But then, she’d not have known about the ring. Carys couldn’t see Enfys mentioning the existence of such a rich piece of jewellery, once found. No, better to have the boy, disruptions and all, than not to know about the ring. Carys stacked a row of driftwood where it would catch the sun when the sun deigned to come out, then looked around in the darkness, at a loss. If it was a normal day, by now she would be preparing her dinner or sweeping the floor. She would prefer not to go into her cottage while it was so unfamiliarly full with people, but there was nothing left to do out here and Carys wasn’t one to care for doing nothing.

  She bent to push her bundles a little more securely against the cottage, and as she did so, there was a wild yell from the house. Carys stood up straight in surprise and the boy came tumbling out of the cottage, bare to the waist and staggering in the wet night air. There was an uneven patch of brown salve spread across his chest, and a wild look to his eyes beneath his golden fringe; he stumbled across the few feet of grass and launched himself into her arms.

  “Lady! Help, Lady!”

  “You young caution!” scolded Enfys, from the doorway. “Come back here!”

  The boy yelped and shuffled until he was behind Carys, still clinging to her waist. “Lady, make her stop! Why is she touching me?”

  “She’s putting salve on your chest,” Carys said. The arms around her waist were shaking; so, if she wasn’t wrong, were his legs. She turned, seizing him by the hair to stop him wobbling back and forth, and put her fingers to his forehead.

  “Ow, ow, ow,” he said, but he didn’t try to struggle, just shivered as he gazed up at her. “Don’t let her touch me, Lady!”

  “Don’t be rude to Enfys,” she said, taking her hand away again. “Why are you out of bed? You’re still feverish.”

  “She was touching my chest!”

  “She has to put salve on it. Don’t you want to get better?”

  He glared at Enfys, and his arms tightened around Carys. “You do it.”

  “What?”

  “Can’t you do it?”

  Carys sighed. “Then I’d be touching your chest.”

  “I don’t mind if it’s you,” the boy said. “That one—she slapped me!”

  Enfys gave a shrug. “He was wriggling.”

  The boy’s legs gave way, smearing Carys with ointment as he fell, and she released his hair, turning swiftly to seize him beneath the arms.

  “That’ll teach him to be so sprightly when he’s ill,” said Enfys in satisfaction.

  The boy made a protesting mumble into Carys’ neck, and she gave a small, dour smile. “Be quiet,” she said, and carefully manoeuvred him onto her back once more.

  “What a waste of good salve!” grumbled Enfys, but she pushed the door out of the way for Carys; and, when it was obvious that Carys was going to put him in her bed instead of in front of the fire, she pulled the covers back, too. “Waste of a good bed, too.”

  “What?” Carys asked, lowering the boy’s head to the pillow carefully. “Will he die?”

  Enfys spat a laugh. “That one? He’ll live! The cheeky ones always do.”

  “Don’t hit him again,” said Carys.

  “Well!” huffed Enfys. “Well! Of all the things to say to the kind old woman who’s helping you! I never did!”

  “You’re being well paid,” Carys said. That was another game she wasn’t willing to play.

  Enfys grinned suddenly, her ill humour gone. “Modest little thing, isn’t he? I’d heard Eppan boys were shy, but I’d not thought it was as bad as that!”

  “I hadn’t noticed,” Carys said dryly. Everything she’d seen of the boy so far had led her to believe the opposite. “Maybe he knew someone like you before he was lost to the sea.”

  “Now there’s a thought,” nodded Enfys. “He looked a bit panicked when he woke, come to think of it. Oh! Don’t mind if I do!”

  Carys, who had simply been filling the kettle with the hope that Enfys would take the hint and leave, stifled her faint sigh and crossed to the window to lift two teacups from their hooks in the window frame.

  “I’ll try again with the salve,” Enfys added. “Now that he’s out.”

  “No,” said Carys. She set the teacups on the table and took up the salve instead. “I’ll do it.”

  “He’s asleep,” said Enfys. “He won’t know.”

  “I know,” Carys said, and went to the bed.

