“I’ve known Aled since I was quite young,” Carys said. She put the bread on the table and unwrapped it, giving the task more time and attention than it strictly needed. “I know him very well.”

  “Yes,” said Eurion. He rose to fetch plates for each of them, and reappeared with the jam and cold meat. When had he learned where those were kept? He smiled at her as though he was laughing, and said, “But I’ve been thinking about it all night, and that’s why I decided.”

  She said, “Oh?” before she could stop herself, and poured her own cup of tea.

  “Yes,” Eurion said again, and sat down in his place again to smile up at her. “I’ve decided that I’m going to love you slowly.”

  Carys had the sensation that the world went very quiet for a moment, and she heard the beat of her heart in her ears, too fast. She sat down rather suddenly in her chair and said, “What?”

  “I’m going to love you,” he repeated, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “Just nice and slowly so that it doesn’t startle you too much.”

  Carys put down the teapot very carefully, and pushed Eurion’s teacup closer toward him. “Don’t do that,” she said. “I’m not a good person to love.”

  It was the surprise of it all that made her heart beat so confusingly fast, turning the world into a fuzzy blur that only had one focus to it. It wasn’t that she had thought Eurion had given up, exactly. But she’d thought she had managed to nip things in the bud with enough harshness that any remaining feelings would quietly and naturally wither away.

  “You can tell me not to kiss you,” said Eurion, and grinned as he added frankly, “Though I wish you wouldn’t! But you can’t tell me who to love. I don’t want to love Miss Allen and I do want to love you, so I’m going to do that.”

  “I didn’t tell you to love Miss Allen,” Carys said, because she didn’t seem to be able to find anything else to say.

  Eurion sipped his tea, still looking at her through his lashes. “I’m not stupid, Lady,” he said. “I was confused for a little while, because you were hard to read and I wrong about some things, but I’m not stupid. I know why you’re always letting Miss Allen come here with Aled, even though she says sharp things about you.”

  “Miss Allen is—”

  “No, but I don’t care about Miss Allen,” said Eurion, and his eyes were glowing again. “I only care about you.”

  He was, realised Carys, as the world turned upside down, laughing at her. Quietly, softly, delightedly laughing at her. She said, more unsteadily than before, “You can’t. I think perhaps—perhaps it’s time for you to go away.”

  Eurion gazed at her for a long time, and although the glow to his eyes was less pronounced, it was still there. He said, “I don’t think you want me to go. And I think—I think—” he added slowly, “that you can’t get rid of me, even if you did want to. I still have some memories you need. I don’t mind if that’s why you keep me.”

  “You should mind,” she said harshly. “I’ll only keep you as long as I need to get your memories. Don’t expect anything else.”

  “Enfys says it could take years,” he said. “That’s all right. I like to move quickly but I can move slowly if I need to.”

  “Do you not understand that I’m married?”

  “This week, I found out that Sunderland marriage laws are really simple,” said Eurion thoughtfully. “Much more simple than Eppan ones. Isn’t it funny, Lady—I remember Eppan marriage laws, but not my own name.”

  “Then you should know that—”

  “I know that in Sunderland, when a husband abandons his wife, the marriage is dissolved after the fifth year and any land or goods that were the husband’s become the wife’s,” Eurion said. “Sort of payment for him being a—well. But Eppan law is very different.”

  “I choose not to have it dissolved,” Carys said sharply. “I do as I please.”

  “That’s not what Enfys said,” Eurion remarked. “She says that even if he came back, you’d have to marry him again. Actually, I did some studying—”

  “I see,” said Carys. She was angry, and frustrated, and entirely at a loss—and yet she didn’t seem to be able to help the amusement that threaded through it all. “And how exactly did you do this study?”

  Eurion grinned guiltily. “Enfys took me to the town hall. They have the laws written on the walls, Lady.”

  “I’ve been to the town hall.”

  “Yes, and I don’t think you should marry him again, even if he does show up.”

