Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Mr. Martin Blackwood, heir to the Blackwood Linen Company, had just sold the last of his late father’s textile mills to a Norwegian entrepreneur by the name of Jürgen Leitner.

He was accompanied on his journey across the North Sea by his solicitor, a Mr. Henry Richardson, and his wife and assistant, Mrs. Helen Richardson, who, Martin had secretly determined, was not only much more sociable than her taciturn husband, but also glaringly more knowledgable when it came to matters of business.

Having concluded the affair to everyone’s satisfaction (or so Martin liked to think; he did not necessarily take account of his own feelings concerning the matter in these speculations), Martin and his companions boarded the ferry from Bergen to Newcastle, a Bergenske Dampskibsselskab steamer named Arachne, on a cold and windy December evening.

The first night and day of the passage spun away uneventfully; the small group spent their waking hours in the cramped lounge, huddled in their coats. Mr. Richardson smoked his pipe and hid behind the same days-old newspaper, while Mrs. Richardson tried to teach Martin some obscure card game his mother would have been scandalised by (a not insignificant amount of gin being involved). Which was the reason Martin tried especially hard to memorise its rules, even though his mind kept drifting off into a strange, comfortable fog.

It must be the waves, Martin thought, rocked by the gentle up-and-down. I never knew I liked being on the sea this much. Uncle Peter will be pleased.

When they said their good-nights on the second and last evening of their journey, the wind was picking up and the gentle rocking was turning into more of an uncomfortable bucking. But this was no cause for concern considering the time of year, several members of the crew had reassured them. Perfectly normal. To be expected, even.

Only a few hours later, Martin awoke to the sound of screaming.

It was pitch black in his tiny cabin and he found himself toppled onto the floor from his narrow bed by one of the violent, jarring movements of the ship. His heavy portmanteau slid across the polished planks and smacked into his legs painfully as he tried to scramble to his feet.

Owing to the bitter cold he had slept fully clothed, coat and all, and was grateful for it; only he couldn’t find his shoes to save his life. He tumbled through the cabin door in his stockings and into a throng of bodies pushing through the corridor, panicked yells of “What’s going on?” and “Stay down!” and “God help us!” ringing in his ears. 

There was a terrifying creaking noise and then the ship lurched forward, trembling and groaning like a giant beast, and people were smashed into the walls and each other and shrieked in the howling darkness. Martin was pushed up the stairs to the deck, dragged along blind and numb by the bodies of terrified passengers trying to escape the lower cabins.

The deck was raging chaos; spray and rain immediately soaked Martin to the bone as he tried to find something—anything—steady to hold on to. He grabbed the next best thing, which was someone’s arm, and was pulled portside on the slanting, slippery surface until he was flung into a metal guardrail. His invisible companion was not as lucky. Martin listened frozen with shock as they disappeared into the darkness, crying out in horror.

He allowed himself one overwhelmed sob and then heaved himself up, clinging to the cold metal with desperate strength, and squinted into the roaring night, icy water whipping his face.

The lights of the coast ahead flickered in and out of existence like fen fire. They were so close.

The wave came so fast he did not even have time to yell. Martin Blackwood was not a small man, and yet he was washed overboard as effortlessly as a threadbare rag.

———

Martin’s father had made sure his son was a decent swimmer.

It made no odds in the current circumstances.

Martin managed to emerge into the icy air with a hoarse cry and then was immediately swept headfirst into something hard and cruel. Bright colour exploded behind his eyelids and he fought for long painful seconds against losing consciousness with wild determination.

There was no conceivable up or down in the absolute blackness of the depths into which he was pulled. Martin tried to move anyway in hopes of reaching the surface, feeble and uncoordinated, fighting the instinct to breathe. 

He was very cold, and very tired, and started to feel lightheaded. The naked panic was slowly receding, giving way to something inevitable, peaceful. His chest hurt.

It would not be long now.

And then—

There was a presence with him in the dark.

Something circled him several times before wiry arms wrapped around him, claws digging into his skin through his waterlogged clothes. Gripped by a deep old terror, Martin began to struggle. The arms only held him tighter; and then there was a voice.

Don’t, it said, deep and exasperated and clear as if spoken by someone standing in front of him in a close, quiet room.

Martin opened his mouth in shock and lost a few precious bubbles of air.

Don’t breathe yet. Just a little longer, the voice said, and then he was being dragged through the pressing black towards what he could only hope was up.

Three, it spoke, two, one. Now.

And Martin, at the end of strength and reasoning, gasped desperately for air and was genuinely surprised when his lungs didn’t fill with seawater. He sucked in huge, aching breaths through his freezing lips. There was a face next to his in the dark. 

Well done. 

Then his head was lying on a shoulder, back pressed against a narrow chest, and he was being hauled through the choppy midnight water with strong, rhythmic movements.

This is going to take a while, I apologise, the voice said, darkly serious. Please don’t freeze to death.

Which, Martin had to admit, was a valid concern. He was slowly losing all sensation in his limbs. A bottomless fatigue wrapped around his brain, and he went away for a while.

———

He came back around shivering violently. The relentless noise of raging wind and angry waves had receded into the background, the rain turned into a soft drizzle.

Someone hummed a strange and wordless tune that swept through Martin with a melancholy warmth.

He tried to move and realised he was lying on his back, half buried in a heap of something squishy and rustling. A sharp, fishy smell filled his nostrils. He squinted his eyes open to the first grey light of dawn and the dark face of a person looming above him.

“What happened?” Martin whispered, tongue clumsy with cold.

“You were drowning,” the person—man— said, a crease between his inky eyebrows, his voice deep and soft. This time it came from his mouth instead from inside Martin’s head.

Martin strained his neck and looked around. He was surrounded by a veritable mountain of dried seaweed and flat, ragged rocks. A little further down waves lapped against a sandy shore, deceptively calm. 

“Where are we?”

“North Shields. Your ship ran aground on the Black Middens. I had to navigate around them— I’m sorry it took so long. The tide is high.”

Martin couldn’t help but gaze at the strangers’ mouth, transfixed. His teeth were… wrong. They looked like large, pointed pearls.

I almost drowned, Martin thought, and I’m freezing. And: Oh, he’s beautiful. Ah. Wait. Did I hit my head? Oh, yes, right.

The man stretched out his hand as if to touch Martin’s face, then pulled it back quickly. His fingernails were slate grey and curved. He was leaning across the large, flat rock next to Martin’s head on his bare arms as if it were a nice wooden side table, staring Martin down, sharp curiosity in his large, dark eyes. His naked torso was partially covered by long, slick-black strands of hair shot through with iron grey. He did not seem to feel the cold.

“W-who are you?” Martin wheezed, caught between terror and awe.

“I’m Jon,” the stranger said.

“Jon?” Martin squeaked, incredulous.

“Yes?” Jon said, wary, eyes narrowing. “It is short for Jonathan. Who are you?”

“Oh, no. My name is Martin Blackwood. And I am definitely dead.” Martin started laughing deliriously, then stopped abruptly, teeth chattering. “B-blazes, wait. A-are you an, an angel?”

Jon’s eruptive laugh was surprisingly high and sweet. “Mmh! I have no idea how you would come to such a conclusion, but no. I’m an archivist.”

“Y… wh… alright.” Martin’s voice came out airy and thin. He was hit by the next bout of forceful shivering and the world went a little out of focus. Jon’s blurry face screwed up with worry. 

“You have hurt your head. You need to stay awake.”

Martin groaned, but tried to concentrate very hard on not slipping away. His thoughts were drifting by fog-like, so he kept staring up at the strange and very fine features of the man who had saved him. From a sinking ship. Oh good grief—

“God!” Martin yelped and tried to force himself upright. He made it to his elbows and then slumped back down. “W-what happened to the ferry? The, the other passengers? Mr. Richardson, Helen? Is Helen alright?” he babbled, frantically searching Jon’s face with his eyes. Jon leaned closer, half lying on the rock now, and tentatively laid his hand on Martin’s shoulder.

“The ship was definitely wrecked. As for the other passengers, some will be saved and some won’t. Unfortunately I do not know anything about a Mr. Richardson, or a Helen. I was able to pull you away because you had been dragged a decent distance from the rocks. I could not risk being battered against them myself. I am very sorry.”

“Ah, uhm,” Martin sniffled, “don’t apologise. And— thank you for saving my life? I, I don’t know what…”

Jon squeezed his shoulder. It stung. “I will wait with you until help arrives. They are coming down from Tynemouth, I can already hear them. Don’t worry.”

“Uh, thank— thank you.” Martin fumbled at the little finger of his left hand until he managed to slip his signet ring off. It was solid gold and heavy for its size.

He carefully pried Jon’s hand from his shoulder and pressed the ring into his palm. The other watched, wide-eyed, then unceremoniously took the ring and slipped it onto his middle-finger. He turned his hand, watching the metal glint in the pale morning light with a quizzical expression.

Martin smiled up at him shakily. “I am so sorry, I don’t have anything else on me to give you! Will you call at Holywell House, so I can thank you properly? It’s just about five miles up the coast from here.”

“You do not have to thank me, or give me— things,” Jon murmured and turned his gaze up and beyond the dunes, “but I would like to see your house someday.”

He made to pull the ring off again, but Martin said: “Please don’t!” and he stopped.

Jon’s face went still and oddly blank. Then he twitched, and his head whipped around, and he lifted his right arm and yelled: “Hello! Help! Over here!”

Martin managed to scramble into a half-sitting position more or less successfully despite his stiff limbs and throbbing head, and stared into the direction Jon was waving. He had to squint into the pale grey distance for quite some time before he could make out the figures moving down towards the beach. 

When he turned back, Jon was gone. There was no trace of him in any direction Martin looked; it was as if he’d never been there at all.

Martin took a deep, shuddering breath and then started hoarsely calling for help.

Chapter Text

The Archivist emerged from a senseless darkness convulsing with an anguished gasp. 

The world above was too bright and too hot and it ripped into him with countless claws. He felt raw, exposed; every inhale was a blade to his lungs, every twitch of his limbs searing agony. He had made a mistake.

He couldn’t move, couldn’t see, couldn’t even think; he must be dying. 

He had made a mistake.

Through the droning noise in his ears he could hear a voice calling in the distance, light and unsure. It was slowly moving closer, becoming clearer, faintly familiar.

“Hello?”

Martin Blackwood, he thought, burning breath hitching.

Please, please, by the Deep Ones. Be Martin.

———

News of the shipwreck spread like wildfire.

By the afternoon of the same day, reports circulated claiming that of the 117 souls on the Arachne’s roster only 34 had survived. By the next day, this was joined by a peculiar rumor stating that every single last one of the deceased passengers and crew had been found washed ashore below the ruins of Tynemouth castle.

“Ill weeds do grow apace,” was Anne Blackwood’s only comment when Martin was brought home to Holywell Manor House by the good men of the Tynemouth Volunteer Life Brigade.

Martin counted himself lucky to still be in possession of all his fingers and toes, and tried to sleep his concussion off more or less successfully. His physician had ordered strict bed rest; other than that it was just trying to keep warm in the drafty house whilst putting cold compresses on the rather large lump at the back of his head. He kept feeling muddled and drowsy, and occasionally forgot things he’d been told a minute ago, which was very annoying indeed. Not as annoying as the infernal headache, though. 

Anya kept the fire in Martin’s bedroom blazing at all times, and Mrs. Jennings kept Martin supplied with sheer infinite amounts of hot soup and tea from the kitchen.

On the evening of the disaster, Peter Lukas came by to pay his respects. Martin was not really in a  talking mood, dizzy and aching and still racked with shivers.

“Pity, that,” his mother’s older cousin exclaimed, voice light. The man was unable to sound genuine about anything, wasn’t he. “I was going to invite you on the Tundra in spring. Well. You might still want to go. It’ll do you good, after all that.”

Martin opened and closed his mouth a couple of times before saying: “It is not like falling from a horse, uncle Peter! Dozens of people have died!”

“Isn’t it?” Peter mused, deposited a bottle of Brandy and a book wrapped in grey tissue paper on Martin’s bedside table, patted his arm with a sympathetic expression that did not reach his pale gaze and left.

Martin woke up from nightmares four times that night.

Only in one of those dreams did he not painfully choke on freezing water; instead he was being chased through a maze of silt and algae covered rocks by a creature with obsidian fingernails and gleaming teeth and large, dark, magnificent eyes.

———

On the second day of Martin’s involuntary confinement to the bedroom, Julian poked his head in around noon and announced with barely suppressed delight: “You have a visitor!”

Martin groaned, eying the growing stack of messages on his bedside table, all from people asking to see him. He hadn’t even responded to the multiple requests from the Stokers, even through they were probably the only ones not just greedy for gossip. 

“Do I have to?”

“Believe me, you will want to see this one.”

Martin glared at his excitable footman, shrugged and flopped his hand down in resignation. Julian disappeared and a tall woman with dark curly hair slipped into the room. She wore her left arm in a sling made of black lace—like the rest of her attire—and her skin was excessively pale, but the grin that split her face when she laid eyes on Martin brightened the whole room.

Martin gasped and threw the blankets off and almost fell on his face in his haste to stumble out of bed. “Mrs. Richardson!” He swayed dangerously with a sudden dizzy rush, and Helen practically leapt across the room to steady him with her uninjured hand and push him back down onto his mattress.

“My poor boy, you look dreadful!”

“Oh, well,” Martin croaked and crawled back underneath the covers, head pounding, “I am just so glad to see you alive!”

Helen took a seat at Martin’s bedside. “I, too, am so glad you are still with us, Mr. Blackwood. Not many have been so fortunate.”

Martin swallowed. “Mr. Richardson…?”

“Dead,” Helen stated matter of fact. “I’ve just come from the Tynemouth mortuary.”

“Oh god, I am so sorry.” Martin took her right hand in his and squeezed. Helen sighed, deep and thoughtful.

Eventually, the corner of her mouth ticked up in a self-deprecating smile and she clapped Martin on the shoulder. “The devil looks after his own,” she mock-whispered and winked at him. Then she blinked, cleared her throat and delicately dabbed her eyes with her lace-trimmed handkerchief. “I apologise. That was not funny.”

Martin laughed awkwardly. “Kind of funny though. Especially since mother said something very similar upon finding out that I had survived.”

“Oh good grief. I’m sorry, my boy. I really am so happy that you are doing well— under the circumstances, I mean.”

Helen squinted at Martin then, something very obviously burning on her tongue. Martin surreptitiously rolled his eyes.

“Go on, ask.”

“Alright. How on earth did you end up in North Shields anyway? Apparently you’re the only one, dead or alive, who was found upriver!”

Martin made a face. “Well. Uh. You will think me insane, but— someone rescued me. Dragged me up the Tyne and saved me from drowning, and freezing, and then immediately disappeared into thin air as soon as the Life Brigade arrived. He was…” Martin’s words had taken on a dreamy quality he didn’t have the wherewithal to be ashamed of. “He was the most peculiar man.”

“Mr. Blackwood, are you hearing yourself?” Helen asked, incredulous.

Martin shrugged and gingerly touched the damp curls covering the good-sized lump underneath. Not for the first time he wondered if he had hallucinated Jon.

———

On a grey and quiet morning in late February, Martin went down the grassy slope past St. Mary’s Lighthouse to take a walk on Whitley Bay Beach. 

Thick fog hung heavy above the flat, scraggy rocks. In the far distance, sea and sky had merged into one indistinguishable bank of white, the winter sun only betraying its rise with the hint of a sickly yellow hue.

He walked for a while between the tide pools, trying to enjoy the bracing cold and peaceful silence, only broken by the soft lapping waves. Now that he was finally free of the demoralising headaches that had plagued him for most of two months, he intended to get some of his strength back, and fresh air was what his physician recommended (for basically any ailment under the sun).

In any case, he was glad to be out of the house and as far away from his mother as his conscience allowed.

About twenty minutes into his brisk stroll he started lagging, and stopped in his tracks to stare balefully down the wide stretch of undisturbed sand. His gaze landed on something strange. There was a dark lump breaking the light brown monotony about a quarter mile down the shore; he squinted, suddenly unsettled. Was it a seal? Some other sea-creature? It looked very much not like a rock.

Martin trudged on, increasingly vexed the closer he got. The shape now appeared grotesquely human-like.

“Hello?” Martin called, and broke into a trot. “Hello!” he repeated, slightly panicked, when the sight before him took on a definitive form.

It was a body, sprawled on its side as if thrown there by an inclement breaker, twisted and lifeless and carelessly discarded. Martin began to run.

He fell to his knees next to the figure, panting with exertion and then gasping with disbelief: “No. Oh, no.”

The man’s olive skin was encrusted with pink-tinted brine and he was tangled in a dark slick-looking material that Martin mistook for seaweed at first; at closer inspection it turned out to be long strands of his hair that appeared almost greenish in the dull morning light. He was utterly naked, and utterly still.

“Jon?” Martin breathed, carefully laying his hand on a cold, bony shoulder. Then, expecting the worst, he slowly turned the man’s head and chest so they were facing upwards, and swiped the stiff, damp hair aside.

“Oh lord,” Martin whispered. 

It really was him. 

Jon’s closed lids were caked with salt, greyish lips and chin streaked with flaking blood, but his chest was moving minutely with strained breaths. His hands were a mess, fingernails torn and bloody as if he’d clawed his way up the rocky shore. On his left middle finger Martin’s ring glinted through the red-brown grime.

Martin quickly slipped out of his coat and threw it over the thin body, hands shaking badly. “Buck up,” he hissed at himself, and then patted Jon’s cheek none too gently and called: “Jon. Jon, wake up,” voice raw.

Jon’s eyes flew open, wild and unseeing. He shuddered and heaved, swaying sideways, and promptly vomited bright red foam onto the sandy ground. Martin, still clasping his shoulder, sharply sucked air in through his teeth. Jon choked and writhed in some sudden awful paroxysm, limbs jerking— then he went limp, light leaving his half-lidded eyes. Martin frantically searched for his pulse— there it was, still thrumming in his neck. Jon’s breath came on fast and erratic, but he seemed only half-conscious at best.

Martin wrapped the dazed man in his coat and lifted him into a bridal carry. Then he turned back towards the lighthouse and started jogging up the shore with surprising ease, hugging Jon to his chest in hopes of warming him up.

He wondered at how light and small he was. Martin remembered the force with which Jon had pulled him through the water; his larger than life, looming presence at dawn on the beach. 

Now he was just a frail, too cold bundle of limbs in Martin’s arms, bare legs cramping with painful looking spasms. Beside his shallow, straining breath, he had not made a sound.

There was something very wrong with Jon.

———

When Martin, following the death of his father, had moved with his mother from their comfortable, modern Newcastle townhouse into Holywell Manor, he’d despised the place immediately. It struck him as nothing but a miserable, crumbling seventeenth century monstrosity; the small windows half-blind, the ceilings low, and the floorboards creaking incessantly. 

He had to argue with his mother about every little piece of renovation he knew needed to be done to make their ‘ancestral family home’, as she liked to call the sizeable rattrap, reasonably habitable. He was very gentle about it, and more often than not yielded to her will. She was, after all, very ill.

He spent months trying to get his father’s affairs in order—bowing to the wishes of his mother as to how this was to be accomplished, naturally. But he saw no reason to not utilise some small part of the modest fortune Maurice Blackwood had left them to turn the house into more of a home.

One of these measures was to set up one of the empty bedrooms as a guest room. It hadn’t yet been used in the two years the Blackwoods had lived in Holywell, but Anya still dusted in there and changed the sheets regularly without Martin saying a word. 

Anne Blackwood didn’t know anything about it, and he had felt guilty about this stupid little indulgence of his for years. 

He didn’t feel bad about it now though. 

He barrelled through the gate towards the main entrance and kicked the door twice, hard, before it was opened in a hurry.

“Julian, go get the doctor!”

The young footman frowned and opened his mouth, but before he could formulate a question his eyes widened comically when he realised that there was a pair of naked legs poking out of the bundle in Martin’s arms.

“Yessir!” he yelped, and was out of the door like lightning.

Martin crossed the hall, calling: “Anya?” his voice cracking with anxiety, and then started hurriedly climbing the stairs to the first floor. Jon was deadweight in his arms. Martin could see the whites of his eyes through his barely open lids.

He made a beeline for the guest room, wrestled the door open with his shoulder, and then carried Jon over to the neatly made bed and gently peeled him out of the coat with trembling fingers. 

When it was done, Martin stared down at the unconscious, bloodied, very naked man laid out in front of him and immediately flushed hot with mortification. This was— a lot. He yanked the edges of the blue satin counterpane out of the bed frame and draped it over Jon’s body, not a second too late. The maid bustled into the room behind him. “Mr. Blackwood, what— oh.”

Martin whirled around and gaped at her wide-eyed, trying to collect himself. “Ah. Yes. Anya— good. Can— can you light a fire please, and, uh, hot water I think, and send Dr. David up immediately once he gets here. Yes.”

“Yes, of course. But—“ Anya knelt down and started shifting kindling from a basket into the open fireplace, half-turned and still looking up at him. Miss Villette was usually the quiet sort, but she was not shy. 

“Mr. Blackwood, who is that?”

Martin bent down and touched Jon’s neck, searching for his pulse once more. It was much weaker now, but still there. Underneath the layer of salt and grime his skin was very cold. Martin swallowed thickly. 

“The man who saved my life.”

Chapter Text

The first thing Jon knew was their Song. 

Before he could speak with his mouth and with his mind, before he could swim as fast as the harbour seals and use his claws and teeth to gorge himself on little pink crabs and silver fish, they would sing to him, and he to them.

He did not remember his father’s face. But the first and last thing he remembered of his mother with any clarity was her regal bearing and her solemn black eyes, gazing into the dark blue depths of the Silverpit at the festival of the winter solstice. The Song of the Court had almost carried him off to sleep; she’d nudged him, still singing, and said, in his head: The Song is our duty, so pay attention, Jonathan. For this is what we do to honour the Deep Ones: we let them sleep. If they get restless, we sing them lullabies.

And he listened, wide-eyed, and then joined her mournful voice with his own small, high-pitched chirps and trills. He had not known what fear was, back then. He had only known awe.

But Jon was not a child anymore, and his mother was not queen; she was dead.

Gertrude was queen, wise and just. He was her Archivist, which was a joy and an honour. 

Well— it used to be all he could ever have wished for. 

Right now his mind was restless and full of doubt. 

He tied another unpolished piece of amber to a large flat periwinkle with a twisted strand of hair. The shell was a glossy yellow-brown and held a Song he knew very well. Too well, maybe. He had to admit that he had hesitated dangerously long to categorise the story and give it its ill-boding mark.

The fast clicks of Melanie orienting herself in the submerged rock chambers of the Queen’s Archives grew closer. “Jon!” she called, irritated, “I’ve run out of string again. Where did you put the bag?”

Much of the work in the archives was mind-numbing maintenance. The Songs of each clan were tied together chronologically with threads of hair, leather or braided sea grass, and the sea would so quickly destroy anything that was not stone or bone or shell; and even those were ground down eventually. It was never ending Sisyphean labour to keep the older Songs from crumbling or being carried away by the currents. Sometimes, centuries of collected history of a whole clan would tear and tumble to the ocean floor, and it would take the Archivist and his researchers weeks to reassemble.

“It’s here,” he grumbled, untied the seal-skin from his belt and pushed it at her. She took it, frowned and clicked at him, then pressed her small palm against his chest.

“You sound stuffy. And I mean in the literal airless sense for once. Let’s go.” She unceremoniously grabbed him by the arm and dragged him out of the stone maze of the archives and the short distance up to the surface. “Melanie!” he protested weakly at her claws pricking his skin, but let himself be pulled; she was a little shorter than him, but admittedly much more athletic. She also did not forget to come up for air regularly like he sometimes did.

They broke the surface and he gasped, abashed. “Thank you.”

She snorted. “Foolish pinniped. Gerry would eat me if I let you drown. But I’ll have you know that I think your stupidity should not go unpunished.” She turned upside down with remarkable speed and slapped him in the face with her ringed seal’s tail. Then she flopped onto her back next to him as he sputtered and whined: “That was uncalled for!”

Melanie just jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow. “Was not.”

They floated for a bit, shoulder to shoulder, swayed by the waves, she with her sightless eyes half closed and Jon staring into the darkening blue above, counting the first stars of the evening.

Into the quiet of the endless waters around them Melanie said, apropos of nothing: “You marked Daisy’s Song.”

“Yes,” he answered, hoarsely.

“Do you think she is lost?” Her voice was flat and cool.

Jon shook his head. “No. But I think she is in trouble.”

“Who’s in trouble?” A dark head bobbed up next to them and Jon flinched. Melanie snickered.

“Never mind, don’t answer that,” Georgie said with false cheer, her thick black tail whipping up foam. “Come on down, you two. Basira’s back.”

“You’ll be running out of amber flakes soon,” Basira remarked as the four mer floated in front of the tall cave wall designated for the English coastal clans; it held string upon string of shells of all sizes and kinds. Many bore one of the little dark yellow marks, which got more numerous towards the ends of the threads and the newer Songs. They also seemed to cluster at the right side of the wall. 

“Northumberland?” the large cetacean mused, the nervous flick of her intimidating orca’s tail betraying her impassive face.

