Rosaline's Sea
(an almost-fic set in the world of Patricia McKillip's The Changeling Sea.)
Notes: Most of the story emerged from my head. This can be read even if you don't know anything about the Changeling Sea, so it's mostly an original.
Disclaimer: The Changeling Sea is copyright to Patricia A. McKillip.
I. Sea At Night.
They avoided the hut on the cliff, the people of the village. It was unnatural, they muttered over mugs of dark ale and crust-hard bread, for such a young girl to be living all alone like that. But of course no one took steps to amend her loneliness; she was merely referred to as a secret sort of pariah. When she came into the village square as inconspicuous as you pleased on the market days with a little reed basket over an arm, you could almost pretend that she was normal. That everyone was especially careful to pick out the best eggs, the freshest fish, the greenest cabbage, and set them reverently into the tiny basket, taking great pains not to let the tip of s single finger touch the slender wrist, the faded sleeve. For they were not merely disapproving of her, they were afraid.
The girl would return to the disreputable hut with her food, and for another week the villagers would not even catch the slightest glimpse of pale hair or greenish-grayish eyes. But still they would gossip of how Fiarn had seen her standing still and white as a ghost on the edge of the sea, bathed by moonlight; of how sometimes small children would discover her footprints going to the sea and no returning tracks.
Rosie was the name they called her; sometimes substituted by such epithets as "witch" or "spellmonger". The older, less discriminatory folk would go to her hut to be cured of small ills, to soothe their rheumatisms and aches. And she would sometimes receive ribbons, eggs, fish, bread, and various seafoods for her pains.
The years passed without mishap; Rosie the orphan in her hut, the fishermen returning or not in their small craft; the King coming to his summer-house. She was perhaps eighteen, perhaps sixteen when the sea appeared at her door.
It was another one of those moonlit nights when Rosie sat on the tideline, staring out at the spires looming like giant fingers, thrusting from the placid sea that lapped at her toes warmly with its pearly foam. She picked up a fragment of shell and carved into the wet sand some rather rough letters, "Rosie" and "night". She was working on "sea", diligently twisting her wrist for the troublesome "s", when a footfall startled her hand and sent the tail of the "s" into her toe along with the piece of shell. Yelping, she hopped up and glared at whoever had caused her injury, and drew in a deep breath when she met unfamiliar eyes. This fact was given more substantial weight considering that she'd spent her entire life in the village, and until her self-inflicted exile four or five years before, had known of every face just as they'd known hers.
Gaping, forgetting her throbbing toe, she stared into the deep blue-blackness of the eyes of the dark-haired stranger until he smiled. Then she flushed, as on cue, and stumbled back, favoring the hurt foot, retreating footsteps blurring the words she'd written. "Who are you?" She stammered, hoping to sound intimidating and cold, "What are you doing here?"
The blue-eyed man grinned, very pleasantly. "Call me what you want." He bent to look at the unfinished "s", streaked a bit with blood. "Ah. You were writing something. I have disturbed you?" It wasn't a deliberately impertinent question, and Rosie could not suppress a rather foolish smile. "Not really. I probably would've done it anyway." At this he focused the strange eyes on her bleeding toe. "My, you'd best wash the wound," he said with the same lightness as before, "I think a bandage would be in good order also."
"Yes," she murmured in reply, thinking that she should be indignant that this stranger would advise her in her own territory, about what she did for a living, but oddly almost giddy. Perhaps it was hysteria. Loss of blood. She went towards the door awkwardly, and he put out a white hand to catch her elbow. "Carefully," he said, and with his unsettling hand thus positioned she slowly went to the stool before the fireplace, where she ripped a shred of the loose linen that served as tablecloth and wrapped it around the toe several times andtied a practiced knot. He was standing, still, and she realized her impoliteness immediately, flushing again. Stupid, she said to herself, standing stiffly and indicating that he should sit in the only proper seat in the hut(aside from the low cot), why are you so unsettled?
