Page 37 of A Magic Deep & Drowning

“Is there anyone who would recognize you? Vouch for your identity?” Tryn asked gently. “Someone outside of the city who could perhaps take you in?”

“There’s no one,” she whispered, the gravity of her situation settling in her stomach.

“Poor child,” Jan said around his pipe stem, his eyes creased with pity.

Clara rubbed the heels of her hands into her eyes until stars exploded behind her eyelids. In the cave, it had seemed enough to escape, to get back to land. But now that she was here, reality crashed over her like a frigid wave. “What am I to do?” she asked, more to herself than the old couple watching her.

“Well, I’ll tell you what I would do,” Jan said, crossing his arms over his thin chest. “I’d go on to Amsterdam and find myself a position. Good manners and breeding mean you could be a lady’s maid, or even a companion.”

A lady’s maid or companion. Clara searched his face for any sign that he was jesting, but of course found only earnestness. Her life at Wierenslot might not have been a happy one, but it was all she had ever known. Even in her dreams of escaping and starting a new life as a wife of some esteemed man, she still would have had a good name behind her, a level of comfort to which she was accustomed. But to start anew, and with none of those considerations...

As Jan lit another pipe and rambled on about different possibilities, Clara let the idea settle. Losing herself in a city, starting a new life for herself... She would put Maurits from her mind, devote herself to forgetting all that had occurred. She was an orphan and a widow, completely alone in the world. And wasn’t that what she had always wanted? Independence? A future that could forge herself? She had just never imagined that it would come with such a cost.

“Hush, you,” Tryn admonished her husband. “The poor mite is too tired to think about cities and positions. Let her rest, then we’ll talk of it tomorrow.”

Hoisting himself up from his seat with a grunt, Jan tamped out his pipe. “You bide here a week or so, and I’ll teach you some husbandry, and Tryn here can teach you mending and sewing. By the time you’re in Amsterdam, you’ll be skilled as any maid.”

Clara offered the kind old man a weak smile. Her legs ached, her eyes were heavy, and her mind was all tangled up with dreams and memories from the flood. Time since then had slowed down, the days and nights spent under the water and walking the land blurring until she could no longer parse out what was real and what had been a dream. But as she curled up on the blankets Tryn had arranged for her by the stove, her head was finally blessedly empty, and she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Life on the small farm with Tryn and Jan was a new kind of dream. Clara went to bed every night with aching arms and fingers numb from spinning wool, but also with a full belly and clear mind. If only Helma could see her now, working with her sleeves rolled to her elbows, her brow glistening with sweat. It would be a lie to say that she was good at the work, that it came naturally to her. But to Clara’s surprise, she liked it. She liked feeling useful, like she had accomplished something by the time she lay down each night.

Though her family had owned some farmland adjacent to their estate, Clara never knew much of what went on within a farm. She wondered if all farms were as idyllic as Jan and Tryn’s, with a well that produced the clearest, sweetest water Clara had ever seen, and chickens that laid plump eggs by the dozens every day.

“I don’t know what we’ll do when you leave,” Jan confided in her one afternoon as they sat to eat a meal of soft bread andcreamy cheese after cleaning out the chickens’ coop. “You’ve become like a daughter.”

The breeze was lifting Jan’s wispy gray hair at his temples, and she had the sudden urge to reach out and brush it back for him. The tender feeling took her aback. Was this what it was like to be beloved of a parent? Could there be more between a father and daughter than simply cold, transactional duty? “Maybe I don’t have to leave,” she said quietly.

Tryn, who had come outside to join them, put down her cup with a clatter on the ground. “Now don’t start becoming sentimental, the both of you,” she said. “This is no life for a young woman, never mind a young woman of means. You are educated and gently bred, and it would be selfish of Jan and me to keep you here feeding chickens and mending hose.”

Clara’s shoulders sagged. It was no use arguing with Tryn—she ruled the house with the authority of a queen. For a few days at the farm Clara had been able to forget, but more than that, she’d known what it was to have a family, people who cared about her and valued her. The farm was like a little world unto itself. She hadn’t seen another person besides Jan and Tryn since she had been here. No carriages passed on the road, no peddlers selling trinkets came knocking at the door. It was cozy and safe, and she was loathe to plunge back out into the uncertain world beyond the gate.

But the day of her departure came, and with it, a deepening sense of finality.

Clara broke her fast with a bowl of boiled potatoes, mashed and served with smoked sausage. It was strange to think this was the last meal she would eat at the wooden table, the last time she would listen to Jan and Tryn good-naturedly bicker over cups of tea. It had only been a fortnight, but already this place had indelibly imprinted itself on her heart.

When she was finished, Tryn packed a bag for her with some apples and cheese, a blanket, and her old clothes whichhad been mended and ironed. On the front step, the clouds slid over the sun, and a rooster crowed from beyond the yard.

“A fine day for travel,” Jan remarked, squinting up into the sky. “Clouds in the morning is always a good omen.”

Tryn elbowed her husband. “Now, don’t be putting it off any longer. It’s time we told her.”

Jan was suddenly red in the face, making a show of examining his pipe with a deep frown. Clara looked between them. “Told me what?” she asked, a prickle growing along her neck. “What is it?”

Jan gave a heavy sigh. “Very well.” Plunging his hands into the pockets of his rough trousers, Jan faced Clara. “Child, there is a reason you cannot stay with us. A reason why you must find your own way.”

Clara waited for him to continue, but it was Tryn who cut to the heart of the matter. “What do you know of the Old Ones?” she asked.

Clara opened her mouth, closed it again. “From the stories?”

Tryn gave an impatient huff. “So you do know of them, but you think they exist only in tales?”

“Come now,” Jan said to his wife. “How would she know? They aren’t like us, they don’t teach their young the way of things.” Clara watched, confused, as he fumbled in his pocket for his tobacco and prepared another pipe. “We have not told you a single falsehood, but neither have we told you the truth,” he said to Clara, his creased blue eyes boring into her over the curling smoke of his pipe.

A strange feeling began to spread in Clara, and she looked at her friends closer, as if seeing them for the first time. Had Tryn always been so small of stature? Was Jan’s beard always so white, so long? They both had an almost... sparkling quality about them, as if they had bathed in starlight and dewdrops.

A rare smile spread over Tryn’s lined face, her eyes sparkling emerald green. “That’s right. Don’t just look at what is in front of you. Use your eyes, your heart, toseeus.”

The rooster had left off in its crowing, and even the breeze seemed to hold its breath. There must have been a name for what Tryn and Jan were, but if Clara knew it from her childhood tales, she could not find it now.

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