Song of the Silkie

The Song of the Silkie

She hadn't really believed him when he’d told her that she'd see him again, but she was beginning to change her mind on that point. A Silkie, a creature straight out of myth and folklore that most people believed never existed and here she was wondering if she’d see one again. Yet, as she stood at her bedroom window listening to the secret whispers of the cold, dark water muffled in a soft gray morning mist, she had to admit to herself that it was beginning to seem like a real possibility. She wasn’t certain whether seeing him again was a good thing or a bad thing, but she knew that she would enjoy it either way.

The dreams he had left with her had not faded, as she had feared they would. In fact, they had solidified into very real memories. Sometimes a smell or a sound would trigger a memory and it would take her a moment or two to realize that it was his memory, not hers. Lately those memories were becoming more frequent and more vivid. They had even begun to invade her dreams now and again and, as she had there on the beach at Cape Alava, she would find herself flying beneath the water’s surface or walking the cool grasses of a time she had never seen. He had told her he would not trouble her dreams again and yet, there was no doubt that his memories were the inspiration for some of her most interesting dreams.

Last night’s dream had been the most intense by far. It had seemed to her that she was dancing on a bridge of reflected moonlight that crossed the inlet from the eastern shore, where the moon rose, to the western shore where her home was nestled on the bank; dancing with feet so light that they never actually touched the surface of the water. As she had danced lightly across the reflected light she had begun to realize that the music that stirred her, that directed her dancing, was the song of the stars, a drifting, sparkling chorus in the air around her. Then, rising from the dark water and through the glow of the moonlight bridge, a dark form had stepped toward her, had come to join her in the dance. He seemed to have no face that she could see, only shadows obscured slightly by soft dark hair. She wasn’t afraid of him, though. How could she, a creature of the air and light enough to dance on reflected moonlight, be afraid of any creature from the solid world?

As he moved with her in the dance she felt, felt rather than heard, the rhythm of the music change. It grew faster, less restrained, as if twice the number of dancers meant that the music must whirl at twice the pace. She hadn’t felt dizzy so much as giddy, exhilarated. Whether it was from the faster pace of the dance or the closeness of the strange, faceless man she hadn’t known. She also hadn’t cared. Even when she had felt her feet slipping through the moonlight bridge and into the cold water, she felt only elation and anticipation.

As she slipped back into his world with him, every step of the dance taking her just a bit deeper into his world, she could hear the tone of the music changing, changing from songs of starlight into the rushing whispers of water running in deep, swift currents. With each whirling step the music, his music, was growing in her ears until, at last, it had become an aquatic symphony of such intensity that she had begun to feel breathless. Oddly, however, and in complete contrast to her sense of excited anticipation, she had also begun to feel a bit chilled, especially those parts of her already under the water.

The chill had, ultimately, startled her into wakefulness and she had found that her legs were poking halfway out from under the covers. She assumed that was the reason she had begun to feel chilled and numbed in her dream, but the dream had been so intense, so real, that she wasn’t certain of that “rational explanation” even now.

Sighing, she turned from the window. It wasn’t really fair to accuse him of disrupting her dreams, when it was her own unrestrained imagination that seemed to carry her off now and then. Granted, it was to his memories, or variations on them, that her imagination tended to turn, but that was probably only because his memories were so much more exciting to her, so much more intriguing than her own memories were. After all, she’d lived with her memories all her life and with his for only a few months now.

As she headed out the door to work, she tried to put the dream and any lingering questions regarding his whereabouts aside. She had a busy day at the office today and it was just the first day of what was shaping up to be a long, hard week. She was fairly certain she’d have more than one “Monday” this week, but at the end of it would be the Memorial Day weekend and a three-day break.

It’s odd how our expectations seem to define our perceptions. Looking back on the day, it had fully lived up to her expectations. It had been harried and frenetic, but also quite productive. Had she told herself, going into the day, that it was going to be exciting instead of hard, she might have come out of it a bit less rattled. As it was, she came home feeling a bit like the rat race track was located right in the center of her desk and she’d spent all day sweeping up droppings. The thoughts she’d had no time to linger over during the wild pace of the day, slipped clandestinely back into her mind as she settled onto the freeway for the routine 45 minute drive back to the house and the haven it offered her weary mind.

Formlessly, the evening drifted into the night. The occasional whopping of a seal subduing its dinner, stunning a large fish by slapping it onto the surface of the water, was the only sound that intruded on the ripple of dusk lapping at the edges of the night. Even the loons and the gulls seemed to have settled into a peaceful lull that night. It was always amazing to her how, only 15 minutes from downtown Olympia, there could be such absolute peace in the night.

In contrast to what she had hoped, her dreams that night were less exotic. She seemed to be always just at the edge of hearing of a distant party. She caught hints of light, tinkling music, and laughter. Maybe that was dancing she heard or maybe just the breezes ruffling the grasses on the bank above the water. Always the moonlight shown just ahead of her, but never right where she stood. She didn’t actually spend the night chasing her dream as much as she spent it realizing that she was missing the bulk of the dream, but not quite knowing how to find it.

