The Changeling Sea Read online

  WAS there really a magical land beneath the sea, as her mother thought? Periwinkle was not sure. All she knew was that her father’s fishing boat had come to shore without him, and her mother looked sadly out to sea, sure that the sea folk had stolen him.

  Home was too sad a place to stay these days, so when Periwinkle was not at work scrubbing the floors of the local inn, she was staying at the house of the old woman who had once taught her magic. The woman, too, had disappeared. And now, with the magic she had learned, Periwinkle decided she would hex the sea. Perhaps that would help make her mother the happy person she had once been.

  But before her hexes were ready, Peri had met the king’s son, Kir, and with her hexes there also went into the sea the message he wanted sent. Because Kir longed for the sea. He wanted to be a part of it, to walk into the sea and be accepted by it.

  Periwinkle had little faith in her magic when she made her hexes. She didn’t dream they might bring a sea monster, the king’s second son, a magician, a mermaid, a huge gold chain that a magician might turn into blue periwinkles, or a complete change in her life. But then, magic never is what it seems, and it may be that it never does what one thinks it will do. The things that come from magic can sometimes be almost better than the reasons for trying it.

  Patricia McKillip’s story is a fairy tale, a magical adventure, and a whisper that love can create a magic of its own, both good and bad.

  BOOKS BY PATRICIA A. MCKILLIP

  The Throme of the Erril of Sherill

  The House on Parchment Street

  The Forgotten Beasts of Eld

  The Night Gift

  The Riddle-Master of Hed

  Heir of Sea and Fire

  Harpist in the Wind

  Stepping from the Shadows

  Moon-Flash

  The Moon and the Face

  The Changeling Sea

  Copyright © 1988 by Patricia A. McKillip

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Atheneum

  Macmillan Publishing Company

  866 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10022

  Collier Macmillan Canada, Inc.

  First Edition Designed by Eliza Green

  Printed in U.S.A.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McKillip, Patricia A.

  The changeling sea/Patricia A. McKillip.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “Jean Karl book.”

  Summary: A floor scrubber and a magician try to help a prince return to his home beneath the sea and help his half brother, a human trapped in the body of a sea monster, return to land.

  ISBN 0-689-31436-1

  [1. Fantasy. 2. Magic—Fiction. 3. Islands—Fiction.]

  I. Tide. PZ7.M478678Ch 1988 [Fic]—del9 88-3435 CIP AC

  FOR

  JEAN KARL

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  One

  NO ONE REALLY KNEW where Peri lived the year after the sea took her father and cast his boat, shrouded in a tangle of fishing net, like an empty shell back onto the beach. She came home when she chose to, sat at her mother’s hearth without talking, brooding sullenly at the small, quiet house with the glass floats her father had found, colored bubbles of light, still lying on the dusty windowsill, and the same crazy quilt he had slept under still on the bed, and the door open on quiet evenings to the same view of the village and the harbor with the fishing boats homing in on the incoming tide. Sometimes her mother would rouse herself and cook; sometimes Peri would eat, sometimes she wouldn’t. She hated the vague, lost expression on her mother’s face, her weary movements. Her hair had begun to gray; she never smiled, she never sang. The sea, it seemed to Peri, had taken her mother as well as her father, and left some stranger wandering despairingly among her cooking pots.

  Peri was fifteen that year. She worked at the inn beside the harbor, tending fires, scrubbing floors, cleaning rooms, and running up and down the kitchen stairs with meals for the guests. The village was small, poor, one of the many fishing villages tucked into the rocky folds of the island. The island itself was the largest of seven scattered across the blustery northern sea, ruled for four hundred years by the same family.

  The king’s rich, airy summer house stood on a high crest of land overlooking the village harbor. During the months when he was in residence, the wealthy people of the island came to stay at the inn, to conduct their business at the king’s summer court, or sometimes just to catch a glimpse of him riding with his dark-haired son down the long, glistening beaches. In winter, the inn grew quiet; fishers came in the evening to tell fish stories over their beers before they went home to bed. But even then, the innkeeper, a burly, good-natured man, grew testy if he spotted a cobweb in a high corner or a sandy footprint on his flagstones. He kept his inn scoured and full of good smells.

  He kept a weather eye on Peri, too, for she had a neglected look about her. She had grown tall without realizing it; her clothes were too loose in some places, too tight in others. Her hair, an awkward color somewhere between pale sand and silt, looked on most days, he thought, as if she had stood on her head and used it for a mop. He gave her things from the kitchen, sometimes, at the end of the day to take home with her: a warm loaf of bread, a dozen mussels, a couple of perch. But he never thought to ask her where she took them.

  Occasionally her mother, who had simply stopped thinking and spent her days listening to the ebb and flow of the tide, stirred from her listening. She would trail a hand down Peri’s tangled, dirty hair and murmur, “You come and go like a wild thing, child. Sometimes you’re there when I look up, sometimes you’re not…” Peri would sit mute as a clam, and her mother’s attention would stray again to the ceaseless calling of the sea.