  “Eurion.” Carys closed her eyes, and against her better judgement—purely for the sake of gaining herself some breathing space—said, “Did you not say that you were going to do things slowly?”

  His eyes, bright and hopeful, fastened on her. “Yes, Lady.”

  “Don’t look at me like that.”

  Eurion lowered his eyes, but they still sparkled as they had, and he was still smiling.

  “Don’t hope,” Carys told him, stern and forbidding. “Don’t love me. I’ll only push you out as soon as your memories return. Don’t forget that.”

  And Eurion, smiling into his tea because she wouldn’t have him to smile at her, only said, “Yes, Lady.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Carys left for the rocky seashore in something of a dazed confusion. She was uneasily aware that Eurion was as conscious of that confusion as she herself was, despite the sternness of her face, and spent the walk to the seashore in wondering how she could discourage him when he was now apparently capable of seeing through her most forbidding looks.

  At the seashore, the breeze sticky and sulky around her, she was forced to the conclusion that there was nothing she could do. She could try to frighten him out of his puppy love, or disillusion him out of it, but just as Eurion had said, she couldn’t tell him what to think or feel. The only thing she could do, from her own side, was to refuse to accept what was offered.

  And she must refuse it: there was no question of anything else. The laws of Sunderland might not agree, but Carys felt herself still married. More than that, for ten years she had looked—she had waited—she had pined—

  But there was no point in thinking about that, either. Not until Eurion got his memories back. And Eurion and his memories were the final, unstoppable reason for Carys to harden her heart. Eurion was only a means to an end, and to allow him to think otherwise was to become utterly despicable.

  That was decided, thought Carys. But having decided it, she was left with the issue of how to make it clear to Eurion that he wasn’t to be encouraged, when he was having none of the idea. She thought about it while she cleared away the seaweed, but by the time she saw Ma Yong Hwa toiling along the shore from the far caves where she had once taken Eurion, she still had no better idea of how to go about it.

  It was easier to allow herself to wonder what Yong Hwa was doing along the shore than it was to keep thinking of Eurion, and Carys kept an eye to his progress as he moved closer through the morning. He seemed to be moving along the cliffside from the cave mouth in zig-zagging lines, stopping every so often to look out to sea and then up at the cliffs, and Carys thought there was a paper in his hand. He had done with his paper by the time he drew near to her, just as Carys had done with her seaweed; she saw him slip it into his pocket as he approached, and thought she caught a glimpse of a sketch on it.

  If it hadn’t been for that slip of paper, Carys would have thought he was stopping to pinpoint the red glitter that was again sparkling from the cliffside. The same flash of red had annoyed her all morning once again. It could have been another of the selkies’ tricks if it had not been so far from the foamy seashore.

  She greeted Ma Yong Hwa, packing the last of her bundles onto the cart, and resisted the urge to ask him what his paper represented. Instead, she asked, “Is your wife well?”

  “Yes,” he said, and added, “She dreams.”

  That, Carys was fairly sure, meant that Clovis Ma was sleeping, which was probably a good thing. “I’m glad,” she said. “I’m sorry that it happened this way.”

  “No,” he said. “Certainty is…helpful.”

  He caught Carys’ eye as she frowned at another flicker of red, and asked, “Something troubles you?”

  “There’s a colour to the cliffs,” she said. It was not asking him about his paper to mention it; even if he had noticed it while he was looking at his paper, he needn’t feel bound to mention one in connection with the other. “It was there yesterday, too.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought it unusual: the birds, perhaps?”

  “Yes,” said Carys. “But if it catches my eye, it would have caught the eye of another bird.”

  “The creatures of the sea are playing tricks, perhaps?”

  “Yes,” she said again, but there was a hesitation to her voice. “But outside of the tales, I’ve known only one selkie to go so far from the sea, and never for a mere prank.”

  “You knew one who came ashore?”

  “They all come ashore,” Carys said. “It’s what they do. But they don’t stay—they shouldn’t stay. When they stay there’s trouble and mischief.”

  “Mischief? What kind of mischief?”

