The Merrow’s Cap
The cap sat in all its scarlet splendor in a forgotten nook in the attic.
Once it had flown through the waves, singing with the sea and laughing at the wind. Nowadays, it simply sat, slightly crushed between trunks and crates, and was home to at least a hundred generations of spiders.
The spiders, in gratitude for such a hospitable home, wove delicate threads of silk about the hat to keep away both dust and hungry moths.
For a long time, the cap didn’t mind the solitude. The spiders told wonderful stories of the things that happened downstairs and outside. But to a cap that is used to wonder and adventure and great explorations, its quiet life of retirement soon began to wear thinner than spider silk.
It couldn’t remember the girl. She was just a hazy smear of color with long golden hair. But it did remember her song.
The cap perked up as it thought of the song, remembering the cool sleekness of the sea and the underwater revelries. Those had been grand times, and it missed the gray sealskin cape that fluttered behind the girl like wings whenever their wanderings took them into colder climes. Being a cap, it never got cold.
But the girl did.
It should have expected that, sooner or later, with her thirst for wanderlust, that the girl would find a reason to explore the earthy world with its delicate flowers and strange creatures that had legs instead of fins. Creatures that had shorter lifespans than a lone mackerel passing a clutch of newly hatched barracudas.
She had tucked her cap and cape in among the grass waving gently among the salt patches along the shore. As fate would have it, that was to be their final goodbye. For not long after the girl headed inland on feet that looked more like flippers no matter how carefully she arranged her skirts, the cap and the cape had been rudely snatched from the grass by a large, calloused hand that was a bewildering mix of land and sea.
The cape, of course, was fed to the fire. The cap, being far more sensible to the danger, had blushed a stunning crimson and made sure the small shells stitched along its brim winked and laughed in the sunlight. I am too beautiful to burn, the cap purred gently in his hands—not that mortals were adept at hearing anything beyond their own boisterous tongues.
So, against his better judgement, the mortal tossed it into a dark corner of the attic. Every so often, he’d stick his thatch-colored head up into the attic long after the moon had risen in the sky. The cap glinted an icy welcome, which was always reassuring enough to the youth that eventually he stopped coming.
As for the girl, she never came at all.
But something had happened that caused it to sit up straighter and brush the sleep of those-who-had-been-forgotten from itself. Its movement caused a small explosion of dust to clear away from the spider netting. The spider, herself, was knocked from her perch right above the cap’s crown. She muttered grumpily about manners and such as she stomped back into place, her feet jabbing at the cap like miniature nettles. But the cap shook itself again, ignoring her.
What had woken—
And then it craned itself toward the one tiny window in the attic the wind had blown open as it had made its riotous way through spring.
Somewhere a girl was singing. Her voice wasn’t as bright and clear as the other girl’s voice, but the melody she was singing ran through the cap like eel-shock.
It was the selfsame song the girl had sung to it as she wove shells and feathers into a delicate cap fit for a princess of the sea, calling into it life and magic and knowing.
A fierce ache tore through the place where its heart would be if caps had hearts. Homesickness for the sea washed over its jaunty scarlet feathers until it felt the ages that had passed while it had slumbered forgotten.
But it was awake now. And waiting.
It cleared what passed for its throat and prepared to join in the song, but another, older voice murmured something and the girl stopped singing.
No! The cap cried in the silent language of caps. No! Come back! I’ve forgotten so much. Please, quiet and desperate, I’d forgotten that I’d forgotten.
It waited, every inch of its being quivering toward the empty place where the song had trilled up in lazy loops, but to no avail. The sun sank down into the ashes of its own making, and the moon made her stately way across the sky, and still the little cap waited.
Now that it was awake—truly awake—the urge to return home was too strong to let it fall back into a fitful slumber.
The girl might have forgotten it, but it had not forgotten her, nor the promise it had made when it had first perched on her head: keep you safe in the sea, and retrieve you back home. The girl who had sung earlier that day wasn’t the girl, but the girl’s blood was in the song, and that was close enough.
So the cap waited.
Waited through the cheerful sunshine of the next day and all through the night, listening to crickets singing and frogs gossiping, all the way until the first storm of spring.
“Good Morrow,” the wind cried as he slammed the tiny window’s shutters against the wall again and again. Then he narrowed his eyes and gave the cap a considering glance. “A bit out of your usual way, if you take my meaning.”