"No," he said, still in the almost teasing way, and promptly sat on her cot, which creaked. She swallowed and tried to return his wide smile, and returned to the stool. After a moment of hesitation, she asked, "Why are you here? You never said."
His grin widened. "To help you, presumably, from the wound which my arrival brought upon you." She watched him, not a little bewildered at his speech. She'd never heard anyone speak like him except for the courtiers who flocked to the village during Summer Court. So she didn't notice that he hadn't answered her question. "Wh--what's your name?"
His laughed; his teeth were very very white, and perfectly formed, like pearls. "Call me what you like, my lady. And what is your name?" His eyes were on her face, but despite the rest of his expression they were very serious, and intent upon something.
"Rosie--I mean, Rosaline, but everyone calls me Rosie, although Mother called me Rosalie and Papa just said Ro--" She looked at her lap, fumbling for words under his gaze.
"Ah." He sat back, as if contented, and most of the keen look went from his eyes. "Rosaline." He chewed the word and swallowed it, and another smile spread over his face, almost a savage smile. "I have journeyed for a long while," he told her, putting his fingers on the line of his narrow smooth jaw, "and would like a little to eat, if you have anything, Rosie." She rose accomodatingly, with the uncanny feeling that he knew that she'd just gone to market that very morning.
She watched him consume sausages and potatoes with her sole pan in one hand and a warped fork in the other. He ate gracefully, as she'd expected, despite the rough implements. She noted, dreamily, that he wore rich clothes, a velvet vest, silk shirt, and leather trousers and short embroidered boots, all of the same peculiar blue-black as his eyes. Maybe twenty, she thought, chin in palm, with a stretch. More likely he's eighteen or so. The thought somehow excited her, though she didn't know why. Apparently he was some rich merchant's son, maybe even some strange noble from the the King's own court. But it was early winter, when neither merchants nor Summer Courtiers were plentiful in the coast villages. "Where are you from?" she said, feeling courageous, "Are you from the King?"
He looked up with a strange smile. "No." He stopped eating--she saw that he'd consumed about as much as a sparrow would have in the same time--and twirled his fork. "But I am a King, of sorts." He amended when she looked panicked, "but just as you are the Queen of this house, I am a King."
"Ah." Rosie was at a loss. No one, not even the villagers, had ever been this hard to talk to. She rubbed forefinger and thumb on her dress, much-patched and not very warm in the sharp weather. Struck by sudden inspiration, she looked up. "Can I call you Sea?"
His blue eyes widened, surprised, and then the oddly sharp look came into them. "Why?"
"I don't know, you justyou just remind me of the sea, sometimes. Your eyes are the same color as the sea at night." She looked down, red, embarassed that he should know how she watched him.
"I see." He set the pan on her table, and put the fork in it with a gentle clank. Sea stood, and in the firelight he turned his dark head and smiled his easy smile, with the pearl-like teeth, and walked out the door. Rosie, involuntarily following, saw that he had already vanished into the night and that the moon was obscured by thick clouds, and the sea raged against the shore.
II. The King of the Sea.
She did not see her Sea again until it was close to spring, and the gorse around the cliff behind her house was shooting up with small yellow flowers. It was a gray day, with dull gray drizzle in the morning. Rosie was sitting inside a ring of shells she had laboriously collected, and was attempting a hex to fix a stubborn tangle in her hair, hoping that it would not remove the hair as it had done before. Her fingers were chilled, for she had gone to the water and plucked several pebbles for her purpose, and now she paused a moment to blow on them futilely. She nearly fell as a small crunch of sand sounded behind and below her clifftop perch, trying to stand too quickly. She whirled, stepped on two of the largest shells, slipped, and landed on four more shells. By the time she managed to clamber to her sore feet, she saw that it was Sea again, in a heavy mantle of dark gray, walking along the edge of the foam in boots of the same color. She blinked at his sudden apparition, and then waved. "Sea!"
He looked up, stared for a while at her, and slowly smiled. "Rosie."