  The kettle was just beginning to boil when she was done. Carys wiped the excess salve from her hands on the apron of her dress; it was already smeared with salve from the boy earlier, and it was about time she did the washing again, anyway. She filled the teapot from the kettle, sweeping the scattered tea by the fireplace back toward the hearth with one foot, and took it back to the kitchen table.

  Enfys’ sharp eyes caught the sweeping motion. Jerking her chin at the bed, she asked, “Did he do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “What a troublesome child.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll take him with me,” she said decidedly. “He’ll have a hard night of it tonight, and you’ll need your sleep, I’m thinking.”

  “No,” said Carys, passing a full teacup to Enfys.

  “No?” Enfys took the cup, looking curiously at her over it. “You can’t keep him here.”

  Carys put her teapot down on the green trivet. “I can. He washed up on the beach. Everything that washes up on the rocky shore is mine. That’s the agreement.”

  “I see. What will the village say?”

  “Does it matter what the village says?”

  For the second time that afternoon, Enfys grinned. “I suppose it doesn’t, at that,” she said. She sipped her tea, and added, “He’s not so young, you know. Not but what I’d call him a boy—but I’m fifty, you know.”

  Carys, who knew that Enfys was a good deal older than fifty, only said, “He’s just a boy. Not much older than twenty.”

  “And you’re only thirty yourself, Miss. People will talk.”

  “People already talk about me,” Cary said. “If they’ve nothing better to do, let them talk.”

  Enfys tsked. “Now you’ve become stubborn and boring again—just as I was beginning to think there was something interesting to you.”

  That surprised Carys. It had always seemed to her that Enfys didn’t like her, but she hadn’t cared enough to wonder why.

  “There’s never been anything interesting about me,” she said. “Never will be: just salt and water.”

  “Well, we’ll see,” said Enfys, and she gazed at the boy in the bed as she sipped her tea.

  Enfys left the cottage just as Carys was beginning to think she would have to politely offer a place to stay for the night.

  “Give him the tea tomorrow,” the old woman said, pulling tight on the ribbons of her bonnet and tying a bow beneath her chin. “First thing. And if he gets worse during the night, spread the salve on his feet as well and cover them.”

  “Do you need a light?”

  “I think not,” said Enfys, fishing in the pocket of her cape. The last Carys saw of her, as she shut the door to keep the cool night air from doing more damage to the boy, Enfys was winding up a handle on the side of what looked like a lantern. It must have worked, because Carys saw the glow of it later through her window, too, brighter than a flame-lit lantern in the night. She smiled a little as she cleared away the tea things; Enfys was the only one who could have gotten away with starting a fashion for what the village still called ‘those Scandian faradiddles’. There was a general consensus in the village—and Sunderland as a whole—that if Scandian Contraption devices were not absolutely evil, they were at least several levels lower than actual magic. The village not only tolerated, but were proud of, their magic users. Contraption devices, on the other hand, with the wild, unpredictable way they sometimes acted and the villagers’ complete ignorance of how and why they worked—when they worked—were something to be feared and distrusted. Carys herself would have welcomed a few of those gadgets, but she had yet to store enough of the pearls she found—and when that was done, find a trader willing to trade in Contraption devices.

  A Contraption device for warming up the water, Carys thought, as she stirred up the fire; would be pleasant. A device to bring up the water inside, too, so that she wasn’t always going to the pump outside to fill her water barrel. That would be nice. She put her apron in the scrubbing bowl to wash tomorrow and busied herself with finding something to use as a screen in one corner of the room. If the boy was to stay, there would need to be certain arrangements made, the first of which was a place for either of them to change and wash in some privacy. She strung a piece of leftover washing line to make a triangle in the far corner of the room, close enough to the fire to keep warm but not close enough for the sheet she hung as a screen to waft into the flames if the door opened unexpectedly and sent a breeze fluttering against it. Then Carys put the half barrel she used as a wash tub behind the makeshift screen, with the small washstand that was the only belonging she’d brought with her when she first came to the cottage.

  When she came out, the boy’s voice said threadily, “Lady? What are you doing?”

  “Making a screen.”

  “Oh good,” he said hazily. “That means I’m going to stay.”

