The Tide Knot (10 page)

  “But, Dad, look at your shoulder. You’re bleeding.” He glances down. “It’s nothing. Maybe I scratched myself on one of those rocks.”

  It’s a deeper cut than that. Blood makes a dark track down Dad’s skin.

  “Come with me now, Dad.” I beg him. “I’ll find a bandage.

  We can make it better.
Please
, Dad. I promise Mum won’t be angry. I’ll help you. You can lean on my shoulder. It’s not far to Granny Carne’s cottage. I’ll get you there. She’ll help us. Please.
Please
come home.”

  “What would you do with me in the human world, Sapphy? Put me in a tank as a freak for folk to stare at?” asks my father. “You don’t understand. I can’t change back to what I was.”

  “Don’t show yourself, Dad!” I beg again as the water heaves. I put my hands over my eyes. I won’t see him. I will not see my own father changed into one of the Mer.

  “If you don’t want to look at me, I shan’t force you. But I am what I am, Sapphire. I belong to Ingo now.” His words hit me like hammers. “You have a family, Dad!

  What about me? What about Conor? Have you forgotten that we’re your children?”

  “No,” says Dad. “I’ve forgotten nothing. None of it. Not one word either of you ever spoke to me. Not one look even.

  Not a single day of your childhood. But I can’t come home.”

  “Don’t you want to know about Mum? Aren’t you going to ask how she is?”  

  “Your mother is better off without me,” says Dad. “She always feared Ingo, and she was right to fear it.”

  “Why, Dad, why? Why was Mum always so frightened of the sea?” I remember Conor’s story of the fortune-teller’s prophecy. Dad has got to tell  me everything now. I’m afraid there are more secrets hidden away, waiting to burst out and destroy my family a second time.

  “A fortune-teller told your mother that the man she loved would lose her by water.”

  “What?”

 
“The man you love will lose you by water. Beware of the
sea. The sea is your gravest danger,”
says Dad, and I know he’s only repeating something he’s heard many, many times.

  “And Mum believed it?”

  “Yes, she thought that if
she
kept away from the sea, all would be well ,” says Dad. His voice is sad, but he sounds as if Mum were someone he knew a long time ago, in a different life.

  “You don’t care about us,” I say bitterly. “You’ve forgotten us. You don’t care about us now.”

  “I haven’t forgotten anything,” whispers my father. Why’s he whispering? Why doesn’t he shout at me?
Dad
would shout if I spoke to him like that.
Dad
would yell and slam doors, and then he would come back later and give me a big hug and say,
Sorry, Sapphy. I lost it there for a moment,
you were winding me up so much.
 

  “Dad,” I say. Dad is still half hidden under the water.

  Sadness rises in me until my anger is swallowed by it. “Dad, where are you? It’s me, Sapphire. Your own daughter.” The water seems to be rising too, or perhaps my father is sinking. Water swel s around my father’s chest, his shoulders, his neck. The moon shines on his face. He looks strange. Unfamiliar. Mer. He reaches out his arms to me underwater.

  I want to go to him so much. I want to hug him tight and never, never let him go again. But I’m more afraid than ever.

  He is Dad, but he’s also a stranger. One of the Mer. The water is like a black, shining curtain that hides my real father from me.

  “Tell Conor,” says Dad as the water reaches his lips.

  “Warn him of danger. Good—”

  But Ingo takes him before the word is out of his mouth.

  He sinks beneath the skin of the moonlit water. His face is still turned toward me, and his eyes watch me until the water covers them. As the pool swallows him, its surface stirs and lashes around as if some monstrous creature is fighting for freedom there. I watch the dark underwater shape of my father plunge over the lip of the pool and vanish downstream.

  The surface of the water trembles and then settles.

  There’s nothing left but granite boulders, leaning over the edge of the pool.

 
I
can’t believe that Granny Carne isn’t going to ask what happened last night. Surely she didn’t sleep through it all , like an ordinary old woman. But instead of questioning me, she keeps on doing her morning tasks—riddling and feeding the stove, feeding Sadie, making breakfast.

  “Did you sleep well, my girl?” is all she says. Her face is inscrutable, and it doesn’t invite conversation. I nod and fil my mouth with bread and honey so I won’t have to say anything. But there’s a glint in Granny Carne’s eye that makes me suspect that she’s teasing me. I’m glad to be teased. It relieves the dead feeling I have in my heart from meeting Dad.

