Skin Deep (33 page)

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“NO!”
Mahtahdou shrieked.

“Damn,” she muttered under her breath. He hadn’t forgotten about them after all. The pain of his cry in her head made her close her eyes. But when she opened them again, she saw that Mahtahdou hadn’t moved.

“Conn,” she said, pulling his hands from over his ears. “Can you stand?”

He let his legs relax from around her waist and set his feet to the floor. After a second, he nodded.

“Good. Get ready to run when I say so. Run to the beach if you can and look for seals. They’ll take care of you.”

“Not leave,” he whispered.

“Yes leave. It will only be for a little bit.” Just because the storm-thing seemed hostile to Mahtahdou didn’t necessarily mean that it would be friendly to them.

But where had it come from? And how had it gotten hold of one of her quilts? A mental picture of her cedar-shingled roof flying into Nantucket Sound flashed through her mind, and she flinched.

A gust of wind blew into her face, and she looked up. The enormous tempest was looking at her, and she saw the purpose in its eyes. Whatever it was, it seemed to know exactly what it was doing. Somehow it had gotten hold of one of the quilts Kathy had made her take back and had brought it to her. And whatever it was, Mahtahdou feared it. The question was, what did it want her to do with it?

She picked up the sodden quilt, wrung the water from it and inspected it swiftly, one eye on Mahtahdou and the storm. The gold cord she’d so carefully knotted into a net with real fishing net knots and sewn into place over the fish was still intact. Of course it was. She didn’t do shoddy work.

But why had it been brought to
her?

“NO!”
Mahtahdou shrieked again. The storm had turned away from her and was reaching for him.

But Mahtahdou would not go down without a fight. With a whoosh of displaced air he shot upwards, as tall as the storm-figure and as terrifying. The two figures circled one another and then grappled, wet wind and black smoke surging and rolling above her. Conn cowered against her, clutching her purple shirt around him.

Then it hit her. Alasdair’s skin lay forgotten on the floor where the flood had washed it, directly across the chamber from her. Could she get to it and run while Mahtahdou was distracted? Not that Alasdair needed it anymore—the thought cut like a knife—but it didn’t seem right to leave it here. And she had to try to find Conn’s as well.

“Get ready to run, Conn,” she murmured. “Stick close to the wall.”

Slowly, cautiously, she inched around the edge of the room. She kept her head down, hoping that the enormous grappling figures wouldn’t notice her slow progress or step on Rob’s limp form, and cringed when a limb of wind or smoke crashed into a wall with as much force as one of flesh.

When she’d reached the wall closest to where the skin lay, she looked up once more. Above her Mahtahdou roared as the storm seemed to get a grip on him, but in the next second he’d squirmed free and they circled each other once more. She resisted the urge to yell encouragement to the storm thing and darted across the hall. Alasdair’s skin was just a few feet behind the throne, a tumbled brown heap. Ten more feet…five…

“No you don’t, human!”
roared a voice.

Just as her fingertips brushed short sleek softness, something slammed into her. She grunted and grabbed, and was rewarded with a handful of fur before the momentum of whatever had knocked into her sent her sprawling. She heard Conn scream somewhere across the room and tried to shout to him to run, but the blow had winded her.

Mahtahdou had wrenched away from the storm and stood over her, reaching. She held Alasdair’s skin closer to her and scrambled up into a crouch. He wouldn’t get it. Not without a fight.

Then another voice spoke. But it whispered, not roared, and Garland wondered for a split second if it had spoken aloud, or only in her head.

Garland. Use the quilt.

The quilt? Then she realized that she still clutched the golden fishnet quilt in her other hand. Use it how? What could a small, wet quilt do against Mahtahdou’s huge surging, chaotic power? And who had spoken to her?

The storm leaned forward and grabbed Mahtahdou from behind even as the threatening shadow bent toward her. She rose and held the quilt up and stared wildly from it to Mahtahdou writhing in the storm’s grip, imprisoned for a few precious seconds. The golden grid of the fishnet sparkled, even in the gray storm-light.

