The Serpent's Shadow

Peter felt himself relax immediately. Let Almsley and the other Water Masters seek out the naiads and the other familiar creatures of river and spring; when it came down to cases, it was the Elementals of the deep ocean that he felt most akin to. There were fewer of them, but they were correspondingly more powerful—and that was wherein his value to the White Lodge lay.

But not Leviathan. Not today. He had already decided that he would not seek the Greatest Ones of the deeps. I’ll do my duty, but no more than that.

Slowly, he moved himself landward over the waters under a brilliant moon, searching for the dark bobbing head of a seal, swimming a shadow amid shadows among the foam-flecked waves, and not finding one. The pull of power had led him here, though, so one or more of the Selkie should be about somewhere.

It was not until he reached the shore and alighted among the bushes just beyond the sands, that he saw one, and a passer-by would not have seen anything out of the ordinary about the fisherman who strolled beside the water's edge. True, there was something a little odd; as he walked above the waterline, the hems of his trousers were soaking wet, and although by the footprints he had been walking for some time, they never seemed to get any drier. Not only that, but the footprints themselves were full of water and bits of weed. But that was the only odd thing about him, and could be explained away readily enough.

Peter followed the faint tug of power until it brought him to a dark shape lying concealed within a gorse bush. It looked like—and in fact, it was—a sealskin. There he waited, until the fisherman came up the path and stopped beside it, eyeing him keenly, though he should have been invisible to mortal eyes.

' Tis you, is it, Peter Scott?' said the Selkie, bending over to pick up the sealskin and shake it out.

You've sharp eyes, my lad, Peter replied in thought, for of course his spirit form could not actually speak. Courting the ladies, were you?

'Visiting my good little wife Alice, and thanks to you,' said the Selkie complacently, and by that, Peter knew which Selkie it was and blessed his good fortune in having come across one that he had directly aided.

The Selkie, uniquely among the magic creatures of England these days, retained their physical nature. They were human on land, but when they donned their magic cloaks, they lived as seals in the sea and Selkie spirits within the walls of their own magical homes. Yet every seven generations they had to seek human women to bear them children, (or, occasionally, a human male would take a Selkie bride) as their ties to land and physical form thinned and threatened to bind them into their seal-and spirit-forms for all time. In the old days, that had been of no great moment; it was understood that an occasional fisher girl or boy would have an 'uncanny' spouse. It was considered lucky. A Selkie husband would bring back plenty of fish, and occasionally gold from the sea, and the relatives of a Selkie bride would drive fish into the nets of her husband (so long as he was kind to her and kept her safe and content). But in this age, that had all changed. A Selkie couldn't walk into a Registry Office and put down his name and address beside his would-be bride's. And a girl these days wanted something material, a lad with a boat, or a job in a shop, or a smart young clerk, or even a fellow with a steady place in a factory. More often than not, she wanted a young man that could take her away from these bleak and storm-racked shores into the city, where things were happening. Girls even in the wildest parts of Scotland didn't believe in Selkies, and as for the boys, they didn't believe in anything but God and shillings. If some strange man with melting brown eyes came 'round, talking sweet words, girls these days would tell him to be about his business, and that right sharp. And no boy would take up with a strange girl he found walking along the shore with her hems all wet. She might be a gypsy, intent on stealing everything he had that was portable.

So for the first time, the Selkies of Sul Skerry found themselves looking at the end of life as they had known it, and they were afraid.

Then came Peter Scott, drawn by their distress, and in a position to do something about it. In London there were plenty of young women who would have given their souls for a husband, any husband, with or without a Registry License or the posting of banns, any escape from the life of grinding poverty and endless humiliation that was the lot of a girl who no longer had 'virtue' to protect. There were girls whose greatest ambition was to have three good meals, a roof, and a bed, with a man who wouldn't beat her or force her to do anything she didn't want to do. How he had found ten honest, clean- hearted ones among the gin-soaked floozies was a tale in itself, but he had, and brought them here, where the Selkies had built them a tiny enclave of stout stone cottages with magic and strong, brown hands on the site of a fishing village long abandoned.

With Selkie gold, Peter had bought glass windows, sturdy, well-built furnishings, and all the homely comforts these young women had dreamed of as they walked the filthy streets of Cheapside or Whitechapel. Alice and Annie, Mabel and Marie, Sara, Sophie, Delia, Maryanne, Stella, and Nan had moved into their cottages. They'd been properly courted and won, and married after the fashion of the Selkie, and it was enough and more than enough for them, who had dreamed only of a roof that didn't leak, a bed with more than a threadbare blanket, and not an entire cozy home of their very own and the means to keep it. There were no relatives or neighbors to ask awkward questions, and if the babies weren't in the parish register, that didn't much matter, since the fathers would be taking them off to sea as soon as they could swim.

Literally.

And in the meanwhile, they had sweet babies who never cried and never had tantrums, who suckled with the greatest of gusto and fell asleep like puppies when they were done with playing. A Selkie baby was a perfect baby in every respect, thanks to the magic that made them so. Unlike changelings, who made the lives of their 'mothers' a misery until the poor things died, a Selkie babe made their lives a joy. The Selkie husbands took care not to bless their wives with new babies until after the current one was weaned and toddling, but that didn't mean that the gentle pleasures of the bedchamber were neglected until that time either.

And if the fathers had no job, they still brought income to their landward wives in the form of Selkie gold, the ancient gold pieces the Selkie had scavenged from wrecks since the time of the tin traders. It was Peter who took the gold away, converted it to proper shillings and sovereigns and good paper notes, and brought it back for the wives to spend to maintain their households. There was a donkey and cart that belonged to this tiny village of ten