“It’s no ‘it,’ ” the captain retorted. “It’s a ‘they.’ ” He glanced at Sullivan. “Do you want to field the question, or shall I do it?”
Sullivan’s preternatural poise didn’t so much as flicker. “Go right ahead. I imagine you know the legends better than I.”
Frost gave him a long look. “I don’t think that’s true.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll explain, but I’m saving my turn to tell a proper story for something else, so I shall try to make it brief.” He pointed to the huge map on the wall above the mantelpiece. “Have a look, young lady: a good, close look.”
Maisie got to her feet and, carefully avoiding the card castle, stepped onto the hearth. She stretched up on her toes to grip the mantelpiece and peer over it. Sorcha hurried over to carefully lift the music box with the filigree tree out of the way, passing it gently to Mrs. Haypotten, and then going back to move the case clock, the vase of paper spills, and a small stack of books, too.
“The captain will be wanting you to see the creatures at the edges,” Sorcha said to Maisie when she had finished. “Shall I give you a boost?”
“Thank you,” Maisie said, feeling a bit awkward to be the center of all this unexpected fuss.
Sorcha gave her a wink. “It’s good to know about the seiche, just in case you ever find yourself meeting one.” She knelt on a knee on the hearth and offered her hand to help Maisie step up onto her other, bent leg.
The map showed the Skidwrack and its inlets. It was old, with the green-brown of the river and the green-blue of the pine woods on the riverbank painted by hand. The compass rose had been drawn in ink, and to eyes that knew the city well, it was clearly meant to look like old iron. In one corner was the usual warning always found on maps of Nagspeake waterways (which, whether due to a restless caldnicker or for some other reason, could never be trusted): THIS MAP IS NOT MEANT TO BE USED FOR NAVIGATION. And at the farthest inland reaches of the river, where the Skidwrack and its offshoots disappeared off the page, the words HIC ABUNDANT SEPIAE were enclosed in an oval formed by the curving bodies of two sleek river otters very much like the one that had been hidden in her napkin at dinner.
“Otters?” Maisie asked. She turned and looked from Frost to Sullivan. “What’s so terrible about otters?”
Frost crossed himself as he picked up his drink again and took a long pull from it. It looked rather as though he was fortifying himself for a task he didn’t particularly care for.
“I’ve never yet found anyone who could tell me how the two things came to be associated with each other,” Sullivan said, observing Frost’s hesitation, “but for as long as any oldster on the Skidwrack can remember, superstitious folk have always crossed themselves when they see river otters, for fear of the seiche. Except, of course, for the odd foolish romantic who actually thinks he wants to meet one. The seiche are supposed to be beautiful, after all.”
“I thought you didn’t want to tell the thing,” Frost snapped.
“The silence was threatening to become awkward,” Sullivan retorted.
Sorcha stepped into the breach. “Not just beautiful,” she corrected, helping Maisie back down. “Magnificent. Stunning. You hear them spoken of like mermaids or selkies. Perhaps it’s the selkie lore that first tied them to the otters, the way selkies are tied to seals—but of course the seiche are no shape-shifters, nor is there any magic pelt that, hidden, will keep one from returning to the water.”
The captain nodded his agreement. “Nor would there be any point in hiding it if there were. When a seiche girl comes ashore, it’s because ashore is where she wants to be, and from the moment she shakes the water from her heel, her life becomes a search for the one thing that will allow her to remain on land: someone else who’s willing to take her place.”
“Take her place . . . in the river?” Tesserian asked.
“Aye.” The captain affected a portentous tone. “For the water knows what belongs to its kingdom, and it keeps a close tally of its creatures, wherever they are. When one of its citizens tries to defect, the water demands an equal exchange, and until that exchange is properly completed, the water goes in search of what has left it.”
Tesserian nodded and began to lay out the new, blue-backed cards in a wavy pattern of overlapping scales before the castle and its handful of outbuildings, like a flat tide lapping at the worn floorboards. “I see.”
Maisie looked from the captain to Sullivan as she sat cross-legged beside the card castle again. “I don’t. Not exactly.”
“In short,” Sullivan said, his gaze on the encroaching paper sea, “when one of the seiche attempts to leave the water, the waters will rise in the wake of the leaving until either the seiche returns to it—a death sentence, for seiche lose the ability to breathe underwater once they’ve been ashore for a day—or someone else goes voluntarily to take its place, which is also a death sentence, for humans can’t learn the trick of breathing underwater. And it must be voluntary,” he repeated. “The sacrifice can’t be made through trickery, or it doesn’t work.”
It was impossible for anyone in the room to fail to be aware of two things. The first was that outside, the waters were still rising. The second was that, although for the most part none of those who’d heard of the seiche could remember hearing of one in the shape of a man, if one were to imagine a seiche boy, Sullivan—tanned golden, his face lean and even under longish hair the brown-gray of wet stone, staring at the cards out of eyes the changeable color of the river—might well have fit the bill. He,
