Page 14 of A Magic Deep & Drowning

“I am sorry, Clara. I am sorry for more than you will ever know. You should get back to your maid now, and back to your family.”

She was being dismissed, but what choice did she have? With a heart so heavy that it threatened to drown her, she turned to leave, when his voice stopped her once more.

“And Clara? Remember what I told you: stay away from the water.”

Maurits watched as the maid dragged Clara back to the big stone house. Even when he could no longer see the white smudge of her gown, he still stared after her into the darkness. Saying goodbye had been harder than it had any right to be.

Rain was falling light but steady, and he tugged his torn shirt off over his head so that he might feel it on his skin. The water felt good—more than good. It felt like a held breath let out after too long. It felt like life.

His mother was near; he could sense the heaviness in the air, the expectation. He shivered despite himself—a grown man, afraid of his own mother. The seven days were drawing to an end, and he did not wish to find out what sort of punishment she might devise if he did not return in time.

He could hear his mother’s dulcet voice through the canal, calling for him, asking where he was and if he had the girl yet. As soon as he stepped back into the water she would know that he had failed, and willfully so. At least on land he was free, if only for a time.

Pacing along the canal, Maurits forced himself to think. Clara was the last girl that his mother required. He’d never felt right about his mother calling in a debt he had always assumed was a bluff, had hoped that as some of them grew into adults that his mother would leave off in her quest for revenge. “The humans broke their word,” she would say, Thade, fawn-eyed, nodding vigorously by her side. “They knew the terms of the agreement, and now they must pay.”

His mother was right; he knew that. The humans were careless with the land that they had conquered and reclaimed. And their greed did not stop at the land; if it had, then perhaps his mother would have been content to let the tree spirits and moss people handle them. But the humans insisted on encroaching into the sea. They hunted whales for their oils, fished herring to the point of extinction. It seemed that their hunger for the sea’s bounty could not be sated.

As the rain fell, Maurits could feel the eyes of the widde juvven peering out at him between the trees, the elves watchingfrom under rain-spangled flowers. It was their land, but like all of the nature folk, they adhered to the truce. So long as humans occupied the lowlands, the Old Ones were bound together by their common interest.

By the time Maurits reached the sea, his legs were burning and his throat was on fire. The breeze, though slight, felt good in his hair. Waves blanketed in starlight lapped at the beach, beckoning him home. He didn’t want to go back, not yet, but he had been out of the water much too long, and was beginning to feel faint. He had little choice but to let the waves take him and meet his fate at the hands of his mother.

Chapter Ten

It was with trembling fingers that Helma helped Clara out of her robe in her bedchamber. They had come in through the back, Clara begging Helma to be quiet so that they would not wake any of the servants, or God forbid, her parents. Clumsy with anger, Helma had nearly knocked over a vase and awoken the whole household.

“Helma, please, I wish you would let me do it. There’s no need for you to. Won’t you sit down?”

Helma didn’t resist as Clara guided her to the edge of the bed. “How... how long has it been going on?” she asked Clara, and then to herself, added, “Right under my nose! How did I never see it?”

“Hush, now. You’re making a fuss over something which I think you must realize is really a very little thing.”

Helma’s eyebrows shot up. “Where does your mind travel on Sundays in church? What is the world coming to if maidenly virtue amounts to only ‘a very little thing’? I might understand if you had no one to teach you better, but you’ve had me. Child, you’ve had me!”

Clara was not untouched by Helma’s concern, but Helma failed to understand that there was a difference between polite conduct and passionate matters of the heart. “There now,” Clara said as if she were comforting a child, “dry your tears. I’m not a lost soul, nor a fallen woman.” She didn’t add that if Helmahad not come upon them when she had, that she very well might have been. “But do you expect me to enter my marriage a complete innocent, without any taste of the ways of the world?”

“I expect you to enter your marriage a virgin and an obedient woman! As does God, and as do your parents and your poor intended.”

“Do you think Hendrik has never had his own... adventures?” Even as she said it, Clara couldn’t quite picture Hendrik with a woman, or enjoying anything besides business, for that matter.

“I’m sure it’s not my place to think anything about what Mr. Edema does or does not do. Besides,” Helma added with an uncomfortable sniff, “it’s different for gentlemen.”

The thought of Maurits with another woman in his arms made Clara’s stomach tighten. For as little as she knew about him and as thinly acquainted as they were, she couldn’t deny the way her whole world turned brilliant and exciting when he was near.

“You can’t speak a word of this to my mother,” she said in deadly earnestness.

Helma nodded. “I will not tell your mother. For all your folly, I wouldn’t see you beaten at her hands, or your marriage put at risk.”

After Helma had insisted on praying with her and finally left her alone, Clara lay in bed. Sleep would be impossible, not just because of the racing of her heart, but because of the lingering sting from Maurits letting her go so easily.

Maurits’s mother came to him, as she always did, in a school of darting fish, then transforming into her true form with a bright flash of sea foam. He was on the sandy ocean floor, leaning against a rock as he recovered his bearings, letting the water seep into him, revive him.

“When will you learn that land holds nothing but pain and disappointment?” she asked him by way of a greeting. Her voice was the thunderous sound of waves crashing on rocks, the whisper of rainfall on a placid canal. “You return spent and half-dead, yet you cannot wait to go back at the earliest opportunity. It pains me to see you thus.”

There was nothing he could say that would satisfy her, so he remained silent, letting the waves high above gently massage away his aches and pains.

She sighed, adjusting a tendril of flame-red hair into her pearl crown. “You only make this harder for yourself by growing attached.” Maurits snapped his gaze up to meet hers, and saw the corner of her lips pulling into the smallest of smiles. “Yes, of course I know what is transpiring up on land. I have eyes everywhere. Did you really think I wouldn’t discover your infatuation?”

There was no anger in her sea foam eyes, no malice. Just sharp interest. “Why does it have to be her?” he couldn’t help himself from asking.

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