Presently he was sitting beside her in the now-broken circle, long legs stuck before him, his black hair pulled gently back and pushed into place with a huge blue stone set in mother-of-pearl. "What were you doing?"
"I was making hexes," she explained, ashamed of her vanity, "for my hair."
He examined her hair, near-white in color and near-waist in length, very tangled and very thick, with grave care. "What's wrong with it?"
She went from pink to crimson. "I-It's terribly tangled, and I couldn't undo one, and"
"So you were going to use a hex?" Sea sounded mildly amused. "How convenient."
She couldn't say anything to that, so eventually they left the ring of shells for the hut, where Sea made her sit on the stool and close her eyes. "What" she began, more flustered than ever, but he only said "hush".
"Now look."
It was a lovely book, bound in what she took to be polished wood until she reached out gingerly and stroked it. "Pearl," she gasped, as Sea shifted the weight of it to her hands, "and silver, and" she forgot to speak when she opened the hasp, for the book had fallen open to a page that she thought at first to be a window into the sea, for it shimmered and shifted as true water, and the man with the tail of a fish was clear and glowing golden against the green waves. His hair was of palest gold, and only when she saw his eyes did Rosie realize that he was moving. With a deep intake of breath,she dropped the book, and it closed on the window of water, the sea-thing with a click.
"Who are you?" She asked, holding her breath as though she too were under water. "What is that? Why do you give it to me?"
His eyes gazed back at her, inexplicable, black and blue, shifting like water. Finally he said, "You already know who I am."
"I don't! You tell me, "make up a name", to call you whatever I want" she was on the verge of tears, and did nothing to control herself. "Then you give me thisthis bookwhat do you want? A hex? Money?"
"No." His hair was rippling blackly in a sudden draft. "I don't like money, and I don't want hexes." A faint smile at the last word. "That is one guess. Look at my eyes, my face, and you will be able to say it like you did before, without knowing it. Say my name."
Rosaline drew in a deep breath. "You are the Sea."
He smiled his fierce smile. "Indeed." The Sea reached out his slim pale fingers and picked up the dropped book that gleamed in the weak light. "Do you take my book?"
She clutched it wordlessly, and watched him rise to leave. Before he could step from her doorway she said, half-shouting, half-whispering, "Why do you give it to me?"
The Sea turned with a look of such misery, such terrible loneliness, that before she knew it she'd flung arms around his neck and had buried her face in the gray mantle, over his clavicle. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she muttered, not sure what she was sorry for as she said it, "of course, no one is with youyou must be lonely"
They stood like that for a time, and then he pulled away at the same time that she did, so there was a bubble of space between them. Outside, a stormhead was approaching with dismal speed.
"So," Rosie tugged at the sleeve of her dress, noting an unraveling thread numbly.
"So." The Sea returned, setting the book (which she'd dropped again while embracing him)on the bed, "what will you do?"
Rosie made a flurried movement. "You can stay here anytime you want, you can come here" she faltered and stopped at the calm insistence in his silence. "Ohyou want me to come with you?" He nodded. "But--but my father and my motherthey both went to the seaevery year there are at least four or five who are lostsurely you"
"No, Rosaline. I want you to come." When she said nothing, he continued. "You don't have to come now, Rosie. You can come any time, tomorrow or ten years or a century from now. That's part of it, the not-changing. You will change, I know. Don't worry." He plucked a black pearl from somewhere, not round but thin at the ends, irregular and lovely. "Call me, and I shall come to fetch you, I shall rise from the water to take you."
"Yes." She was frozen, cold, and her voice was distant in her ears. "Yes."
"Farewell then." He came close and kissed her, very gently. When she opened her eyes he was gone into the dusk of the storm, now hurling lightning to the earth, glaring on the waves.