  Carys said hastily, “It doesn’t! It doesn’t mean that at all. Go back to sleep.”

  The boy, more urgently now, said, “I have to stay. There’s a man who is trying to kill me and he can’t find me here.”

  “What man?” demanded Carys sharply.

  There was silence from the bed. She strode over to the bed and shook him roughly, and the boy woke, gasping.

  “Lady! You’re there! Don’t leave me!”

  “Who is going to kill you?”

  “I think—” the boy’s voice faded away, and when he spoke again, it was in a language that Carys couldn’t understand, though she recognised it as Eppan.

  “I can’t understand that,” she said.

  His fingers gripped around her wrist, almost white in the firelight. “Don’t leave me, Lady,” he said. “I couldn’t help it!”

  “What couldn’t you help?”

  “I wasn’t supposed to jump,” he said, and sank back against the pillows. “It was all right to die, but I shouldn’t have jumped.”

  Carys looked down at his hand and briefly considered wrenching her arm away from those fingers. There didn’t seem to be a way of doing that without shaking him from his uneasy sleep again, so she shuffled him closer to the side of the bed and laid down on the floor instead, her arm propped against the bed where it wouldn’t pull either of them too much.

  She didn’t remember falling asleep, but she woke before the dawn just as usual, something warm and alive in her hand. She stared at the slender hand gripping hers, and at hers wrapped around it, and shook her own free as if the other was a snake.

  The boy mumbled something in Eppan into the pillows above her, then his head flopped over the edge of the bed, crumpled with sleep and confusion.

  “Lady? What are you doing down there?”

  “Sleeping,” Carys said, and got up. She put the kettle over the fire, mindful of Enfys’ order to give the tea to the boy first thing in the morning. He wasn’t sweating any longer, but he still looked pale in the firelight, and Carys would prefer not to come back to see his prone body on the floor when she returned to the cottage that afternoon.

  “You said you don’t have tea in the morning,” said the boy. He sounded vaguely indignant.

  “It’s not for me,” Carys said briefly, unstoppering the bottle of tea leaves. “It’s for you. Inhale the steam first until it cools a little, then drink.”

  The boy didn’t say anything to that. He silently watched her as she tipped some of the leaves into a small bowl and stoppered the tea again, offering a tentative smile whenever she looked up and caught sight of him.

  Carys could have avoided looking in his direction; instead, she asked, “Who is trying to kill you?”

  He looked surprised. “Who is—? Is someone trying to kill me?”

  “You said so last night.”

  “Did I?” He thought about that. “Was that why you were holding my hand?”

  “I wasn’t holding your hand,” said Carys. “You were holding mine.”

  “Oh.” He thought about that, too. “I don’t remember saying that. Why were you sleeping next to the bed, Lady?”

  Carys hadn’t thought that he would remember his night time murmurings, but she still felt the drag of disappointment at her heart. “You wouldn’t let go of my hand,” she said. “Stop talking. You should be resting.”

  When the kettle began to boil, she threw a look at the boy. He was still awake, still watching. He shuffled his feet until his knees were under his chin, and wrapped his arms around them. “Do you think I’ll remember my name?”

  “Yes,” said Carys, because he had to remember. If he didn’t, how could he remember what else she needed him to remember?

  “Oh,” he said. “But I can’t remember now. Maybe I should pick a new name until then.”

  Carys took the boiling kettle off the swinging arm and poured it over the leaves. “I’ll call you Eurion.” That’s what she’d first seen of him—gold. Gold in the water. It was a fitting name.

  “Oh, Lady! Shouldn’t I be called something like Fychan Mor, at least?” he protested. He settled his knees down in the covers to take the bowl of hot tea in his lap. “You pulled me from the sea!”

  “No,” said Carys. She put the cloth over that gold hair with its dark roots and pushed his head toward the steaming brew. Then, as she’d said to Enfys yesterday, she told him, “Everything that washes up on the shore is mine. Those are the rules. I can name you anything I want to name you.”

  He gave her a sudden, brilliant smile beneath the cloth. “All right. But if I’m yours, you have to feed me and keep me warm.”

