meant to be ‘Search every nook and cranny’ – Conor got it wrong when he was little and so we always say it like that.”
“Why would you search a granny – you mean, your mother’s mother?”
“Never mind, Faro, it’s not important.”
It’s like trying to tell a joke at a funeral. Everything is so eerily silent. The split rock glimmers like oil. At the corner of my eye something flickers.
“Faro!”
But when I turn my head, there’s nothing.
“Faro, I’m sure someone – something was there.”
A flash of alarm crosses Faro’s face.
“Just keep swimming,” he whispers in my ear. “Pretend you haven’t seen them.” He takes my hand and pulls me with him. “Don’t look back.”
I wasn’t going to look back. I swear I wasn’t. But somehow my head turns, and the flicker of movement behind me becomes real, solid—
“Faro, look! Look at her!”
“No, Sapphire!”
“But she’s so beautiful!”
So beautiful. She’s sitting on the knife-sharp edge of the rock, but it doesn’t seem to hurt her. Her shining hair drifts around her shoulders like a cloak of glass. Her smile glows with welcome and her arms are open wide as if to embrace us.
“But, Faro, she’s Mer. She’s one of your people. Why won’t you look at her?”
Her eyes fix mine. They are huge and hungry. She wants me. She wants me to come to her.
“She’s not Mer!” says Faro, his voice full of revulsion.
“Just look for a minute. She’s so lovely,” I plead with him.
“All right then, Sapphire, you look at her if you want to! Look!”
Her beautiful face, her sloping shoulders and swirling hair – her—
“Look, Sapphire!”
She twists her body free of the rock. She pushes off with her hands. She’s coming towards us…
Where a tail should be if she were Mer, where legs would be if she were human, there is a claw. A single claw, steel blue and gleaming. An open claw that snaps as the creature swirls towards us—
Faro raises both hands, fingers crossed, and touches them to his forehead. The creature stalls in the water.
“Get behind me,” he mutters, “and whatever you do, don’t look at it again.” Very slowly he begins to swim backwards, still holding his hands in place and shielding me with his body. I scull myself backwards with trembling hands, keeping my eyes fixed on Faro’s back. I won’t look at – at it – again. It’s not going to make me look at it. A faint sound drifts through the water. Clack. Clack. The claw, I think. It’s opening and shutting the claw, getting ready to snap—
“Don’t be scared,” murmurs Faro. “Feel behind you.” My back is against the wall now. A sheer, gleaming wall of rock that blocks our way.
Clack, clack.
Surely the sound is fainter now?
“Faro – Faro – has it gone?”
“Wait.”
We hang still in the water, backs to the wall, and wait.
“Don’t look, Sapphire. It’s not safe yet.”
Clack, clack.
It’s almost gone. At last Faro’s shoulders slacken with relief. His hands drop to his sides.
“It’s gone back to its hole,” he says. “But we’ve got to be quick. There’ll be more of the Claw Creatures around here and I can’t hold off more than one at a time.”
“Can’t we swim straight up the rock, Faro?”
“No. We’ve got to go through. There’s a passage here somewhere. I used to know where it was, but since the Tide Knot broke, everything’s changed. Even the routes we’ve used for a thousand years. Come round this way, Sapphire. Squeeze through. That’s it. Good, the Claw Creatures can’t get in here.”
We’re in a small cave. The back of it is blind, and there’s no passage through the rock.
“We’ll rest here for a while,” says Faro, and closes his eyes. It’s very gloomy in the cave, but there’s enough light to see how drained he looks.
“At least now you know never to look at one of the Claw Creatures,” he says lightly.
“If you hadn’t been there—”
“Shall I tell you what would have happened, little sister?”
“No, don’t. I can guess.”
We are quiet for a while, resting. I wonder how much farther we’ve got to go. Faro says that everything’s changed in Ingo since the Tide Knot broke.
“But the tides went back,” I say aloud.
“Ingo is slow to heal.”
Like the human world, I think. St Pirans is shadowy in my mind now, but I can’t forget the destruction of the flood.
“Ingo er kommolek,” I say suddenly, without realising that I’m going to speak. Just as suddenly I remember where those words came from. The dolphins spoke them, that day last autumn when they came into the bay, and we were out in the boat with Mal’s dad. But the words were different then… Ingo er lowenek… was that it?
My brain doesn’t know what the words mean, but something deeper in me understands. There’s a shadow over Ingo now. Grief and destruction have spread through Ingo like currents of rushing water.
“Ingo er kommolek… kommolek… trist Ingo… trist, trist Ingo…”
Faro is staring at me.
“How do you know those words, Sapphire?”
Power rises in me again, as it did when I was standing on the rock, back in our cove.
“I learned them from the dolphins.”
“You’re coming on, little sister,” says Faro in his mocking way. “You are becoming a daughter of Ingo.”
His words thrill through me.
“Sometimes I think that won’t ever happen. Just when I feel I’m part of Ingo, I’m pushed away again.”
“I don’t push you away.”
But