He returned, thought, a month and or a week later. The storms had passed, and a hard corundum sky with a white scalding sun boiled the sand until Rosie was forced to stay indoors for fear of heatstroke and burns on her bare feet. It was the hottest year they had seen, murmured the villagers. Might not the spellmonger ease the heat? They came with slightly wilted fruit, bruised peaches and plums, apricots, eggs, bread, nuts and dried meat. But she could only shake her fair head until even more tangles formed in her hair. She knew who was causing the heat, but could not summon him or visit him. She could only wait.
At last, one night as Rosie sat with her feet propped on some pillows, the pearl-bound book in her lap as she struggled through another page, she heard the door open. When she lifted her eyes, the Sea stood at her door; he'd only opened the top half of it, though, and appeared almost phantasm-like in the weak glow of her candle. He entered as she opened the bottom half of the door, and let in the balmy wind. He was dressed in a brilliant, almost blinding white the color of the summer sunlight, and his eyes were a good deal lighter than they had been. He kissed her, absently grinning, and smoothed back the unruly hair from her sweaty forehead. "Warm?"
"Yes, though you don't seem to be," Rosie replied with some annoyance, for he was cool as the sea itself although the white buckled robe and cape seemed winter gear.
"Ah, my feet are bare," he said, pointing, and she saw that his feet (even they were white and finely formed) were indeed uncovered. "Quite a luxury."
"Aren't you going to bring some rain, or some clouds or something?" Rosie saw little point in evading the subject. "I know it's been you making it so hot."
"So accusing," he said, smiling like a languid cat, but she caught a spark of something fierce in his eyes. "Summer is supposed to be hot."
"Not this hot."
"So I like to meddle. No laws bind me from doing what I want."
"Quit meddling. I can't even leave the house, it's so hot in the daytime. I'm practically starving because I have no food."
He regarded her lazily, as though the heat had seeped through him only enough to pacify him somewhat. "Ah. That is important. I must bring you food then. I don't want you to starve. Tell the foolish villagers that the weather will stay for a while."
"You--"
"A while."
Her will buckled under his eyes, and she allowed him to embrace her and stroke the nape of her neck. "Don't worry, Rosie, nothing will happen to you. Remember that you can call me. Remember the link between us." With that he left again, and Rosie stared after him in a daze of love, indignation, weariness, and a mad longing to follow.
He brought her food; each morning after the encounter she found a tidy kelp-wrapped package of mussels, oysters, small fish, and the inevitable kelp, all in a soggy heap. Sometimes he would attach small sea-flowers, pearls, bits of shining stones with the food, and she found a glass jar to hold these in and kept the jar on her shelf with the pearl-bound book. She discovered that she could read quicker now; perhaps as a result of her daily stubborn plowing through the pages and the spelling lessons she gave herself following the reading. She had no trouble with her "s"s now, at least. Bored, one afternoon in the cooling dusk she found a sand dollar and a large piece of driftwood and brough them home. Using a little shell-knife she used to cut herbs and cloth, Rosie wrote in the sand dollar "SEA" and tossed it into the grasping fingers of the wavelets, hoping that he would catch it. After a while of straining her eyes after the bobbing fleck, she went back to her hut and cooked a supper of oyster stew.
As she stirred, Sea came in, wet and with a sheen of drying fish-scales along his arms. Apparently he'd come quickly from wherever he kept himself in the Undersea; a fanciful tower of pearl and gold, perhaps. A fortress of coral. She hadn't the thought to ask until he was asking her, somewhat coolly, why she'd called him.
"I wanted to see you," she said simply, spooning the stew into two bowls, trying to control the tremble of her hand. "And to see if I could call you at all."
"Of course you can," he snapped, and brushed at a streak of seaweed in his hair. When she didn't reply he softened his voice and said, "Would you like to come now?"
"N--no." It was very hard to look at him, so she kept her eyes on the stew. "Not now."
He scrutinized her with the eyes that were now so much lighter than before, almost the color of the hard noontime sky, and was silent for some minutes. Then he took a bowl of the stew and sipped delicately at it, like a cat lapping milk, and put it down. "I will return with the food then, in the mornings. Would that keep you from calling me at strange times?"
