Merrow by Ananda Braxton-Smith

Author:Ananda Braxton-Smith [ Braxton-Smith, Ananda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781922179531
Publisher: Walker Books Australia
Published: 2013-08-19T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

Othersea

SPRING TIDES ARE BIGGER than regular tides. They wash further upshore and drag further back into the cove. The waters drag back so far even foxes come down to rummage in the sprawl of leftovers. Sometimes they meet at the weedline and fight over the ghost-shrimp and tiny fish left behind by the tide. I’d always been ready for the spring-tide moon when it came. But not this time. Not this morning. I’d turned my back on the sea, just like Da told me never to.

And not only that.

I’d ignored the moon. I’d ignored the tide. I’d taken no notice of the waters altogether. Like the smallest child I’d been lost in my play. Now the curse was on me and my punishment fit. I was too frighted to leave Market-Shipton so I was to be washed away, stuck under its rock forever. My cowardy bones would become part of the cliff and nobody would ever find me. Just like Mam said, it wasn’t like I hadn’t been told.

I only had myself to blame.

I told myself all this as I squirmed under the fallen stone, as I went on my belly with my face in the dirt. I went that way so I wouldn’t have to look up and see the great dark stone above me.

Lovelypig was waiting on the other side, calling me in a heartening sort of way. Dolyn came through quick smart after me, shouldering his way flat on his back, leaving half his robe behind on the stone’s spars. His knobs of knees dripped bright blood down his shanks and he’d scraped his brow.

And we were not out.

We were even deeper inside the mountain. On a narrow ledge in a spreading cavern. Here there were thready beams and rays coming through far-off cracks. And there were lights moving around its walls. I crawled to the drop and looked down.

And there was a sea down there. A whole sea. With small waves and a tiny pale beach.

The shallow waves rolled in cold blue flame onto shingle. They left behind lightsheets that lit the pebble as they ran back to the sea. Tiny fish crossed the sea, blazey lights weaving this way and that.

Anybody else would be heart-swelled at such a sight. Not Dolyn Craig. He wanted to swap irrits everywhere he went.

“There’s no way out,” he said. Like it was my fault.

“What’s it to you?” I said. “You said it was as good a place as any other.”

All round us the cavern uprose. Here-and-there its rock wall opened in drains that let inland waters fall into into the curdling sea. Most of them were just seeps; their waters dripped slow and left greenslime trails. A few spat water in drops and a few others let it fall in streams. And there was one drain on the farside carrying a whole inland river. That one was a waterfall tumbling white foam and spray down into the bowl of the silver sea.

Dolyn came to the edge and we looked.

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