“Yes,” Jon said, “and up into Scotland, and down to Tyne and Wear and North York.”

“And they all had contact with humans?”

“Indeed. Direct, or second hand so to speak. But humans are involved in all of the Songs; and so is something else.”

“Something else, hah,” Georgie laughed humourlessly. “Call it by its name, Jon. Dark powers, sinister forces, black magic.”

Jon grimaced. “I will not call it that!” he protested. “There could be perfectly… logical explanations for most of the described phenomena!”

“Mh-hm,” Melanie hummed. “Next you are going to insinuate that people have been lying.”

“I wouldn’t,” Jon stated, incredulous, “they are Songs. There is no lying in the Song.”

“But there is omission, obfuscation, evasion,” Basira said.

“Yes. Like in Daisy’s account,” Jon muttered. 

Basira whirled around and all of a sudden she was looming over him, rows of sharp teeth bared. He snarled back and glared up at her. Her tail was twice the size of his and she was probably twice as fast and strong as well, but Jon was used to being bullied by cetaceans.

Melanie let out a string of distressed clicks and Georgie rammed her head into Basira’s shoulder rather forcefully. “Leave off!” she growled. 

Basira recoiled. Her mouth closed with an embarrassed clack and her broad, stoic features wilted into something bleak and hopeless. 

Her trail went cold weeks ago. She is not coming back.

“We don’t know that,” Jon said to her, and immediately regretted it.

“Do not. Read. My fucking. Thoughts,” Basira hissed, low and icy, and then turned and stormed off, a cloud of disturbed sand in her wake.

Georgie sighed, resigned. Melanie rolled her golden eyes.

“Oh, well done, Jon.”

———

“Whatever happened to you?” Martin muttered, mouth twisting with sympathy as he carefully scrubbed away the mess of blood, salt and sand from Jon’s face with a warm damp cloth. The man had not regained true consciousness; instead he kept twitching and breathing rapidly as if in the throes of a very long nightmare.

Sitting at the opposite side of the bed, Anya had started cleaning Jon’s right hand, wincing intermittently.

“His nails are in such a sorry state, Mr. Blackwood,” she whispered across the counterpane, “I hope he doesn’t lose any.”

“Quite,” Martin grimaced, pulling away sticky strands of Jon’s abundant hair that had wound itself around his neck, then gasped at what he uncovered. “Good grief. I think someone’s tried to murder him.”

Anya leaned over and joined Martin in gaping at the long narrow cut splitting the skin of Jon’s neck. It looked relatively shallow, but was still bleeding sluggishly.

“Twice, apparently,” Anya breathed and pointed. Underneath the new wound and crossed by it was a thin pink scar. Someone—multiple someones, even?—had clearly been very keen on cutting Jon’s throat, but had failed to kill him in both instances. Martin shuddered. Then he meticulously dabbed the skin around the wound and softly pressed a clean piece of cloth to it, wiped his hands on his trousers and subsequently buried them in his disheveled hair.

“Will you be wanting to involve the police, Mr. Blackwood?” Anya asked hesitantly.

“I— I don’t know. Probably? We’ll await the doctor’s opinion. Where is he anyway? It’s been at least an hour!” Martin’s voice was high and thin.

“If he’s doing house calls, it might take Julian a while to find him,” Anya remarked. She gently laid Jon’s hand onto a clean rag she had placed on the sheets, where his fingers immediately stained the white fabric red. “Do you want me to do the other one?”

“No, I’ll do it,” Martin said, lifting the bedding to extract Jon’s left arm, and trying very hard not to look too closely at his bare shoulder and chest.

“Could you, ah, go look for some nightclothes that might fit him?”

“Of course.”

Anya bustled out of the room. Once the door had shut behind her, Martin gulped down a couple of deep, trembling breaths, fighting the urge to bury his face in the bedspread and groan loudly. The man on his guest bed—who had saved Martin’s life!—looked about to leave this mortal coil. He needed medical treatment, and a police investigation into who had attacked him; he needed to be save and fed and cared for. He needed to recover.

And good lord would Martin’s mother throw an absolute fit if she knew about any of it.

What in god’s name am I doing?

Martin held Jon’s cold, limp hand and stared at the bloodied signet ring and Jon’s ragged but otherwise normal, human fingers and the lovely, fragile jut of his bony wrist and felt distinctly faint.

…And what is wrong with me? He’s hurt and desperately ill, what am I thinking?

He blinked, unnerved, and then flinched when Jon’s body spasmed and shuddered and his long clumped lashes fluttered. When his eyes flew open, he jerked his hand from Martin’s soft grip, thin chest heaving. He scrambled back and away from Martin with surprising speed and pushed himself into the headboard, arms curling around his torso, face a grimace of pain.

Martin lifted his hands in a soothing gesture and said, voice thick with apprehension: “Jon? It’s alright. You’re safe.”

Jon’s eyes remained tightly shut, but his lips started moving, forming a rapid stream of utterly soundless words. Martin inched closer, movements slow and careful, but it made no difference. He couldn’t make out anything but Jon’s panicked breathing. “Jon—“ he murmured, the telltale burn of tears creeping up his throat, “can you hear me? Do you— do you understand what I’m saying?”

Jon’s legs started cramping then, knees locking and feet bending inwards at an unnatural looking angle and he gagged, all colour leaving his face. Martin froze, hamstrung. The fit was over after only a few short, agonising moments but it left Jon panting, head and shoulders slumped forward. His injured fingers were digging into his ribs and his shivers were worse than ever. 

Martin made a small, pained noise, hands hovering ineffectively.

Finally, Jon lifted his head and looked at him with a desperate intensity, forming a two-syllable word with his lips, slowly and repeatedly. His teeth (human teeth, Martin thought, not— fangs) were stained red.

“Are you— Jon, are you trying to say my name?”

Jon nodded. Martin suppressed a sob.

“I— I’m here,” he said, small and choked, “I want to help you! Can you— can I—?” He brought his hands closer to Jon’s, not touching. Jon looked down to where his bleeding fingers were digging into his sides and let go, hesitantly stretching out his arms, air shuddering out of him.

Martin took his wrists so gently; he wrapped the right hand in a piece of cloth, then showed Jon the damp rag and pointed to his left, asking: „Are you alright with me cleaning your fingers?“

Jon gave another tiny nod. He squeezed his eyes shut but otherwise stayed perfectly still when Martin started his ministrations. Martin winced at the split and broken nails and blurted: “I’ve sent for a physician, he’ll be here shortly, it’ll be alright!” to which Jon didn’t react.

Martin looked up from his task, wanting to gauge something, anything, from Jon’s face. His eyes didn’t make it all the way up there, frozen by the sight in front of him. There were more scars; jagged cuts of differing lengths all over Jon’s chest and belly, silver with age.

“God!” Martin said a little too forcefully. Jon startled, his breathing picking up again. He stared at Martin, large eyes searching, confused.

“Sorry! Sorry. It’s fine, you’re fine, you’re doing really well!” Martin babbled.

There was a knock on the door and they both jumped, and Anya snuck into the room with a bundle of folded up cotton fabric.

“This is the best I could do,” she said, unfolding a plain white nightshirt. “I had to ask Mrs. Jennings for something of Julian’s, since—no offence, Mr. Blackwood—none of yours would have fit.”

Jon, obviously spooked by Anya’s appearance, jolted backwards and knocked his elbows into the headboard, hard.

“Oh!” Martin and the maid exclaimed simultaneously. Then Martin heard the front-door fall shut and someone come barreling up the stairs rather ungentlemanly. There was another knock. 

“He’s here!” Julian shout-whispered, while slower, more delicate footsteps approached.

Martin looked at Jon. He was curled into a corner of the bed, arms raised protectively, pupils collapsed into pinpricks in his wide, transfixed eyes. He looked very far away and completely petrified.

Anya—wonderful, sensible Anya—carefully, soundlessly crept to the door, cracked it open and slipped outside. Martin heard her whisper something to the men in the hallway, whereupon Dr. David entered the room, clearing his throat and looking a bit bemused.

Martin tore his eyes away from Jon and hurried to the doctor to shake his hand. As always, his grip was a little too firm for comfort.

“So— you see, I, I went to walk on the beach, and— he was just—“ Martin stuttered, and gulped. Cold sweat covered his neck and crept down his back.

Dr. David threw a cursory glance at Jon, still curled up and shaking like a leaf, and said: “Ah.” Then he turned to Martin, pale eyebrows raised, and smiled. 

It wasn’t a nice smile. It was the smile of a man trying to stay polite in the face of something rather disagreeable and off-putting.

He stepped around the bed, gingerly deposited his leather bag on the escritoire and asked, soft and condescending: “What’s this then, Mr. Blackwood?”

Chapter Text

Song of Daisy (born Alice) of the Tyne Clan, recorded by the Archivist of Queen Gertrude I. in the 27th year of her reign, quarter-moon after the autumn equinox.

Song begins.
 
When I was eleven years old, I used to play with my best friend Calvin at the abandoned pier in Cullercoats. The harbor seals liked to come there, and we made a game of chasing them through the shallow water between the old wooden stilts. 

One day at dusk we saw two human men fighting on the decaying planks; they were obviously drunk, stumbling and cursing incomprehensibly. A third man was standing a little behind them, watching from the shadows. I could not make out his face. Eventually, the two quarrelling men broke through the planks and landed in the shallow water amidst a heap of rotten wood. One was floating face down, either unconscious and dying or already dead. I was about to take a look at the other one who was struggling in the water, when Calvin pushed me into the jagged end of a rotting plank, injuring the back of my shoulder badly. Then he went over to the struggling man and cut his throat with his flint dagger. He did not say a word and his face was utterly void of any expression. I swam away as fast as my injury allowed. When I looked back, the human up on the pier was still watching.
 
Adelard tended to my shoulder; he told me the starburst wound reminded him of one of the flowers growing up on the dunes in Whitley Bay, daisies. I liked the name, so I kept it.
 
Calvin was never officially exiled from the clan for his deed because he was only a pup, but he left anyway, roaming the coast as an outcast for a few years. We know this because of the six mer he attacked in that time, some of which did not survive the encounter. Then he disappeared.
 
I found him, a little while ago; I was scouring the mouth of the Tyne for sea trout and there he was, in a shabby little fishing boat. He was wearing a large coat of dark green oilcloth, and he was obviously a grown man—and he had legs. But I’d have known his face anywhere. I swam up to the boat, wary and cautious, and greeted him. He smiled and said hello to me as if to an old friend, and we talked for a bit. Then he suddenly and without warning picked up a fish gutting knife from the bottom of the boat and lunged at me.
 
I drowned him. He did not struggle much. He just looked at me, calmly, baring his strange blunt teeth. When he went still at last, I dragged him to the bottom of the estuary and buried him under a couple of large rocks, so the Deep Ones would not be able to feed on him.
 
Are you happy now, Jon?
 
Song ends.

———

Since Gerry was the fastest swimmer of Jon’s pod, his slate grey tail resembling that of a long-finned pilot whale not in appearance alone, he had been tasked to relay to the queen her archivist’s request for a Small Council assembly. He returned two days later from the queen’s seat with a positive reply, and the archive staff started making preparations for the journey.
 
The archivist’s finery, donned for court functions and other official business, consisted of a rather heavy torque covering Jon from his neck down to his shoulders and sternum made from shells, pearls, amber discs and beads of fossilised coral. A long string of small mother-of-pearl carvings, symbols for each of the North Sea clans, was threaded through his belt.
 
According to Gerry, the bone white and dark gold and iridescent turquoise did look splendid with his warm brown skin, spotted silver-furred tail, and the thick dark loops of the ceremonial braids. It helped a little to remember those words, when Jon was feeling ridiculous in his get-up (which was always).
 
Gerry was almost finished plaiting little white shells into Jon’s hair, while Jon carved a mussel out of its black shell with his claws and crammed it into his mouth. Gerry grunted at his jerky movements and bumped his arm lightly.
 
“Please stop fidgeting.” Are you alright?
 
Jon chewed, then swallowed and pressed his lips together.
 
I’m fine.
 
Gerry turned Jon by his shoulders, looking him straight in the eyes with a grave frown. Jon scrunched up his nose.
 
Yes, alright. I’m not fine. I’m afraid that they won’t listen. I am afraid the council will dismiss the evidence we have collected. That they won’t take us seriously, and that the queen will deny us our… investigation.
 
Are you still considering not telling them about our plans to go to the coast?
 
No. Whatever happens, whatever we find out—we need them to know, we need their resources. We need the clans at our backs. 
 
Gerry nodded with a grim expression.
 
Then it’s decided.
 
Jon’s gaze softened.
 
I understand if you don’t want to come. You don’t have to.  I can try to convince Basira to accompany me to Whitley Bay, or one of the queen’s staff, Michael maybe—
 
No. I’ll come. There is a reason I’ve stayed away from the place for almost ten years, but I won’t back down now. This is more important.
 
“Are you done in there? We’re almost ready!” Melanie called from the main hall of the archives, sounding impatient. Jon flicked the empty shell away and it floated down to the sandy floor, joining the other remnants of his hurried breakfast. Then he straightened his back and lifted his chin.
 
Gerry kept his hand on Jon’s shoulder as they left the little stone alcove to swim out into the hall; a nice little gesture while Jon was perishing of mortification. 
 
Melanie whistled.
 
“Well, aren’t you a fancy boy!”
 
“Queen’s Archivist,” Jon muttered, pointed, “formal attire. It’s really not the first time I’m wearing this. Also, you can’t see me.”
 
“Well, I can hear you jingle, can’t I,” Melanie exclaimed.
 
Georgie snorted, but her voice was warm and sincere when she said: “You look lovely, Jon.”
 
Basira grunted quietly. While she still acted like her calm and level-headed self most of the time, she got moody and irritable regularly now, especially around Jon. He didn’t blame her.
 
His assistants had carefully extracted the marked shells they had chosen from their strings, wrapped them in strips of leather and packed them into Jon’s satchel. Georgie attached the small seal-skin bag to his belt with deft fingers, careful not to disturb the little carvings dangling from it. When she was done, she took Jon’s hands and squeezed them. Melanie huddled against them both with a grimace, her claws tapping a nervous rhythm against his arm.
 
“I’m sorry I can’t tell you when we’ll be back,” Jon said, emotion churning in his belly. “If we really do go to the coast, it could be weeks depending on how many leads we stumble across. I hate leaving the archives for so long, I—” he ducked his head and cleared his throat. “I hate leaving half of my pod behind.”
 
“One third,” Basira muttered behind him. As if Jon would forget that his pod consisted of six mer. As if this whole operation wasn’t ultimately about Daisy.
 
“I know, Jon. We’re going to be fine though.” Georgie nodded her head towards the entrance of the archives, where two large shadows hovered. The coastal guard had dispatched a pair of fearsome looking orca-tailed cetaceans to help watch over the archives while Jon, Gerry and Basira went traveling.
 
“Just make sure you stay safe. Don’t do anything rash.” Georgie gave him a fretful half-smile.
 
“Yes, try not to do anything stupid. I know you,” Melanie groused.
 
Basira chuckled humourlessly. “Don’t worry. I won’t let him.”
 
Gerry shot her a look. Then he said with forced cheer: “We’ll keep him safe! Did you pack us any lunch? I don’t fancy wasting precious time hunting cod and herring all along the way.”

———

Jon knew the humans were talking about him, hovering at the doorway of the gloomy little room he had woken up in. Martin’s voice was anxious and insistent and Jon thought he could make out his name, but he was not able to discern any other meaning through the hollow droning in his ears.

His head was throbbing, his teeth and throat and fingers and newfangled limbs stinging and burning. 

Suddenly the doctor’s face was too close, his voice loud in Jon’s ears. Jon followed Martin with his eyes, desperate and frozen with the primal fear of a trapped animal, as he and the woman called Anya left the room. 

He did not want to be alone with this man.

Martin nodded at Jon through the gap in the door; a gesture meant to be encouraging but conveying dread instead, with his eyes as large and worried as they were. Then the door was pushed shut, and Jon fixed his gaze on the tall pale man looming over him. 

The doctor made to take Jon’s arms; they were still raised in front of his face, bloodied hands curled into fists in a pathetic attempt at protection. He jerked back and hissed, Don’t touch me! But the man didn’t react—he didn’t hear. None of them did. Not even Martin. 

Jon shuddered and felt something trickle down his chin, thick with a coppery tang. The physician wrinkled his nose in mild disgust.

“There is no need for dramatics, Jonathan,” he said in a soft, lilting tone. Underneath his light and pleasant surface, Jon could sense the keenly honed blades of a thousand slender knives.

“I understand this may all be a bit… distressing, but your agitation is utterly unnecessary.” He patted Jon’s shoulder lightly, and then he winked at him. “You can drop the act, dear; I know exactly what you are.”

Jon froze, blinking. 

“Though it is curious that you don’t speak. I’ve known your kind to be rather verbose.”

The man leaned forward and grabbed a strand of Jon’s hair, rubbing it between his fingers with a strange expression. Then he deliberately picked up the edge of the blue counterpane and swiftly pulled it from Jon’s lap, eyes flicking over Jon’s figure with unabashed curiosity. 

“Where’s your belt?”

Jon just stared at him, unmoving, flooded with utter disbelief. How on earth did this man know about his belt?

The doctor turned and started sifting through the contents of his dark brown bag with precise movements, prattling on unperturbed. “Never mind. You can call me Doctor David! I’m here to help you. Now be a good boy and give me your hands.”

No! Jon growled, leave me alone, except it wasn’t a growl— it wasn’t anything. Just a furious, utterly impotent thought that slid off the doctor’s uncomfortably placid facade.

Doctor David produced a large bottle, opened it and poured some of the clear, sharp smelling contents onto a clean white rag. Then he unceremoniously grabbed Jon’s left hand and started scrubbing at his wrist, where his skin was still caked with flaking blood and salt. He pressed down into the tender flesh and it hurt; Jon tried to jerk away but the man did not let go. 

Jon choked on an inaudible yell, staring at the skin the doctor kept uncovering heedless of his distress. His half-cleaned forearm revealed vicious hand-shaped bruises, muddy purple yellowing sickly at the edges like split, rotting fruit—

White hands, large and slender, clasped his wrists in a crushing grip; Jon could feel his bones grind together as all around him through the strange golden glow an ancient Song rose in the water, soft and faint at first but quickly turning into a deafening roar, a wailing cacophony that ripped through him and tore him limb from limb as he writhed in the boiling foam, thick and cloying and filling his throat with the dark metallic taste of his own blood but the hands would not let go; they just held him while pale and hungry eyes watched as Jon was pulled apart and could not even scream—

Jon felt acrid bile rise in his throat and he coughed and gagged and swallowed it down convulsively. His eyes started to burn and then spilled hot liquid down his cheeks. He ripped his hand from the doctors grasp with a feverish strength and curled in on himself, burying his face in his arms, shaking uncontrollably— 

Don’t think about it, please stop, stop, stop, don’t, I can’t, I—!

“Stop that.”

The doctor’s voice, suddenly sharp and irritated, cut through his panic like a sliver of obsidian glass. Cold, polished metal was pushed against his heaving chest; Jon sucked a reedy breath in and then ceased breathing altogether, shocked out of his spiralling thoughts.

“I didn’t mean stop breathing, boy. Just calm yourself, for goodness’ sake.” He lifted the circular piece of metal up to Jon’s eyes. It was connected to his ears with light brown, opaque tubes. “It’s called a stethoscope. I am trying to listen to your heart and lungs. Now, for poor Mr. Blackwood’s sake, stop throwing your little tantrum and let me do my job.”

Jon tried to weigh the man’s words in his mind; there was, undeniably, something to them. He did need help. He was still bleeding from numerous wounds, and in a significant amount of pain, and he was not in the slightest prepared to deal with the— the situation below his hips (legs, Jon; they’re called legs). But he couldn’t stop his shallow, frantic breathing, making him feel faint and unreal, and he couldn’t stop flinching away from the doctor’s touch, and baring his teeth at him like a cornered beast. The man was too keen and oily and wrong.

“This isn’t going too well, is it,” Dr. David sighed, benignantly inconvenienced. “Alright. I won’t try to treat your wounds while you insist on behaving this way.”

Jon’s awful new limbs chose this moment to twitch, and he just had time to think please no, not again, as a cruel spasm made him gasp and bang his head against the bed-end painfully. He breathed heavily for a few moments, fighting down another bout of nausea, eyes squeezed shut. When he opened them again, he saw the doctor with his chin leaning on his folded hands, his expression one of cold intrigue; watching.

Then, as if nothing of note had happened, he packed the stethoscope away and extracted a smaller glass bottle from his bag, smiling. “This will help with your… affliction,” he said, pouring some of the dark brown liquid onto a silver tablespoon and holding it up to Jon’s face. “Open up.” 

Jon didn’t. He just curled his arms tighter around himself and pressed his lips together. There was no way he could trust this man, or anything he tried to feed Jon. All he could do was hope for Martin to come back, to realise that this was all wrong, to—

“You are doing the kind Mr. Blackwood a huge disservice, refusing the aid he so selflessly provided,” the doctor said, still smiling. “You don’t want to disappoint him, do you? As I’ve said before— I know what you are. I know where you come from and I know how to help you. You have been through quite the stressful ordeal, haven’t you?”

Pity coated his words like oil slick on an ice floe. Jon scoffed at the monumental understatement. Indeed. And yet… It wasn’t supposed to have turned out this way, none of it. He wasn’t supposed to lose his belt (his artefacts, his tools, his weapons) and he wasn’t supposed to be as useless as a newborn. And while he’d had to give his voice away, he hadn’t given his mind-song, they just did not listen for some reason! 

Jon’s breath hitched painfully. By the Song— he hated the doctor’s soft voice hiding knives, hated being talked to like a spooked animal, hated hated hated this strange, frail body, hated his helplessness, his panicked thoughts running in circles, nothing but pain and anger and confusion and betrayal— 

His eyes started spilling hot saltwater again. Another reason for concern, though probably laughable in the grand scheme of things.

“I know, I know. Now be a good boy, for Martin, and open your mouth.”

It was getting impossibly hard, coming up with reasons to not just give in.

The medicine tasted dark and bittersweet and burned down Jon’s throat, making his eyes leak even more heavily. After three spoonfuls Dr. David finally relented, and Jon slumped into the bedding, utterly shattered.

The eye-leaking had turned into a full-body thing, making his head pound, his nose run and his chest contract until black spots obscured his vision. 

The doctor’s voice was distant and muffled, almost drowned out by the swelling rush of the sea in Jon's ears.

“Well done, pup. Go to sleep.”

Chapter Text

Martin, pressed with his back against the wall next to the guest room in the dark hallway, tried very hard not to bite his nails to the quick. He listened to the soft up and down of the doctor’s voice, unable to make out the words. He heard glass clinking and wood creaking and eventually a dull thump; then more quiet words, followed by silence. 

Footsteps approached and Dr. David opened the door just enough to poke his head out, face and voice calm and placid, addressing Anya who was hovering at the other side of the door.

“More hot water please, Miss Villette, and then you can help me with the dressings and… clean-up.”

Martin sidestepped and pushed his hand against the door before it could fall shut again. Through the gap, the doctor raised a pale eyebrow at him.

“Is, uh,” Martin stammered.

“Everything’s perfectly fine, Mr. Blackwood,” Dr. David said pleasantly. “You can see the patient once I’m done. Why don’t you go sit in the parlour, have a glass of Madeira to calm your nerves?”

“Oh. Right,” Martin said faintly, stepped away from the door, and watched it close with a quiet groan. He leaned against the wall again with wobbly knees, dragging his hands down his face.
 
Before she went off to fetch the water, Anya gave him a meaningful look. Martin just nodded, resolved to hold the fort; he’d sit on the floor before leaving his position. Or so he thought.

There was the creak of a door being opened and closed carefully at the other end of the hallway, and then a figure emerged from the gloom, her steps fast but almost completely soundless. Martin sighed inaudibly and squeezed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger.

“Miss Ennis.”

Anne Blackwood’s maid did not look him in the eyes, just glanced at the closed guest room door as if she had some notion of what was going on behind it, and rubbed the rather large crucifix dangling from a golden chain around her neck with her thumb.

“Good morning, Mr. Blackwood. Your mother is enquiring about the noise.”

———

Anne Blackwood’s room was perpetually too dark and too warm for Martin’s taste; a dusky, airless chapel of wax-covered candlesticks, velvet drapery and at least a dozen large vases filled with dried flowers that failed to drown out the smell of illness.

Natalie Ennis stood, as she was wont to, next to his mother’s bed, hands folded demurely and half-hidden in the folds of her voluminous grey dress. Her eyes were downcast but sharp. Martin knew it was a moot point, trying to argue her presence. He had not been granted a private conversation with his mother in a very long time.

“I hear we have a guest,” Anne Blackwood said, spitting the last word out like milk gone sour.

Martin stood at the foot of her bed in just the same manner he’d been standing there for years, every time she deigned to let him into her sanctuary; fiddling with his lapels, shoulders drawn up to his ears and head lowered like a naughty schoolboy. Through a considerable act of volition alone he managed to speak around the large lump in his throat.