“Yes,” the cap said, relieved to be heard at last. For all its boisterous noisiness, the winds were surprisingly adept at hearing. “But that will soon change. I’ve been wanting—“
“I know,” the wind said, rubbing his ear. “I could hear you up above the Nimbus, and even through the revel the Sky Lords are hosting above. I imagine the world will get a sound spring cleaning.”
“Good.” The cap settled back in its place, content. Mortals had a strange aversion to water, especially when it explored places it wasn’t supposed to. Once the rain started dripping from the rafters, someone would be forced to come to the attic to investigate.
The wind frowned. “I don’t think you’re going about this the right way.”
“How so?” Once, the cap had ridden upon tidal waves, and it was almost giddy with fond remembrance.
The wind howled into the room, tangling carefully woven threads in the spider’s web, chasing dust and grit and anything that wasn’t nailed down or boxed up into corners and back and forth across the room.
“Wanting someone to you is strong magic, and magic is a bit down in the mouth at the moment thanks to everyone and their cat thinking they can make wishes with no regrets. I could hear you, because I’m a wind, but her,” he jabbed a finger toward the floorboards, “she won’t hear you.”
The cap straightened itself, nudging its spider away with an apologetic puff. “I haven’t done magic in a good long while. I just need practice.”
The wind furrowed his brows until they nearly met in the middle. “I don’t think you understand. Here, I’ll show you.”
Then, without so much as a by-your-leave, the wind swept the cap out of its dusty corner and out into the world. As the cap was jostled from the second story to the first, it could almost remember what it felt like to be tossed between the waves.
Its short flight was brought to an abrupt halt by a rather solid pane of glass.
“Look,” the wind boomed, smooshing the cap against the window. Grateful it neither felt pain, nor needed to breathe, the cap obeyed.
A pale smear of girl sat in a well-cushioned chair next to the fire, a book in her hands. Her hair reminded the cap of its girl when the sun oozed down the sky in crimson magenta fire and washed against the gold of her hair.
“Yes,” the cap said happily. “That’s her. Now, if you would be so kind as to open the window—“
The wind pressed the cap more firmly against the window. “Look again. She hasn’t been down to the beach in ages, and she won’t be taking you anywhere.”
More than a little annoyed at the wind’s insistence, the cap did as it was bade. The girl wore a white shirt and blue trousers. Bright socks with lemony yellow and tangerine stripes covered feet that curled elegantly like its girls fins had done. She would do well in the water, and the cap could almost feel the sharp gritty tang of the sea that would starch it stiff with salt.
“Thank you,” it said, for it had been brought up to be a polite cap. “Now, if you don’t mind, the window?”
The wind shrugged his large, round shoulders and rolled his eyes. “Caps.” But though the word dripped like an insult from his lips, the wind obliged and threw back the latch and opened the window wide.
“Thanks to you and your house,” the cap called as it caught a pinch of wind and rode the current in through the window and straight into the girl’s lap.
The girl jumped as it landed, her eyes wider than clamshells. Time stopped as the girl and the cap regarded one another.
“Where did you come from?” she asked, brushing a finger against its brim while the wind danced through her hair.
The cap remembered his girl and the way things happened as she approached the shore for the final time. If it was going to do a thing, it was going to do it properly. It took what it imagined to be a breath large enough to fill it with courage and daring and gleamed at her in the firelight.
I’ve been waiting for you, it said it the language of caps. So very long. Take me down to the sea, and together we’ll have grand adventures. You’ll see. We’ll watch the sun be born and die and be born again. We’ll laugh at the moon and gossip with the stars. We’ll fish for pearls in the deepest oceans and tease schools of hippofish as they make their way to Atlantis. The world will be ours and everything in it, and we need never say hello again, for we shall never say goodbye.
This was by far the largest and grandest speech the cap had ever made, and its crown sagged a little in the center from the effort. But its scarlet color had not been dimmed with time, and it had had a lot of time to think.
To imagine.
To dream.
Now it was ready to go out and do.
“What a funny cap,” the girl said with an affectionate smile. Her fingers brushed against the shells and the feathers, lighter than a butterfly’s kiss.
Before the cap could venture to ascertain whether or not it had just been insulted, a dark-haired woman rushed into the room with the airy grace of the wind.