Net. For trapping things. Could that be it? Was that why the storm had brought it to her?

Muttering a silent apology to Alasdair she dropped his skin, and with both hands, flung the small quilt over a flailing, billowing piece of Mahtahdou.

Instantly the quilt became even heavier. She hung onto it desperately as it drew the thick, roiling smoky figure into itself as if it were a sponge soaking up water. Mahtahdou screamed again, but this time his screech was hollow in her mind, receding like a train hurtling down a track. He shrank, sucked into the quilt, and it writhed horribly in her hands as he struggled to escape the pattern that was entrapping him.

And then he was gone.

The quilt in her hands rippled, then fell limp as anything made of fabric should.

She couldn’t take her eyes off it. Was Mahtahdou inside it? Would his shadow roil out of it once again if she moved? After a long moment of hardly daring to breathe she shook it a little.

Nothing.

She shook it a little harder. Still nothing.

With careful, deliberate movements she folded the quilt into a square, then rolled it. Some cord to tie it might be nice just now. Even nicer would be to drop it and run, find Conn, and sail home…if her dinghy hadn’t been swept out to sea by the storm.

Something sidled up behind her. Conn held onto the back of her shirt and peered around her side at the bundled quilt. He was pale and there were scratches on his cheeks, but he was otherwise unhurt, thank heavens. “He’s gone,” he said.

“He’s gone,” she agreed, and hugged him against her side with her free hand. “Are you all right?” And Rob—she had to check on him—

A gust of wind hit them, and then another and another, in a strange sort of rhythm. The storm-figure—she’d forgotten about the storm. She looked up at it and realized what the odd, rhythmic puffs of wind were.

It was laughing.

It was standing over them in a nimbus of flying rain and wind, and it was laughing.

Then suddenly, it too was gone. She blinked and stared up toward the rafters where its head had been. A small movement at the bottom of her field of vision drew her eyes down.

Another figure, man-shaped and this time man-sized, stood about twenty feet from her and Conn. It was sliding some sort of cloak from its shoulders, a cloak made up of sea-colors, deep blue and limpid turquoise and pale frosty green the color of foam on the crests of waves…a cloak made of triangles and diamonds and squares, set in a pattern of curves.

Her knees gave out then. But Alasdair was across the room and pulling her into his arms before she touched the floor.

“You did it!” he muttered fiercely into her ear, holding her so tightly that she could barely breathe. “Grandmother couldn’t have done it better.” He hugged her even more tightly until she coughed in protest, then held her away from him to look at her with shining eyes.

She clutched at his forearms because her knees still didn’t seem to be capable of holding her up. Joy and vitality radiated from him in an almost visible glow.

“Mahtahdou said you were dead.” She touched his bare chest, crisscrossed with scars. “But you’re alive.”

“Because you healed me.” He glanced behind him at the Storm at Sea quilt, lying where he’d shed it. “I woke up and you were gone, but the quilt…with it around me I.…” He squeezed her shoulders. “You saw. I am alive and Mahtahdou is gone. Now do you believe me about your quilts?”

“I still don’t understand—”

He was smiling and shaking his head. “The net. Do you remember how it trapped Conn’s fingers? It caught Mahtahdou as well, but it took all of him. Just like my grandmother’s woven band, but stronger. I don’t think there’s any way he’ll ever be able to escape your magic.” His face grew solemn. “You did this, Garland. You gave me back my life, my home—”

Conn suddenly appeared under Alasdair’s arm, peering up at them. Alasdair pulled him into their embrace. “And my son. You saved my son.”

“Bad gone,” Conn said again, nodding at the quilt she still held.

“Bad gone,” Alasdair agreed. He took the quilt from her and set it carefully on the floor, then looked around the room. “And we’re home. This is your home, Conn. We can return to it now.” He turned back to her. “Garland gave it to us,” he said softly.