“Yes, mother. I did tell you about him—Jonathan—Jon, who… uh, he saved me from drowning, back in December. I found him on the beach this morning, hurt and ill, and took him home. Doctor David is seeing to him right now.”

Anne Blackwood exchanged a pregnant look with her maid.

“So you are telling me,” she concluded, low and incredulous, “that a man who’s existence is highly questionable, considering the fact that you hit your silly little head when you managed to fall into the sea, is now staying under my roof, enjoying the attention of my doctor?”

Martin felt heat rise to his face, his cheeks and ears burning with shame and frustration alike.

“Mother, he saved my life!” he choked, thinking by God, whatever you do, don’t start crying.

Anne Blackwood leaned forward and grimaced, her eyes two bloodshot lumps of ice.

“He could have conquered the African Continent for all I care, Martin! You are to discuss it with me if you let any foreign… persons into my home!”

Martin took a shaky breath, trying to steady himself. “We— we are discussing it now, mother. I couldn’t just leave him— just leave him to die out there! I will try to find his, his— family, obviously, but until there’s better care on offer than he’s currently receiving, he will be staying here!”

Martin’s mother opened her mouth, her face contorted with indignation, but before she could hiss something undoubtedly hateful at him she started coughing, wet and rattling. Miss Ennis hurried to press a handkerchief into her shaking hands that she held in front of her mouth, glaring at Martin over the lacy edge.

“I think it is time for you to leave, Mr. Blackwood,” the maid said, laying a hand on Anne Blackwood’s bony shoulder and giving Martin a beady-eyed smile. “Your mother needs to rest now.”

Once her fit was over, Anne Blackwood wiped her mouth, pointed a spindly finger at Martin and rasped, breathing heavily: “We are not done talking about this, boy. Don’t think I’m so easily swayed by your— your fairytales. You’re worse than your father. Get out of my sight.”

———

Martin, finally called in by the doctor, entered the guest room with a lingering feeling of nausea.

Anya was kneeling in front of the hearth, stoking the fire, a basket of dirty—bloodstained—sheets next to her on the floor. Doctor David stood in the middle of the room, hands folded behind his back. He nodded at Martin with a solemn expression, the perpetual amusement absent from his face for once.

Martin hurried to stand at the foot of yet another sickbed; this one had his stomach cramping in fear for entirely different reasons, though.

Jon, narrow face slack with either sleep or unconsciousness, looked small and brittle all swaddled in white; pristine sheets, outsized nightshirt, and thick bandages covering his neck and his hands and forearms almost up to the elbows. His hair, piled up above his head on the pillow, resembled a large heap of tangled seaweed, dark strands tacky with drying brine.

On a porcelain saucer on the bedside table Martin’s signet ring was lying, spotless and bright.

Dr. David stepped up to the bed and Martin’s side, leaned his hands on the carved bed foot and stared at his patient, mouth twisted with visible worry. 

“I’ve treated his injuries and given him something for the pain; that’s all that can be done for now.”
 
He turned his head, addressing Anya: “I will be back later in the day; until then, get him to drink some beef tea when he wakes, and a spoonful of laudanum; two if he gets agitated.”

The maid, looking up from gathering up the gruesome-looking laundry, nodded sharply.

“Now,” the doctor said to Martin, adopting a more serene tone, “how about some tea in the parlour, Mr. Blackwood? I’d prefer to discuss the specifics of this case in private, if you don’t mind.”

———

The tea set rattled on its silver tray when Anya put it down on the small table next to where the doctor had taken a seat in a plush, slightly faded armchair. Martin looked down at the maid’s hands, a little alarmed. They were not shaking. Her face was expressionless when she poured them both some tea and then asked with exaggerated courteousness: “Will that be all, Mr. Blackwood?” She had not cast a single glance at Dr. David during all of it.

“Thank you, Anya, that’s all,” Martin said gently. Anya inclined her head towards him and left the room, the ancient floorboards groaning beneath her brisk stride. 

Martin took a nervous sip of his tea, almost spilling some into his shirtsleeve. He put the cup down with a noisy clack and winced. When he looked up, the doctor was watching him, reclined comfortably with his legs crossed and his fingers steepled under his chin.

“Don’t fret about his nails,” he said, with one of his small, jovial smiles, “they’ll grow in just fine, give it two weeks or so and they’ll be as good as… well. New.” He chuckled lightly, as if pleased about some secret joke only he himself understood. Martin felt irritation bubble up in his gut, replacing the anxiety paralysing him. He took a deep breath, frowning down at the doctor, and then pointed to his own lips.

“What about the bleeding there?”

“From the gums, most likely a side-effect of a poor diet.”

“And the cramping, the paroxysms? The lost voice?” Martin knew he sounded impatient now, maybe even downright rude. He found himself a little surprised at the lack of shame concerning his own tone.

“These— are more complicated matters.” The doctor sighed exaggeratedly, all signs of humour leaving his face. “I couldn’t find anything physiologically wrong, neither with the legs nor with the voice box. Which, considering the nature of the injuries, leads me to the conclusion that it is a matter of nerves. The muteness though, that would most likely be a congenital condition.”

“No. No,” Martin shook his head, “he talked to me. I heard him speak, loud and clear, when… after he pulled me from the water. We spoke!”

The doctor cocked his head, then said, low and soft: “We’ve been over this, Mr. Blackwood. You were suffering from a serious concussion. Your mind was playing tricks on you. Your memories of the whole course of events around your rescue are fragmentary at best. You cannot trust them.”

Martin grimaced and stared at the half-empty teacup vibrating between his trembling fingers.

“If it is, as I suspect, an affliction of the mind, you may have to consider that your little friend has done most of this to himself. He may have experienced some dreadful shock, some breakdown of mental faculties caused by a combination of extraneous events and a hysterical disposition. His family, whoever they may be, have most likely cast him out. His reactions to his surroundings are marked by agitation and violence. He may pose a danger to himself and others, unable to function in civilised society, and will most certainly be in need of… special care.”

There was an odd emphasis on the doctor’s words, as if he was simultaneously too polite to express some unspeakable thing while also cheerfully contemplating said thing. His little speech had trickled down Martin’s spine like ice water.

“S—so what you’re saying— are you saying…?”

Dr. David lifted his hands in a placating gesture, that damned little smile back on his face. “Let’s not rush to conclusions. I will have to take him to my clinic and perform some tests to determine the best course of treatment.”

Martin felt indignant all of a sudden and squinted at the man.

Let’s not rush to conclusions indeed. 

“Whatever you are… proposing here,” he said slowly, his voice more calm than he’d managed all morning, “isn’t it a little hasty? You’ve spent, what, half an hour with Jon?”

“I’m afraid I have to disagree with you there, Mr. Blackwood. Jonathan is not an isolated case, you see. I had a somewhat similar patient about twenty years ago, displaying almost all the same seemingly incoherent symptoms. Unfortunately, that was before I had established my clinic, and he eventually disappeared from his caregiver’s house. Since then, I have been able to study a handful of analogous cases.”

“Were you able to help him? That first patient?”

Martin was still squinting. He put his cup down and folded his arms across his chest.

“I was. But it took a lot of patience and close observation. A time- and resources-consuming treatment.”

Martin blinked and dug his fingers into his arms. The doctor sounded… eager. Quietly excited in a way that raised uncomfortable goosebumps all over Martin’s back and neck.

He sniffed. “I’m not sure this is a good idea.” 

It was the doctor’s turn to blink. “Not a good idea, to accord someone the best possible treatment for their illness?”

The goosebumps did not retreat. Something’s wrong, his skin seemed to say, and Martin, fighting his deep-rooted sensibilities, listened. “I, I have to think about it.”

Dr. David rose from the chair, appearing unaffected. “Right, Mr. Blackwood. You do that. I’ll be back in the evening to check in on the patient.”

Martin nodded and got up, and saw the doctor off with all the cool politeness he could muster. Then he went up the stairs again, full of grim determination. 

He would find a way to get another medical opinion as soon as possible, if he had to pay his former family doctor to come out here all the way from Newcastle. 

He would go to the police, to the mayor, to whomever it took and find out who Jon was, and what had happened to him. 

He was going to get to the bottom of this.

———

Martin sat at Jon’s bedside, watching his awfully still face with a strange sense of purpose.

When Anya came back from the kitchen and deposited a metal canteen—to keep the broth warm—on the escritoire, he turned to her and said, low and halting: “Anya, would it be alright if I asked for your, your honest opinion on… all of this?”

Anya looked at Martin for a long moment. Then she sighed, deeply, pulled a stool over and sat down next to him.

“I’m really not the right person to ask, Mr. Blackwood! I don’t know what to make of any of it,” she said, carefully touching the back of Jon’s left hand with her fingers.

“You see… well. His wrists are horribly bruised, as if someone has held him by force, and he’s been crying. The doctor made me clean away the tear tracks. And then there’s… that,” she shot Martin a quick, wide-eyed look, and pushed the duvet away from Jon’s legs emphatically, muttering: “Forgive my indiscretion, but you need to see this.”

Martin winced, and then he looked.

There were faint marks covering Jon’s legs, not thin and silver like the scars on his torso, but oval and slightly darker than his skin tone. They looked more like moles or freckles but were as big as coins in places, and most numerous on the outsides of his calves and around his ankles and knees. They created a symmetrical pattern distinctly reminiscent of fur markings.

“I scrubbed at them really well. They don’t come off.”

Martin stared for a too-long moment at the exposed skin, then felt his neck flush hot and cringed, carefully tucking the duvet back around Jon’s legs. Thankfully, Anya seemed, as always, unperturbed by his manner. He cleared his throat.

“Ah. Uhm. Birthmarks?”

“Maybe. The symmetry is rather unusual though, don’t you think, Mr. Blackwood?”

“Sure, Anya, but neither you nor me are a doctor or, or a naturalist. Whatever would we know about it?”

“I did not have a natural explanation in mind, Mr. Blackwood,” she said bluntly. “I was, to be quite honest, thinking of stories my grandmother told me. About folk who live in the sea.”

Martin chuckled, high and humourless. “Superstition is not going to help him, is it,” he said, his voice wavering.

Anya shrugged. “No, Mr. Blackwood—you’re probably right. I apologise. I seem to be grasping at straws. But I didn’t, uhm.” She looked pensive now, unsure. “I did not tell the doctor about it. He was packing his bag with his back to us, and once I was done scrubbing this one’s legs, I quickly wrapped him all up in the duvet. I hope that wasn’t…” she trailed off.

Martin blinked, then said, slowly: “You… didn’t think Dr. David should know about this…?”

“Forgive me but I. I don’t trust him.” Anya scowled, picking at her nails.

“Oh, good,” Martin said darkly. “Neither do I.”

Anya nodded, then stood and dusted off her pristine apron. “I have to go down for a bit, it’s almost lunchtime. Just, one thing—“ she reached across the pillow and picked out a strand of Jon’s infinitely long hair, lifting half the knotted mess it came from with it. 

“Mr. Blackwood, what are we going to do with this?”

Chapter Text

It took the three mer almost two days to travel from the archives at the north-western edge of the Dogger Bank to the queen’s seat at the Outer Silverpit. Jon knew he was being stubborn, but outside of absolute emergencies he refused to be dragged along by one of the cetaceans like a pup. Basira huffed and muttered under her breath at their slow pace, but Gerry remained unruffled.

Once they had crossed the deep, crystalline waters of the Silverpit Crater, the large stone pillar of the queen’s seat rose before them from the dark blue abyss.

They approached the plateau, which lay right underneath the surface and was brightly lit by the afternoon sun, and at the edge were nodded through by four guards, outfitted with the royal armour: ornate breastplates made from turtle shells, inlayed with mother-of-pearl in the shape of stylised sea-creatures.

“Archivist!” then came the enthusiastic call of Michael, youngest member of the Small Council. He rushed towards them with his porpoise-like tail, arms outstretched and long curls trailing in the water like a school of golden eels. Even Basira could not suppress a smile when they were greeted in such a way, and there was much hand-clasping and forehead-touching amidst their fond how-do-you-do’s.

Then Michael led them to the centre of the plateau, were the queen was waiting amidst the other members of her closest circle.

Emma, her long grey tail coiled atop a flat rock to the right of queen Gertrude, nodded at them with her mild and inscrutable countenance. An artful net of threaded shells was covering her head and half her face, the ends softly clacking together at the motion.

Adelard rose from his place at the queen’s left side and greeted them all with a strong grip of his hands and his shrewd, piercing gaze; he was pushing two hundred years, which was a proud age even for a cetacean. His black tail was mottled with white scars just as stars mottled the night sky. 

He towered over his queen, Gertrude being a pinniped; her limbs were short and delicate and her squat tail a greying, dappled brown. Her silver hair was piled atop her head in a tidy bun, her only adornment the carvings dangling from her belt; similar to Jon’s, if larger and more detailed. She looked immutable, Jon thought; he had known her all his life, and she did not seem to change, ever. Her face was hard, reserved yet expectant. Jon, Gerry and Basira bowed their heads to her, and when she stretched out her right hand with an almost absent-minded motion, it was Gerry who moved to take it, and press his forehead against it in a familial gesture. He had, after all, called her mother for a time.

Meanwhile, Jon looked about, trying for inconspicuousness, and saw Basira do the same. 

The number of council members remained painfully low.

He caught Michael’s nervous, flickering gaze, shaking his head minutely.

“Jonathan.” The queen looked him over, hands folded in front of her chest. “It is good to see you. Although Gerard tells me that the purpose of your visit is a troubling one. So, let us take air, and food if needed, and then get to it without delay.”

———

Songs could be collected by any mer in which the Song was strong; but only the Archivist could release them from their vessels and make them be heard.

When Jon relayed a Song and made it audible to others’ ears, there were always two voices speaking, synchronised, entwined. One was strong, present, animated—his own. The other was faint, distant and haunting—the one of the Song-giver.

“…I dragged him to the bottom of the estuary and buried him under a couple of large rocks, so the Deep Ones would not be able to feed on him.
 
“Are you happy now, Jon? 

“Song ends.”

Jon took the large periwinkle from where he’d held it pressed against his sternum a little too hard; his voice had grown rough and low. That last bit had been for him, and Daisy’s voice, though thin and ghostly, had sounded sharp and irritated. He glanced at the queen, but she didn’t seem to take offence at the tone. She looked thoughtful, her chin resting on her short, clawed fingers.

The other mer were hovering around them in a circle. They were quiet, but their thoughts were very loud. Jon made a conscious effort to let them wash over him without making out any meaning.

“I see,” said the queen. “And you have reason to believe that her Song has something to do with her disappearance?”

“I do.”

“And why is that?”

“Because it is not the only one. We have numerous Songs, many of them collected in the last years, that follow a certain pattern.”

Jon glanced at Basira, who had been clutching her elbows with a faraway expression. 

She shook herself and then said, voice grimly calm: “It goes like this: mer come in contact with humans. Something strange or, more often than not, bad happens. Sometimes they do it themselves, sometimes it is done to them, or they witness it being done to someone else. They are always being watched, or feel like they are. And then they disappear.”

“This happens all along the coast,” Gerry concluded, “but especially around Tyne and Wear.”

Gertrude nodded. “So you want to look into it.”

“Yes,” Jon said emphatically.

“Where would you go to investigate first, then?” The queen sounded slightly bemused.

“This,” Jon said, pulling another, smaller gastropod from his bag, “is the Song of Dominic of the Hartlepool Clan. I collected it not even a moon ago; it tells of an encounter with a human woman. She was reading out a strange-looking and apparently utterly captivating book to him, at St. Mary’s Island north of Whitley Bay. She also promised to help ‘get him some legs’.

“He appeared distraught, when he gave me his Song. Nervous and shaken. He would not even stay at the archives to rest from his journey, as if he was being… chased by something. 

“We just received word from his Clan that he disappeared a fortnight ago. And we have reason to believe that the woman who read the book to him was none other than Mary Keay.”

At this, the eyes of all Small Council members fell on Gerry. He lifted his chin, stared back at them, and with a steady voice said: “Dominic described her as an old woman with shorn hair and a face ‘like a shark’. Her arms were inked like a sailor’s, and she was using a stick to walk. She called herself a bookseller.”

“I see,” the queen mused, her eyebrows raised. “Whitley Bay, then.”

“Yes,” Jon said. “We seek permission to speak to an exiled member of the Court.” 

His voice seemed to echo strangely in the silence following his request. He felt the heavy gazes of the council members weighing on him. Jon could sense them conversing amongst each other through their Mind-Songs, but now they had put up their barriers, well-practiced and strong and impossible to penetrate.

“Very well,” Gertrude said eventually, “but be aware of the danger Mary poses. Keep present in your minds the reason she was exiled from our midst, and don’t attempt to approach her alone. Seek advice from the Tyne Clan beforehand; they may know more about her goings-on.”
 
Relief washed through Jon, paired with a jittery apprehension.

“We will,” he said, bowing his head once more before his queen, “and thank you.”

“Don’t thank me, Jonathan. It is in all our interest that there is light shed upon these incidents. Make sure to report your findings back to us, and don’t be too long—I hate to see my archives understaffed.”

Adelard shot Gertrude an almost-smile, then spoke up: “You may want to take a small detour further up North on your way back. There are two hunters of the Farn Deeps Clan, Trevor and Julia, who are said to be the best trackers between Britain and Denmark, and if anyone can find a mer lost at sea, they can. At the queen’s behest, they may be persuaded to look for Daisy; and for others who have gone missing after their Songs were collected.”

Basira, arms folded and brow furrowed over her sharp, displeased gaze, perked up at this.
 
Jon nodded gratefully at the old cetacean. “We will certainly pay them a visit too, then.”

Gertrude hummed, then turned her head to her youngest council member. “Michael, make sure they are fed and well-rested before continuing on their journey, and outfitted with any provisions they require.”

———

Michael was utterly delighted to host them in his alcove beneath the plateau, and rather distraught when, after resting for one seal-hour* and taking a rushed supper of haddock and cod, they made to leave again.

“Are you sure,” he asked them, hands fluttering at his sides, “you do not need more sleep? Another bag of mussels, more anchovies?”

“You’re too kind,” Gerry told him, squeezing his shoulder, “but the sooner we’re off the better. We plan on making it all the way to Scarborough the day after tomorrow, and then we’ll be traveling up the coast to the Tyne from there, which will take us at least another two days…”

“The weather’s going to be absolutely miserable soon,” Basira interjected. “We really need to hurry. Especially considering our pace.” She squinted at Jon. Jon rolled his eyes, grumbling: “Yes, yes. If we don’t make time according to the plan, you can drag me along a tiny bit.” 

Then he turned to Michael, smiling at him a little sullen. “I do have a favour to ask of you. Can I leave this,” and he pointed at his heavy torque, “with you for safe-keeping? It will only further slow me down. And in case someone demands evidence of my status as archivist and queen’s envoy, I can always show them my belt.”

“Oh, it would be my pleasure!” Michael said with a shaky laugh and then, obviously happy to be able to help, turned Jon around by the arms and started unlacing the intricate piece of jewellery from his neck with long and nimble claws. 

Jon took the opportunity to release his hair from the tight braids, which were slowly but surely starting to give him a headache. Gerry and Basira helped by picking the delicate little shells from his hairdo.

When Michael was done and had carefully stowed the torque away in a large stone jar, and Jon’s hair was once again flowing about like so much seaweed, they said their goodbyes at the surface, the queen’s seat stretching pale beneath them in the light of the rising moon.

Michael quickly hugged Jon to his chest and then looked at him intently, saying: “Do take care, my friend. It’s so much bloody work, training up a new archivist.” 

A gentle, awkward chuckle softened his words, but they did not sit well with Jon regardless.

———

The visits to both the Scarborough and the Hartlepool Clan turned out utterly fruitless. The respective elders of the Clans received Jon with the courtesy appropriate for an archivist on a queen’s errand; but they acted even more taciturn than the Small Council itself. Jon was growing more restless and impatient by the hour. 

The only tangible, emotional reaction he could provoke of these proud and reticent mer was when, speaking to the Hartlepool elders about poor Dominic, he mentioned the possibility of the disappearing mer—and there had been more of those, though their disappearances were all ruled accidents—finding a way to acquire legs and live as humans. At this, their eyes turned hard and cold. They denied knowing anything about such abominable occurrences and told Jon, Gerry and Basira in a roundabout, respectful way to leave well enough alone and kindly shove off.

A half-day from Whitley Bay, as the three mer were leaving the Hartlepool Clan’s domain behind empty-handed, the weather did finally turn, just as Basira had predicted.

They surfaced in the late afternoon to slate grey, choppy waves and a gloomy sky, and even darker clouds rolling in from the West.

Gerry swept his sopping black hair from his face and scowled at the coastline. “I don’t like this,” he grumbled. “It looks like a proper winter thunderstorm in the making.”

“That’s exactly what this is,” Basira muttered, studying the fast moving clouds. 

Jon shivered. The wind was strong and icy up here, and breathing the air almost hurt. “Let’s keep moving,” he said, rubbing his very cold nose. “See that we reach the Tyne Clan’s domain before the sea grows even rougher; they will give us shelter.”

But when they had passed the mouth of the Wear and came up to Seaburn Beach, which marked the southern border of the Tyne Clan’s territory, they were not stopped or greeted by any mer; neither guard nor hunter crossed their way. 

At a small rock formation off the coast of Whitburn, which the humans called Elephant Rock and the Tyne Clan elders used to call home, the Archivist and his small retinue surfaced for air, and looked out into the hostile, pitch black night all around them. The deafening roar of thunder was growing ever closer, and rain fell in icy sheets around them, whipping them to and fro almost as forcefully as the raging waves.

They dove down again quickly, and sought out the entrance of the submerged caves they knew would grant them some reprieve, and maybe even a familiar face or two. But they were disappointed. The caves were just as deserted as the last stretch of the coast had been. There was no sign of occupation other than floors littered with empty shells, scattered fishbones, and shards of broken stone crockery. The mer were gone, and with them their belongings: their tools, weapons, jewellery and crafts. Of the usual light-sources only small patches of luminescent plankton remained, which had collected in crevices in the walls, producing just enough brightness to bathe the caves in a dim and eerie glow.

The place appeared utterly and systematically abandoned.

Jon, Gerry and Basira huddled with their backs to the wall in a small alcove in the central hall and stared at the hollowed out wreck of a home before them.

“Did they leave of their own accord, or…?” Jon croaked, his voice almost drowned out by the violent waves crashing into the rock above them.

“It almost looks like it,” Basira concurred, “but why?”

“We won’t find out here, I’m afraid,” Gerry said, casting about with wide and anxious eyes. “Jon. Will you try and call for them?”

Jon bit his tongue too hard and pricked it with his left incisor. He flinched, and then he nodded. “In the entrance. Stay back and brace yourselves; I’ll direct it out to sea, but it’ll be… noisy.”

Gerry and Basira nodded at him gravely, and then pushed themselves harder into the wall at their backs.

Jon left the hall with a grim resolve laced with nausea. Underneath the natural arch of the mouth of the cave, he gripped the rock to his left and right with his hands, grit his teeth and closed his eyes. 

He had always loathed Siren-Songs.

Jon reached for the elusive strings of power threaded through the fabric of the world, and let the Song rise in the dark waters and coalesce in his mind until he was shaking with a force he almost could not contain, too much, too vast, and cried into the void—

Mer of the Tyne Clan, in the name of the sacred bond of the Song we seek your aid! Heed my call and show yourselves if you are able.

The Song burst from him like the shriek of a wounded whale, raw and deafening and awful.

In the subsequent hollow silence, he sank down to the bottom of the cave's entrance and curled his arms around himself, shuddering. Then he listened.

But all he heard through the rush of the breakers above were the faint, nervous whines of a family of harbour seals seeking shelter from the storm nearby, and the quiet clicks Gerry and Basira made when they approached his huddled form in the mouth of the cave and then sank down beside him. Gerry took his hands and held them gently between his own.

“They’re truly gone,” Jon told them, feeling brittle and exhausted.

“That they are,” Basira said, her voice softer than it had been in many weeks, looking out into the darkness beyond their shelter. “It’s no use, staying here. Let’s rest for one or two hours, and then move on.”

———

Jon fell asleep almost at once, curled up against the cave wall between the large, solid bodies of Gerry and Basira, and found himself in a strange dark world. 

His eyes were open, but he could not see; an alien feeling, with his sight attuned to the ocean depths as it was. At first, he was floating in a wide and empty space, utterly quiet and peaceful. But he sank in the water, deeper and deeper, dragged down by a gentle yet relentless undertow, and soon realised he was not alone. Something moved past him in the vast and boundless darkness; something colossal, and ancient, and cold. 

It started to Sing.

Its Song was made of many voices. They Sang of fear, regret and pain; desperate pleas lacing the black waters like bitter ink. Then there was a deep and terrible groan, and the cries swelled and crested in one heartbreaking wail.

Jon twitched awake with a panicked whine, clutching at his throat. Next to him, Gerry and Basira stirred, slow and bleary. Jon choked out some garbled excuse, pushed himself off the rock wall and hurriedly darted through the hall and out of the cave and up up up, until he broke the surface, coughing and gasping, and was immediately dragged back towards the rock by an angry wave.

He dove down instinctively, and avoided being smashed to pieces by a hair’s breadth.