“Emily, why is the window open? Your grandmother will catch a chill in this weather.” She closed the window and checked the latch to make sure it was shut good and tight. But though she’d put a stop to any errant wind mischief, the worry line between her eyes was as deep as when she’d come into the room.
The girl, Emily, dropped her hand into her lap. “The wind blew it open.”
“You ought to have called me. I would have closed it for you.” The woman—from what the cap had gathered from watching its girl, this person was more than likely Emily’s mother; she had the same harried look the girl’s mother had worn—bustled over to the other side of the room, and smoothed blankets and plumped pillows, and so didn’t see the frown curving Emily’s lips into a fallen crescent moon.
She dropped her eyes, bright with tears, to her hands and pressed her lips until they’d gone quite away. “I could have gotten it,” she muttered.
The cap, not yet sensible to The Way Things Were in this particular household, nevertheless approved of Emily’s mutinous tone. Mutiny meant a heart that wasn’t quiet, and the cap had had its fill of quiet. His girl had had a heart freer than sea or sky or wind. In a girl whose head would—should circumstances prove that even cap wishes can be granted—be graced with its presence, the cap expected nothing less.
Emily’s mother turned to face her, brushing an errant strand of hair from her cheek. “You aren’t allowed on your feet for another week. You’ve got to give them time to heal.”
Emily nodded, but even the cap could see the words she was biting down on before they could escape her lips. Her mother stepped toward her before a crash sounded from another room.
“Octavius,” she grumbled, her attention diverted. “If he’s gotten into supper, we’re going to have a new fur rug!”
It was only after Emily’s mother had hurried out of the room that Emily lifted her eyes. To the cap’s confusion, she looked at the window instead of at it. Then she sighed a wish that was so soft the cap nearly didn’t hear it.
Freedom.
Her eyes went bright again and her frown deepened.
“Emily,” a voice like brittle leaves dropping onto still water called.
The cap went stiff at the sound. It couldn’t be—
“Yes, Grandmother?” Emily dulled her eyes with the back of her hand before she pulled a lever at the side of her chair and rolled the chair—and herself—over to the place her mother had been fussing with.
“Don’t mind your mother,” the old woman said. For now that the cap was looking, it could make out a pale face that had more wrinkles than a manatee and wisps of white hair that had escaped their plait. There was nothing of its girl in the face, and yet . . .
Emily’s mouth quirked into a grin. “I try not to, but she usually catches me.”
“I’m afraid that’s my fault.” The old woman glanced at Emily’s stripy feet that curved inward at impossible angles, her dark eyes soft and deep. “Hopefully this time’s the charm.”
Emily’s happiness slipped from her face before she carefully folded up her sadness and slid it into a corner of her heart where she stored Things Better Left Forgotten.
The cap, its attention torn between the old woman and the Emily, suspected that it was a rather crowded corner.
The sea will make your heart right, it assured her the best it could. There is nothing like riding a herd of waves washing out into the great unknown to everyone but us. Freedom is salt and sea and everything in between.
“Look what the wind blew in,” Emily said, adjusting her chair before she held up the cap. “I’ve never seen anything like it before. I’m not quite sure if it’s beautiful or not.”
The cap puffed itself up proudly. It was far too strange and wonderful a thing to be considered something so pedestrian as beautiful. It was lovely enough to be saved from a fiery end, but not something comfortable enough to be displayed with the special china.
And that was just fine with it.
It was what it was, and what it wanted was out. Right now.
It stared hard at the girl, willing her to hear, wishing her to understand.
The old woman, meanwhile, had gone paler still, if such a thing were possible.
“Where did you get that?” she asked, the words barely squeaking past the breath caught in her throat.
“I told you,” Emily smiled, “the wind blew it in. I would have noticed it in the house before, and when the window flew open, this appeared on my lap.”
“May I . . . Can I touch it?” The old woman held out a hand gnarled by time and working too hard.
Wordlessly, Emily passed the cap to her grandmother. The moment the old woman’s fingers brushed against its brim, the cap knew.
You abandoned me, it cried. Then, remembering its manners, You have grown old, yet still you remember me.
The old woman’s eyes went wet with long forgotten dreams in a long forgotten life. “You came back,” she said wonderingly. She patted the crown before she traced the garland of seashells, stopping every third one to rub the center of the shell, just as she’d always done before.
The cap leaned into her touch, only now realizing how lonely it had been all those years without touch or conversation. Spiders were useful for gossiping and telling stories, but they didn’t live them. Not like the girl.