Rosie nodded, head down. "Yes." He was of course gone again when she dared lift her face, but she was shocked from her longing by the heavy summer-storm that had abruptly appeared and was emptying sheets of rain onto the beach.
III. A Summoning.
The little princeling frequented her house now, and again he had appeared on her doorstep, his dark head uncovered and his wide eyes the color of the night sky peering in at her whispering over a small hex for the curing of someone's goats. "Kir," she called, "come in."
He came, wordlessly, and stared at the webs of thread and crystals in her hands. "What is that?"
"A healing hex for goats," Rosie replied. She'd not told him her name, and he didn't ask, out of native stoicism or shyness it was difficult to tell. He seemed to like her company, though, and every time he could sneak from his father's Summer Court he would ride the fine black horse to her hut and sit with her.
"Oh." Kir bent to look at the hexes, careful not to touch them, and straightened in his fine clothes, silks and softest cottons. He was perhaps eight; Rosie had kept rather still herself in his presence, and so little such information was exchanged between them. But she knew, in her now aged wisdom, what he was. She dimly saw what would happen, much later, but gave no intimation. Sea hadn't come for years, now, but the black pearl rested in the jar, still, gathering no dust.
Kir left with some of her jam-filled biscuits in his pockets and a few pretty shells; Rosie watched him ride slowly off, knowing that he longed for what she did. Often he would turn and watch the sea's churnings, thoughtfully. Sighing, the old woman finished her hexes and waited for the other little child to come, with her pale tangled hair and golden invisible sparklings of magic flowing all about her. Eyes the color of periwinkles, and again Rosie caught dim visions of the little girl Periwinkle and Kir standing on a dark beach together, watching something.
The years passed very quickly in her old age, and she wondered if she might even die before he would come, or she call him. When Peri was fourteen, on an autumn night with a high black sky, she took the pearl from the jar and walked to the line of the foam in her bare wrinkled feet. With all her strength she called him, and flung the pearl with as much force as she could summon into the tossing breakers. It landed between the distant spires and sank without even a bubble or splash.
Rosie watched it vanish, and after half-an-hour when nothing appeared, dragging wondrous rainment of pearls and fish-scale, she sighed. Delusion of an old woman, she called herself as she went to bed, pulling the blanket around her chin.
She woke on something soft and wet, almost slimy to the touch. With a little yell she sat up, and sighed in wonder when her rheumatic back failed to drag her back to her bed in pain of sudden movement. Her eyes were remarkably clear, too, and she saw that she sat on a thick mat of sea kelp. And over her stood him, the Sea-king himself, with his smooth untransmutably set in that grin and his dark eyes vivid. "Rosie," he said, and she stood, limber as she had not been for decades. "Rosaline." Then he began to sing.
Rosie had heard, just as almost all children raised by the sea had, of countless tales of the glory of the sea's songs, the siren-like luring, the tenously wrought melodies beautiful and shifting as the sea itself. This song that Sea sang carried her to her feet lightly, and she felt as though she were dancing instead of walking into the line of the waves. Her feet as they struck the warm foam seemed strange, and she glanced at them to see them lose their wrinkles in the touch of the briny water, and realized something as she stared at the blurred reflection of a young girl in the water. Sea was beside her, holding her hands and dancing on the balls of his feet; he was cloaked in magnificent silver scales that danced with irridiscence under the faint stars.
"Come, come, Rosaline," he called her with his liquid music, flowing as gently as the water that lapped around her waist. "Come!" She followed him, her young hands in his, laughing as he did, and when the water came like a good friend over her head she still laughed and danced to his song. A young fisherman, coming home from the inn's common room with not a little beer inside him, fainted where he stood on the beach when he saw her disappear, pale hair and all. No one credited him, of course, and so no one knew what had happened to the old woman who had lived in the seaside hut.
Post Script: Hohohoquite nice and sweet, huh? The Changeling Sea provides lots of material for fanfiction.