  “Bodies,” she told him. It wasn’t just bodies, of course, but that was the usual result.

  “They hate humans so much?”

  “Not hate,” she said. “But they’ve no souls and their play is cruel.”

  Ma Yong Hwa’s dusky forehead creased. “No souls? But—”

  “Perhaps I should have said that the sea is their soul,” Carys said quietly. “It’s truer. If they wish to stay ashore for more than a few hours at a time, they need to bring some part of their soul with them, so they don’t try. Their sorrows and joys are not like ours, and they live only to play. When there are no other playfellows to be had, they come to us.”

  “I see,” said Ma Yong Hwa thoughtfully. “Your fishermen are brave men.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I think you—”

  “I do my job,” Carys said. “I’m safe enough on the shore. There’s no other life for me.”

  He smiled at her; a friendly, approving sort of smile that Carys refused to allow herself to appreciate. She didn’t need more friends. Life on the seashore was a single, dangerous existence, and either friends or loved ones were a hazard that couldn’t be allowed.

  “Perhaps,” he said, and stopped as though he wasn’t sure she would find what he was about to say agreeable. “Perhaps you would visit my wife today. If you have time.”

  “I may have time,” agreed Carys. If it had not been for the fact that she was looking forward to her trip to the village even less than usual this week, she would probably have declined in no uncertain terms. She was in no hurry to face Eurion again, however, and it was a convenient excuse to arrive in the village centre when it was already well-peopled with shoppers and stalls, even if she missed the first quiet time for setting up. Eurion would find it difficult to talk privately with her in that bustle, even if he did abandon his building to seek her out.

  “Thank you,” said Ma Yong Hwa, and, bowing, he left her alone.

  Carys followed him much more slowly, her feet toiling through the sand more than usual, dreading the thought of continuing up the cliffs toward the village. She had once or twice wished that she need not go to the village every week with her seaweed, but although Aled had always been an uncomfortable thorn in her side, he had never been effective enough to cause her to have second thoughts about actually going to the village. Her regrets or discomforts had always and ever been the other people of the village.

  Today, that was no longer true. Today, Carys’ spirit, so well inured to the danger and heartbreak of the seashore, failed her at the thought of a golden head of hair with dark roots, and brown eyes that saw far too deeply for comfort. Those eyes lingered in her thoughts as she worked her way up the cliffside with the unusually-empty cart, and left her entirely exasperated with herself for allowing herself to be thus affected.

  “Ridiculous!” she said to herself, as she stopped inexplicably just below the ridge where she usually saw Aled first. There was no need to be fearing Eurion.

  Though if she thought about it, Carys wasn’t sure it was fear so much as a certain, helpless certainty that no matter what he said, it would somehow manage to be something she didn’t expect. There was nothing about the seashore that Carys didn’t expect—nothing about Aled’s determined, unswaying courtship of her, nothing about the way the village acted. She had lived for years in that certainty—comfortable in it. Cold, but certain. How could warmth be so confusing and unsettling?

  “Lady!” said Eurion’s voice, so close at hand that Carys jumped and, just for a moment, was certain she must have imagined it. “Are you sick? Why did you stop?”

  “I was looking at the sea,” said Carys, which was true enough, if not the reason she had stopped. “Why are you here?”

  “I’m making sure that old man can’t pull your cart for you,” he said, with mischief in his eyes. “Even if it is empty.”

  Earlier, she had fully decided to give him no sign of encouragement—no smiles, no greetings, nothing that he could interpret as encouragement or even toleration—but when Eurion’s eyes curved, aglow with mischief and welcome, Carys found herself smiling without being aware of when she began to do so. She banished the smile as soon as she was aware of it, but was less successful in dispelling the sense of warmth that came with it.

  “I didn’t ask you to pull my cart for me,” she said. “I won’t allow Aled to do it, either.”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” Eurion said, wriggling in between Carys and the shafts of the cart.

