Adrift (15 page)

Devin noticed with a laugh.  “Uh-oh, they’re conspiring against us!”

I giggled.  It did look like the two animals were busy planning something nefarious.

Birds warbled in the trees as we finished our preparations for an overnight ride.  Maura came out of the house to see us off, with a picnic lunch packed in a backpack for me to carry.

“Have fun,” she told us, her eyes twinkling.

I felt my face burning as we turned the horses and headed up the trail, Kip bounding along around the horses like a golden dervish.  Saffron ducked her head and snatched up a mouthful of grass, jerking her head up and acting as if she hadn’t done it. 

The day was beautiful.  The morning cast golden sunlight against the vivid greens of the trees and the hills.  To one side the earth dropped off abruptly into cliffs of sheer stone, the roaring sea below striving with might to tumble them down.

I thought about my dream and my mother.

“Are there caves in the cliffs, there?” I called to Devin, against the wind.

He shaded his eyes in the direction I was pointing and nodded.  “The water makes them,” he shouted back.  “It carves them out of the stone, but they are very dangerous, being so close to the water.  You’d never reach them by land.”  He raised an eyebrow at me, inquisitively.  “Why?”

“A dream,” I shouted.  “With my mother,” I clarified, seeing his face tighten.

His face cleared.  He guided Moose up a steep slope, further inland.  I followed slowly, letting Saffron pick her way up gracefully, like a mountain goat.  Her hoofs clopped hollowly against a stony outcrop.  I clenched my eyes shut, discovering definitively that heights gave me vertigo.

For the first hour, the horses were restive.  They pulled impatiently, flicking with their tails at imaginary flies and shying at nothing, looking for any excuse to run.  We held them back, knowing the trek ahead of us would be a long one.

The salt in the air was now overlaid with the sharp green scent of crushed grass.  We were surrounded by wildflowers.  Purple stalks of lupine scattered around us, dancing in the stiff breeze.  They stretched as far as the eye could see, an ocean of endless green and amethyst. 

I shivered at the beauty of it.  There was no doubt that this was an enchanted isle, just out of reach of the touch of Faerie.  Some primal part of me wanted to leap from my horse and dance like a mad thing.  Another part of me felt like I was intruding in hallowed ground, that I did not belong.  I half expected to see the face of some ancient being staring up at me from the green, commanding me to leave.

I shook the fancy off, wishing I knew some kind of sign or offering I could give to the land.  I couldn’t stop feeling I was trespassing on something I would never be able to understand.

Devin was relaxed, riding in front of me.  I had never seen him so at ease, his shoulders relaxed, sitting quietly in the saddle.  Moose, for all his ungraceful height, had some sort of genius for picking the trail out of the harshest hillsides.  We climbed higher and higher, and further into the wild.

I saw moose, real ones, a couple times, from a distance.  One large bull moose looked up at us from his marshy bog, his massive antlers dripping with water and green water weeds.  He regarded his namesake with interest.  I clutched Saffron’s mane, hoping that he wouldn’t take it into his head to chase us off.  I knew, from experience, that moose could be surprisingly aggressive, and they were big.  When I was a little girl my father had tried to described elephants to me.

“Are they as big as a moose?” I had asked.

“Much bigger,” Dad had said.

I still couldn’t really comprehend an animal that big.  Even my previous zoo-visits and consequential elephant-sightings had not helped.  My inner child was convinced that moose were the hugest, most dangerous, creatures in the world.  Nothing I could do could convince me otherwise.

It was well past noon when we stopped for lunch.  We were all of us, human and four-legged creatures, hungry enough to dig into our feed with gusto.  The horses tore up mouthfuls of lush grass, while Devin, Kip, and I all fell-to with sandwiches and heavy slices of berry pie, which stained our hands and faces and covered me with juice.

We had paused in a particularly beautiful spot, with a double-tiered waterfall roaring down into a hollow of a pond of surprisingly clear water.  After our messy respite, I went down to the water to wash my hands.