  I had no idea how I was going to get back into the cottage last night. It was easy enough to jump out of the window onto the bank, but it wouldn’t be so easy to climb back in. I had all kinds of plans in my head: I’d wait until morning, then pretend I’d been out for an early walk; I’d find a ladder in the shed; I’d manage to open one of the downstairs windows. But when I tiptoed up to the cottage door and tried the handle, it turned as smooth as silk. The door swung open without a sound. Maybe Granny Carne never locked it, or maybe she knew that I had gone out and had left it open for me. I crept up the stairs, opened the door of the slip bedroom, and slid into bed.

  It felt as if a hundred years had passed since I’d said good night to Sadie and Granny Carne. My heart was still beating hard. I was back in bed, safe, I told myself.
Calm
down, Sapphire.
The booming of my blood in my ears was so loud, I was sure Granny Carne could hear it.

  I wasn’t safe. Nothing was safe. Dad was in Ingo, and he wasn’t like my dad anymore. He wouldn’t come out of the water. No, it was worse than that: He couldn’t, even if he wanted to, because he’d made his choice. He belonged to Ingo now and not to us. The only way I could live with him was if I chose Ingo too. That was too huge and frightening to think about.

  I’d been waiting so long for him to come home. Month after month after month, when everyone else had given up hope, we’d kept the faith. Conor said, “As long as we keep the faith, we’ll find Dad one day.” We swore and promised that we wouldn’t rest until we found Dad. Now what am I going to tell  Conor?

  I’d found Dad—or he’d found me—and it had solved nothing. We didn’t hug and kiss and cry. I didn’t even touch him. Did he even ask about Conor? Not really. Not the questions a father should ask about his son when he hasn’t seen him for a year and a half. But I remember what it’s like being in Ingo. The human world fades quickly.

  I turned over in bed restlessly. Maybe my heart was booming so loud because it was empty.
Away in Ingo.
My dad could never come out of Ingo now. Unless—unless there was some magic that could change him back again into a human being. Earth magic. Granny Carne’s magic.

  Surely there was some hope.

 
Away in Ingo…away in Ingo…
 

 
But now you know where he is, you can go to him. You
can slip through the skin of the water and into Ingo. You
can go where he is.
 

  I tossed in the bed as if there were lumps of rock in the mattress. I would never be able to sleep. How was I going to be able to tell  Conor about Dad? I should have asked more questions. I should have made Dad tell  me everything that had happened to him from the moment he left us. Maybe Conor would blame me for being so stupid, but with the moonlight and everything being so mysterious and terrifying, I didn’t have time to think of questions.

  No excuses.
You had the chance, Saph, and you let it
slip away.
As for telling Mum, that would be out of the question. Even if she believed me, she wouldn’t be able to help Dad. She’d hate him for abandoning us. She might even say we were better off without him.

 
Poor Mum,
I thought. She didn’t choose to fall in love with Roger and go to St. Pirans to live. It was all chosen for her because Dad left. And I’d blamed her so much, almost hated her sometimes when she smiled at Roger and sang so cheerfully around the house in the mornings.

  I would never be able to sleep. I would have to lie awake until morning. Or was it morning already? The sky seemed to be growing lighter, but perhaps that was the moon—  

  I woke with a shock to hear Sadie barking joyously downstairs. I didn’t know where I was, and then everything jumped into place. White walls. Granny Carne’s cottage.

  Was Sadie better? She sounded better. She was barking as if she had never been ill in her life.  

  And now here I am in Granny Carne’s kitchen, eating bread and honey while Sadie sits on the flagstone floor beside me, quivering with life, her eyes fixed on me. Sadie looks as if she’s been dipped in a pool of sunlight. Her coat gleams; her eyes are bright and moist; her tail is a golden plume.

  She can’t wait for the day to begin, with all its adventures, and she can’t believe that I’m being so slow and dull , munching breakfast when I could be outside, leaping downhill, chasing rabbits.

