the murmured excuse of finding where the youngers ones had gotten to, but Aled had already stopped and turned a little toward her.

  “That boy,” he said; and his tongue tripped over the word boy, as if he would have used another word but hadn’t quite been able to. “That boy—you said you took him from the sea?”

  “The sea or the selkies; I’m not sure which,” Carys agreed. Aled was frowning, which worried her a little. Frowning Aled was inclined to be very earnest and hard to persuade from his earnestness.

  “He’s not—he’s not living with you, is he?”

  “He is,” said Carys, sighing faintly. “He’s a boy, Aled. Let’s not be tiresome; let’s. I feed him and let him sleep in front of the fire.”

  “He’s not that much of a boy!” Aled protested. “Carys, it’s not safe!”

  “He has a memory I need to get if he can only remember it,” Carys told him. “When he gets that back, he can go back to wherever it was he came from. But until then, he stays where he is.”

  “Can’t he go to Enfys until he remembers? Why should you look after him?”

  “It’s an important memory,” Carys said quietly. Her hand was already in her pocket, the heavy gold of the ring leaving indents in her skin from the constant turning. She began to draw her hand out to show the ring to him—Aled would recognise it as easily as she had done—but there was a scattering of sand above them.

  Carys looked up sharply, and saw Eurion descending the grassy, sandy bluff, barefoot. His shoes hung around his neck by their laces and bounced as he approached.

  He beamed at Carys and said, “I saved you something, Lady! I don’t think you like very sweet things, so I got you a bitter-sweet thing—the others are taking them off the trees.”

  “I don’t need any things to eat,” Carys said hastily. She never accepted things from Aled, and she saw no reason why she should accept them from Eurion. “I’ll eat later.”

  “But Lady, it leaves just a little taste of sweetness on your lips after. Like salt after practising in the sea air in front of the cottage.”

  “Where is Miss Allen? I thought you were all walking along the cliffs?”

  There it was again; a shade of sulkiness—or perhaps reproach—to his eyes. “You didn’t come, so I thought I’d come back and see where you’d got to.”

  “Carys doesn’t care to walk along the cliffs,” Aled said, breaking his arm-folded silence. “Don’t tease her to go.”

  Eurion’s golden-brown eyes turned from Aled to Carys, curious. “Don’t you, Lady? Why not?”

  Aled shifted his weight, irritating Carys by brushing against her sleeve. “It’s a private matter.”

  Eurion scowled. “Why do you know it, then, old man?”

  “What did I tell you about being rude to my friends?” Carys demanded.

  “Sorry, Lady,” Eurion said, without according the same politeness to Aled. “But if you don’t want to go to the cliffs, let’s go somewhere else. They said there was a good view of the ocean, so I thought you’d like it. You always watch the sea when we’re at home.”

  “We’re content here,” said Aled. “Go back and enjoy the cliffs—look, your lady friend has come to see where you went.”

  “She knows where I went,” Eurion said, in surprise.

  However, the girl at present waving at them from the rise, called, “There you are! We thought you must have fallen over!”

  “I told her where I was going!” protested Eurion. “I said I was coming to fetch you.”

  “I think Miss Allen doesn’t care for the competition,” Aled said, smiling faintly.

  Carys gave a small sniff of laughter, and tilted her chin toward Miss Allen. “Look there! What competition?”

  Miss Allen was fit to rival Eurion in beauty; as golden haired as Eurion in his dyed splendour, she was fair-skinned in contrast to his dusky tones, and they were both the same kind of slender, glowing youths who drew eyes wherever they went. She could have been the sun above the horizon, standing at the top of the bluff.

  “There is no competition,” said Aled, but he didn’t look toward Miss Allen; only at Carys, and then the sudden glow of flame back against the village. “They’ve started the bonfire, Carys. Shall we go back?”

  When they reached the village once again, in a tangled, noisy group of young and old, Carys escaped to tuck herself away again in a cool, shadowy spot beneath a tree, nearby the bonfire. She was tired of noise, and people, and Aled. She would be tired for tomorrow’s work, too, but perhaps Eurion would sleep in a little and she could leave the cottage without the necessity of a cup of tea, or his bright eyes watching her.