Rainbows danced through the crystal mist and I sat back on my heels, hands dripping, drinking in the beauty around me.  It energized me, filling my veins with joy.

Kip dashed past me.  He plunged into the icy water, drenching me to the skin.  I let out a shriek that probably could have been heard for miles, if there was anyone around to hear.

Devin laughed.

“Think that’s funny, do you?” I demanded.  I swept my hands through the water and splashed him.  I was surprised by how much water I was actually able to gather.  Devin ended up soaked and spluttering.

“Now that,” he said, “calls for revenge.”

Before I knew it he had scooped me up and thrown me into the water.  At the last minute I was able to grab hold of his arm, and the two of us tumbled down together.

The water was so cold it almost burned my skin.  It felt strangely good, after having ridden in the sunlight all morning. 

Apparently war had been declared.  Devin grabbed me by the waist and tossed me deeper into the water.  I went under and came up spluttering and shivering.  Water went up my nose and I shook my head, sneezing and choking. 

Devin stared at me, and I looked down, suddenly very conscious of the way my shirt was plastered to my chest.  It wasn’t a white shirt, thankfully, but didn’t offer much coverage.  I pulled at the hem, trying to loosen it, my face flaming.  “Hey,” I protested.

“All’s fair in love and war,” Devin replied.

I swished my hands through the water and sent it flying, pummeling him with a good-sized wave.  It was his turn to be soaked to the skin.  I laughed at his shocked expression.

He took three flying strides and tackled me in the shallow water.  We grappled together for a moment, laughing and splashing.  I gave him a hard shove on his chest, dunking him under water.  He sat up, coughing and laughing.

The mood shifted as I suddenly realized I was sitting on his lap.  His hands swept along my arms, leaving goose bumps in their trail.  He tucked his fingers into the hair at the nape of my neck and dragged my mouth down to his.  We were so close that I could feel his heart hammering against mine.  The icy fingers could do nothing to calm the roaring fire that sprang up between us.  I clung to his shoulders, wrapping myself around him.

Some part of the back of my mind reminded me that I should stop the kiss, and stop it now, but I didn’t want to.  All I wanted was to be here, with Devin, wrapped around him and him around me, his mouth moving against mine until I tingled with electricity.

Devin threw me from him so hard that I flew back into the water.  It closed over my head and I clawed my way up to the surface.

“What are you trying to do?” I gasped.  “Drown me?”

Devin grabbed my hand and hauled me up.  I shuddered with adrenaline that had nothing to do with the kiss we had just shared.  I hauled my arm back and slammed his chest with my fist.

“Ow,” he winced, “What was that for?”

“I can’t swim, you idiot!” I shouted at him.  My heart pounded in my chest and I gasped, the memory of the water closing over my head sending ice through my veins.

Devin moved to take me in his arms, but I pushed him away.

“Meg… I didn’t know.  I’m sorry.”

I sobbed in a breath, putting my hands on my knees, trying to pull myself together.

“My dad never let me near water of any kind,” I said between sobs.  “I don’t know how to swim… I never learned.”

Devin put his arm around me and I leaned my face into his shoulder.  “That is the craziest thing I have ever heard… with your heredity?  Surely he knew you wouldn’t be able to stay away from water of any sort.  What was he trying to do, keep you from any kind of water, ever?”

“Pretty much.”  I scraped my hair away from my face.  “I always thought it was because my mother drowned, but now… Now, I know that it was because he was scared of losing me.  He thought that I would disappear like my mother did.”  The slight bitterness of my tone surprised me.  I hadn’t really realized how much I resented my father for all he had hidden from me.  “It wasn’t fair,” I whispered.

Devin squeezed me tighter.  “No, it wasn’t fair.  He should have prepared you.  I’m sure he was trying to do the right thing for you, but… You could have drowned.”

I managed a smile.  “I said that already.”

“Well, that clinches it,” Devin said, his face suddenly serious.  He kissed the tip of my nose.

I squinted up at him.  “What?”