  “I’ll feed you and keep you warm,” said Carys. “But if you’re mine you have to do as you’re told. You’re not to come down to the rocky beach, or any part of the shore that isn’t sand. You’re not to chatter at me all the time. And you’re to clean up the mess you make around the house.”

  “I will, Lady; I will! I can stay?”

  “For now,” Carys said. “Until your memory comes back.”

  “What about when it comes back?”

  “We’ll get to that when we come to it,” said Carys.

  Chapter Three

  The storm broke around Carys with an ear-splitting crack of thunder just before mid-morning. Rain followed after a moment of dull silence, and Carys worked through it, grim and dogged. Like the fishermen in the village, she didn’t have the luxury of staying indoors in inclement weather. The roughness of the waves might keep the selkies from the rocks a little longer—it might even keep them off for the whole day—but there was no way to be sure of that. The only thing she could be sure of was that if there was seaweed to play with, and selkies there to play with it, there would be more bodies washing up on the rocky seashore. It was likely enough that bodies would wash ashore after a storm anyway, but at least those wouldn’t be the village fishermen.

  So Carys worked through the lashing rain and the bitter wind, wrapping her oilskin tightly around herself, and scoured the pools and tideline for every last piece of seaweed. The days had passed when coming down to the shore every day brought a sparkle of excitement to her stomach—gone, too were the days when it had brought the heaviness of dread to her heart—and now Carys felt only a distant kind of satisfaction of a job well done when the rocky shoreline stretched around and out of her sight, entirely free from every spot of seaweed.

  There was no time to waste on that fleeting feeling; Eurion waited at the cottage, and he would have to be fed, medicated, and generally taken care of. He seemed to be remarkably careless of his own health, and it had already occurred to Carys that it was going to be an involved job to make sure he stayed in bed long enough to heal.

  To her relief, he was asleep again when she got back to the cottage at noon. Carys laid a cool, damp hand briefly on his forehead; it was still warm but not as warm as it had been, and he no longer moved restlessly in his sleep. There was a crease between his brows, but that could have been the result of more bad dreams. If she was lucky, thought Carys, he would have more of those. The thing was to make sure he spoke to her while he had them, since he evidently remembered more in his dreams than he did in his waking.

  She put the kettle on and hung her oilskin by the door with a slight, lingering wonder that she hadn’t taken it off before she went to check on Eurion. That was careless of her; she would have to mop the floor now. While the kettle boiled, Carys stripped and dressed behind the curtain, patting dry her chilled skin with a scrap of cloth that was worn and smooth with age. The fire would do the rest of the work in warming her up.

  Carys waited until the floor was mopped and her hands were warm before she checked the boy’s injuries again. It was no part of her plan to wake him up with her cold hands; he talked a great deal, which was distracting, and watched her a great deal, which was more distracting. His cheeks were still too red for the dusky tone of his skin, and she thought his hair had already been slightly damp with sweat before she dampened it with seawater earlier; still, by and large, he seemed better than he had that morning.

  Nevertheless, thought Carys, turning away from the bed, he had taken a sudden bad turn last night, and it would be just as well to make sure the boy—that Eurion—stayed in bed for a little while yet.

  She prepared the midday meal without really thinking about it, and it was only when she found herself taking a mostly-raised dough from beside the fire that she realised she was making speckled bread to go along with the goat cawl she’d put on to stew through the night. Carys stared down at the dough in bemusement. She hadn’t made speckled bread in at least ten years—there was no one to share it with, and although it was a pleasant treat she sufficed very well on eggs, cheese, and the occasional goat or pork cawl as a change to the usual fish. Still, at his age Eurion was probably still growing, and there was no sense in starving him. Hopefully, good food would aid in the recovery of his memories; and could, in that sense, be said to be an investment rather than a waste. She could feel the ruined ring against her leg through the cloth of her skirt pocket. She had swapped it from the pocket of her trews to the pocket of her skirt without even thinking about it when she changed earlier. It was a heavy, uncomfortable reminder that Eurion was now an important, necessary part of her life—if only for a season.