  Her mother was enchanted, Peri decided. Enchanted by the sea.

  She knew the word because the old woman whose house she stayed in had told her tales of marvels and magic, and had taught her what to do with mirrors, and bowls of milk, bent willow twigs buried by moonlight, different kinds of knots, sea water sprinkled at the tide line into the path of the wind. The old woman’s enchantments never seemed to work; neither did Peri’s. But for some odd reason they fascinated Peri, as if by tying a knot in a piece of string she was binding one stray piece of life to another, bridging by magic the confusing distances between things.

  The old woman had lived alone, a couple of miles from the village, in a small house built of driftwood. The house sat well back from the tide against a rocky cliff; it was shielded from the hard winter winds by the cliff and the thick green gorse that overflowed the fallow fields and spilled down around its walls. The old woman had made her living weaving. When Peri was younger, she would come to sit at the woman’s side and watch the shuttle dart in and out of the loom. The old woman told stories then, strange, wonderful tales of a land beneath the sea where houses were built of pearls, and a constant, powdery shower of gold fell like light through the deep water from the sunken wrecks of mortals’ ships. She was very old; her eyes and hair were the fragile silvery color of moonlit sand. One day, not long after Peri’s father had died, the old woman disappeared.

&nb
sp; She left a piece of work half-finished on her loom, her door open, and all her odd bits of things she called her “spellbindings” lying on the shelves. Peri went to her house evening after evening, waiting for her to return. She never did. The villagers looked for her a little, then stopped looking. “She was old,” they said. “She wandered out of her house and forgot her way back.”

  “Age takes you that way, sometimes,” the innkeeper told Peri. “My old granny went out of the house once to take her hoe to be mended. She came back sitting on a cart tail three days later. She never did tell us where she finally got to. But the hoe was mended.”

  Peri, used to waiting in the empty driftwood house, simply stayed.

  She was fidgety and brusque around people then, anyway, and there was nothing in the house to remind her of her parents, both of them lost, in one way or another, to the sea. She could sit on the doorstep and listen to the tide and glower at the waves breaking against the great, jagged pillars of rock that stood like two doorposts just at the deep water. They were the only pieces of stone cliff left from some earlier time; the sea had nibbled and stormed and worn at the land, pushed it back relentlessly. It was not finished, Peri knew; it would wear at this beach, this cliff, until someday the old woman’s house would be underwater. Nothing was safe. Sometimes she threw things into the sea that she had concocted from the old woman’s spellbindings: things that might, she vaguely hoped, disturb its relentless workings.

  “If you hate the sea so now,” Mare asked in wonder one day, “why don’t you leave?” Mare was a few years older than Peri, and very pretty. She came to work in the morning, with a private smile in her eyes. Down at the docks, Peri knew, was a young fisherman with the same smile coming and going on his face. Mare was tidy and energetic, unlike Carey, who dreamed that the king’s son would come to the inn one day and fall in love with her green eyes and raven tresses. Carey was slow and prone to breaking things. Peri attacked her work grimly, as if she were going to war armed with a dust cloth and a coal scuttle.

  “Leave?” she said blankly, knee-deep in suds. Mare was watching her, brows puckered.

  “You haven’t smiled in months. You barely talk. You scowl out the windows at the waves. You could go inland to the farming villages. Or even to the city. This may be an island, but there are places on it where you’d never hear the sea.”

  Peri’s head twitched, as much away from Mare’s reasonable voice as from the sound of the running tide. “No,” she said shortly, not knowing why or why not.

  Carey giggled. “Can you imagine Peri in the city?” she said. “With her short skirts and her hair like a pile of beached kelp?” Peri glowered at her between two untidy strands of hair.

  “No,” Mare sighed. “I can’t. Peri, you really should—”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “But, girl, you look like—”

  “I know what I look like,” Peri said, though she didn’t.

  “How will anyone ever fall in love with you looking like that?” Carey asked. Peri’s glower turned into such an astonished stare that they both laughed. The innkeeper stuck his head into the room.

  “Work on my time,” he growled. “Laugh on your own.”

  They heard him shouting down the kitchen stairs a moment later. “Crab,” Carey muttered.

  “It’s just,” Mare said insistently, “you have such pretty eyes, Peri. But nobody can see them with your hair like—”

  “I don’t want anybody seeing them,” Peri said crossly. “Leave me alone.”

  But later, after she had gone to the driftwood house and made something full of broken bits of glass and crockery and jagged edges of shell to throw into the great sea to give it indigestion, she looked curiously into the old, cracked mirror that the woman had left on her spellbinding shelf. Gray eyes flecked with gold gazed back at her from under a spiky nest of hair. She barely recognized her own face. Her nose was too big, her mouth was pinched. Some stranger was inhabiting her body, too.

  “I don’t care,” she whispered, putting the mirror down. A moment later she picked it up again. Then she put it down, scowling. She went outside to a little cave of gorse where the old woman had found an underground stream wandering toward the sea, and had dug a hole to trap it. Peri knelt at the lip of the well and dunked her head in the water.