“I’m going to have to teach you how to swim.  We can’t have you show up at the selkie family reunion and not know how… that would be
so
embarrassing,” He teased.

“Can’t have that, can we?” I said, as brightly as I could.

Swimming, apparently, came as naturally to me as though I were, well, a seal.  In less than an hour Devin had taught me enough to swim across the pond and lounge with him on the rocks next to the waterfall.  The day was cool, but the sun was bright and we dried off in no time, or would have, if Kip hadn’t insisted on performing cannon-balls into the water next to us, sending spray all over us.

“We’d better go,” Devin said, shading his eyes to check the angle of the sun.  “We still have a good ride ahead of us.  Do you want to change into something dry?”

I considered my options and decided having to repack my pack was less evil than the prospects of trying to ride a horse in soaking jeans.  Devin, kindly, turned his back and got the horses ready while I stepped behind a bush and changed into some dry clothes. 

I pulled my tangled hair behind me in a ponytail, cringing to myself.  I hadn’t expected to need conditioner on a camping trip.  I knew that getting the tangles out of my hip-length hair was going to be next to impossible.  Despite my efforts to scrape it back, it stood out in a frizzy halo around my head. 

I didn’t know whether to rue or be grateful for a lack of mirrors.  Oh, well.  My hair would have to wait until we made camp.

We rode on in silence.  Somehow the companionable moment we had had back at the waterfall was over.  Tension filled the air, like a storm just waiting to burst down on me.  Electricity filled the air.  I could feel it hang heavily between Devin and me.  It was something impossible to ignore.

The animals seemed to sense that something was wrong.  Beneath me, Saffron jigged uneasily, each foot lifting as if she were stepping on coals and touching down almost in the exact spot she had lifted it from.  She arched her neck like a stallion, curving like a dressage horse and snorting.  Moose, also, was restless.  He tossed his head and tried to rear, his eyes rolling until the whites showed.  Devin had his hands full, trying to gather the reins and get the unruly gelding back under his control.

Even Kip was agitated.  He ran in circles around us, barking and barking like a mad creature.  He snapped at a passing butterfly, irritably, and got under Saffron’s hooves until I was afraid he was going to be trampled to death.

“It’s you,” Devin shouted at me.  “They’re drawing off of your energy.”

I scowled at him, trying to sit a particularly athletic buck.  “I’m not doing anything!”

Devin spun Moose around on his haunches, keeping the gelding from rearing up again.  He dug his heels into the horse’s chestnut sides.  “Come on, let’s work this out of them!” He pulled Moose into another spin and then leaned forward in the saddle, urging Moose to do what he had been longing to do all day-- gallop.

Without even the slightest hint of a cue from me, Saffron bolted after her comrade.  She pinned her ears back and set her jaw against my hold on the bit.  I had absolutely no control over her.  I grabbed a fistful of mane, just as insurance, in case she decided to throw me.

The wind whipped up over our heads as we plowed forward across the wide expanse of meadow.  My hair pulled free of its ties and streamed behind me, a tangled, dark banner, which combined with the thistle-down cream of Saffron’s mane.  The horses’ hooves created thunder, a living earthen storm.  Blood roared in my ears, echoed only by hoof beats and the snorting breaths of the horses.

We neared the edge of the trees again and Devin hauled Moose to a halt.  The gelding was breathing hard, eyes staring out of his head, sides heaving, foam dripping from his bit.  Saffron was drenched with sweat.  My hand, as I stroked her neck, came up soaking.  I immediately hopped out of her saddle. 

“They need walking,” I told Devin.  He nodded, wordlessly, throwing his reins over Moose’s head and joining me on the ground.

Kip dashed up, wagging his tail and staring up at our faces as if he were afraid we would do something rash or strange.  He didn’t know what to make of us on a day like this, all the riding, and swimming and now galloping through the wild.  He must have thought we had gone completely crazy.

“Why did you blame me?” I demanded of Devin, crushing bracken under foot.  “Or is this another ‘blame the selkie blood’ thing?”