He shoved himself against the wall next to the mouth of the cave, clinging to it like a limpet, humming to himself, calm down, calm down, just a dream, just a… 

An icy shiver swept through him. He could still hear the cries in the distance.

Gerry appeared next to him, asking: “Jon, are you alright? What’s wrong?” worried and confused.

“Do you hear that?” Jon rasped, squeezing his eyes shut.

“Hear what?” Basira said, coming up behind Gerry.

“Humans. Crying for help, praying. Dying.” Jon buried his hands in his hair and pulled, hard. Then he shook himself, reached out for his companions, and said with sudden fierceness: “North-west of here, in the Tyne estuary. We need to go, now. Take me between you.”

They both just stared at him in utter bewilderment and muttered: “What…?” in unison.

“Take me between you, by my arms! We need to be quick.”

———

Even with Jon being dragged between the large cetaceans, it took them an awfully long time to arrive at the mouth of the Tyne. Jon listened feverishly for the voices in the dark, extinguishing one by one, his heart sinking further and further. They would not be able to save many. If any at all.

Once they surfaced in the estuary, they saw a huge and bulky shape sticking from the churning waters at an odd angle.

“Black Middens!” Gerry called over the clamour of the wind and rain and waves.

“Yes, I know!” Jon yelled in answer. “It’s a steamship!”

“What do we do?” Basira roared.

Save them, Jon pushed his Song at them, and they both cringed with the force of it. 

Gerry recovered first, and even in the stormy darkness Jon could make out the hard and stubborn line of his mouth. Alright, he agreed, but we will not risk our lives unduly. If we split up, you go West, up the Tyne. It’s safest.

Of course we split up, we’ll hardly save anyone if we don’t! Jon groused, and made to break away. Gerry dug his claws into his arm. Did you listen? Up the Tyne! Jon, you’re not strong enough for those breakers!

You’ll be bashed against the rocks just like the humans, Basira hissed at him.

Yes, alright, alright! Jon seized their hands, one in each of his own, and squeezed them.

They squeezed back, and Gerry grabbed the side of his face and pushed their foreheads together. We’ll meet underneath Tynemouth castle at sunrise. Be safe, and do not let them see you.

And then they were off.

———

Jon circled the human once, twice. Listening.

The water around them had a sharp, metallic tang; blood seeping from a head-wound. The man was motionless, slowly being dragged down by his heavy, waterlogged clothes. His eyes were half-lidded and dim. 

He was large, soft and ghostly pale, exuding quiet. And still, there was something… there. Suddenly, Jon could hear it: the deep and steady Song of his heartbeat. 

He was still alive.

Chapter Text

Martin penned a quick and urgent note to his former doctor in Newcastle, then had Julian take it to the post office to be telegraphed. He was still hesitant about involving police, but nevertheless asked his footman to drop by the station too, and inquire about any missing persons in the area—without giving any detail as to the motive of his request. Then he dragged the old armchair from the corner of the guest room to the head of the bed, settled down with a book, and did most certainly not read more than two lines, over and over, until he gave up pretending. Jon remained deathly still, and Martin honed in on the slight rise and fall of his chest.

He ignored the lunch-bell (Anya knew he wouldn’t come down anyway), and only got up to open the door for Julian who, back from his errands, informed Martin that there were indeed quite a few missing persons (most of them fishermen, which came as no surprise considering the temper of the winter-sea) posted on a notice board at the station, but none of them appeared to be Jon.

Hours later, when it was almost time for tea, Jon stirred for the first time. It was nothing more than a huff and a twitch, but Martin, anxiously poised, leaned forward to see sweat beading at Jon’s temples, and his eyes moving wildly beneath his closed lids. He pressed the back of his hand against Jon’s forehead and found it overly warm, where before his skin had been worryingly cold to the touch. Wouldn’t it be conducive to wake him, then, from some feverish nightmare? Martin softly shook Jon’s shoulder and called his name. Jon’s breath hitched, but his head just lolled to the side on the pillow, heavy and insensate. There was no waking him; not even when Anya brought some lukewarm water and they dabbed his flushed face and neck with it.

At six o’clock on the dot Doctor David made another appearance. Martin, despite his reservations, was glad of it—the worry about Jon was weighing heavy on him, so much so that he hadn’t been able to stomach any food all day long. While shaking the doctor’s hand, he blurted, forgoing all expected courtesy: “He’s not waking up, and now he’s running a fever!”

The doctor just smiled his bland, patient smile, and said, without sparing Jon a single glance: “Mr. Blackwood, have you thought about my proposal?”

Have you thought about minding your own business and just doing your job? Martin didn’t say, but he felt blood rush to his cheeks, and his voice shook with emotion when he stuttered: “Yes, no! Just, if you please…!”

Dr. David sighed like a mild, slightly exasperated school teacher, then opened his bag on the armchair and picked out a smallish bottle. He opened it and held it directly underneath Jon’s nose. Martin caught the whiff of something sharply alcoholic and grimaced.

“Not to worry, Mr. Blackwood,” the doctor reassured him, “this is just some very potent Brandy, basically.”

Jon’s eyelids fluttered and he winced, trying to turn away from the repugnant smell, but the doctor casually grabbed his jaw to hold his head still, then dribbled some of the liquid between his lips. Jon jolted as if hit, his eyes flying open, wide and unseeing. Martin pressed his fists against his mouth to muffle a sympathetic whimper. Jon was breathing heavily, but his lids kept fluttering and his eyes had a look of half-awake confusion in them, unable to focus properly. He tried to lift his head, his arms, but soon slumped down in defeat, dazed and weak. The doctor pushed his fingers against the side of his neck above the bandage, then nodded and looked up at Martin.

“It’s of the utmost importance that he eats and drinks. So if you can’t wake him, this will.” He pointed at the bottle on the bedside table, then lifted his eyebrows condescendingly. “Do take a seat, Mr. Blackwood. You look ghastly pale!” He took his bag off the armchair for Martin to wilt into it. Jon was still blinking, lost and bewildered.

“I can see how this upsets you,” Dr. David said gently, standing over them both and looking between them. “You do know there is a solution to your predicament, Mr. Blackwood—and to his.”

“No,” Martin muttered mulishly, shaking his head, “no, that isn’t one. I can’t— just do something to help him!”

The doctor let out a long breath, then gripped the back of the chair next to Martin’s head and said, voice low but full of odd intensity: “Look, Mr. Blackwood— let me be plain; I’ve spoken to your mother, and she is obviously quite unsettled by the whole affair. You wouldn’t want to threaten her health because you’ve bitten off more than you can chew, right? Are you ready to face all the consequences of taking in a very ill stranger you’re not at all equipped to care for? I can make sure—“

“No!” Martin’s face had been gradually flushing with angry heat during the doctor’s speech, but the man did not relent.

“If you are set against me taking him to the clinic, there’s, well. I can recommend a place, down in Harton. It’s private, very respectable.”

Martin stared up at him in disbelief. “I’m not— I will not under any circumstances be sending Jon to an asylum! Something terrible has happened to him, and I won’t have him treated as some sort of— of lunatic!”

“I wasn’t suggesting anything of the sort, Mr. Blackwood. There is really no need for this level of agitation.”

Dr. David was still smiling. Martin discovered in himself the very unusual urge to wipe the smile off the man’s face with… well, some disreputable act of violence that didn’t bear thinking about in detail. He got up from the chair with momentum, which had the doctor take a step back, and then he used his stature (another very unusual urge he generally did not indulge in) to loom over the man.

“You needn’t concern yourself with this any longer,” Martin said icily, “I’ve sent for another doctor already. One that won’t threaten to, to take Jon away. And you needn’t come back tomorrow. Thank you very much.”

Martin opened the door, and pointed to the hallway.

“I see,” the doctor said calmly, and took his bag. “Well. Feel free to call on me when you have a change of heart.”

Martin grit his teeth, and said nothing. Dr. David walked out past him, then glanced back into the guest room at the half-conscious figure on the bed with a glint in his pale eyes.

“On your head be it, Mr. Blackwood,” he muttered under his breath, and left.

———

Jon did not regain true consciousness; his unfocused eyes kept fluttering shut and his head wobbled on his neck, his breath coming choppy and strained. He did not react to his name, nor any other form of address. Martin tried to get some broth into him, but Jon pressed his lips together whenever he approached with a spoon, either staring straight through Martin as if he were a ghost, or flinching away from him as though he did perceive but not recognise him.

“Oh my Lord, Anya, have I done the right thing?” Martin whispered when the maid entered the room with a tea-tray and the evening mail. He immediately ripped open the reply from his Newcastle doctor and skimmed it with dismay—he  very politely excused himself, his workload making the journey impossible at present, but would Martin consider travelling into the city with his ailing friend?—Which, regarding Jon’s poor condition, did not seem like a good idea at all.

“I’m afraid I might have been irreparably rude to Dr. David. What if, what if no one else can…?”

“Nonsense, Mr. Blackwood!” Anya hissed, then cleared her throat and said: “Sorry! Sorry. But, in all seriousness, that man is more than fishy, and there must be some proper doctors out there! Not as close maybe, but it’s not impossible to get help.”

She took up the tablespoon Martin had been so unsuccessful with, squinted at it, and then at Jon, who, eyes half-lidded, was pushing his bandaged hands against the duvet, his movements feeble.

“What about this Fanshawe fellow?” Anya said, and put the spoon down with a frown. “He does come down to Moorland Hall, does he not? Your uncle sings his praises.”

“Yes, but he’s all the way up in Edinburgh!” Martin said, wringing his hands. “He comes down maybe once a month to treat the Lukases and Rayner and the lot, because apparently no one from around here is good enough for them—I’m not sure he’s any use!”

“He always arrives on the first of the month. That’s in four days, Mr. Blackwood.” Anya opened the canteen and poured some of the still warm broth into a teacup. “Also, I think spoons are too finicky.”

She sat down on top of the mattress next to Jon and gently put her hand to the side of his face, rubbing her thumb against his cheek, and then lifted the cup to his slightly parted lips, tipping it.

Jon swallowed, blinked, then swallowed some more.

Martin leaned forward in the armchair and watched them, awed. In a matter of seconds, Jon had emptied the cup, and Anya refilled it for him. “There ya go, hinny,” she murmured, while he drank with fervour, “ya clamming, huh?”*

Then, realising what she had said, she glanced up at Martin self-consciously, but he just gave her a small, shaky smile, and she went back to her task, lips twitching.

After three cups of broth, Jon turned his head to the side with knitted brows and started pushing at the duvet again. Anya put the teacup aside and laid the back of her hand against his forehead. Martin groaned and buried his face in his hands, mumbling: “That bloody man was no use whatsoever! He didn’t even address the fever, for Christ’s sake!”

“I don’t think that’s a fever, Mr. Blackwood,” Anya said, and Martin looked up, puzzled. She slowly pulled the duvet aside, until Jon was lying there with nothing but his long white nightshirt.

His arms fell to his sides and he closed his eyes and sighed, long and soundless.

“Aha!” Anya put her hands to her hips. “I think you’re just overheating. I’ll find you a thinner blanket,” she said to Jon, her voice fond.

“But— but it’s February!” Martin sputtered.

Anya turned to him with a shrewd expression. “Indeed, Mr. Blackwood. And he took a swim for you in December, and was none the worse for wear because of it, right?”

———

Jon dreamt of deep dark waters, as he so often did. 

He was floating in a black and quiet place so far down it would have killed him in an instant, had any of it been real. Something passed underneath him; one of his terrible, silent dream-leviathans. Knowing he was not awake did not make it less upsetting. 

What do you want, he called to them, but his Song was weak, hoarse and fearful, and it went unanswered. 

Jon decided he’d had enough. He slowly drifted up through the darkness towards consciousness and, surfacing, took a deep breath. It was a regular occasion, him struggling up for air only half-awake, not able to sleep more than an hour at a time underwater. This was… different, though. When he moved his arms, there was no resistance, nothing to push through. The movement felt clumsy and helpless and it hurt; sore muscles protesting, wrists and fingers throbbing with a deep, immutable pain. But—his head was finally clear again, and his senses seemed to be working fine.

He concluded that the poison that horrible, sticky-wrong man (Jon refused to call him a doctor) had forced on him had at last left his body. His memories of the last hours—days?—were of course muddled at best. 

Anyway, he would do well not to… dwell on certain things. Figuring out what to do here and now was daunting enough. Where was he even to start?

His tongue felt swollen and fuzzy, and he flinched when it pushed against the large blunt things that were his teeth. New teeth. Human teeth.

Jon sucked more breath into his gravel-filled lungs. At least his gums seemed to have stopped bleeding; the coppery tang of blood was faint and stale, overwhelmed by some rich and complex taste. He swallowed, and his skin stretched oddly over the cut on his throat. Then he carefully squinted one eye open.

It was strange to see the room again, to perceive it without a veil of terror or confusion. Grey light filtered in through the small window; dawn or dusk, Jon couldn’t tell. He was very warm, but it was not the sweltering, smothering heat from before. He pushed a thin, soft blanket aside with his arms, sat up with quite some effort (and internal groaning), took a bracing breath, and looked at his legs.

They lay stretched out before him on the mattress, thin and brown, and freckled with a pale echo of his tail’s markings. He wiggled the toes and was surprised at how little effort it took. Then he bent the ankles back and forth and left and right, and, oh, that did hurt quite a bit. He hissed. As if in answer, there was a snuffling sound to his right. Jon instinctively jerked his head towards the noise, and then he stared, bewildered.

Martin was squeezed into a cushioned chair, eyes closed and chin resting on his folded hands. His legs were propped up on a smaller stool, and a large piece of chequered fabric was wrapped around him. His thick auburn hair curled around the pale shells of his ears; his cheeks looked very soft beneath his long, coppery lashes, and his breath was deep and even with sleep.

Jon felt a rare, tender thing unfurl in his chest at the sight. What would have happened to him, had this man not found him? A life for a life, he thought, a little awestruck. 

Between them, on top of a high wooden box, the golden ring lay in a delicate dish. And I can’t even give him anything in return.

His right leg started cramping then; he could see the muscles spasm and bunch up in his calf, and the sudden pain punched the breath out of him in a wheeze. He bent forward and tried to push the meat of his palm into his flesh, press against the knot to ease the strain, but his wrists screamed in agony.

He let his head hang in defeat, breathing heavily, a now familiar prickling at the corners of his eyes.

“Oh God, Jon,” Martin said, voice thick with sleep and worry. There was a soft thump and then the mattress was dipping next to Jon. He jolted, alarmed, eyes squeezed shut and breath hitching. He was still weakly trying to rub his hands against the offending leg.

“Jon, uh, can, can you look at me?“ Martin asked. Jon turned his head to the right and squinted at Martin, whose tired face was awash with emotion.

“There you are,” Martin whispered, and then said, a little firmer, “May I— may I touch you?”

Jon hesitated, staring up at him with wide, swimming eyes. Martin’s hands were raised, unmoving, his expression soft and anxious. Jon nodded.

Martin smiled, eyes alight in the gloom, and touched his fingers to Jon’s calf, watching Jon’s expression. Then he dug in, gently at first, and when Jon’s breath shuddered out of him with relief, his motions became firmer. Jon collapsed back into his pillows and blinked up at Martin, who was working Jon’s leg with his lips pursed and an endearing little wrinkle of concentration between his brows.

Once the worst had passed, the knot melting away under his ministrations and the burning pain turning into soreness, Jon laid his hand on Martin’s arm and he stopped, lifting his hands from Jon’s leg as if stung. He looked at Jon, nervous and rapt.

Martin, Jon pushed his thoughts towards the other man forcefully, you heard me, I know you did! Martin, listen!

But it was to no avail. Martin did not react; he kept staring at Jon, expectant and oblivious.

Jon closed his eyes. Why did he not hear him? He knew humans were supposed to be near incapable of mind-song themselves, but they were not immune to it—the Siren-Song had even made its way into their folklore, had it not? And Martin had listened to him, once—he had done what Jon had told him, and he hadn’t drowned…

Jon’s stomach chose their tense silence to make itself known through a very insistent growling noise.

“Oh Lord, you must be starving!” Martin blurted, apologetic. “It’s early, but we’ll find something for you— oh, I know! Porridge, that’ll be easy on the stomach. I need to…” he dragged his hand through his hair with a grimace, then not so surreptitiously sniffed at his crumpled shirt. “I really need to wash up. Uhm. Will you be alright with Anya bringing you breakfast? I’ll be back as fast as I can, I promise!”

Jon wasn’t overjoyed at the idea of Martin leaving, but he had a hazy memory of Anya speaking very gently to him, her touch careful and kind. He lifted his hand from Martin’s arm and nodded.

It’s fine, Martin. And thank you.

Martin beamed and said: “Brilliant!” and then rushed from the room.

———

Jon tried to pass the time waiting for Anya by studying his surroundings; the furniture and textiles and lamps; the images in wooden frames on the the walls, dizzying in their realistic depictions of humans and animals— but he kept getting distracted by his clothing. The white fabric was thin and reasonably soft; still—it felt so odd and unnatural on his skin, Jon had to keep himself from picking at it constantly. He knew very well that he would have to get used to it; humans never went about uncovered. And that was explained not only by their propensity for feeling the cold more keenly, but apparently also a question of propriety. 

Although what ever might be considered inappropriate about the body one was born with (or temporarily inhabiting, as it were), Jon had not the faintest idea. 

Very soon there was a knock on the door and then Anya let herself in, carrying a silver plate. She put it down next to him and her narrow face split with a wide grin. “Oh, Jon,” she said, and stretched out her hand towards him, “it’s so good to see you all awake!”

He blinked at the offered hand, and then slowly lifted his own up to it. Anya squeezed his palm gently, careful not to hurt him.

“Now, I know you’re not partial to spoons,” she said, procuring one from the plate, “but there’s really no other way to eat porridge, so—will you let me help you?”

She lifted a bowl from the plate and held it and the spoon out to Jon, and the smell hitting him was so rich and fragrant, his stomach gave another impatient complaint. He inclined his head and clumsily took the spoon in his right hand.

Anya patiently showed him how to most efficiently go about eating the mushy meal, which was like nothing Jon had ever tasted—warm and soft and so sweet it made him feel almost giddy. When he had finished the whole bowl, and was starting to feel heavy and tired once more, Anya, having put the empty dish aside, pointed at something behind him.

“Once you’re feeling a little better, we really have to do something about your hair!” she said lightly.

Jon turned his head and then tried to pick out a strand out of the dark mass with his bandaged fingers, but it didn’t come loose; the chunk of hair just pulled at his scalp painfully, clumping together heavy and sticky. It did not smell particularly pleasant, either. Jon glared at it with dismay.

“Uhm, Jon,” Anya said, her hand grazing his shoulder. He looked up at her now rather serious face. “Listen, you may think me a bit silly, but… you’re not from here, are you? I mean to say— land. If you can’t tell me, I completely understand. But if you can, I swear I will keep your secret, even from Mr. Blackwood if that’s what you want!”

Jon froze. He had not expected to— was it really so obvious? First the horrible ‘doctor’, and now this— what was he supposed to—?

He must have looked rather terrified, because Anya shook her head and said, her tone soothing and cheerful: “Never mind. In your own time, hinny. You look knackered; do you want to lie down again?”

———

Martin climbed the stairs to the upper floor with renewed vigour; he had cleaned himself and changed his clothes for the first time since yesterday morning, and Mrs. Jennings had made him eat a full breakfast. He’d done it hurriedly, at the kitchen-table, but she’d not let him go until he’d finished every last scrap.

When he entered the hallway, he saw Anya step out of the guest room from the open doorway, her face a calm, polite mask. It fell once she spotted him; the corners of her mouth turned down, and she quickly approached him, gripped his arm and whispered, distraught: “I’m so sorry Mr. Blackwood! He just… let himself in.” Then, before he could reply anything, she pulled him into the guest room.

On the bed, Jon slept on his belly, sprawled out like a child; his face buried in a pillow while hugging another to his side, freckled ankles peeking from beneath the thin woollen throw Anya had procured for him. His messy hair fell over the edge of the mattress, almost touching the floor.

At the foot of the bed stood Peter, watching Jon with a curious expression. In the low light seeping in through the closed curtains he looked almost— affectionate. Martin’s mouth opened and closed soundlessly several times, until Peter turned his head towards him with a pale smile.

“What an interesting little friend you have made,” he said, nodding towards Jon. “Well— if you ever grow tired of him, I’d be happy to take him off your hands.”

“I’m sorry, what…?” Martin stammered, utterly mystified.

Anya stepped towards the bed stiffly, her hands curled into fists at her side.

Peter’s smile didn’t waver. “As a kindness to your mother obviously, to accommodate her nerves.”

Martin resisted the impulse to pull at his own hair with frustration. Then he inhaled and exhaled deeply and said, calm and respectful: “Thank you for your concern, uncle Peter, but that’s really not necessary. But if you are keen to help, you could send your Dr. Fanshawe down sometime next week.”

Peter’s grin widened. “I might just do that, my boy! But you will owe me a favour, won’t you?”

And he clapped Martin on the shoulder a little too hard for comfort, and left.

Chapter Text

Dragging the human to shore was hard but exhilarating, for the simple, grim reason that all the others Jon had come across between the low lights flanking the mouth of the Tyne had been already dead, their bodies drowned or broken by the rocks. He had been getting very tired, and very disheartened. The pale hope that any members of the Tyne-Clan would as mysteriously reappear as they had disappeared and help died quickly. It was just the three of them against the violent waves of the midnight storm; and they were too late. Well, almost.

Jon impulsively reached out to the man’s faint and wavering consciousness with his Mind-Song, even though he was aware that doing so with a human was considered futile; but he seemed to hear, or at least to get the gist of what Jon was trying to communicate, and only gasped for air when they had breached the surface and he could do so safely. He kept breathing, too; even after his panicked mind went blank and his body went slack in Jon’s arms.

Pulling someone about twice his weight through the water, raging sea notwithstanding, was the easy part. Even though Jon was quite skilled at moving on land, using his arms and tail to crawl over rocks like his seal-siblings would, heaving the dead-weight of a waterlogged, unconscious human over the sand posed a rather novel challenge. Jon soon realised it wouldn’t do to just leave him lying on the beach above the waterline and vanish. The man's skin was icy and blueish, and all that work would have been for nought if he now died of exposure instead of a smashed in skull or water in his lungs.

Covering those few meters of distance to a convenient heap of dried seaweed, sheltered between large flat rocks, left Jon winded and took so long he could hear the sea slowly calm down and see the grey fingers of dawn reaching over the horizon. He collapsed onto his back on top of a rock, muscles sore, panting heavily for a few moments before he turned, shook some of the itchy sand off himself, and started to wrap seaweed around the body of the freezing human. Then he leaned over him—keeping the rock between them, just to be safe—and started rubbing the man’s sternum with his knuckles, humming a Healing-Song his mother had taught him.

When the human stirred, that’s when Jon should have turned tail. But he was the Archivist, keeper of the Songs of the North Sea, and he had never spoken to a human in his life. The circumstances, he argued to himself, were low-risk enough to let his burning curiosity win.

———

Martin Blackwood was not exactly what Jon had expected a human would be; odd, yes, but also amiable. It may have been the concerning head-wound that made him seem so strangely… sweet. Jon felt so touched by the gift of the small but heavy, glinting piece of jewellery he even expressed a wish to visit the man’s house of all things. The physical and emotional exhaustion of the past hours was doing funny things to him, Jon concluded.

When he saw humans coming down the beach from afar, and knew that his charge would be safe, he used Martin’s state of distraction to make off unseen. With a few strong, graceful movements he heaved himself over the sand and slipped soundlessly into the water.

The next part of this venture would be the opposite of uplifting. Before him lay the solemn task of dragging dead bodies to shore.

———

Underneath the ruins of Tynemouth castle, which stood against the early morning sky like a row of jagged, broken teeth, squeezed between the treacherous Black Middens and the causeway of the Tynemouth lighthouse, lay a small muddy beach. On it, quite an alarming number of corpses were piling up.

Behind a small cliff at the southern end of the beach, Jon and Basira were catching their breath. They had scoured the estuary for hours, searching the water for humans dead and alive, until Gerry had sent them to go hide and rest. He himself was still out there, making sure they hadn’t overlooked anyone. 

One did not leave the dead to the sea, if one could avoid it.

“I found four with a heartbeat,” Basira said, crouching next to Jon, tail underwater and torso leaning against the dark rock, greedily sucking in the icy air. Her arms were shaking from the exertions of the night and early morning, and so were Jon’s. “I left them for the Life Brigade, they are hard at work down there.” She pointed southwest.

Jon nodded. “There were some still alive, clinging to the ship or the rocks, too,” he rasped. Then he flinched. A large shadow moved past them through the water, very fast and very close.

It wasn’t Gerry, but it wasn’t something as simple as a harbour porpoise, either. A dark and menacing aura trickled into Jon’s awareness; some kind of wordless Song, wild and animal and angry. Basira followed his gaze with a deep frown.

“A hunter,” she said, “or at least I think so—they are carrying a whalebone spear. They are not of the Tyne Clan, otherwise they would have been compelled to follow your call. They won’t show themselves, are not helping, and repel my Mind-Song. They’ve been circling the place like a scavenger out for carrion for hours. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s disgusting, abominable.” She spat into the water and glared.