  Shivering and sputtering, she threw more driftwood on the fire, and sat beside it for an hour, tugging and tugging at her hair with a brush until all the knots came out of it. By that time it was dry, but still she brushed it, tired and half-dreaming, until it rose crackling around her head in a streaky mass of light and dark. She remembered a long time past, when she was small and the old woman had brushed her hair for her, singing…

  “Come out of the sea and into my heart

  My dark, my shining love.

  Promise we shall never part,

  My dark, my singing love…”

  Peri heard her own voice singing in the silence. She stopped abruptly, surprised, and heard then the little, silky sounds of the ebb tide washing against the shore. Her mouth clamped shut. She put the brush down and picked up a clay ball, prickled like a pincushion with bent nails and broken pieces of glass. She flung open the door; firelight ran out ahead of her, down the step onto the sand. But something on the beach kept her lingering in the doorway, puzzled.

  There was an odd mass on the tide line. Her eyes, adjusting to moonlight, pieced it together slowly: a horse’s head, black against the spangled waves, a long, dark cloak glittering here and there with silver thread, or steel, or pearl…She could not find a face. Then the sea-watcher sensed her watching. A pale, blurred face turned suddenly away from the sea to her, where she stood in the warm light, with her feet bare and her hair streaming away from her face in a wild, fire-edged cloud down her back.

  They stared at one another across the dark beach. A swift, high breaker made the horse shy. The rider swept the cloak back to free his arms; again came a moonlit spark of something rich, unfamiliar. He rode the dark horse out of the sea and Peri closed her door.

  “The king came back to the summer house last night,” Carey said breathlessly the next morning as the girls put on aprons and collected brooms and buckets in the back room. “I saw his ships in the harbor.”

  Peri, yawning as the apron strings tangled in her fingers, made a sour noise.

  “It’s early,” Mare commented, surprised. “It’s barely spring. The rainy season isn’t over yet.”

  “Prince Kir is with him.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I asked one of the sailors.” Carey’s eyes shone; she hugged her bucket, seeing visions. “Think of the clothes and the jewels and the horses and the men—”

  “Think of the work,” Mare sighed, “if they stay from now till summer’s end.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Jewels?” Peri echoed suddenly. Something teased her brain, a glittering, moonlit darkness…

  “Girl, will you wake up?” Mare grabbed Peri’s apron strings, tied them impatiently. “This place will be full by nightfall.”

  There were already strangers in the inn, tracking sand across the floors, demanding fires, spilling things. By the end of the day, the girls were almost too tired to talk. The innkeeper met Peri at the back door and gave her oysters to take home. He studied her, his brows raised.

  “You washed your hair!”

  It shouldn’t have been all that surprising, Peri thought irritably, taking one of the cobbled streets through the village. A moment later she didn’t care. She was climbing over a low stone wall to slip burrs into the back pockets of Marl Grey’s fishing trousers, hanging on his mother’s line. He had called her names a couple of days ago, laughing at her wild hair, her short skirt. “Let’s see how funny you look,” Peri muttered, “sitting down in a boat on those.”

  Then she went to see her mother.

  She didn’t decide to do that; she was just pulled, little by little, on a disjointed path through the village toward her
mother’s house. She didn’t want to go: She hated the still house at the time of day when the boats were coming in. No matter how hard she looked, her father’s small blue boat would not be among them. It would be idle, empty, moored to the dock as always. And yet she knew she would look. She opened the gate to her mother’s yard. A hoe leaned against the wall among a few troubled clods of dirt. Already the thistles were beginning to sprout.

  She went into the house, tumbled the oysters out of her skirt onto the table, and sat down silently beside the fire. Fish chowder simmered in a pot hung over the fire. Her mother sat at the window, gazing at the sunlit harbor. She turned her head vaguely as the shells hit the table, then her attention withdrew. They both sat a few moments without moving, without speaking. Then Peri’s mother lifted one hand, let it fall back into her lap with a faint sigh. She got up to stir the soup.

  “The king is back,” Peri said abruptly, having an uncharacteristic urge to say something. She even, she discovered in surprise, wanted to hear her mother’s voice.

  “He’s early,” her mother said disinterestedly.

  “Are you making a garden?”

  Her mother shrugged the question away. The hoe had been standing up in the weeds for months. Her eyes went to the window; so did Peri’s.

  The sun was hovering above the horizon, setting the water ablaze. The first of the fishing boats had just entered the harbor; the rest of them were still caught in the lovely, silvery light. Peri’s mother drew a soft breath. Her face changed, came gently alive, almost young again, almost the face Peri remembered.

  “That’s what I dreamed about…”

  “What?” Peri said, amazed.

  “I dreamed I was watching the sun go down. The way it does just before it dips behind the fog bank, when it burns up the sea and the clouds, and the fishing boats coming home look like they’re sailing on light…like they’re coming from a land you could walk to, if you could step onto the surface of the sea and start walking. It’s a country beneath the sea, but in my dream I saw the reflection of it, all pale and fiery in the sunlight…And then the sun went down.”