Robin McKinley - Water

He exhausted himself at last, and she risked letting Flora go forward. The mare danced sideways as they passed Robert’s horse, but he had run out of drama, and let them go. She wanted to put Flora to the gallop as soon as they were clear of him, but she was afraid that he would read in this a flight worth pursuing; and so she let her mare break only into a trot, and worked to keep it leisurely, although Flora fussed at the bit, and her ears lay back. Gruoch loped casually beside her.

She never saw Robert again.

She went to bed early that night, but there was little rest for her in the long continuous dreams of the land under the sea; and now she was seeing her sea-prince arm in arm, as lovers should be, with a sea-princess, who had golden-green hair that lay in curls behind her, suspended on the silvery, ripply water that was their air. She saw them kiss, and she thought her heart would break; and it had broken once already. She did not know if she could recover, this second time, so soon after the first. She woke in cold, grey dawn, imagining her prince telling her of his betrothed, she the land-girl of whom he was so fond, just like a sister to him. He would offer to let her meet the sea-princess, and the sea-princess, who had a good heart, would ask that Jenny be godmother to their first child.

She almost did not go to meet Dreiad the next day, but she had promised, and they had never yet broken promise to each other; and what she feared had nothing to do with promises. So she went, but she knew that her eyes were shadowed, and that smiling made her face hurt, and she did not know what she could give him as an excuse, for she had promised herself that she would not tell him the truth. If he was happy, she wanted him to be happy with no hindrance from her. She did not think of telling him of the meeting with Robert as a reason for her depression of spirits, for she had forgotten it herself.

But as it happened, Dreiad was too full of something else to notice her mood: too full of the same suppressed excitement she had seen in him two days before, only it was much stronger now, it was as if he moved carefully for fear it might burst out of him without any decision from him to yield to it. They must already be betrothed, she thought drearily.

He held out a hand as if to take hers, and then dropped it, remembering; she had made no answering motion, having not forgotten. “I have something to tell you,” he said.

“Yes?” she said, and was pleased to notice that her voice was calm, even cool.

He looked at her in a little puzzlement, as if first taking in that perhaps not all was well with her; but the excitement bubbled up again and would not be stoppered. “I went to visit someone yesterday, which is why I could not be with you. This is someone I have been looking for for some time, someone who could answer my dearest wish.”

She nodded, her hands clasped at her belt.

“And I have found her!” He laughed as if he could not help himself, but then, looking at Jenny, the puzzlement came back for a moment. “Can you not guess?” he said, but in a quieter voice; and again his hand reached to touch hers and withdrew, and again hers had made no motion to meet his.

She made herself smile. “Yes, I think I can guess,” she said, but the tone of her voice was wrong and he heard it, and the puzzlement deepened, and the excitement sank out of his eyes and some uncertainty crept in, and distress with it.

“I—” he said, and paused. “I was so sure you would be as pleased as I. It is the answer, you see. Or I hoped it was.”

She did not hear his words, but she saw the distress and was sorry. She was breaking her promise already. She tried to smile. “Tell me,” she said.

But the excitement had left him, and he stumbled over what he had to tell her. “She lives far away, and at first I only knew the rumour of her, and I couldn’t ask openly, of course, but everyone is accustomed to my having strange fits of curiosity about this and that and I didn’t tell anyone why I wanted to find her, of course, and I was able to at last, without telling anyone, I mean. I had to tell her, of course, but it won’t matter, soon. . . . I mean, I thought it wouldn’t matter. . . . I thought. . . .” He looked at her, miserably.

His misery touched her, for she did love him. And her hands made the same gesture that his had, twice, wanting to reach her, touch her. Her hand reached towards him and, remembering, retreated. “Tell me,” she said again, her voice stronger. “I do want to know.”

“It’s only that she told me how you may visit under water,” he said in a rush. “Visit me.”

It was so completely not what she was expecting that her mouth dropped open; and when he saw that she had not guessed what he had to tell her, he laughed for pure relief. “She is very old, and will not tell you her name; I believe nobody has known her name for centuries; she is very old even by our standards. And she says that it is not that she doesn’t want to help anyone, it’s just that almost everyone has such silly ideas of what they have to have help with, and she got tired of sending silly people away, and so now she is very hard to find in the first place. She says sometimes the silliest people are the most stubborn, and she wonders if some of the people with the problems she really could help with simply decide that it is their fate and stop trying; but then maybe if that is their attitude, it is their fate. But when I found her, and told her about us, she was perfectly willing to help, but she said it was an unusual situation and she could remember only one other case, but it was a long time ago, and she would need time to remember what she knew about it. That’s why I couldn’t tell you last time. I wanted to wait—just in case she couldn’t remember, couldn’t help us, though I was pretty sure she could, she had all but promised that she could.”

Jenny was responding to his excitement without, still, really taking it in. All that she understood clearly was that this she was not his betrothed sea-princess, and that Dreiad was calling himself and her, Jenny, we. And so she listened to the tone of his voice and was happy. But when he came to the end and drew breath, she still didn’t know what she was happy about.

“She’s really very nice,” he said, finally, “and it’s funny, because she likes to talk. It’s not that she doesn’t like people or anything. I’ll take you to meet her. You’ll like her too.”

Jenny couldn’t speak. She stood, smiling, her misery evaporating like fog in sun.

“Well,” he said, beaming at her. “Will you come?”

“Come?” said Jenny, still thinking, He calls us we. It was too absolute a thing, the division between land and water, the division between her and him. By tomorrow she would have figured out a way to see even this as merely a putting off of the inevitable, putting off their eventual, absolute parting; he was offering her a visit to his land, like the visits he could make to hers. That was all. That was why she still resisted taking it in, because of what would follow.

“With me,” he said. “To my home.” And then his self-possession broke, and his hands reached for hers and seized them, and he said, “Oh, Jenny, I love you so!” Her hands had reached too, to seize his the sooner, and the clasp was as if their two hearts met, for neither noticed that one was too warm and too dry, and the other too cool and too wet. He drew her into his arms, and wrapped them around her, and hers went round him, and she laid her face against his cool wet shoulder, and his damp hair brushed her flushed cheek.

But after a moment, solemnly, he took a step back from her, though he kept his hands around her waist. “It is a risk for you,” he said.