“Gerry,” Jon whispered, and made to push himself off the rock. Basira grabbed him by the arm. “No. You won’t be any help, Jon. You know him; he’s relentless. And he can out-swim them effortlessly.”

Jon grunted, frustrated, cursing the inadequacy of his flesh. Basira still held his left arm, a little too tight. She was staring at his hand. Or, more precisely, at the golden ring on his middle finger. “What is this? Have you been looting?” she hissed. 

Jon pulled his arm from her grip. “I haven’t,” he grumbled, “and it’s none of your business!”

“Right,” she said, cold and low. “Don’t tell me, then. But you know what?” She was shaking harder now, digging her claws into the rock-wall behind her. “I’m done, with all of this. There’s something rotten going on, and she’s still out there, all alone, and I’m—”

“You’re leaving,” Jon stated, rubbing his wrist.

“Yes, I am. And if you do this one more time I’ll bite your arm off,” Basira said sharply.

Jon rolled his eyes. “I didn’t need to read your thoughts to arrive at this conclusion, but do go off if you have to. I’m rather used to it by now.”

“I— Jon. I cannot do this anymore.” Her voice sounded pained now. “It’s driving me to distraction! This aimless meandering up the coast, stumbling into one dilemma after the other, looking for clues to a mystery that does not make any sense! Her whole birth-clan just— disappeared! I need to go up north to the Farn Deeps, find the hunters Adelard told us of. I need to go look for Daisy. Now.”

“I know,” Jon sighed. “I—it’s not like I want to force you to stay with us. You have my blessing, Basira. Just… Please be safe.”

“As soon as I’ve found her, or at least a tangible lead to her whereabouts, I will turn around and meet you as quickly as possible. I promise.”

“It’s fine.” He carefully touched her shoulder. “Go, before Gerry returns. He will not understand.”

“I can’t though, now,” she said grimly. “What if that cursed hunter realises you are all alone, and eats you for breakfast?”

Jon flashed her a sinister grin. “Oh, let them come and try. I would very much like to rip their Song out of them; it might give us some valuable insights.”

Basira side-eyed him, the corners of her mouth twitching. “I do sometimes forget that you can be terrifying if you want to.”

Jon huffed a bitter little laugh, then froze, wide-eyed, when she bowed down, took his right hand and pressed her forehead to the back of it, murmuring: “I’m sorry.”

“I— it’s alright,” he stammered. 

She stayed like this for another moment, squeezing his fingers hard, and then, with a powerful flick of her black and white tail, she was gone.

———

“I can’t believe she just— left!”

There was a tremor in Gerry’s voice, his shoulders, his hands; physical exhaustion and emotion in equal measure.

“She didn’t. I gave her my blessing.”

“Then I can’t believe she would ask this of you, Jon! It is her duty—”

Jon pushed himself underneath the surface with a sigh. He clutched the rock, slippery with algae, and waited for Gerry to follow, exhaling a long stream of small bubbles. The cetacean dove after him and then hovered in the murky water in front of Jon, looming and elegant, brows quirked.

Jon looked up, blinked slowly and said: “Gerry. Imagine if it were— if it were me. In Daisy’s stead.”

“I— ah.” Gerry closed his hands into fists, inclining his head with a deep frown. His downcast, dark blue eyes shifted back and forth. Then his head jerked up, black hair billowing around him like a plume of ink, and he glared at Jon and said in a feverish whisper: “I would abandon my pod, if there was only a sliver of hope that I could find you.”

Jon smiled, soft and morose. “Now you see.”

He pushed himself further down, to an outcropping he could curl up on, the wall still at his back. His movements were slow and clumsy; too sore and tired to be anything else. Gerry followed, as always, still graceful even in distress. He sank down next to Jon and rubbed his eyes with his palms.

“Yes. But,” he said, tone dry but face crinkled with dismay, “I still think this could have been avoided. Forgive me for saying this, but you’ve both got the diplomatic skills of moray eels. Now Basira’s out there all alone, too. It just isn’t— right.”

“I know!” Jon muttered defensively, wrapping his arms around himself. “Nothing about this is right! Did you see the hunter?”

“Is that what it was? I wasn’t even sure it was mer. I thought it was a stray porpoise, or some lost whale pup maybe—”

“Basira saw their spear. And I felt their Song. It was the Song of a hunter but … wrong?”

“Mh. They sound like trouble. What— Jon.”

Jon pursed his lips. Gerry had frozen mid-gesture and was—of course—staring at the ring.

“So,” Jon said, lifting his chin, trying to sound nonchalant and failing, “that human I dragged ashore at North Shields— I may have spoken to him.”

“You what?” Gerry sputtered. “Did he give that to you? Jon, it’s metal!”

Jon scrunched up his nose. As annoyed as he was by the old superstition, it wasn’t completely unfounded—when humans had started using metal tools and weapons on a grand scale, that was, after all, when their relationship with mer had turned sour. But still— it was just a ring.

“Well,” Jon groused, “my finger hasn’t fallen off, so—”

“Jon, that’s not the— he saw you! You spoke to him!”

“Calm down! He was concussed and I didn’t let him see my tail. He most certainly thought I was a … weird human.”

Gerry dragged his hands down his face, groaning. Then he shook his head, long-suffering, and took Jon’s left hand in his right to take a closer look.

“MKB,” he read out, frowning, tapping a claw against the cachet. “What does it mean?”

Jon shrugged. “He told me his name was Martin Blackwood. I don’t know what the K stands for.”

“Mhm.”

“Gerry…” Jon pulled his hand back, pressed his palms together and stared down at them. “There was something else.”

“Of course there was,” Gerry muttered darkly.

“Nothing bad! Just, well— odd, I suppose. He heard me. He heard my Mind-Song. I, hm. I thought humans couldn’t.”

“I think some can. But it’s obviously not a well studied phenomenon. Did you do more than just, you know, speak?”

“If you mean did I use Siren-Song, no, I most certainly did not,” Jon said, failing to not sound utterly prissy. He felt miserable all of a sudden, aching and worn-out. He realised that his forearms stung, and he turned them, scowling down at the tender, reddened skin, scoured by sand and rocks.

Gerry hummed and bumped Jon’s left shoulder with his right. “Let’s get further out, this place will be crawling with humans soon. We should rest for a bit and have a decent meal before moving on.”

Jon nodded. “And then to the lighthouse?”

Gerry’s head turned northwards and he swallowed, his throat bobbing. 

“Yes. Then to the lighthouse.”

———

It was nearing noon and the wind had picked up again, bringing with it more sleety rain. The two mer sought shelter between the ragged cliffs of Brown’s Point, just south of Whitley Bay Beach. The crevice they were hiding in was covered in limpets, which Gerry levered off the rock face with his claws and then by turns fed them to Jon and gulped them down himself.

After they had eaten their fill, they huddled against the cliff next to each other, staring out at the grey and fretful sea.

“We should stay here until nightfall,” Gerry said. “It will be safer to approach St. Mary’s Island then. And safer for you to— well. Do your thing.”

“Mnh,” Jon yawned, limbs and eyelids heavy with fatigue. “Do you think she’ll hear?”

Gerry shrugged. “She could be too far inland, but I doubt it. Otherwise, why wouldn’t she?”

“I do wonder. Turning human— how a Song might change, or— get lost,” Jon said, low and ponderous, closing his eyes.

“You do lose … something. That I am certain of.”

“What did Mary lose?”

“Her heart.” Gerry said dryly. “Although one could argue that she never had one to begin with.”

Jon wordlessly took his hand and squeezed. Gerry squeezed back, then said: “Go to sleep.”

So Jon did. And for once he did not dream at all.

———

Jon woke with a violent start to a large hand clamping over his mouth, pushing his head back into the hard, broad chest of whoever was restraining him. Something cold and very pointy dug into the side of his neck, and he found himself unable to suppress a muffled mewl of confusion and pain. His sleep-blurred vision cleared, revealing Gerry, eyes wide with shock, still curled up in the little alcove they had sought shelter in. His hands hovered at his belt, where his sturdy flint dagger and keen obsidian knife rested in their seal-skin sheaths.

Jon, I am so, so sorry, I must have fallen asleep—

Shhhh, Jon shushed his companion. Don’t apologise. Tell me what is happening.

Hunter. Don’t move. His—his claws —

Gerry’s voice trembled in Jon’s head, making him think that the hunter’s claws did not have much in common with his own or Gerry’s. The man’s hand did feel abnormally huge, covering half of Jon’s face. Jon went limp in his grip. Then he reached for the hunter’s mind. 

Let me go! He told him, in as commanding a tone as he could muster, but the mer didn’t even twitch. To Jon, it felt like swimming headfirst into a rock wall.

“Drop your belt,” the hunter said, addressing Gerry. His voice was deep, gravelly with disuse, and filled with so much hatred it made Jon flinch.

Without hesitation, Gerry started unlacing the weave in the small of his back. His motions were slow and careful, eyes not leaving the hunter’s, and he said, brittle but calm: “You’ll regret hurting him. What do you want?” He let go of the undone belt and it sank down onto the rock below him, fast and silent.

“I am on the lookout for a monster. And you are going to tell me where she’s hiding, or I will rip this one’s throat out.” While the large mer spoke, he slowly pulled his claw across Jon’s throat. It burned, and Jon swallowed fitfully.

Gerry’s raised hands started shaking. “Stop, please! I—I don’t know what you—” he stammered. 

The hunter laughed. It was an awfully distorted, bitter sound.

“Hah, you should see what she’s turned into! She’s of your pod, the beast who killed my Julia. And if you don’t tell me where she went so I can find her and tear her apart, I will enjoy pulling your precious little archivist to pieces instead!”

Oh! Jon thought. Then the claw dug deeper and he yelped. He could see his blood rise in the water in a small, reddish cloud.

“We don’t know where she is!”Gerry babbled, his voice taking on a sharp and frantic edge, “and if you’d open up your Mind-Song you would know I am not lying!”

The hunter hesitated. Then he tightened his grip on Jon’s jaw painfully and his Song crept into Jon’s mind, cold and low with menace.

Tell me, then. Where’s your golden-haired companion?

Jon did not waste a second to push into the crack and rip it wide open.

Trevor of the Farn Deeps, he cried, in the name of the Song, release me! 

The split-second of terror that washed through Trevor as he was being hit by the force of Jon’s Mind-Song was enough for Jon to duck out of his slackening grip. He went for Gerry’s belt immediately, diving down quick as a sailfish. Jon pressed the bundle into Gerry’s still shaking arms, then whirled around while pulling out his largest blade, a leaf-shaped, pretty yet useful thing of dark red radiolarite.

His eyes grew wide at the sight before him.

The hunter was huge, even for a whale-tailed cetacean. The whalebone spear dangling from his belt looked like a toy. His mottled grey tail was at least as long as all of Gerry, if not more; his skin was leathery and littered with scars, and the hair on his head was white and patchy, chopped off haphazardly. No other hair was left on his body, brows and lashes gone, and his wild gaze was more animal than mer. The whites of his eyes were invisible and his large irises were glowing a deep orange, the colour of the setting sun.

And then there were the fangs; and the claws. Gleaming black and wickedly curved, they were almost the size of Jon and Gerry’s pitiful stone weapons. One wrong move, Jon realised, and, slashed by one of these, he’d have bled out in a matter of moments. 

Trevor hung in the water before them, still and staring, and slowly raised his misshapen hands. Gerry pressed himself to Jon’s side, belt slung across his shoulders and dagger pointed at the hunter.

“Traitor,” Jon hissed at Trevor. “What did you sacrifice to them, to be changed into that?”

“I am not the traitor, Archivist,” Trevor answered, his voice flat. “I have been blessed, wherefore I shall be ready for the world to come.”

Jon’s mind reeled. “How?” he asked, alarmed. “How where you blessed, and by whom? What world to come?”

But even as Jon uttered these questions, he knew they would go unanswered; Trevor’s Song writhed and wailed at the nebulous memory of something vast and unspeakable.

Jon cringed and shuddered, and the hunter groaned, curling in on himself, gripping his head as if in pain. Jon wondered how he managed to not hurt himself with his grotesque claws. 

He dug in his satchel for an empty shell, then held the brown whelk he’d found out to Gerry, a question in his eyes. Gerry nodded in assent, mouth set in a grim line.

Jon did not usually have to compel mer. Most gave their Songs to him freely. But he had done so on occasion, if only at the queen’s behest— to extract confessions from murderers and traitors, or to stop a quarrel from tearing a clan apart.

He swam forward and pressed the small shell in his small hand against the mer’s absurdly broad chest, pulling at the string of terror winding through the hunter’s Mind-Song and said, his voice gentle as the darkest deep-sea trench: “Then tell me what Daisy has done, Trevor of the Farn Deeps. Sing.”

Chapter Text

Rather pointedly, Martin did not invite Peter to stay for lunch. 
 
After enduring a very tense spot of tea in the parlour with the man, during which his uncle made too little polite conversation and too many incomprehensibly ambiguous remarks, Martin had excused himself to hurry upstairs and take his place at Jon’s bedside once more. There he spent the afternoon, re-reading one of his favourite books and worriedly watching Jon toss and turn. More than once, Martin took one of his hands in his, carefully extracting it from some cramped position, afraid Jon might hurt himself in his sleep.
 
When Jon awoke hours later, it was dark outside, and the guest-room was bathed in the warm glow of the ingle and two wall-mounted gas-lamps. Martin looked up from his book at the slight man shuffling onto his elbows from his prone sprawl and yawning unselfconsciously, rolling his shoulders and neck with a wince.
 
“Uhm, hello,” Martin said, low and soft, so as not to startle him. Jon turned his head and looked up at him with his large, dark eyes, and they were alert now, so much more than before, studying Martin just as they had at dawn on the freezing North Shields beach, many weeks ago. Martin shrunk a bit under the warm and curious gaze.
 
“You—uh, are you hungry, thirsty? You really should drink something,” Martin said and pointed to the metal canteen full of broth and the still steaming teapot on the bedside table. Jon, wheezing with the strain, turned and scooted up against the headboard, using, Martin noticed with concern, his injured hands to lift himself, and very much not moving his legs. He ignored Martin’s question, and, once settled, stared with intense focus at the edge of the mattress where Martin had deposited his timeworn edition of Frankenstein. Jon cautiously stretched his hand out for it, then froze and glanced up at Martin as if asking for permission.
 
Martin pushed the book towards him with a giddy smile. “Go on,” he said. “It’s a good read.”
 
Jon lifted the book into his lap and started leafing through it with his knuckles, clumsy and slow, scanning the pages intently. He stopped abruptly, tapping at a passage with an eager expression. 
 
Martin bowed down and squinted at the words.
 
“Where is,” he read out loud, then flinched when Jon snapped the book shut and pointed rather vehemently at the author’s name on the spine. 
 
“Mary…?” 
 
Jon nodded so hard his hair rustled like dried seaweed.
 
Martin frowned, puzzled. “I, uh, she’s dead? She died more than thirty years ago. I think she is buried in Bournemouth?”
 
Jon sucked his lips in between his teeth and shook his head impatiently, then opened the book again, browsed for a second and pointed at another word. “Not,” Martin read. Jon closed the book once again, this time a little bit more careful, and then dragged a finger underneath the letters W. Shelley.
 
“Oh!” Martin said, realisation dawning. “Another Mary, then! Are you— do you know someone named Mary? Are you looking for her?”
 
Yes! Jon mouthed, gripping Martin’s arm, his face lighting up with excitement.
 
“Ah, Jon, that’s brilliant! Is she family?”
 
Jon’s face fell suddenly. He shook his head, once, and then stared into the middle distance, hands clasping his knees.
 
Martin wavered, unsure how to react. The urge to somehow reassure Jon made his fingers twitch.
 
“Uhm. But—is, is there anyone I can contact? Or, or locate for you? There must be people worrying about what happened to you!”
 
Jon glanced at the window, and then, after hesitating for an odd little moment, shook his head again.
 
“Really? There’s no one?”
 
Another head-shake, this one more emphatic. Martin swallowed.
 
“You’re, I mean, are you telling me that you’re, ah—all alone?”
 
Jon’s solemn eyes swept across the room and landed on Martin. His lips twitched in a wry little half-smile and he shrugged. Martin’s heart contracted ominously in his chest. “Good grief,” he breathed, “what in god’s name happened to you?”
 
Jon just kept looking at him, head cocked and delicate features inscrutable, clutching at the book. Martin cleared his throat and gestured to Jon’s bandaged neck.
 
“Did, ah— whoever did this to you, did they hurt your voice box? I mean, more than slicing your skin. I—is that why you don’t speak?”
 
Jon blinked at him pensively, then made a small, casual gesture with his fingers, pulling something invisible from his throat and dispersing it, as if saying it’s gone. He did not appear particularly distressed by the fact.
 
Martin bit his lips, then forced them into a strained smile and turned to the bedside table, clinking a fingernail against the painted porcelain pot.
 
“I—I see. Well, uhm. Tea?”

 
———
 

‘Tea’ turned out to be some strangely scented, much too hot liquid, which Jon deliberately pushed away after the first tentative sip. Martin, cheeks flushed and forehead creased, was very obviously suppressing some grand emotion in response to his refusal of the beverage, which Jon had the audacity to find a little bit amusing. 
 
Afterwards, Anya brought up more of the soft and fragrant, mushy food Martin’s pod seemed to favour, and, while eating, Jon grew very tired again. He would have liked to leaf through the book some more, find suitable words to communicate with Martin; though whatever he should actually tell the man he was still very much unsure of. He was condemned to being misinterpreted that way, he felt. While he was very much interested in certain people’s whereabouts, he did not want Martin to alert them to his presence. It really wouldn’t do to be confronted with a potentially dangerous exile yet, considering the weakened state he was in. 
 
But it was a moot point, anyway. Jon kept nodding off with his half-eaten meal in his lap, the spoon slipping from his useless hand. That was all he seemed to be good for, now; a little food and a lot of sleep. Eventually, he gave in to the dark and heavy pull of unconsciousness again. At least, he thought, his head sinking into the pillow with a soundless sigh, it made the pain very manageable.

 
———
 

Martin thought he would enjoy sleeping in his own bed, after the fretfully uncomfortable night in the armchair at Jon’s bedside, but sleep mostly evaded him. Every time he heard the old clock in the study down the hall chime the hour, he crept through the dark corridor on his tiptoes to peek into the guest-room to see if Jon was awake; thirsty, hungry, in pain, needing something—
 
Jon slept on peacefully. Martin did very much not, and eventually gave up trying in the small hours. He dressed and washed his face and then slunk down to the kitchen for a very early breakfast. Mrs. Jennings tutted at him but indulged him anyway. After a plate of bacon and eggs, with bread rolls still warm from the oven, he left the kitchen and almost collided with Miss Ennis when he turned a corner, who greeted him with a sour little smile. Before he could even think of something to say to her, Julian came running from the direction of the entrance hall, and, spotting him, his mother’s maid excused herself with a grimace of disdain.
 
“Mr. Blackwood, you have a vi—!”
 
“Uhm, Julian,” Martin interrupted his footman, pinching the bridge of his nose, “your shirttails! If your mother sees you like this…”
 
“Ah, I’m so sorry, Mr. Blackwood!” Julian turned away from Martin with beet-red ears and tucked his shirt into his trousers, then turned back and stammered: “Mr.—uh, Mr. Stoker is waiting for you in the parlour!”
 
“Christ, that’s early,” Martin muttered, “I, uh, don’t really… What’s he want?”
 
“Mr. Blackwood, it’s the day! Last Friday of the month!”
 
“Ah. It is, isn’t it. Well, come with then, Julian. Let’s see if the madman needs some breakfast.”
 
Julian, trying very much to walk in a dignified manner and failing, hurried to open the door to the parlour for Martin.
 
“Ta-dah!” Mr. Timothy Stoker, wearing a ludicrously garish waistcoat and generally looking rather disheveled and wild-haired, said in lieu of greeting. He took a large step towards Martin and grinned from ear to ear, brandishing a slim volume with an elaborately illustrated black and white cover.
 
Tempest & Vane, Lady Detectives 

by N.S. James 

VOL. 31: The Curse of the Yellow Door
 
The rather infamous publication was the pièce de résistance of the Stokers’ Tyne Journal Press, and its monthly arrival highly anticipated in Holywell Manor. 
 
“Tim, you shouldn’t have! It’s half seven!” Martin couldn’t help but mirror Tim’s infectious grin.
 
“I know!” Tim’s laugh was lightly laced with the mania of the sleep-deprived. “Only for our resident poet! Sasha and Danny are fast asleep; we started binding yesterday and finished at around four in the morning. But most of the glue has dried in time, so I’m positively sprightly today!”
 
“Ha! Whenever are you not?” Martin teased.  
 
“Mr. Stoker, can I bring you anything?” Julian piped up, grinning excitedly, even though it would be days before he’d get to read the thing, him being last in line after Martin, Mrs. Jennings, and Anya.
 
“Coffee, if you have it? Thank you kindly, Mr. Jennings.”
 
After Julian had rushed from the room, closing the door behind him too forcefully, Tim slumped into an armchair by the fireplace and Martin followed.
 
“Good god!” Tim said, hushed, “How old is he now?”
 
“Seventeen,” Martin groaned, “and he’s still no control of his limbs!”
 
Tim snickered. “He’ll grow into them, don’t worry! He’s a good one, kind and—” Tim stopped, frowning, then asked: “Martin? Are you quite alright?” leaning towards his friend.
 
Martin had wilted forward, clutching his head in his hands. “I’m—not sure!” he said, voice thin. “Tim, can you keep a secret? A, a rather big one?”
 
Tim raised his eyebrows until they disappeared beneath his dark, messy fringe. “Depends, Mr. Blackwood. Am I being made an accessory to crime?”
 
“No!” Martin squeaked, then cleared his throat, embarrassed, “l—listen: do you remember when you visited in December, when I was still feeling rather poorly from…”
 
“From almost drowning? Oh, do I remember! You’d scared us all to death, and then you wouldn’t let us visit for more than a week! It was misery.” Tim’s voice had subsided into a dramatic whisper. 
 
Martin rolled his eyes. “Yes, I’m sorry,” he grumbled, “but when you did visit me, I told you all about the man who’d saved my life, and that I wasn’t completely sure if I hadn’t…imagined things, and, well—I haven’t! Jon— he’s here, in my guest-room! And it’s just so, so damned strange, and I…!” Martin stopped, exhaling shakily. 
 
Tim was staring at him openmouthed. Then a huge grin split his face, and he gripped Martin’s arm. “He’s here, really? The long-haired creature of legend who went skinny-dipping in the North Sea in December? My god, that’s fantastic! Where is he? I need to go and kiss his feet for saving your behind!” 
 
Martin felt himself blush rapidly and immediately understood that his cheeks had turned a deep shade of scarlet. “D—don’t!” he stammered, “He—he’s mainly asleep, and, and… Tim, he doesn’t speak, and I don’t know where he’s from or what happened to him, and he seems to have no family or acquaintances anywhere near at all—”
 
“Oh, this is brilliant. A bona fide man of mystery! Can we write about it in the Journal?”
 
“Tim! Absolutely not! I just asked you to keep it a secret!” Martin whined, wringing his hands.  
 
Tim did not relent. “But what if it helps finding out who he is?” he asked eagerly.
 
Martin winced at the volume of Tim’s voice. “Shhh! You could—maybe!—write a small column in…I don’t know? What’s the opposite of Missing Persons?”
 
“You want me to put your saviour in the Lost and Found rubric…?” Tim snorted.
 
“I don’t know! No? I’ll have to ask him first, anyway! I don’t want to put him in, in any danger—”
 
“Danger? Martin! Oh, this is getting more riveting by the minute!”
 
“It’s—Tim, it’s not funny! He was attacked by someone, he’s hurt and ill. He can’t even get up, not to mention walk by himself, and he can’t speak!” Martin’s frantic whisper broke on the last syllable. 
 
Tim looked very sober suddenly. “Blazes, Martin. Did you go to the police?” he asked, voice low.
 
Martin grimaced. “No. I have thought about it, but after how Dr. David has reacted to him, among other things, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d rather not.”
 
“What? Why?”
 
“Because they are going to take one look at him and tell me I’m being flimflammed by a criminal!”
 
Tim just lifted his eyebrows at Martin in bewilderment.
 
Martin rubbed his forehead with his palms, his voice pained when he croaked: “He looks…foreign.”
 
“Ah. Well, they can go to hell, then,” Tim muttered grimly. “We will figure it out! But good grief, the poor man; and with Dr. David being such a useless, arrogant toad too…!”
 
“Exactly! I even asked my uncle for help, and you know how I hate doing that. He promised to send his doctor over. And Anya’s an absolute treasure, as usual—I think I’d be utterly lost without her. But, apart from that, we’re on our own.”
 
“Martin,” Tim said, sounding very earnest and a little sad, getting up to clasp Martin’s shoulder, his grip warm and comforting, “no, you’re not! How can we help?”