“Grandmother?” Emily said, a wary expression on her face. “Is everything all right? If the hat upsets you—“
“No, no,” the cap’s girl said, lifting it out of the girl’s reach and hugging it to her chest.
The cap would have closed its eyes if it had had any to close, and just listened to the sound of the ocean beating through the girl’s heart. The melody had changed a bit, of course. That’s what living on land did to a person. But underneath it all was the sound that was so familiar, it was as if the girl had never gone away and forgotten them all.
“I promise I’m all right,” the girl said—although the cap wasn’t quite sure it should be calling her girl any longer. She had aged far beyond her sisters. She reached out and clasped one of Emily’s hands. “I just never expected to see this again.”
Emily raised a brow. “That’s your hat? I thought you didn’t like wearing them.”
Her grandmother looked down, and a single tear splashed against the cap’s crown. “Neither did I.”
I will take you home, the cap said. Return you to the sea and your sisters. You have grown old, but you are still of the sea—your tear tells me this is so. Put me on your head as you used to and let us go have more adventures.
“I’m a little old for adventuring,” she said with a wry smile, but there was a faraway look in her eye. The cap’s offer had awakened something within her, something she’d forgotten so long ago.
“Adventuring?” Emily leaned toward them.
The cap perked up. There was something in her voice, nebulous, yes, but definitely there.
I cannot return you to the sea and bring her along as well, but perhaps you might make another—for her, of course. Now that it had gotten its girl back, the cap was resolute that they would never be separated again. It knew a thing or two about old magics, but it would need the sea to seal the bargain.
“Emily,” her mother walked back into the room, looking more harried than she had before. “That blasted cat dumped the dish I’d prepared for supper all over the floor.”
Emily sprang back into her chair with a guilty lurch while her grandmother tucked the cap beneath her pillow. Fortunately for the both of them, her mother was still focused on the stew splattered against the floor and the cabinets. For though Octavius was nowhere to be found, her mother hadn’t missed the trail of cat-shaped footprints leading from the scene of the crime to the sofa, and out through the window.
Her mother sighed. “Your father’s going to be home soon, and he’ll have to deal with the cat. I need to run to the store to pick something up. Is there anything you want? I could pick up some pizza, if you’d like.”
The cap, now that it had brushed up on its listening skills, could clearly hear the wish reverberating within the mother’s heart. She wanted to make everything all right. Wanted to make up for the numerous surgeries on her daughter’s feet that never worked and only made the bright, sunny girl pull more and more into herself the way a crab pulls into its shell. She wanted her daughter to laugh again.
“Sure,” Emily said, her voice not quite as sad as it had been before.
“Really?” her mother said. The cap didn’t need to be able to see her to know that some of the spark had returned to her as well.
“Yes,” Emily said as though trying the words on to see if they fit. “I’d like that.”
“Pizza it is, then.” Hope radiated from the mother and snuggled deep inside the place where the cap kept its heart. “I’ll be back soon. And if you see that cat while I’m gone—“
“I’ll be sure to let him know he has disgraced the family name and blackened its honor,” Emily replied, the smile in her tone there for all to see.
“See that you do,” her mother said. I love you, her heart whispered.
“I will.”
The girl—the grandmother—waited until the backdoor closed and the car coughed to life before she pulled the cap out from under her pillow.
She can’t come, the cap said, a bit of its heart wrinkling in the process. It was in its nature to hear wishes, and it tore at its heart like the rough winds of a sea at war with the beach when what was wanted wasn’t what would be.
I know, the old woman’s eyes said. I know.
“Emily, how would you like to have an adventure?”
She eyed her grandmother dubiously, and neither one of them looked at her feet. “What sort of adventure?” she asked in a tone that implied she was far too old for the games that had made the waiting and hoping—and eventual disappointment—easier to bear.
The cap beamed from seam to seam. Put me on.
Emily’s grandmother settled the cap on her head, sighing as though a burden she’d been carrying around for years without realizing it had been lifted.
The cap allowed itself a moment to luxuriate in being in its proper place once more before it seized the magic collected in its heart and set to work at honoring the promise it had made so long ago.
The magic of the sea was far older than the land, and far less likely to obey. It had a will of its own, and wasn’t above subverting the goal simply to be contrary. It crashed through the threads of magic the cap had held on tightly to all those years, nearly carrying it away with the strength of its swell.