Garland looked away, not sure of what to say, and her eyes fell on Alasdair’s sealskin, lying where she’d dropped it before casting the quilt at Mahtahdou. There was one more thing she needed to give him. She detached herself from his arms and bent to retrieve it then stood for a moment, her back to him and Conn. In a moment she would turn and give Alasdair his skin. He would be complete again, free to return to his world. The selkie world.

Where there wouldn’t be any room for her.

The thought nearly crushed her but she couldn’t let the pain stop her. She’d known what would happen if she rescued his skin. He would take it and be a selkie once more, and life would go back to the way it was before. Only now she’d be even lonelier, because she’d learned what it was like to be truly loved.

The skin was heavy in her hands. She smoothed her hand over its sleekness. Behind her Alasdair made a soft sound.

“This is why I came out here in the first place. This and Conn.” She swallowed hard at the sight of the slashes Mahtahdou had made in it and ran a finger along one. A strange tingle ran through her hand and into her finger, and the slit closed as she traced its length.

“Garland…” Alasdair said.

Hardly daring to breathe, she touched another cut. It too closed.

She touched them all though she could barely seen them through the tears that ran unchecked down her cheeks. Her arm felt as though it were glowing white hot. How she did it was almost beside the point. She could give Alasdair back his world. All of it.

“I said I’d get your skin and bring it back to you. Here.” She turned and held it out to him, sniffing fiercely. Powerful magic-women shouldn’t cry in public. “You can be a selkie again. You and Conn. His skin is here somewhere. I’ll find it and make it whole again.” She’d be losing Conn, too, wouldn’t she? Her little limpet. Her almost-child.

Alasdair was silent. The hissing crash of waves on the beach and the sigh of the wind in the broken windows were the only sounds she heard. Then he reached out and took it from her. There was an expression on his face that she wasn’t sure she understood—or that any human could understand. Would it be comparable to returning a lost limb to an amputee, or sight to a blind person? He ran his hand over its length, feeling its wholeness, and finally looked up at her with blazing eyes.

Then, without a word, he strode out of the throne room.

Conn looked up at her, opened his mouth, then turned and ran after his father.

Chapter 21

G
arland stood still, staring after them, then around her at the pearly walls of the room. The clouds and fog had lifted and the setting sun illuminated them with soft golden light so that they almost glowed. She bent and picked up the still-folded fishnet quilt then found a length of the cord that had bound Conn and tied it snugly around the quilt. There. She didn’t know if it was necessary, but it made her feel better.

It was nice that
something
could make her feel better.

She’d known it would happen. Of course Alasdair had gone back to the sea, and Conn had gone with him. That was what selkies did. It didn’t matter that she loved him more deeply than the deepest ocean, or that he loved her too…she knew he did. Nature was still stronger.

Still, he could at least have said goodbye.

But maybe it was better this way. What good would words be at a time like this? Could they make it easier for her to let him go?

She rubbed her face on her damp sleeve, making it damper. She was safe and so was Mattaquason. She could go home now and try to be glad that this had happened. Without Alasdair she wouldn’t have learned what she was capable of. If she worked to focus her new-found power, what could she do with it? Could she make quilts that healed the sick or eased grief and pain?

But in the meanwhile, what was she supposed to do with Mahtahdou’s quilt? Was she stuck being his guardian now just as Alasdair’s grandmother had been? Somehow the thought of drying out the quilt with Mahtahdou inside it, wrapping it in acid-free tissue paper, putting it away a lignin-free cardboard quilt storage box in her cedar closet, and checking it for moths periodically seemed anticlimactic. Would her homeowner’s insurance cover it in case of theft or—she shook her head. Being giddy wouldn’t help now. Surely she could find a way to give it to the selkies to guard. And maybe Kathy would be her friend again, and Sandy and Elizabeth and the rest of them in town. And Rob—if he survived, would he be her friend again too? They could never be lovers—probably neither of them could face that now—but maybe they’d be able at least to nod and smile politely at each other at Friends of the Library and Historical Society events—