 
———
 

The winter sun was visible through the small window when Jon awoke next, a pale yellow shape behind a bank of mist, warped by the wavy glass pane. Anya was sat next to the bed, attacking a piece of clothing with a very sharp and thin little needle. She put her work aside when she noticed him shifting and yawning. “Y’areet*, hinny?” she said, smiling, “ya want some lunch?”
 
Jon nodded with enthusiasm and was handed another bowl of sweet, milky oats, marvelling at the perks of his transformation. His stomach did not show any signs of upset at the human fare; a fact he considered quite miraculous after decades of subsisting on variations of raw seafood. He also really appreciated the fact that he did not have to do much chewing; but that was a whole…other story.
 
When he had almost finished, Martin entered the room with a good-sized copper basin in his arms. It appeared to be quite heavy. He deposited it on the floor next to the bed with a huff, and when Jon looked down, he found that it was filled two-thirds with water.
 
“Hello Jon,” Martin said, when Jon looked up at him inquisitively. “So, we thought—” Martin floundered, and glanced at Anya. She made an encouraging motion with her hands, and he went on: “We, uhm. We could wash your hair?”
 
Oh, and what a thrilling idea that was—a way to bring the stiff, knotted mass weighing his head down under control! Jon nodded, and smiled widely. The motion stretched his lips across his blunt new teeth in such a strange and unnatural way, he cringed and almost slapped his thickly bandaged hand across his mouth. But Martin did not seem to notice anything amiss; he smiled back, wobbly and sincere, and then ducked his head to rub his eyes, his ears flushed pink. Jon felt a strange urge to reach out and touch Martin’s kind, round face and— and then what? It was unfathomable. He blinked and scowled, trying to shake his bewilderment off.
 
Anya took a bundle of cloth out of the tall, painted wardrobe and spread them on the mattress behind Jon’s back. Then they made him lie down, head hanging over the edge of the pail and neck propped up with pillows, and started attacking his hair with deft hands and a bar of scented soap. It was an oddly relaxing affair, the two humans sitting left and right of him and untangling the strands, careful not to tear or pull; so much so that Jon almost fell asleep again. 
 
At some point though, Martin filled a pitcher from the basin and carefully poured it over Jon’s scalp. It made Jon shudder violently and all of a sudden he was wide awake, breath hitching. 
 
The water was warmer than a stagnant tide pool at the height of summer; it was warm as death.
 
“What’s wrong?” Martin asked; “Oh, that’s too warm,” said Anya simultaneously. 
 
They switched to cold water then to rinse the soap out, squeezed the excess water from Jon’s now clean hair with soft cloth, and then started going through it with two wide tooth combs slowly and meticulously, and Jon was dozing off again in content exhaustion.

 
———
 

An odd droning noise drifted down the hallway and into the guest-room through the closed door. It sounded like several voices, speaking or singing monotonously. Oh god, it’s Friday, isn’t it, Martin thought and groaned quietly. Jon was stirring, squinting up at him with groggy eyes. The combed-out swaths of his long, damp hair were spread all around him and over the edge of the bed-frame to dry, looking like some dark, fantastical halo.
 
“I’m sorry if they woke you,” Martin muttered, smiling down at Jon whose face was screwed up in consternation, very obviously listening. “It’s just my mother’s bible-group. Mother’s very ill and can’t go to church anymore. Father Burrows holds a little gathering with a couple of very devout parishioners in her rooms on Friday evenings. Sometimes they pray far into the night. It can be a bit…eerie.”
 
Jon heaved himself up to sitting against the headboard, lifted his eyebrows in an unreadable expression, then gestured at the unfolded pieces of stationary Martin had been studying, looking at them and at Martin in turn.
 
“Ah, yes—these actually concern you!” Martin said, surprised and a little aflutter. He cleared his throat. “First off, good news. My uncle’s doctor will come by on Sunday—” Jon inhaled sharply and then shook his head with wide eyes, lips pressed into a stiff line. Martin lifted his hands in an appeasing gesture. “Oh lord. I’m very sorry for, for subjecting you to Dr. David. I really should have known better. But I swear, Dr. Fanshawe is not like him! He does come highly recommended. And I will stay in the room the whole time while he’s with you, and if he says or does anything dubious, I will immediately send him packing!”
 
Jon didn’t move. He just side-eyed Martin with a blank expression. Martin fancied he could hear the gears turn in his head. “Please,” he said softly, “I worry a—about you. Please give him a chance.”
 
Jon closed his eyes and nodded almost imperceptibly. Then he exhaled and pointed to the other letter in Martin’s hand.
 
“Oh, thank you! Thank you, Jon. This one is from my friend Sasha. She is asking to meet with you. She’s a writer—writes for the Tyne Journal, among other things, and she is a great researcher, and well connected. She knows a lot of people from many different social circles. She’s…” Martin glanced at the closed door and then lowered his voice, “…to be honest, she’s a bit of a political radical. They all are—the Stokers. Her husband, Tim, and his brother Danny, too. Mother hates it; she doesn’t want their publications in the house. I—I actually keep them all in here.” Martin bent down and pulled a worn suitcase out from underneath the bed halfway, then pushed it back. “You can ask me or Anya if you want to read some, but please don’t tell anyone else. 
 
“Oh, and also there’s this—” Martin pointed to the escritoire, on which a pile of very large, very heavy looking books had appeared. He picked one up and held it out for Jon to see. 
Encyclopaedia Britannica, golden letters on a dark red leather case read, A to Anno.
 
“It’s very comprehensive. In case you want to…to tell me something. More complex than yes or no, I mean. It might be easier to find in there than in Frankenstein? But you don’t have to! It’s just—in case.”
 
Jon took the book from Martin’s hands and placed it in his lap, then opened it right in the middle, examining the text intently.
 
“So, uhm—yes to meeting Sasha?” Martin asked, lacing and unlacing his fingers. Jon nodded absentmindedly, utterly absorbed in the passage on Agoraphobia.
 
“Alright, great! Well. I will leave you to your book presently, there’s just one more thing. A, uh, a matter of practicality? I thought…would it be alright if I plaited your hair?”
 
At this Jon perked up, giving Martin another one of his devastating smiles. He closed the book and without hesitation gathered his hair with clumsy hands, lifting it over his shoulder and offering it up to Martin like a bolt of cloth; brown silk so dark to almost appear black, shot with tarnished silver thread. 
 
Martin swallowed thickly, took it with the reverence one might bestow on some holy relic, and realised that he was in deep, deep trouble.

 
———
 

Jon’s consciousness lurched from a calm and restful darkness, his whole body jerking with the painful cramp in his right calf. He sat up, dazed and wavering, and pushed the palms of his hands into the bunched-up muscle, trying to breathe deeply. He was alone and the house was silent now, the room only lit by the dying embers in the hearth and the dim moon outside.
 
Once the vertigo had passed, he turned his head towards the bedside table and considered the little brass bell Martin had left there. He quickly decided against making use of it. The spasms were getting easier to handle, and this one was fading fast, the initial agony giving way to mere discomfort—nothing to wake Martin or Anya for.
 
He grabbed his thigh, trying to make his knee bend, and hissed with the pain shooting through his leg. From the hallway came a soft creaking. 
 
It was the sound of someone—two someones even—very carefully walking over the old floorboards towards his room. Jon froze. By now he knew very well what Martin’s or Anya’s gait sounded like, and this was neither. They stopped in front of the closed door and exchanged unintelligible, whispered words.
 
Jon realised he had stopped breathing, holding his blanket in a stiff and painful grip. A faint, wordless Song suffused the air, filling him with fathomless dread. He couldn’t move; could just stare in terror at the door, opening slowly and soundlessly, and the figure appearing in the crack, watching him like a hungry shark.
 
The woman’s head was covered with a dark scarf and her face was deeply lined. She was tall and pale; but those were about the only traits reminiscent of her son. Where Gerry’s gaze was shrewd and kind, hers was calculating and deathly cold.
 
But there was no doubt about it; standing on the threshold, like a spectre from the Otherworld, was Mary Keay.

Chapter Text

“Do you think we were right to— to just let him go?”
 
“What else could we have done?” Jon asked, then flinched when Gerry started dabbing at the wound on his neck with a small piece of sea sponge. “Take his life?” he hissed through gritted teeth.
 
Gerry, his face carefully blank, did not answer. Instead, he examined the long cut with intense focus, pushing his knuckles against the edge here and there. Jon, gripping the rock he was curled up on with both hands, stared up into a darkening sky, thick with greyish-brown clouds, and tried hard not to twitch too much.
 
“You’re lucky; it won’t need stitching.” Gerry fished a small green bundle out of his satchel. “It’s not a very clean cut though. It’ll probably scar.” He carefully wrapped a broad strip of seaweed lamina around Jon’s neck and tied it at the back. Jon hummed and grimaced, and Gerry paused his ministrations with a worried frown. “Sorry. Too tight?” 
 
“No, just stings. Thank you,” Jon sighed. He gingerly stretched his neck, moving his head in a slow circle, and swallowed. 
 
Gerry watched him, opening and closing his mouth, uttering a small, sad noise. He gripped his own arms, claws digging into his skin. “Jon—I’m so, so sorry I fell asleep!” he blurted suddenly, “This never happens!” 
 
Jon took his wrists and pulled them off. “Stop apologising,” he said tiredly, “it does happen, and it is not your fault! Everything about this journey has been incredibly draining, I’d say.” Which was not merely an empty phrase; the jittery wakefulness of the encounter with the hunter was receding, and the fatigue that had been plaguing Jon for days now was returning with a vengeance. 
 
But there was nothing for it—they needed to move on, and quickly. This stretch of coast was distinctly unsafe (as they had now learned the hard way), corroborating a not insignificant number of Songs concerning the area that had found their way into the archives of late. And if they wanted to—against the longest odds—catch up with Daisy at some point, there was no other way than to move north as fast as possible. If Basira had not caught up with her yet. Which was a thought that gave Jon pause, considering what they had learned from Trevor about the fate of their companion.
 
“Still,” Gerry murmured, “I’m not going to let it happen again.” He looked down at his hands with an obstinate scowl, and then back up at Jon, seemingly catching on to his very noisy thoughts.
 
“Do you think she knows what she is doing?” he asked, low and a little hoarse. “What is—what is happening to her?”
 
Jon huffed. “You can say a lot of things about Daisy, but she’s no traitor. She would never give herself up to the Deep Ones voluntarily,” he said with utter conviction.
 
Gerry exhaled and stared out of the alcove at the murky waves, occasionally side-eyeing Jon. “No. But you know it does not have to be as straightforward as ritualistically sacrificing someone to the Hunter in the Deep to receive their ‘blessing’, or whatever you want to call this nightmarish metamorphosis. It was probably just…Daisy being Daisy. Stubbornly convinced that she must go and hunt down a certain monster, and then…”
 
“…And then turning into one herself in the process,” Jon finished, pulled his tail up to his chest and buried his face in his arms. “Fuck.”
 
“Indeed,” Gerry whispered, then heaved himself up next to Jon. Perching on a rock was by far not as comfortable for him as it was for Jon, his tail being so much longer and much less flexible than a pinniped’s; but he had a go at it anyway, so he could pull Jon into a short but fierce embrace. Jon did not move, could not move to reciprocate. He just closed his eyes and fought against the wave of nausea that recalling the hunter’s short and painful Song had conjured. Gerry let go of him and slid back into the water, only his head still above the surface, looking up at Jon with dark, kind eyes.
 
Jon took a bracing breath, lifted his chin, and looked north. Night had fallen over the forbidding winter sea, black and starless, and the only thing visible far and wide was the flickering beacon of St. Mary's lighthouse. 
 
He pushed himself off the rock and into the waves with a graceless splash.
 
“Let’s go.”

 
———
 

The tide was receding, but the narrow causeway that linked the small rocky island to the mainland was still flooded. The lighthouse rose from the dark sea squat and pale, standing lonely and unmoored. Jon and Gerry carefully slipped through between the rocks, heading towards the low brick fortification at the foot of the tower. There they stopped and gazed up at the rotating lamp high above.
 
“This is where Dominic met her,” Gerry said, laying a hand against the whitewashed wall. “And it is also where I last saw her, more than ten years ago.”
 
Jon pushed his hand against the brick next to Gerry’s. “You do not have to speak to her. When she appears—if she appears—go and hide.”
 
Gerry shook his head and smiled, gaze cold and sharp teeth flashing. “She is still my mother, and I know her too well. I reckon she has not changed one bit. I will not leave you alone with her.”
 
Jon nodded, too weary to argue. Then he pulled himself up onto a flat, half-submerged rock a few feet from the wall and dug his claws into the porous stone.
 
“Are you ready?” Gerry asked.
 
“As much as I will ever be,” Jon huffed. “It won’t be as— noisy up here, but still. You better get your ears submerged for this.”
 
“Alright.” Gerry gently brushed his knuckles against Jon’s arm and then slid underwater, until all that was visible of him was a blurred flash of white skin against the base of the rock.
 
Jon sucked in icy air between his teeth, closed his eyes, and reached into the dark waters beneath.
 
The strings of Siren-Song were fainter here, and harder to grasp, the ancient call made to travel water, not air. But as long as Jon could feel the sea, he could feel the web of powers suffusing it. He allowed them to rise from the depths into his blood, and he Sang.
 
Mary of the Silverpit, by the sacred bond of the Song, heed my call—
 
That was as far as he got before he choked, his throat seizing suddenly, and his claws were ripped from their death-grip on the rock. Whatever else he’d been intending to say was pushed from his lungs by the force of rushing water, rising around him in a blinding, deafening maelstrom. Immediately, Jon lost all sense of direction, flailing about panicked and disoriented, until there was nothing but the inescapable force of the surging sea, overwhelmingly dark and deathly cold, and a voice—
 
Song-Keeper, it Sang, piercing the thunderous rush, look at me.

 
———
 

All mer who’d ever heard a Deep One Sing and lived to tell the tale would agree on this: That their Song was the sweetest, most painful sound in existence. 
 
That they sounded like your deepest desires; beautiful, soft and familiar. That they sounded like all you’d lost. That they sounded like home.
 
The voice shook through Jon with agonising bliss. And yet, he did not want to look. 
 
But the Song overwhelmed his body and mind and gave him no choice. In the clamorous flood he heard his mother and father calling for him, his grandmother. And he stared into the abyss below from where a savage sorcery rose compared to which the force of his own Siren-Song seemed a pitiful nursery rhyme.
 
A shadow was moving in the depths, incomprehensibly colossal, it’s monstrous head slowly rising towards Jon, mottled-grey and shapeless. Trapped and smothered by sentient water, he was pushed towards it, until he hovered in front of a long and ragged crevice in the pockmarked skin of the leviathan. And then the crevice cracked open, revealing an eye the size of a blue whale elder, the iris a shimmering dark rainbow of amber, ruby, amethyst, sapphire and emerald. 
 
Thus, being Seen at last, Jon was overwhelmed by terror and elation so vast his consciousness went out like a light.

 
———
 

“Jon! Jon!”
 
He was lying on his back, sharp-edged rock digging into his spine. The cold air stung and his lungs were still seizing, and he rolled weakly onto his side to cough and retch until he felt able to breathe again, if only in frantic little gasps. Hands were grasping his shoulders, shaking him. Or possibly just shaking. Jon turned his head, looking up into Gerry’s panic-stricken face and rasped: “Wha…?”
 
“By the Song!” Gerry exclaimed, voice cracking. “Are you alright? Are you hurt?”
 
“Why’m I—?” Jon slurred. He tried to sit and realised with alarm that his arms wouldn’t hold him up. Gerry took his hands in his and started rubbing his knuckles with his thumbs mindlessly, his gaze just as fearful and confused as Jon felt.
 
“You just— crumpled and slipped from the rock, dropping like a stone!” Gerry choked. “I could hardly keep up, diving after you. There was— it was as if— as if something was pulling you down.” He shuddered, eyes wide with horror.
 
“I don’t, uh— nothing happened, Gerry,” Jon whispered, dazed. “I was just, just Singing, and then you were calling my name—”
 
But that…that wasn’t right, was it. There was a gaping hole in his memory, a large dark stain of something, and when he tried to look at it, it warped and shifted like a living thing. His head started throbbing, his teeth chattering, and with a low whine he scrambled to turn onto his stomach, expelling its meagre contents onto the rock with a painful heave.
 
“Sweet spirit of the tides,” Gerry cursed.
 
“Nhh,” Jon said, spitting and shaking, “d-did you h-hear it? The, the S-song?”
 
Gerry reached up to brush Jon’s heavy, waterlogged hair from his face, but Jon batted his hand away, his voice a desperate croak: “Did you hear it?”
 
“I heard your Siren-Song, if that’s what you mean,” Gerry said, exhaling long and tremulous. “It was rather short, but you did call her.”
 
“Good. Let’s f-find a place to, to w-wait and rest.” 
 
Jon pulled himself to the edge of the rock. His weak and trembling arms made it an arduous task, but when Gerry reached for them to help him along, he just hissed: “I’m fine,” with a viciousness that surprised himself. His companion flinched back, muttering: “You’re not fine, you big lump,” but did not try to aid Jon’s slow and clumsy descent into the water any longer.

 
———
 

“How long do we wait?”
 
“I…I couldn’t say. The Siren-Song is much w-weaker on land, and I’ve never tried to call anyone who is not mer. Well, n-no longer mer. A day? Maybe less?”
 
“Mh,” Gerry grunted in assent. “I’ve got a good view of the causeway from here. You should really try and get some sleep, Jon. You look awful.”
 
Jon scoffed. He had not stopped shivering, nauseous with nerves; his skin felt raw, oversensitive. There was a constant prickling at the back of his head, a feeling of being watched. 
 
“I won’t find any peace to-tonight.”
 
“And why is that?” 
 
Gerry’s voice was low and fretful. When Jon looked up at him, he saw his throat bob, the long line of his neck stiff and tense, white tendons stark in the flash of the petrol lamp high above. Jon started fiddling with the ring, shakily turning it around and around, a mirror of his thoughts. “We cannot stay and w-wait for too long. We need to meet up with Basira as soon as possible, tell her what we’ve learned. Also, Trevor is still out there. And—” Jon’s stomach cramped and he wrapped his arms around it, moaning quietly, and went on speaking on a shuddering exhale. “Gerry— we, we need to talk about what we are going to do next. Whether Mary shows up or not. You know…Rocky Island is l-less than two miles up the coast from here.”
 
At this, Gerry whipped around with a force and speed that made Jon freeze with shock, caging Jon’s body with his arms left and right of his shoulders against the rock-face. There was horror dawning on his face, his mouth opening and closing several times before he growled: “No. Absolutely not. We will not go and seek out bloody Jonah Magnus. How long have you been thinking to do this, planning on it? Did you even think to gain anything from talking to my mother?”
 
“I do want to talk to Mary,” Jon croaked, squirming underneath Gerry’s furious gaze, “…b-but I think we have no choice but to also try and s-speak to the bastard who gave her legs.” 
 
He weakly pushed his hand against Gerry’s chest and the larger mer made another half-turn and slumped against the rock next to Jon, staring up at the overcast night-sky and slowly shaking his head.
 
“Jon. We can’t. He is anathema. My mother may have sacrificed my father to the Deep Ones to gain power, but he has sacrificed dozens of mer, and stolen hundreds of Songs. Had he stayed at the Watch House all this time, don’t you think someone would have ripped out his throat by now? He is long gone. Even the place where he disappeared is cursed.”
 
“And yet we k-keep collecting Songs about mer being given legs. Here, on this stretch of the, the coast. I have never heard of anyone else powerful enough to perform this kind of magic, have you? The unwillingness of our queen and her council to speak of him doesn’t make it any less true. Also—if, if you’re right, and he is long gone, what’s the harm?”
 
“Jon, the whole peninsula is cursed.”
 
“What does that even m-mean?”
 
“How would I know? Mer have been giving it a wide berth for almost three decades!”
 
“Except for those who haven’t. Th-those who let themselves be turned into humans by him.”
 
Jon knew what he must sound like, his voice cracking with a frantic urgency. Gerry squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his temples, as if fighting a headache. It’s me, Jon thought, trying and failing to feel remorse, I’m the headache. And I’ve almost got him.
 
“You sound so certain,” Gerry said flatly, “that it is him.”
 
“I…I think he’s our best lead. And we cannot leave a single stone unturned. We need to know.”
 
“No. You need to know, Jon. I need to keep you safe,” Gerry groaned, hanging his head in defeat. “The queen will have my head for this. Not to mention the rest of our pod! If Basira were here, she would never allow it. Damn you.” He grabbed Jon’s hand and pinned him with a dark look. “Let’s wait for my mother to turn up until tomorrow night, and then we can go up to Rocky Island and have a look at the Watch House. From afar.”
 
“Yes, good, thank you!” Jon said, smiling up at Gerry, trying for an encouraging expression but ending up with a pained grimace when another wave of nausea hit. He pressed his fist against his stomach, unable to suppress a moan. Gerry was immediately in front of him again, frowning, squeezing Jon’s hand. Jon jerked free of his hold, scowling down at his own midriff. “Please stop that. I think I ate something, something wrong…probably one of the limpets was…off?”
 
Gerry hummed, not sounding particularly convinced; but he let it go.

 
———
 

They spent the rest of the night huddled behind a small rock formation, keeping an eye on the lighthouse through a gap between stones. At dawn, the tide had receded enough to clear the causeway, and they saw one lone man crossing it and entering the keepers’ cottage, and soon after another man leaving, relieved from his duties for the time being.
 
Around midday, Gerry disappeared for a very short hunt down along the beach (after making sure Jon was very well hidden between the rocks) and returned with two small cod between his claws, which he then ate slowly and listlessly all by himself since Jon refused to.
 
Neither of them got a wink of sleep, but not a single soul appeared at the lighthouse for the remainder of the day.
 
Mary did not turn up.

 
———
 

Once night had fallen, the thick cloud cover finally dispersed by a strong western wind, they made their way North by the light of the stars.
 
They crossed Collywell Bay and then started circling the small peninsula at its end, a good way away from the shore, until a white cottage came into view atop the grassy island. It was a smallish, simple building with a slate roof and a little tower, looking perfectly unexceptional.
 
“Is that it?” Jon sniffed, bobbing in the choppy water next to Gerry like a very jittery wine cork.
 
“Yes,” Gerry said, squinting at it. “If you want to try and get closer, we’ll have to dive though. The night is too clear.”
 
One fathom beneath the surface the water was oddly murky, disturbed by whirling clouds of sand and debris, and the view was dismal. They swam for what felt like a little too long to reach the island’s rocky base, which never appeared. When they came up for air, Jon realised that they had been turned around and were heading in the opposite direction of where they’d been aiming to go. The cottage was a little white speck in the distance now. They tried again, with the same result; then a third time, this time even keeping their eyes above the surface, carefully scanning the shoreline for humans. At some point, Jon’s vision lurched, the horizon tipping and blurring, and then he found himself moving out to sea again, without any conscious decision to do so.
 
“Remarkable, don’t you think?” Jon breathed. “I wonder what sorcery this is. Weaver, Deceiver, or both?”
 
Glancing at his companion, he found Gerry staring back at the island with a very unimpressed frown. “Sorcery of haddaway and shite, if you ask me,” he said, dead pan.
 
Jon snorted, but quickly turned serious again. “One thing is obvious. If Mary or Jonah are still around, we have no access to them from here. From the water.”
 
Gerry exhaled with a hiss. “You are not…planning on calling him, are you?”
 
“While I am very keen on solving this mystery, I do not actually have a death-wish,” Jon muttered, dragging trembling hands down his face. “Anyway. Sod it. Let’s head to the Farn Deeps.”

 
———
 

“I know you hate being dragged along, but at this pace you will drown before you even reach the surface. You have not slept or eaten in two days, Jon. Curse it, you have not stopped shaking in two days! Please, just let me… please.”
 
Drifting in the murky depths, Jon groaned and feebly flicked his tail one more time, then stretched his arms out in defeat. Gerry slipped underneath him, quick and elegant as ever, lack of sleep only marked by dark shadows beneath his eyes. Jon slung his arms over his shoulders and tried very hard not to audibly sigh with relief.
 
“It’s one seal-hour up the coast, and another out to the Deeps,” Gerry told him with a small smile, looking over his shoulder. “Will you survive that?”
 
“Barely,” Jon grumbled, and buried his face in his companion’s hair.

 
———
 

Once they came up to Seaton Point and were about to turn east, Jon made Gerry stop for a rest at one of the tiny, uninhabited islands just off the coast. Before crawling onto the rocky shore, he floated in the shallows for a good while, head half submerged, listening.
 
“I can hear Basira’s Song,” he told Gerry after a while, who just groaned: “Oh, thank the tides,” audibly relieved. “Curious, though,” Jon muttered, after he’d laboriously rolled himself onto a flat rock, “she’s not coming from the East; she’s coming from the North.”
 
“Well,” Gerry mused, “she’s a fast swimmer. In the time we spent at St. Mary’s she probably went from the Farn Deeps all the way up to the Scalp Bank. How long until she gets here?”
 
“About one whale-hour. I’d like to wait here, this is…nice.” Jon squinted up at the pale blue sky and sighed. The winter sun had warmed the rock underneath his back the tiniest bit, and far up above them seabirds were circling, calling softly.
 