Desperately, the cap fought against the sea magic, clinging to memories of dust and cobwebs and the constant chatter of the spiders as they wove their webs. The cap nearly despaired when those quiet thoughts failed to calm the magic. What did land matter compared to the power of a wish?
The magic thundered through it, screaming with triumph and hunger and fierce anticipation.
Wait, called the cap as it put all its own magic and strength into not being squashed flat by the onslaught of magic. Even so, the sea would only have to push a little harder to punch a hole right through the cap’s magic—and likely the cap as well.
It couldn’t fulfill its promise if it were just a bit of soggy brim with a few tenacious strings of shells and a couple of drowned feathers.
Grabbing hold of this thought—for the promise a cap makes to its merrow is not without its own power, the cap rallied as best it could against the storm battering against it from the inside out.
Wait! It called again, an order.
To its surprise, the magic of the sea hesitated for a moment before looking at it as best as something without eyes can see.
We have waited long, the sea magic bellowed in what, for it, was likely its regular voice.
Yes, the cap scrabbled against its magic, willing it to hold, you have. But if you could just wait—
We are patient, the sea roared. But patience, like the tide, eventually runs out. The sea magic coiled about itself in a way not that dissimilar from sea dragons who were preparing to spring at their prey.
She is mine, the cap tried again, certain that if it lost control of the magic, they, all three, would be lost. I am hers. I made a promise.
By now, the sea magic had doubled its size and, doubtless, its power. If the cap’s heart had been mortal, it would have given way right then. But the cap of a merrow’s heart is made of stronger stuff than blood and air and muscle. It is made of wishes and dreams, promises and secrets, and a bit of the merrow who made it.
She was ours first, the sea replied. And she will be ours at the last.
Yes, the cap said, but at the moment, she is still mine and I am still hers. I want to bring her back home—to you.
You have summoned us, and we have come. Why do you hope to stand between us and our child? We have come to bring her home.
Not like this, the cap said. Not like this.
The sea paused once more, and the cap had a feeling that this would be the last time. What can a scrap of scarlet do against the might of the sea? How can you know better than us, we who have lived longer than you can comprehend?
I can’t, the cap admitted miserably. I am not old or wise. If I had been wise, I would have waited to call you until we stood against the shore. But my girl is old, and she can no longer make it down to the sea. I can’t bring her home without your help, but I can’t let you destroy this place either.
The sea went silent, which made the cap very nervous indeed. The sea’s magic was the sort of creature that stopped to think rarely, and never had very many thoughts often. It was a deep, powerful magic that used brute force and beguilement by turns.
Most importantly, neither the sea nor its magic had a heart.
And yet, there it stood, coiled and ready to spring, but waiting as though seeping through the cap’s words in search of their meaning.
Knowing it could very well spell disaster, the little cap stood firm and true and pulled back the scarlet, the feathers, and shells so the sea could peer into such as what made up its heart.
If the sea had been thunderously loud before, it was now a watchful sort of silence that was a weight almost heavier to bear. It had gone from tempest to swift flowing current, but was no less dangerous for the change.
With each moment that passed, the weight of the sea’s magic grew heavier and heavier, until the cap was nearly crushed with the enormity of it.
At last the sea drew back enough that the cap was no longer quite so certain that calling on the sea’s magic had been summoning up its own demise.
You will bring her back, the sea murmured, a question, a command, and strangely enough, a hope.
I will.
Very well, the sea said, all sun drenched diamonds and playful spray. Don’t be too long about it.
Then it drew back further still, until a slender, but powerful, strand of magic was all that remained. Quickly, before the sea could change its mind again, the cap plucked up the thread and wove it into a spell powered by love and longing and hope.
The thread fizzed with a golden shimmer as the magics combined. Exhausted and hollowed out from spending all the magic it had hoarded meticulously throughout the years, the cap let go of the thread and slumped in on itself.
For better or worse, it was done.
“Grandmother!” Emily cried, moving to jump forward, but falling back in her chair the moment her mostly healed feet touched the ground. “Grandmother!”
Through the pearly haze of Magic Accomplished, the cap could see the terror and wonder on the little girl’s face.
But neither of them had to wait long. The girl was already peeling back the layers of magic that had formed like a gelatinous egg about her with hands that were no longer ravaged by time and bitten by mortality.
