Chapter 23: The Sea Court

The Rook house came into my slip at dawn.

There were twelve of them, silver and green and deep blue, and they filled the water from the stone step to the sea door.

I sat on the step in dry jeans with a blanket over my shoulders.

Lachlan sat beside me, in legs, with seaweed bound around both his burned arms.

Tilda floated in front of us with her chin on her fists.

She had slept four hours in a salt bath and looked ten years older than yesterday.

In the middle of the slip rose an old merman with a gray beard and one milky eye.

"I am the elder of the Rook house," he said. "I have come to hear a wife."

"I'm the wife," I said.

"So I am told." He looked at me with his good eye. "You are smaller than I expected."

"Thanks."

"It was meant kindly."

"I'm sure it was."

Tilda lifted her head.

"Grandfather," she said. "Before the wife speaks, I have something to say."

The slip went still.

"Three years ago, I sold pearls to a kind man on the dock at Gannet Harbor."

"He gave me coffee. He asked me where my family swam in winter."

"I told him."

She was looking at her hands.

"He was so kind, and I was so lonely. I told him the headland and the tide, and the name of my brother."

"Six months later, Lachlan was in a net."

Lachlan did not move.

The elder spoke very low.

"A Rook who betrays the house is put out of the sea."

"No," I said.

The old man turned his eye on me.

"The wife speaks," he said. "Speak."

I stood up with the blanket around me.

"I've known Garrick Moss my whole life," I said. "He gave my grandmother her first bait tank."

"He drove my mother home from the hospital."

"He was kind to every person in my town for twenty years, and every one of us believed him."

"Two hundred grown people. Tilda was one person, and she was lonely."

"She was in the iron for it, too. She held my husband's head out of the water."

I looked at Tilda.

"If you put her out of the sea, you're doing what he did. You're making her pay for being trusting."

Tilda's face crumpled.

Lachlan took her hand across the water.

"Sister," he said. "I would have been caught either way. Garrick wanted my song, and he would have found a road."

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