“Hm,” Gerry concurred, folding his arms next to Jon’s head, eying him thoughtfully. “What are you thinking about?”
 
Jon huffed. There was no hiding one’s spiraling thoughts from a member of one’s pod. “Just—that…strange magic, at the Watch House. It doesn’t make any sense. Even if Jonah Magnus did perform some incredible act of forbidden Song-weaving there decades ago, well—it should not linger like that. This sorcery is being sustained by something. Someone is feeding it, keeping it up.”
 
“Sure,” Gerry muttered, and Jon could see him rubbing his temples from the corner of his eye. “But that’s of no use to us, is it? How about you take a little nap, until Basira arrives?”

 
———
 

“By the Song, Jon. You look terrible,” Basira greeted him bluntly.
 
Jon shrugged and did not argue. He had not slept. Every time he was about to drift off, his mind had been plunged into some odd, jewel-toned chasm and he’d immediately twitched himself wide awake, gasping. Afraid.
 
“Just a bit of…fish poisoning,” he muttered. 
 
She pointed at his bandaged neck. “What happened?”
 
He bit his lip. “Long story.”
 
Basira lifted one laconic eyebrow at him, then clapped Gerry on the back, who eyed her with obvious unease. “No trace of her,” she said, voice artificially bright. “No trace of the hunters, either. After the Farn Deeps, I went up to the Firth of Forth and the Scalp Bank, and then as far as the southern border of the Long Forties. Annabelle says hello.” She pulled a fairly large, meticulously sealed stone jar from her satchel and held it out to them. “They are really very nice up there. Could not provide any information, but sent me off with some Norwegian Moonshine.”
 
“Oh, brilliant,” Gerry said, scratching his neck. Basira blinked at him, suspicion creeping into her eyes. “Yes, well,” she grumbled defensively, “once we’re back home, we’re getting sloshed. We’ve earned as much.”
 
Jon grimaced. While there was generally nothing wrong with getting a little intoxicated on fermented whale milk, just the thought of ingesting that right now made his stomach turn into even more of a knot than it already was. He realised that the prickling at the back of his head was getting stronger. His hands started shaking again when he rummaged in his bag for the whelk.
 
Once he’d found it, he held the hunter’s Song out to Basira, unable to meet her gaze, and choked: “D-do you want to hear this now?”

 
———
 

“Damn it,” Basira cursed, slamming her claws into the rock with an awful crunching noise. “Fuck!”
 
“Yes,” Jon panted with numb lips, “I-I’m s-sorry—” He doubled over, whimpering. He felt like throwing up again. Somehow, relaying Trevor’s Song had been…a lot. Too much. Gerry stretched out his arm for him, eyes wide with worry. Jon flinched back, away from him.
 
“He was lying,” Basira snarled, “and don’t tell me he couldn’t because it’s a bloody Song. It’s not right. She wouldn’t! They tricked her, or, or—”
 
“Basira,” Gerry said, tone appeasing, “Listen—”
 
“Shut up!” she barked at him, then whirled around and pointed a trembling finger at Jon. “You! Call Daisy. Use your Siren-Song, now.”
 
Jon inched closer to the edge on aching arms, scowling at her, hissing between his teeth: “I h-have called for her three times already! D-don’t you th-think—”
 
“You haven’t called for her in weeks, and never this far North or West. Do it!” Her voice was still harsh, dripping with fury, but then her Song swept through Jon: a wave of longing so desperate and unbearable his heart seemed to want to batter out of his chest and his throat closed up. He held up his hand at her with a high, pained noise and nodded. 
 
Gerry shook his head, sending damp black strands flying. “No!” he snapped at Basira. “Can’t you see he’s unwell? Leave him alone!”
 
As she opened her mouth for an angry retort, Jon heaved himself down from the rock and landed in the water between them with a resounding splash that made them both startle. “Quiet!” he rasped, “I’ll do it, j-just— give me some space!”
 
And they did, wordlessly backing off. Jon closed his eyes, pushed his back into the rock-face and dug his claws into the slippery stone.
 
He grasped for the Song of the sea, the ancient strings of power suffusing everything, and—
 
—The prickling at the back of his head turned into knives, the lapping of the waves into a deafening roar, the water was rising and rising and rising and beneath him the abyss yawned open like an enormous eye, staring unblinking and older than the world, and it saw him, and it was beautiful—
 
“No no no no no—” Jon gasped, his breath coming too fast, and he ripped his eyes open, scrambling to get out of the water, to sever the ethereal threads, push the abominable magic down, away—
 
—There were hands on him, and his skin was burning, raw nerves flaring up like lightning, and he started thrashing, yelling: “Don’t touch me! Get a— get away f-from me—” panting desperately for air, but there was not enough, never enough, he was suffocating, shaking so hard he bit his own tongue bloody—
 
—Faces entered his greying vision, distorted yet familiar, speaking words he did not comprehend; all he could do was beg, his voice a broken wail—
 
“Please, I can’t, I can’t! I cannot call for her, please do not make me— there’s something wrong, there’s something wrong with my Song...!”
 

Chapter Text

Jon held his breath, too unnerved to even tremble, and took in the pale wraith in the doorway with wide and unblinking eyes.
 
Underneath the sleeves of Mary’s modest dark dress her bony wrists were circled by intricate symbols, impossible to decipher in the gloom. Her only other adornment was a small gold pendant on a chain around her neck. It lifted and fell minutely with her breath. Her face was utterly blank and still.
 
Behind her in the dark hallway, the second figure moved; they took a step forward on silent feet and came to stand next to her, revealing the face of the abominable Dr David. He gave Jon a sly smile, then brought his finger to his lips, breathing “Shhh…” and winked at him. As if they were all three of them in on some merry joke. 
 
Jon’s hand shot out to grab the bell on the bedside table. But Mary hissed Don’t and he froze, her Song twisting sickly through his head.
 
The little Archivist, how droll! So it was you who called me. Should have known. Not many left able to conjure Siren-Song, are there?
 
Jon felt anger briefly stabbing his gut, before it was once more replaced by the old familiar terror. He was getting quite sick of people knowing who or what he was, and, furthermore, them finding it somehow amusing.
 
Mary—
 
He choked, his Song weak and wavering, petrified. Her face contorted with a slow smile, cold and condescending, revealing a row of false gold teeth.
 
Oh, that’s quite pathetic. But no matter—
 
She took a limping step into the room. Her Song was sinking its claws into his, pulling at strings, unravelling him— Jon could see her pendant clearer now, glinting in the moonlight, a small gold cross.
 
You’ll come visit the bookshop sometime soon, won’t you? Then we can have a proper conversation, you and I. Feel free to bring your sweet and useless friend Mr. Blackwood along. He’s quite the cherished customer of mine, after all.
 
Jon inhaled heavily, trying to collect his scattered Song to push it at her, give him answers—
 
From somewhere down the hall came the sound of a door being opened slowly, the old hinges squeaking, and Dr David whispered urgently: “Mrs. Keay!”
 
Mary did not desist from pinning Jon with her gaze for a long moment, while Jon struggled to breathe, to think. Then she blinked, once, flashed him another cruel smile, and closed the door, slow and soundless.
 
Jon, listening to their uneven footsteps retreating, suddenly swayed, the room spinning and blurring around him. He pitched to the side, dizzy, darkness encroaching on the edges of his watery vision. Such a beginner’s mistake, he thought self-deprecatingly. He should never have opened his Mind-Song to her. But also, she should not have been able to… Had she really done that? Swept aside his powers like swathes of cobweb—? It was impossible. He may be weakened, but he was not useless! He could feel the Song thrumming underneath his skin like a violent current. 
 
But he was also so very tired, and the colours flashing behind his fluttering lids were alien and nauseating. 
 
He must be getting worse, if he could not discern dream from waking anymore.

 
———
 

The following day, Jon could barely keep his eyes open. He twitched through a series of very familiar nightmares, the details of which immediately slipped through his unsteady hands every time he woke. 
 
Whenever he was aware of his surroundings, he could sense Martin and Anya fret. They were patiently cleaning his wounds and re-bandaging them, dabbing at his flushed face with a cool, damp cloth. Trying to coax him into drinking and eating and using the chamber pot. He had to hold on to Martin’s arms for that, legs too weak to even kneel. He did not have the wherewithal to feel ashamed. Martin’s arms were soft and strong, the only solid, real thing in the muddy waters Jon was treading, and he clutched at them desperately.

 
———
 

Martin was feeling increasingly frazzled again, after a day at Jon’s bedside that had turned into one fiercely frightening relapse. Even Anya, telling him that recovery from grave illness was seldom a straight path, could not make him feel any better. Her voice had been too anxious to appease him.
 
On Sunday morning, Jon had been hard to wake once more, still seeming dazed and disoriented. After a slow and hardly enthusiastic breakfast, he gestured at the second volume of the encyclopaedia. Martin silently counted it as a positive development. Once Martin deposited it in his lap though, Jon bracketed the book with his bandaged hands and stared down at its front cover as if he suddenly did not know how he was supposed to interact with the object any longer.
 
Martin’s quiet worry was, fortunately, soon disturbed by the doorbell.
 
 
 
Dr Fanshawe was not at all what Martin had expected, which was someone highly self-important (and possibly even more patronising than Dr David). Instead, he was a rather delicate looking middle-aged man in need of a shave, with incredibly tired eyes and a soft handshake. His voice was low and weary, but also manifestly kind. Martin’s step was light with relief when he led the man up the stairs to Jon’s bedroom after having welcomed him in the entry hall.
 
Martin knocked and then entered the guest-room with the doctor. “Jon,” he said softly, “this is Dr. Fanshawe. If it is alright with you, he’ll take a look at you now.”
 
Jon’s shoulders stiffened and he looked very awake and aware all of a sudden. He slowly and deliberately pushed the book aside, and watched the slight man cross the room with the intensity of a cornered hare. Martin closed the door behind them and remained standing in front of it, clutching at his elbows. The doctor approached slowly, took a seat in Martin’s armchair, and deposited his large, embroidered carpetbag on the floor next to his scuffed brown Oxfords. 
 
“Jonathan, right?” he murmured, folding his hands in his lap. Jon gave a court nod. Martin could hear the smile in the doctor’s voice when he said: “That is also my Christian name. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
 
Jon did not react. He just kept staring at the man, unmoving and unblinking. The doctor sighed. “I am not going to touch you,” he said, “unless you give me explicit permission to do so. I am just going to ask you some questions. Would it be alright if Mr. Blackwood here helps you answer them, since he knows quite a lot about your condition?”
 
At this, Jon’s stiff shoulders seemed to relax a little. He shot Martin a quick glance, and then inclined his head slowly. Martin picked up a stool from a corner and sat down on it next to the doctor, giving Jon a firm nod.
 
“Wonderful. Let’s start from the top then. Do you have any trouble with your eyesight?”
 
Martin frowned. The question struck him as extremely odd, seeing as how there were so many other things visibly ailing Jon. Jon shook his head.
 
“How about your ears? Any hearing loss?”
 
Another shake of the head.
 
“Headaches? Dizzy spells?”
 
Jon cocked his head, lifted his hands, and waggled them as if to say some.
 
Dr Fanshawe hummed, then asked rather delicately: “What about your teeth? Could I— have a look at them?”
 
Jon blinked, then opened his mouth. In Martin’s opinion, his teeth looked perfectly normal. More or less even, ivory coloured, healthy. The doctor didn’t seem to think so, since he let out a little surprised gasp at the sight. He cleared his throat before asking: “Any aching or loose?”
 
Another hand-waggle. Martin lifted his hand like a schoolboy, then blushed when both the doctor and Jon looked at him with a little mirth in their eyes. “His, er. His gums were bleeding when I, well, when I found him, but it seems to, to have run its course?”
 
“I see. Very good,” Dr Fanshawe said, then pointed at Jon’s neck. “Let’s have a look at that, shall we? Would you mind if Mr. Blackwood took off the bandage?”
 
Jon nodded and gestured at Martin. Go on.
 
Martin leant towards Jon and unwound the bandage with practiced hands, noticing how Jon’s eyes went half-lidded. Like a cat’s, he thought with a little thrill. A trusting, comfortable cat.
 
The doctor narrowed his eyes at the old cut and the new one crossing it but did not ask any questions. “This seems to be healing well,” he said. “Best to leave it be. Can we look at your hands as well?” Jon nodded, still with that oddly languid look on his face. 
 
When his hands were free of their dressings, he held them out to Dr Fanshawe, obviously wanting him to take a closer look. The man smiled a little shakily. He did not move to touch or take Jon’s hands, just studied them intently. The fingertips still looked raw and ragged, now encrusted with dark scabs. “Lucky,” the man breathed, sounding a little raspy. “I don’t think you’ll lose any of your nails. Leave the bandages on until it looks like this—" he pointed at Jon’s left little and ring fingers, where the scabs had already fallen off to reveal very short but only slightly frayed nails and dark pink skin. “Do clean them daily. I will leave you an ointment.”
 
Martin nodded, and so, simultaneously, did Jon. He drew his hands back and gingerly laid them on top of his blanket, wriggling his fingers a little.
 
The doctor sighed and rubbed his brows. “So,” he said and inhaled as if bracing himself, “how are your legs?”
 
Martin exchanged a look with Jon, who appeared a little petrified again. “You don’t have to,” he said lowly. But Jon sucked his lips between his teeth and then bravely, carefully, pulled first his blanket and then his nightgown aside, baring his legs up to mid-thigh. In the light of the sallow winter-sun they looked very thin, the markings on his skin standing out starkly. Dr Fanshawe laced his fingers together and brought them up to his lips.
 
“Pain, I am guessing, and cramps?” he muttered, at which both Jon and Martin nodded. “Can you stand?” he asked, very gently. Jon, staring into empty space, shook his head. “We haven’t really…tried,” Martin added. “He’s not been well enough.”
 
The doctor cleared his throat. “Well, Jonathan,” he said, voice earnest and sympathetic, “the fact of the matter is—you will need to walk, as much as you can stomach. It will hurt, but you need to build up certain muscles in your legs. Start by holding on to someone’s arms, then try using a cane. Eat as much grain and vegetables as possible, and, most importantly, don’t forget to drink water, that will also help with the cramps. And—go easy on the laudanum, avoid it if possible. You don’t have the…constitution for it.”
 
Jon’s eyes had been wandering during the doctor’s speech, and were now fixed on the man’s face, wide and a little lost. “Have you got all that?” Dr Fanshawe asked. When Jon inclined his head, he looked over at Martin, who stammered: “Y—yes, certainly. Thank you.”
 
The doctor then cleaned and re-dressed Jon’s injuries with the utmost care, looking to Jon for consent every time he was about to touch skin, and Martin examined him closely, both for his technique and his conduct. When he was done, he turned to Martin with a solemn expression. “Mr. Blackwood— could Jonathan and I have a moment of privacy?”
 
Martin immediately bristled. And this had been going so well! “No,” he said, sounding, to his surprise, much steadier than he felt.
 
The doctor hummed, his whole demeanour the picture of empathy and patience. Martin wanted to believe it so badly. “I need to ask Jonathan some very intimate questions, Mr. Blackwood. It will only take a minute.”
 
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Martin insisted. 
 
Jon looked pensive. Then he took Martin’s hand and squeezed it, and nodded at the doctor, his eyes not leaving Martin’s. It’s fine.
 
Martin rubbed his free hand over his face and then turned to Dr Fanshawe. “But—don’t try and give him any medicine while I’m gone,” he hissed, “and do not touch him…!”
 
“I won’t, Mr. Blackwood. I swear on my life.”

 
———
 

Martin drew himself up to his full height and glared down at the doctor. Jon had realised that Martin tended to pretend to be smaller than he actually was, as if wanting to convince everyone around him that he posed no threat; but when he did not—when he did, in fact, the opposite—and used his height to loom, arms crossed and bright eyes narrowed, he very much reminded Jon of one of the queen’s fearsome cetacean guards. Not aggressive, nor posturing; just very present.
 
The doctor shrunk back a little, looking up at Martin rather wide-eyed, and lifted his hands in supplication. Martin sniffed, then crossed the room with a distrustful look back and closed the door behind him, but his footsteps did not retreat. Jon knew he would stay close, possibly even trying to listen in. It was a comforting thought.
 
As soon as Martin was gone, Dr Fanshawe wilted into his seat, head lolling on the back rest, closed his eyes and muttered: “Damn it all to hell.” Then he sharply sucked in air between his teeth, moved upright with an almost frantic energy, and pinned Jon with a pale, delirious gaze. All his calm professionalism had fallen off him like a mask, and he whispered harshly: “You cannot stay here. And I don’t just mean in this house. If you have any way of going back to where you came from, do it, and quick! You’re not safe.”
 
Jon had flinched back a little at the feverish outburst but did not feel at all surprised. Instead, he felt an odd urge to comfort the man. More importantly though, he needed to know what he knew, throwing all caution to the wind and trusting him. It was not as hard as Jon would have expected. The doctor’s distress was so genuine, coming off him in anxious waves. There was a Song vibrating underneath the man’s flimsy composure, screaming to be pulled out. Had Jon been in possession of a viable shell, he’d not be able to resist taking it.
 
Instead, Jon pointed at his bared legs, made a wavy motion with his arms, and stared into the man’s eyes intently.
 
The doctor buried his face in his hands and rasped: “Oh, I know.” Then he looked up again with a frayed smile. “Mr. Blackwood hasn’t the slightest idea, has he?”
 
Jon shook his head and frowned. Dr Fanshawe frowned back. “How did you lose your voice, then? Black magic?”
 
Jon waggled his hands and shrugged. Kind of. 
 
“Hah!” the doctor breathed. “Do you know what Bouchard wants with you?”
 
To this, Jon had no answer. He had never heard the name before. He gave another head shake.
 
“Curses. Do you have a way to return home?”
 
Head shake.
 
“I see. Listen, if you can’t return to the… to your people, you must at least try and get away from Tyne and Wear as far as possible, as fast as you can. You should take a train to London, or, even better, a ship to—to Amsterdam. I can speak to Mr. Blackwood for you—he dotes on you, he’ll make it possible, I’m sure. If Mr. Lukas already knows about you, it’s only a matter of time. You can’t stay. It’s not safe.”
 
Jon could only slowly shake his head. How was he supposed to convey to the man that he knew about the dangers of being here? Or, well, knew about at least some of them.
 
The doctor huffed, squeezed his eyes shut, opened them again. His gaze was watery. “You’re here by choice? You— you wanted this?”
 
Oh, and what fraught questions these were. But Jon did not know how to say I could see no other way with just his hands, so he inclined his head.
 
“I…see,” Dr Fanshawe murmured. “Well. Until you find a way to get away from here, just…don’t trust anyone. Especially not if they’re wearing one of these.” He pulled out a fine golden chain from between his lapels. The pendant dangling from it looked unnervingly familiar; a small golden equilateral cross. When Jon leant in to inspect it, he discovered a surprisingly realistic looking little eye etched into the centre of it.
 
“I will try and help you, but I’m afraid the best I can do is convince Mr. Lukas that you’re actually human. Which is… not going to be easy.”

 
———
 

“Will you have a cup of tea, or—or coffee? I have quite a few questions still—!”
 
The doctor was descending the stairwell hastily and Martin hurried after him, taken aback by his rushed departure.
 
“I’m sorry Mr. Blackwood, but I must decline. I have a number of pressing engagements and I am already running late.”
 
“But what about Jon’s voice? What about—”
 
They had reached the entry hall, and Martin was blocking the front door, too distracted to care how impolite he was being. Dr Fanshawe’s expression was parts harried parts apologetic.
 
“Mr. Blackwood, I am truly sorry, but this is all the advice I can give you: Teach him how to walk, find out where he’s from, and until he is able to leave, keep a weather eye on him. Everything else is secondary. Oh, and one last thing—know that asking too many questions will put you both in danger.”
 
“I…what?”
 
Martin absentmindedly stepped aside when the doctor’s hand went for the doorknob.
 
“My fee is taken care of. I will visit again in a month’s time, although I do hope for your friend that he’s found his way back home by then.”
 
“I—I want to help him go back home, but I don’t know how! He, he can’t tell me!”
 
The thin man went over the threshold, took the two steps down to the cobblestone path, and then stalled for a moment and said without turning around: “I think he can, Mr. Blackwood. It is you who might have to learn how to listen.”

 
———
 

Martin and his mother had presciently, when moving in, decided to take residence on opposite ends of the long upstairs corridor. Martin usually did not hear his mother’s rattling cough in his bedroom, or study, or even the library, which was halfway between their rooms.
 
He did hear it now.
 
He sat at his father’s desk between stacks of dusty paperwork with burning eyes, staring down at his criminally neglected mail and bookkeeping, pushing an old black ink pen back and forth with his forefinger.
 
You didn’t go to church, Martin. Again. Do you know what this looks like? Do you think you will ever find a good Christian girl stupid enough to marry you, acting like you do? Oh, do go on sinning, please! You’ll accelerate the coming of the Last Judgement admirably. Just don’t think you’ll be saved in the Deluge.
 
But that was not what had upset him. She had said different iterations of that so many times it was like water off a duck‘s back to him. 
 
She had lapsed into a truly horrid coughing fit then, gasping for air, face an awful dark shade of crimson, and had looked at him with a deep abiding hatred in her streaming eyes and he had realised that he was not feeling sorry for her. He’d had not even spared her one single thought in the past three days, besides being annoyed at her bible group’s zealous praying. His mind and heart were thoroughly occupied. 
 
He’d realised that he cared more about the mute stranger in the guest room than his own gravely ill, suffering mother. Exceptionally so.
 
There was a soft knock on the door, and Anya entered and briskly walked over to his slumped over self. She took one worried look at him, pulled a pristine handkerchief from her apron and handed it to him, saying: “I’m…very sorry, Mr. Blackwood. Julian told me you were looking for me. What happened?”
 
Martin sighed and dabbed at his stupidly damp eyes, then looked up at her with a shaky smile.
 
“Nothing. All is well. Forgive my lack of composure, Anya. I, uh, I need your help. We need to figure out how to get Jon to walk.”

 
———
 

“Sooo…how was the doctor?” Anya whispered, while they were walking towards the guest room.

Martin shrugged and said, lowly: “He was a little peculiar, but careful and considerate. Quite close-lipped, almost frustratingly so. Just gave a few instructions and also… uh, never mind.”
 
Anya narrowed her eyes at him but remained silent, as they had arrived at Jon’s door. Martin knocked and they entered.
 
Jon was sitting up in bed, straight-backed and staring at them with a keen, impatient expression. There were three books spread out in front of him on top of his blanket: two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Frankenstein.
 
Martin immediately hurried over to the bedside. Jon huffed around a smile, then pointed at the spine of Frankenstein. “Mary, yes,” Martin said, and continued reading out the words Jon tapped on in both open encyclopaedias: “Key. Bookshop.”
 
Martin frowned, then felt his heart plummet into his stomach or thereabouts. “Mary Keay!” he breathed. “Blazes, Jon. This is the Mary you were trying to tell me about?”

Jon nodded, a triumphant glint in his eyes. Martin shook his head in utter disbelief. “God! She sometimes comes to pray with mother— she might have even been here on Friday!”
 
Anya, who had taken a seat on the stool next to the armchair Martin was perched on, stared at Jon, squeezing her hands in her lap. “The—the strange widow who runs Pinhole Books? You know her?”
 
Jon nodded briskly. Then he pointed at the door, at himself, at the window in rapid succession, eyes flicking between them. When they did not seem to catch on to his meaning quickly enough, he tapped his fingers at the word bookshop again, and then at his own chest.
 
“You want to go there?” Martin asked. Jon gave him an emphatic nod. “I see,” Martin muttered. “Well, I mean, yes! That can be arranged. We can take the Hansom cab, but…uhm.”
 
“But you might want to gain enough strength to be able and walk at least a couple of steps, before you go on any adventures,” Anya added softly. 
 
Jon blinked at her, then at his book-covered legs. He bit his lower lip and pushed the books aside, then the blanket.
 
“So, er, do you want to try, like— like Dr Fanshawe suggested?” Martin croaked through a sudden lump in his throat. 
 
Jon gnawed on his lip for a second, before he started scooting to the edge of the bed, holding up a hand when Martin twitched forward to assist him. He slowly pushed his legs off the mattress, until his feet landed on the woollen rug with a thump, and shuddered. Then he looked up at Martin and Anya, both already waiting with their hands outstretched, ready to catch him if he so much as swayed (let alone fell). He nodded at them, and they took his arms and, slowly, gently, pulled him up; and then he was standing.
 
Jon gasped and his eyes went wide, watering with pain. His knees were shaking hard, but they did not buckle. He lifted the right one with some effort—Martin could feel his thin arm straining against his—and took a wobbly step towards the door.

“Jon!” Martin wheezed, stifling a delirious laugh, “that’s brilliant!” and then he looked over at Anya, who was grinning beatifically, and blurted: “Well done hinny!”

Chapter Text

At some point in his relentless trembling and gasping, Jon had finally reached for Gerry and Basira—feeling so lost and unmoored in the wake of his terrifying vision he tried to ignore his raw and prickling skin as best he could with gritted teeth and allowed his two companions to hold him between them. Their grips were steadfast even in their own shaken states, and they started singing to him with low, wavering voices until his breathing slowed, and his heartbeat did as well, and he grew so brittle with exhaustion he almost fell asleep then and there. 
 