Beneath the cap, the girl’s hair thickened and turned lush, the color of the golden sea grass lining the bottom of one of their favorite grottos. And when she spoke, her voice no longer creaked like a drowning ship determined to have its say before the waves swallowed it whole.
“Emily,” the cap’s girl said, holding out her slender arms. “Don’t be afraid.”
Emily’s eyes widened until they were two identical sand dollars reflecting the sky back at itself.
“Grandmother?”
The little girl’s wonder and hope sparked against the threads of magic filling the room, and the cap dearly hoped it wouldn’t give the magic any ideas. While jubilant at surviving long enough to triumph, it still felt as though the sea—in its entirety—had stepped out of its bed and sat on it.
Which wasn’t all that far from the truth.
“Yes, it’s me,” the girl said. She pushed back the blankets and stepped gingerly onto the floor. Her feet curved inward, though not quite as much as Emily’s, and every step she took was the land reminding her that home and belonging were not to be found here.
For the land had remembered where she had come from, even though she had forgotten.
“But . . . But how?”
“How about I tell you while we go on our adventure,” the girl said. She smiled and beamed as though determined to personify happiness, but the cap knew her well enough to sense the current of sorrow traveling just below the surface.
The closer you get to the sea, the more the binding of the land will loosen until it falls from you completely, it warned.
I know.
Goodbye will be harder with the sea pulling you in one direction and this child pulling in the other.
I know, the girl replied. But just as you had to call down a power far beyond your scope to keep your promise, so must I. This is my burden and my joy. I cannot do it without you, my friend.
And so you shan’t.
In no time at all, the cap’s girl had bundled Emily up against the boisterous merrymaking of the early spring wind. The winter had been long, and he had a lot of mischief to get out of his system before the land gentled into summer.
He plucked at the shawl the girl had wrapped around Emily, tweaking stripy toes, and nipping at unprotected noses and cheeks.
My brother passed through here earlier, the wind said by way of greeting. Said he’d met a most foolish cap who was determined to do the impossible.
Yes, the cap whispered sleepily as it snuggled against the girl’s curls. He was wrong, and you may tell him so.
Oh, the spring wind laughed, I intend to. Then he raced away, bending grass and shaking at the trees, though there was precious little to shake loose.
“Once upon a time,” the girl said as she pushed the chair down the path and toward the sea, “a little merrow took it into her head to visit the land.”
“You,” Emily breathed with a certainty that wasn’t sure how it felt about things.
The girl nodded. She stepped gingerly as she walked, and the cap wished it had thought to enlist the wind’s help in getting them down to the beach. Of course, knowing a thing or two about the winds blowing through the spring, anxious to show off their strength and try their wit, they might have ended up being blown into a tree or tangled up in wash lines instead.
“Yes. The rest of the Sea’s children envy the merrows, for we can live both in the sea and on the land.”
But not without cost, the cap murmured, thinking of the merrow’s cape. She would have to craft a new one, of course, but it wouldn’t be the same. Still, a new cape was better than no cape at all.
No. Not without cost.
They were close enough to the beach that they could hear the sound of the water lapping away at the land as sea and shore swapped gossip and stones and shells. The tang of the waters salted the air, and farther out, the sea birds squawked at each other, trying to find tasty morsels before the others did.
“How do they—how did you do that?” Emily had craned herself half around so she could look at her grandmother while she pushed the chair.
“When a merrow is born, the very first thing she does is make her cap.” The girl rubbed a finger against its brim affectionately. “Once she has made it, she must never lose it or the sea will turn away from her if she is on land, and the land will forever remain beyond her grasp if she is in the sea.”
Emily furrowed her brow. “But I’ve never seen you wear that hat before.”
“That’s because I didn’t have it,” the girl said with a sigh. “When I set foot on the shore, I hid my cap and my cape—
Don’t ask, the cap said sadly.
“—and someone—your grandfather—must have found them. People are very good at hiding things—especially when they must if they are to get what they want.”
“Why didn’t you ask for it back?”
The land beneath them turned from the smooth cement of the walking path to earth pocked with stones and twigs and dried out garlands of seaweed. But though the land did not go completely inhospitable, and sloped gently as it stretched out to meet the sea, the girl struggled for balance as she pushed her granddaughter closer to the sea.
“The price of our power is in our caps,” the girl said, her voice strained with the pain of walking, though she did her best to hide it. “When it is no longer ours, because someone else has claimed it, our memories of the sea disappear.”
