Chapter 23: Wife of

The Tide Festival lit the whole harbour at dusk.

There were lanterns on every mast, and lanterns floating on the black water, and a thousand shifters on the quay in their best.

Lorcan walked beside me in a plain dark coat with no gloves and his sleeves rolled up.

I wore the red velvet gown.

I had thought about that for a day.

Tristram had brought it, and I did not want to wear it.

But it was the only dress I owned that had a story, and I wanted the story to end in it.

"You don't have to," Lorcan had said, last night.

"I know. That's why I want to."

In front of Pearl Hall, on a table covered in white cloth, lay the festival register.

The clerk stood beside it, trembling slightly, with a pen.

The crowd drew back.

I walked up to the table.

There was my name, and his, and a long black line through two words, and an empty space after.

I took the pen.

For a moment the whole harbour was silent.

Then I wrote, in my own hand, in the plainest letters I had.

Wife of.

I wrote it clearly, so that anyone could read it.

Morwenna Harlowe, wife of Lorcan Brae.

I put down the pen.

Nothing happened.

No light went up.

No law shifted that I could feel.

Then the old physician began to clap, and the heron lady, and the baker, and the butcher from the fish market, and the whole quay.

Lorcan took my hand.

His arms came around us both, all eight, and held me against him in front of Saltmere.

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