When he was nodding off for the third time, his twitching limbs instantly throwing him back into wakefulness, Basira said, uncommonly careful: “Jon. We cannot stay here, we’re too exposed. And you are clearly… ill. We need to—” 
 
Jon interrupted her with a hand on her arm, trying to find his voice again. It took him a few attempts before it came out cracking and weak. 
 
“I want to go home.” 
 
He felt Gerry shudder beside him and looked up at him with swollen eyes. His friend’s skin was sallow, his gaze glassy with worry and fear. “I will take you,” he said hoarsely. “Basira— will you go straight to the Queen’s Seat? Report to the council, and then bring Adelard back with you to the archives?”
 
“Yes,” she said simply.
 
“Good,” Gerry breathed. Then he turned his back to Jon, lowered himself in the water so their heads were level, looked over his shoulder and said: “Hold on tight. If I don’t rest, we can make it home in two days’ time.”

 
———
 

After swimming at a relentless pace for no more than one seal-hour, Gerry had to tie Jon’s belt to his own, because his insensate fingers kept slipping from Gerry’s shoulders. Jon was only half-aware of it at this point, fighting the overwhelming urge to slip into unconsciousness. Once he was safely secured to his companion’s back, and Gerry took his hands, slinging Jon’s arms around his torso, and told him to “Please, just sleep!” he gave in, in fits and starts. 
 
The journey turned into a muddled rush of being dragged through the expansive, uninhabited depths between the Farn Deeps and the Dogger Bank, coming up for air once in a while in the freezing winter rain, and drifting in a dense darkness studded with unblinking eyes like jewel-coloured stars.

 
———
 

At the northern edge of the archives, the Dogger Bank crested into a little cliff that rose above the water, concealing a small, shallow cave beneath. It was a perfect hiding spot out in the air, a rock-platform smoothed by centuries of use that went unflooded most days, with a low ceiling jutting out towards the East, open to the morning sun.
 
It was there that Jon came to, curled up on a bed of fragrant, freshly cut seaweed, with a very pale and angry face looming above him. Melanie’s golden eyes were fixed somewhere in the vicinity of his forehead, her lips pursed furiously, while she slowly dragged her palm from the crown of his head and over his face down to his chin. 
 
“Are you awake?” she hissed. 
 
Jon hummed and nodded his head, not even bothering to speak. Or move. He felt like a tiny, wretched bivalve, carved from its shell and about to be devoured by something monstrous and uncaring.
 
“Right. Open up,” Melanie said, squeezing his jaw. When he did not react promptly, she uttered a string of annoyed clicks and poked his lips open with her claws. In her other hand, she held the concave half of a large oyster. She scooped a thick substance from it with her fingers and then unceremoniously stuck them into his mouth. The paste was soft, white, and oily; the thin, highly nutritious layer of fat meticulously scraped from the inside of the skin of salmon and sea trout, mashed into a cream. It was the fare of sickly pups and feeble elders. 
 
“Swallow, you thickheaded nitwit,” she growled at him. You’re so thin and limp, you feel half-dead. We cannot lose you, too.
 
He stalled, pushing his tongue against the mush, nausea rising from the hollow pit of his belly up into his throat once again, and blinked up at her with heavy lids. It was not like her, this vocalisation of a deep, genuine concern, for him of all mer. It took him a while to realise she had not spoken those last two sentences aloud.
 
“For fuck’s sake, Jon. Eat.” She had taken him by the shoulders, emphasising her words with a shake. He groaned, squeezed his eyes shut, and swallowed the paste down with difficulty. She immediately fed him more. He let her, even though his stomach was twisting in on itself cruelly, and he soon started shaking with fatigue and a sharp, churning flavour of sickness that made him feel as though he was being dragged down into a bottomless chasm.
 
No, not bottomless. There were eyes down there, colossal and luminous; they were waiting, watching him with detached infatuation, curious and hungry. He made a high, terrified noise, and started thrashing.
 
“Look at me!” Melanie snarled. She had grabbed his wrists, and was almost staring directly into his eyes, even though she’d obviously be unable to tell. “Don’t look at them. Don’t listen to them.”
 
Don’t let them take you from us.
 
“I won’t, I won’t!” he gasped, and tore his mind from the black depths, trying to hold on to her very real, very tangible presence in front of him; her livid scowl, her damp brown bangs sticking to her forehead, the pink shells of her ears. Her small chest was heaving behind a loose net strung with amber beads, dangling from her neck and shoulders. The tendons in her hands and wiry arms stood out starkly against her goose-bumped skin, as she held onto him with unyielding strength. Jon felt the bones in his wrists grind together beneath her fingers and was deeply grateful for it. He did not lift his gaze from her stern, familiar face as he panted in the icy air, every exhale an exhausted whimper.
 
“Alright,” she said, her voice dry and low, and let his arms go to put one hand against his temple and the other atop his sternum, applying gentle pressure. “Now breathe; and listen to me.”
 
And she sang him to sleep.

 
———
 

Jon woke some time later from a black and heavy oblivion to pale-pink evening light. The sky, or what he could see of it from his half-buried, supine position, was cloudless, and it had gotten colder. Melanie was gone; instead, Georgie’s soft brown arms were resting crossed on the rock next to his seaweed-nest, her chin perched on top of them, her broad back bent over the edge of the platform and long tail in the water. 
 
Her expression struck him as almost unrecognisable; there was no lightness to it. Her thick brows were furrowed over dark, troubled eyes. When she noticed him watching her, she lifted her head and said: “Jon,” in a reproachful tone. He winced. She rubbed her face with her right hand and then reached out and started stroking his head, blunt claws combing through his salt-stiff hair.
 
“How long…?” he breathed, his voice all but gone.
 
“You’ve been here a half-night and a day. Out cold for most of it.”
 
“Where’s Gerry?”
 
“Sleeping, in the archives. He stayed at your side for a couple of hours, but he was fretting so much we sent him down a little while ago. He looked almost as ill as you do.” Georgie smiled crookedly. “I can’t believe you—all three of you, truth be told! And I would like to yell at you quite a bit, but I don’t think you’d survive it, considering the state you’re in.”
 
Jon sniffed dejectedly, but his lips quirked in a weak grin. 
 
He flinched when Melanie’s face popped up next to Georgie abruptly, a good-sized herring between bloodied teeth, and two more between her claws. She slapped all three of them onto the rock in front of her, snorting water from her nostrils. 
 
“There you go, love,” she said, addressing Georgie, “dinner.” Then her head snapped towards Jon. “Oh good, birdbrain’s awake again.” Her hand flew out unerringly and she not very gently poked him in the tail. He tried and failed to roll over and away from her, rasping, almost inaudibly: “Ugh, s-stop that, you brute.” 
 
Georgie groaned and rolled her eyes, grabbed one of the fish and bit its head off with an emphatic crunch. “Can the two of you stop quibbling for a second?” she mumbled, chewing.
 
Melanie just scoffed and heaved herself out of the water, landing next to Jon with a dull slap of her tail, snarking: “You can’t get away from me!” at him, and let her hand slide over the rock-wall behind his head until she found the small recess in which she had stored the oyster. She took it out and pried off the flat half serving as a lid, then bent over him, drawling: “More baby-food for you!” while he struggled to lift himself onto his elbows.
 
When he inhaled unsteadily to utter some sort of protest, she shook her head at him and fumbled for his face, hissing, teeth bared: “Don’t you dare complain. Feed yourself, or I will.”

 
———
 

Jon was rushing through the shallow sunlit depths of the estuary, at a speed he had only dreamt of until now. His senses were bright and keen like obsidian blades, his focus impeccable; a seal-skin bag heavy and bulging with large sea-trout was fastened to his belt. Above him, a shadow; traces of an old familiar Song. He followed its pull. 
 
The boy was a man now, and a traitor. Filled with a furious purpose, Jon dragged him over the edge of the boat and down to the bottom. The hands clutching Calvin’s arms were larger and fairer than Jon’s, the claws longer, sharper. He watched the traitor slowly suffocate, his bright eyes bulging, hatred and satisfaction suffusing both their Songs.
 
He buried him beneath heavy stones in an unmarked grave at the bottom of the bay.
 
Jon was making his way north, the waters growing darker and colder, new companions by his side. They had a common goal, or so he thought, a single, absolute purpose: to hunt down the enemy, those who would betray their kin to selfishly grasp for the powers of the deep, but he… no, she, was wrong. Wrong about them, their intentions. They started whispering to her without cease, worming their way into her Mind-Song, to tell her about the bliss of Becoming… 
 
Daisy could not let them live.
 
But they were strong, stronger than her; so, she sent the hunter off to procure them food, and made to rid herself of the girl. Girl, what a laughable thing to call her, now. Daisy had watched her change from a young woman into a savage beast: her claws a polished black, as sharp and serrated as shark’s teeth, and her teeth even worse, grotesque fangs so long and numerous she could not close her lips over them anymore. She had grown in length and width, her slender frame now hard and swollen with unnatural muscle and sinew; her tail, once porpoise-smooth and grey, had turned a livid, blotchy purple, long rows of crimson spikes pushing through the leathery hide. 
 
Julia was stronger, but Daisy was faster; she let herself be chased relentlessly for hours before cornering the creature, now exhausted and blind with fury, at a dead-end in a system of narrow underwater tunnels. It was almost too easy, to dart at her throat in the dark, dig her fangs in, bury her claws in the thick, tough skin and rip and rend until with a gurgle and a twitch the monster gave her Song back to the sea… 
 
But it was not enough. 
 
Daisy tore into her belly until she was buried elbow deep in soft, warm guts, floating in and surrounded on all sides by a cloud of her prey’s blood and viscera. She reached up into the monster’s chest to rip out her lungs, her heart; then clawed at her face to gouge out the abominable, sunset-coloured eyes. It was elation; the cleanest, brightest, most righteous fury; she felt whole, for the first time in her life. She did not need a purpose, now; she was purpose. She swallowed down tattered chunks of still warm flesh until she had eaten her fill, laughing ecstatically all the way through the best meal she had ever had, and then tore through the water like lightning, wild and fierce and utterly free, until the world went dark.
 
From the black waters rose a whisper, a hundred, a thousand; Jon was Jon again, the hunter’s claw at his throat, bleeding out into the hungry depths. The depths had eyes as large as blue whale elders, hundreds, thousands, watching all, seeing all, knowing all; and from the blood-warm, cloying darkness grew invisible hands that grabbed and choked and dragged him down to a deafening choir of Siren-Song calling him to us, into our infinite embrace, our fathomless fold, come, Song-Keeper, come HOME—
 
 

He tore his eyes open with an anguished cry in a muddle of can’t see, too hot, too loud, no air; his skin was on fire, felt like it was sloughing off his meat and they were still touching him, talking at him with shaky voices and he did not comprehend a word of what was being said; he just writhed and begged and screamed until they finally, finally let go of him, and he could roll onto his belly with a wretched moan, choking, heaving, vomiting violently until he felt like he’d spilled his guts down to the last and there was not one single thing left inside of him to throw up. Jon then realised who he was, and where, and when; and when a pair of short, strong arms wrapped around his chest to keep him from collapsing face-first into the puddle of whiteish sick on the polished rock next to the heap of seaweed he was still half-buried in, he did not resist. He was shivering so hard he could not speak, could not breathe—just uselessly gasp, his hands and arms and tail utterly numb and at his core a hot, throbbing agony.
 
“I said do not. Fucking. Listen to them,” Melanie growled into his ear, dragging Jon back against her, arms slung around his torso painfully tight. He felt the amber beads of her torque dig into his back. She pushed her right hand against his chest, hard, and pointed over his shoulder with her left at the approximate place where Georgie and Gerry perched at the edge of the platform, two-thirds out of the water and looking like wraiths in the moonlight, arms outstretched and eyes wide with shock. “You two,” she barked at them, “Sing. Now.”
 
Her words shook them from their paralysis and they both sank to their elbows at Jon’s right side, each clasping one of his unfeeling hands in theirs, breathing raggedly. Georgie composed herself first, her high, sweet voice falling into the old melody believed to mend both flesh and spirit, and Gerry followed soon, quiet and raspy, but steadfast. 
 
“Now breathe, go on. In. Out.” Melanie kept pushing her hand against Jon’s chest in a slow, sure rhythm, telling him when to inhale, when to exhale, and for how long, and soon there was nothing in the world but her low, hoarse voice, and the serene and trembling notes of the ancient Healing-Song, weaving together in rippling waves, a gentle current defying his terror and pain.
 
It was a very long night.

 
———
 

Pale amber light filled the little cave. The sea stretched mirror-still towards the morning sky, and Jon watched his breath fog in the icy air. Melanie lay curled up against his left side, one arm, limp with sleep, thrown across his chest. He rolled his head to the other side and blinked up at Gerry, leaning on his elbows and clasping Jon’s right hand, lips pressed into a thin line and bruises beneath his eyes. Georgie was nowhere to be seen.
 
Jon opened his mouth to speak but found he did not have the strength for it. The regular kind, at least. 
 
Gerry, he thought, with urgency.
 
Jon. Gerry’s face contorted in a complicated expression Jon was woefully inept at reading. He tried to extract his left arm from Melanie’s hold but could hardly lift it. He fumbled for his belt, and the small seal-skin bag still tied to it, tapping against it with stiff fingers.
 
The Songs are… they are still in there. Daisy’s, and Trevor’s. Please, take it off. Take them away from me.
 
Alright. Gerry nodded jerkily. He let go of Jon’s hand and bent over him to detach the satchel, then scooted back into the water until it reached his waist and tied it to his own belt. When he was done, he stretched his back and groaned. Half-lying on cold, exposed rock all night must have taken a toll on him.
 
With a quiet slosh, Georgie emerged next to Gerry, placing a fine-meshed string bag filled with mussels and cockles and a variety of small fish on the rock-floor. Gerry gave Jon another tight-lipped nod and disappeared with a soft ripple. Jon stared at the place he’d dropped out of sight with puffy eyes and tried to rub some feeling back into his hands.
 
“He’s worried sick about you,” Georgie whispered.
 
“I… know,” Jon murmured, his voice a ruined little croak. 
 
Melanie stirred next to him, then rose to her arms with alarming speed to loom above him. Jon cringed beneath her bleary, cranky scowl. She sniffed and then pushed her fingers into the side of his neck, grumbling: “Oh good, you’re still alive. Don’t you dare scare us like that again. What a waste of my precious fish-paste.”
 
“I’m, I’m sorry—” he breathed.
 
“Shush.” She patted his arm and then unceremoniously crawled across his tail towards the ledge and Georgie. It really must be very bad, Jon thought. She’s not insulting me.
 
Melanie slipped into the water and rubbed her forehead against Georgie’s in greeting, which she returned with a lopsided smile, before her eyes fell on Jon and her face screwed up in concern once more. “I wonder what is holding them up,” Georgie said, squeezing Jon’s trembling dry hand with her steady wet one. “Basira and Adelard. They should have been here by now—even if the old man has gotten slower since the last time he visited, which I doubt.”
 
Jon exhaled with a shudder. “Do you really… think he can…”
 
“Yes,” Georgie cut in, utter conviction in her voice. “No mer has studied the Song and its sources for as long and persistently as he has. Adelard will be able to tell you what ails you, and how to cure it.” 
 
Melanie inhaled as if to speak, but then stuffed a handful of anchovies in her mouth instead and chewed thoroughly, eyebrows pinched together. Her claws were tapping an angry rhythm against the rocky ground.
 
Jon laboriously lifted himself up onto his elbows, eyes flitting back and forth between them. “I could…listen. For their Songs,” he rasped.
 
Melanie grimaced. “Are you sure—?”
 
No, he thought, not at all. “I want to try,” he said.
 
Georgie had to grab him under his arms and fully lift him into the water, which was mortifying to say the least. When he grumbled about it, she and Melanie just laughed at him, with something like relief in their voices.
 
Once he was fully submerged, his companions holding him by the arms, the back of his head started to prickle uncomfortably. He gritted his teeth and pushed the feeling away as best he could and tried to only focus on the familiar Songs of Basira and Adelard.
 
Jon could not, would not let himself be afraid of being in the water. The notion was utterly ridiculous.
 
It did not take him long to find them. “They’re maybe a… a half-day away,” he said, voice shaking with effort. Then he blinked, confused. “But it’s not just…” he mumbled. 
 
“What?” Melanie hissed, gripping his elbow too hard. 
 
“It’s not just Basira and Adelard. There are three more… two guards and—and the queen. Gertrude is travelling with them.”

 
———
 

Basira arrived first, only to find that her pod was ready and waiting to receive their queen. Under the natural stone archway at the entrance to the archives Jon hovered, flanked by Gerry and Georgie, his arms threaded through theirs, with Melanie covering their rear.
 
Jon was not wearing any attire except for the mother-of-pearl charms threaded through his belt. Georgie had proposed to do his hair, but he had refused to go through something he did perceive as nothing short of light torture right now. His skin felt too thin and raw again and he could hardly stand touching his companions as it was, even though he knew he would just sink to the sandy floor like a stone without their support.
 
Shortly after Basira the queen arrived with her entourage, and the group was welcomed courteously. After taking air and a small afternoon meal together, Jon, Gerry, Melanie, Georgie and Basira retired to the central hall with Gertrude and Adelard. There, the seven mer curled up on flat rocks in a circle.
 
Jon, having managed to ingest some small chunks of mackerel, tried hard to concentrate on anything outside the awful, hot churning in his guts. At least Gerry was perched next to him, his hand at Jon’s back as much physical support as moral. Jon started fidgeting with Martin’s ring, turning it around and around until the queen looked sharply at his shaking hands, and he stopped, and swallowed hard.
 
“Basira tells me you have fallen ill,” Gertrude said, raising one eyebrow at him.
 
“I… yes,” Jon said. His voice still sounded small and scratchy as if he’d been screaming for hours. Which was probably not far from the truth. “I suspect it to be an affliction of, of the Song? It is why—” he glanced at Adelard, then at the queen again. “I— I was hoping— I am sorry you felt you had to, er, travel all the way because of it, my queen,” he muttered weakly. He felt his face flush, and his abdominal muscles cramp around the boiling void at his core and nearly doubled up, choking on a whimper. Eyes squeezed tightly shut, he heard his companions utter concerned noises, and felt Gerry’s hands on his shoulders, and then there was a large shadow hovering in front of him; Adelard, who laid his right hand on the crown of Jon’s head, and said: “If it pleases my queen, Gerard and I will take him to the sanctum.”
 
Gertrude must have nodded her approval, because large arms threaded through Jon’s, and he was led a short distance away and then sat down atop a smooth stone surface and made to lean his back against a carved rock-wall. He blinked his eyes open to soft, diffuse light. 
 
The sanctum was a smallish, almost perfectly circular space, open to the water surface above. Its circumference was lined by a polished ledge, its walls carved with the long indecipherable remnants of ancient Songs. The many little recesses were crammed with jars and bowls filled with beads and charms, and shells of all kinds and sizes, and raw materials and tools. Long cracks in the rock were brimming with thick clusters of luminescent piddock shells, filling the alcove with a gentle blue glow. In the centre of what to the archives-pod functioned as a glorified storage room, a smooth white boulder sat, perfect for a pinniped to comfortably curl up on, where Jon (and sometimes Melanie, when it struck her fancy) used to get his hair braided.
 
No-one in Jon’s pod had a particular penchant for prayer, which ostensibly was what this room had been designated for, even before the archive was built around it. Jon could barely remember the last time they had gathered here specifically in matters of the Song. If someone came to offer one, Jon would take it in the central hall without much ceremony to go with the procedure. Not for the first time in recent weeks, Jon wondered if he had taken his spiritual duties as archivist too… lightly.
 
Adelard took a leather-wrapped parcel from the bag at his belt, lifted the edges of the material and held it out to Jon. It was his torque; his most elaborate piece of jewellery, which he had left at the Queen’s Seat what felt like years ago, and what had been probably no more than a half-moon.
 
“Michael sends his regards. He has repaired the fraying threads and polished the beads,” Adelard said, his voice as deep and calm as ever.
 
Jon briefly ran his fingers over the shining beads and shells, then let his hand fall into his lap. “He… did not have to do that. Give him my thanks. I will, I will think of something for you to take to him in exchange.”
 
“He does not mind, you know. Loves to keep his hands busy. He says it helps him think.” Adelard looked down to where Jon was absentmindedly turning the heavy gold ring around and around again. Then he looked up at Gerry, who was hovering with his arms crossed, saying: “Gerard, will you store this, and then guard the entrance?”
 
Gerry shot Jon a quick glance. When Jon inclined his head, he took the torque and swam towards the opening of the sanctum. Once he was out of sight, Adelard took to perching on the central boulder.
 
“Basira has told us all she knew; about the Tyne Clan, the shipwreck, the Hunter and his Song. But all she could relay about your illness was that it seemed connected to your Siren-Song, and that it scared her. So… do you know how, exactly, this has come to pass?”
 
“No.” Jon squeezed his arms around his midriff, not meeting the old mer’s eyes. “But I have some… ideas.” 
 
Adelard hummed. “So do I,” he said, and pointed at Jon’s neck. “Can I see?”
 
Jon nodded and unwound the lamina with unsteady hands. The wound was healing well; the itch of the knitting flesh negligible compared to, well, everything else.
 
“Very well. Will you open your Song to me, Archivist?” Adelard murmured.
 
I will, Grand Advisor, Jon thought.
 
Thank you, Adelard replied, and his Mind-Song spread into Jon’s like a cool, soothing current. Close your eyes.
 
Jon did. For a while, it was just this: Adelard’s Song suffusing his, seeing and knowing him; but there was no fear in Jon, just calm surrender. Then the old mer spoke again.
 
It is as I feared. There is a blight on your Song, Archivist. An acolyte of the Deep Ones made you bleed in a place of power. The sacrifice has been accepted. 
 
Jon shuddered, and nodded. I… thought as much. What can I do?
 
Adelard sighed deeply. Jon opened his eyes to see him lean forward, holding out his hand. Jon placed his numb fingers into his large, wrinkled palm.
 
The fight you’re putting up is commendable. Weaker spirits would have faltered; as would have those without companions as quick-witted and loyal as yours. I cannot tell you with absolute certainty that it will come to this… But I believe that if you keep resisting the call you will simply grow weaker, and sicker, and you will die. And if you cease resisting, well… you have seen now one who has, and collected Songs of others.
 
Jon closed his eyes again, pressing his fist against his mouth. His stomach twisted with nausea and an icy, all-encompassing dread. 
 
This is the worst outcome. There are ways to avoid both fates, or at least stave them off for a while. This is why the queen has come with me; she may be able to help you.
 
“I am in possession of a certain Song,” Gertrude said. Jon’s head snapped up and he stared at her. She had soundlessly appeared in the entrance to the sanctum, Gerry hovering behind her wide-eyed. Her expression was stern and cool as always, but there was a twist to her lips that gave her a look of almost-empathy.
 
“It is a Warding Song,” she continued, “which I am willing to give to you. It should keep you safe for a little while.”
 
She approached Jon with her hand held out. In it was a little reddish-black auger shell on a string. She stopped to hover in front of him, eyebrows raised in silent query. Jon gave her a small, jerky nod and then lowered his head. The queen tied the pendant around his neck with deft fingers and Jon, staring down at where the high-spired shell touched his sternum, realised that the string was braided from hair the same shade of silver as hers.
 
Gertrude glanced back at Gerry, who immediately left his post at the entrance to join the little circle. “Hold him up,” she said to him and Adelard, and they both took Jon’s arms, Gerry to his left and Adelard to the right, while she herself placed her hand over the shell and Jon’s heart, and began to sing.
 
The Song had no words. There was a long and dreadful story behind it, Jon knew; if the queen had not experienced a dark and powerful act of sorcery, she would not have been able to fashion a ward from it. But her craft was exquisite, and she did not need words to weave her magic. A part of Jon was deeply disappointed about his inability to know. He pushed it down guiltily.
 
At first, she was just humming, deep and monotone and a little hoarse, and Jon listened. But then he began to see—colours and shapes rising around him in the water that turned from still and clear to murky and churning. They never coalesced into anything concrete, but they did not have to. The mirages were dripping with power, nonetheless. Dancing shadows wrapped around Jon, and the queen’s voice distorted into an impossible droning noise that built up in his ears, his head, his chest to an almost unbearable pressure, until from beyond it, below it, through it came a scream of rage so piercing and bitter Jon cried out synchronously, convinced the sound would tear him apart.
 
It did not; it petered out, and the waters calmed, and Jon was floating, suddenly feeling soft and heavy with sleep. He could not see Gertrude anymore, nor Gerry and Adelard; nor did he feel their hands on him. He blinked languidly, looked around, and then down. The space he found himself in was cloudy and dim, and where the sandy floor of the sanctum used to be now yawned a familiar abyss. 
 
Deep down, the eye larger than the world was slowly closing, until its colossal lids disappeared in fathomless darkness, and all around Jon a million jewel-coloured irises flickered out of existence like stars at dawn.
 
He sobbed out a high noise of loss, and relief, and then let a black and dreamless current take him away.