“You forgot.” Emily sank back into the chair while she digested this information. She eyed the water curling along the shore in great swaths of white lace and frowned. “But you have it back now.”
“Yes.”
The cap’s girl had gone breathless with pain. There was only a small bit of land left until they reached their destination, but the way was mostly pebbles and sun-dried bracken.
The cap fed a small spark of magic—nearly all it had left—to the girl to make the way a little easier. She smiled her thanks, but even with the magic, the ground behind her was flecked with her blood.
It took far longer than the cap would have liked, but at last its girl shuddered to a stop on the sand darkened by water. The sea sang as they approached, reaching toward them with long, watery fingers.
“You’re leaving now,” Emily said, her eyes bright with tears, but lifeless as she lost one more thing that anchored her in place.
The girl tugged at the lever and locked the wheels in place. She kept the sea carefully in the corners of her eyes. She had a purpose, the cap realized too late, beyond returning home.
I promised—
I know. Trust me. I need you.
Then I am here.
“Emily,” the girl knelt down in front of her so they could speak eye to eye
Emily didn’t move or answer, but she listened, knowing that what was coming would only break her heart into tinier pieces.
“Emily, I have to return to the sea, and I can’t take you with me.”
“I know,” Emily said, the words coming from the deepest part of her, scraping against her tongue and the sunlight until they were raw and ragged.
“No,” the girl said, a laugh in her throat. “I don’t think you do.”
What are you planning?
Trust me, she said. We are about to have our greatest adventure yet.
“I have to go home right now, but I don’t have to stay there.”
Emily tilted her head, the thought deepening in her eyes. “You’re not leaving forever?”
“How can I when a large part of my heart is here with you?”
“You’ll come back?”
“I promise. But that’s not the most important part of what I wanted to tell you.”
The girl paused long enough to grin as she relished in the complete attention of one scarlet cap and one little girl.
“When summer returns, I will come for you.” She touched each striped foot as carefully as she had walked. “You have my blood, so you also have my gift.”
Emily’s jaw dropped open as she stared at her feet. Then she tore her gaze away to look at her grandmother. Hope and wonder, and more than a little magic, burned her words away, but some things didn’t need words to be spoken just the same.
The girl stroked an errant strand of hair out of Emily’s face. “I will teach you the ways and the secrets of the sea. She is wild and gentle, fierce and free. And once the two of you have made friends, I shall take you to meet my sisters and show you my very favorite places.”
“How?” Emily breathed out with her soul.
The cap nestled against the girl’s fingers as she stroked it once more. “You’ll need a cap of your own to convince the sea you truly mean to be friends. I can’t make one for you, for each merrow must craft her own.”
“If you teach me, I’ll be able to make my own so I can come visit you whenever I want.” Emily’s eyes were still bright, but had taken to shining for a completely different reason.
“A merrow is born with the knowing. It isn’t something that can be taught, so we shall have to see if the mortal blood within you is weak enough to let the knowing through. But even if it isn’t, all will be well. My cap is a special cap. It is the only one of its kind with a heart big enough for two. Either we’ll swim together or alone, but you will come to the sea as is your right.”
“Promise?” Emily asked. In that moment, her soul was as fragile as glass from all the hoping.
“I promise.” The girl straightened and kissed her on the cheek. “The tide won’t trouble you, and your mother will know where to find you when she comes home. I thought—I thought you might like to see me off.”
Emily nodded and hugged her grandmother tight. “Hurry back soon.”
“I will.”
The last steps between land and sea bit cruelly into the girl’s feet, but the sea washed away the pain and the blood as legs and feet changed into fin and flippers. She turned back to the girl with striped socks waving from her seat along the shore.
“Until summer,” she called.
“Until summer,” Emily agreed.
The girl waved once. Twice. A third time, before she dove into the sea and the waters parted to pull her into a long embrace.
“Once you have rested, there’s this cove I’ve wanted to visit. To see if it’s still there. Do you think you’ll be up for another adventure?”
The cap sighed happily as the sea water mended its worn spots and polished it to a brighter sheen. Already it could feel its magic returning, stronger than ever before.
Only if you promise to take me with you.
The girl’s laughter echoed through the sea and wove itself into the waves. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Content, the cap fell into a restful sleep, dreaming of the adventures that lay before them.
Copyright © 2014 by Danyelle Leafty. All rights reserved.