  Carys, startled and flustered, moved away at once, and Eurion beamed at her. “You should start first, Lady,” he said. “Or I’ll run over your toes.”

  If there had been even a suspicion of mischief still in his eyes, Carys would have thought he had done it on purpose, and would have pulled him out from her cart by the ear. She was tempted to do it still, but the same, vague discomfort with being too bodily close to him that had prompted her to move in the first place, also prevented her from carrying the thought through. Instead, she moved out of the way and merely said, “Did Enfys not need you at the house?”

  “She told me I could come to meet you,” Eurion said. “I told her I wanted to talk to you.”

  “I see,” Carys said, with a fulminating thought for Enfys. “In that case, you can fetch the seaweed and take it to my usual place in the market. I’ve to meet Mistress Ma before I go there.”

  She left Eurion protesting behind her, burdened by the cart, and strode ahead, her steps swift and light. Aled was waiting for her as usual, but Carys didn’t slow her step for him, either.

  “I’ve to meet Clovis Ma,” she said to him.

  “I’ll walk you there,” he said, lengthening his stride to match hers. “The boy follows with your cart?”

  “He’ll see to the seaweed I left with Enfys,” Carys said shortly. She would have told him that there was no need to walk her to the inn, but she had tired of explaining herself, and if Aled wished to tire himself out in following her to the inn for no reason, he might do so.

  Perhaps he picked up on the dangerousness of her mood, because when they reached the inn, Aled only bowed very slightly and said, “I’ll see you later, Carys,” before he left her. Carys, feeling slightly relieved, went to rouse the doorman and seek entrance to Clovis Ma’s suite.

  The doorman must have been told to expect her, for he didn’t seek permission to show her up: he merely beckoned her to follow him and then left her alone in a sitting room that bore a few touches to show it had been inhabited for some time. A desk of mingled letters and sheet music took the best of the light, and a delicate shawl had been left draped on the chaise lounge that sat before one of the windows. Carys might have thought it was one of the inn’s lounges if it wasn’t for the fact that it had well-worn handles hidden in the carved wooden accents.

  So Clovis Ma travelled with her own furniture, did she? Carys had seen the woman walk, but she seemed only periodically capable of it, and Ma Yong Hwa’s careful consideration of her made Carys wonder exactly how sick the woman was.

  Still vaguely irritated and uncomfortable, Carys was in no mood to wait on the woman, however sick she might be, and she spent the few minutes she was forced to do so in striding about the room. Repaying the favour that Ma Yong Hwa had so lately paid her, she allowed herself the petty pleasure of looking over the writing desk in the centre of the room.

  She was in the process of doing so when the door opened to admit Clovis Ma. The woman proceeded into the room slowly enough that Carys could have moved away from the desk without appearing to be suspicious, but the same perverseness that had prompted her to look over the desk made her remain where she was.

  Her eyes all but shut, Clovis Ma moved with a heaviness Carys would have understood to be the heaviness of sorrow if it wasn’t for the complacency of her pale face. She had already felt an instinctive dislike of the woman that might have had something to do with how difficult it was to remember her, but now that she found it easier to remember her, Carys felt that she didn’t dislike Clovis Ma any less.

  “What’s this?” she asked, lifting one of the sealed envelopes from the desk. The seal was a familiar sort of pattern, inked, but not set in wax: waves in blue ink decorating the outside of a creamy envelope. The whole thing was serviceable as well as beautiful, the ornamental delivery of someone very important in Eppan circles, no doubt.

  “We travelled under orders from the royal family,” said Clovis, her heavy-lidded eyes lifting to meet Carys’ gaze. “My husband still carries some orders for the prince when he’s found.”

  “When he’s found,” Carys said slowly, though it was more of a question. As much as any of the villagers or peddlers, did she think that the prince was long dead. Nor did she think the envelope was a set of orders—if it had been, it would have been sealed in wax, not stamped in ink.

  “We are hopeful,” Clovis Ma said, in direct contrast to the vanilla serenity of her voice. “Thank you for agreeing to see me, by the way.”