  “She’s got plenty of life in her this morning,” says Granny Carne, looking up from her green notebook. While I’ve been eating, she has been writing steadily with an old-fashioned pen that she dips into a bottle of ink. I’ve never seen a pen like it. I did try to read the writing from upside down, but I couldn’t. It is black and spiky, and there are long letters that look like
f
’s without the line across. It’s probably her spell book, I think.
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
like in
Macbeth
, which is the play we are studying at school. Something must show on my face, because Granny Carne looks at me quizzical y.

  “Um, are you writing a recipe?” I say quickly. Anything to distract Granny Carne from what I’m really thinking.

  “No,” says Granny Carne. “I’m writing Sadie into this life book.”

  “Is that like a biography?”

  “A life book’s more than that. A biography’s all about the past.”

  “Oh.”

  “Sadie’s got her past, but she’s young yet. Her future’s dominant.”

  “Do humans have a life book, as well as animals?”

  “Of course. Every one of us is written in the book of life.” As soon as Granny Carne says this, I long to see inside the book, to know the future, as Granny Carne does. If only I could see Dad coming back to us—not Mer, but human.

  “Does anyone ever read inside the life book, Granny Carne?”

  “No,” says Granny Carne. She puts down her pen. “Never try that, my girl. These words can blind you.” Her eyes blaze at me.

  I take a deep breath. My voice squeaks with nerves, but I’m determined. “I need to, Granny Carne. I wouldn’t ask otherwise. I really need to.”

  “No, my girl.”

  “Please! You don’t know how important it is.” Granny Carne stares at me hard. “
You
don’t know what you’re asking.” She weighs the book in her hand; then suddenly she seems to change her mind. She holds up the green notebook, open and facing outward.

  It’s just a book with writing in it. Not a spell book or anything ridiculous like that. Granny Carne’s magic isn’t of that kind.

  “The life book has no power of its own,” says Granny Carne slowly. “It’s what you put into it. What
you
put into it, my girl.”

  The writing faces out toward me. I can’t read it, though.

  The writing is too small , or maybe it’s too difficult for me.

  Granny Carne begins to turn the pages, slowly at first and then faster. There are far more pages than a small notebook could possibly hold. The pages flicker as if a strong wind is blowing them. I stand up and lean forward, desperate to pick some words out of the blur, to catch just one drop of the future. But instead of making sense, the words swarm like bees all over the creamy paper.

  Can words move like this once they’ve been written?

  They’re writing themselves, coiling and clustering and buzzing all over the page. They’re angry. Angry bees that have been disturbed by a stranger at their hive. Any moment now they will fly off the page and straight at me, stinging and stinging until I’m blinded. I put my hands up in front of my face to ward them off. The hum of the words rises dangerous and threatening, fil ing my ears. I step back. A chair clatters. I stumble, reach out to get my balance, and nearly fall . The word bees are swarming close, ready to attack.

  “Granny Carne! I didn’t mean it! Don’t let them—” Suddenly, the noise is gone, as if a door has been shut on it.

  “It’s all right now, my girl. The book is closed.” Slowly I let my hands fall . Granny Carne’s green notebook is shut. It looks so innocent.

  “You have to handle things right,” says Granny Carne. “Go to the bees in anger, and they’ll give you anger back. This book is not for your eyes, Sapphire, no matter if you put your life into it. It’s not for you to read. Remember that, no matter what the temptation.”

  I nod. I feel too shaky to answer.

  “You want to make things go back to what they were before last summer, but the pages have turned.” Granny Carne’s voice is stern now. “You cannot turn them back except by blinding yourself. Go forward, my girl. There’s good and bad coming that won’t be cured by looking back. I can’t see the scope and nature of it yet, but I can read its power. Keep your eyes open. Ingo is growing strong, and the Mer blood in you is racing to meet it.

  “But remember something. Remember that you are Earth too, even when you are angry with her, as a girl is angry with her mother when she’s growing away from her. That’s what you carry, my girl, the gifts of both sides. Two ways they can be used: to split you in half or to heal what needs healing.

  There are hard times coming. Troubled times.” There are hard times coming. Troubled times.” We stand frozen for a few moments. Granny Carne’s amber eyes are as wide as the eyes of an owl hunting in the dark. Sadie is like a statue, and I can’t move or speak. And then the spell breaks, and we’re just an old woman drinking tea, a girl eating bread and honey, and a dog who wants a walk.