When she woke the next morning she closed her eyes and told herself it was just the dream still.
That light beginning to fill the room was just the moonlight on a distant party. She kept telling herself that as she struggled downstairs and made a cup of tea. She even tried to tell herself that she had caught up with the party at long last when she stepped onto the back deck and glanced down at the five distinct circles of mushrooms that seemed to have sprung up in the back yard overnight. Only in a dream would she find five Faerie Circles in her own back yard. Sure, her practical parents, both master gardeners, would simply look at the yard and call it a wet spring in western Washington, but she knew differently. She’d seen the Faeries dancing in those same sorts of rings on hundreds of occasions. The different Kingdoms of the Fey always allowed each other to join their celebrations and she’d been to more Faerie dances than she could remember over her long lifetime.

It was a good thing she had set her teacup down on the deck railing as she had noticed the mushroom rings. Otherwise she might have dropped it when she realized that his memories had just surfaced as her own again. It was most disconcerting because she really had seen, in his memories, so many of these same rings… she actually could visualize the steps of the dance…
What were the Faeries doing dancing in her yard all night? A missing Silkie, hovering at the back of her mind, was bad enough, but now the place was teeming with Faeries! She started to chuckle a bit. You let one Silkie into the neighborhood and the next thing you know….
Oh yes, he was coming back very soon. She could feel it more certainly everyday, every night to be more exact. But the chuckle turned into a pensive frown as she walked back into the house to get a fresh cup of tea and a shower. Did she really want her life to change beyond her control, as it would if she let the Fey become a presence in it? Did it matter what she wanted? The Fey in ancient legends were never overly concerned with the wants or cares of the mortals they impacted. The legends often presented conflicting results from exposure to the Fey, some people waking a hundred years after they had gone to sleep while others returned home ancient after a lifetime with the Fey to find that only a day or an hour had passed in their world. Men left wandering aimlessly through the hollow hills, minds and souls lost forever, after spending a night with a Naiad. Women with dark haired, mysterious children fathered by a Silkie who came and left in a night. The stories were varied, the consequences of interaction with the Fey as varied, but always, always bad for the hapless mortal caught in the wake of such an encounter. For the first time anxiety entered into her thoughts of a reunion with her friend from the beach at Cape Alava. Oddly enough, the rest of the week passed with little incident. No new reminders of the mysterious “Seal Man” she had met three months ago on the coast, no overt indicators of the “other world” intruding into hers. Even work seemed to settle down to a steady, fluid hum. Telling herself that she had been letting her imagination run rampant with her good sense, she slammed headlong into the three-day weekend when she hit the inevitable two and a half hour traffic jam coming back from SeaTac Airport. She had left work early to drop her parents off for a quick run south to visit the grandkids in the San Francisco Bay area when the drive back to Olympia had turned into a nightmare of epic proportions. She encountered not one, but three different jam-ups. One was related to a four car, one semi accident and the others were simply related to the merging of too many people towing too many travel trailers onto one three lane freeway at the same time. By the time she had gotten into the driveway she wanted nothing more than to sit on the back deck, listen to the breeze whistle through the now hollow space between her ears and to sip an exotic drink who’s name was reminiscent of a warm sandy beach populated by half naked, sun baked people who spent all day smiling and singing gentle songs. Instead, she decided to pull the lawn tractor out and get at least some of the 5 acres, on which she lived, mowed while there was sunshine in which to do it. Three hours later the pasture and the orchard were neatly and tidily mowed, leaving only the lawns immediately surrounding the house to finish tomorrow and then she could take the rest of the weekend off. She backed the lawn tractor into the garage and, as she turned off the engine, she heard a sudden whirring complemented by a steady knocking sound. Instinctively she turned to the tall window on the far end of the garage and spotted the culprit. It was a rite of spring, a regular occurrence every year at this time of year, and she knew how to handle it. A small hummingbird had come into the garage through one of the open bay doors and had gotten turned around. It was trying to exit through the large window, a solid pane of glass, which it seemed to notice to the exclusion of the four open garage bay doors. Sighing, half from exhaustion and too much sun and half from knowing that she would have to scale the more than waist high, overly crowded work bench, capture the frantic creature without hurting it’s fragile wings, then climb down again with no hands and no help before she could free the tiny thing, she stepped over to the bench and began to clamber onto it.

Hummingbirds don’t typically like to be grabbed and held by humans, even when frantic and exhausted. So it took her a few minutes to actually pin the tiny creature into a corner with both hands and even more time to get it safely secured in one hand so that she could have the other hand free to aid her in the climb back down off the high bench. As she turned from the window she was pulling off the bits of spider webbing that clung to her hand and to the tiny bird in it, so, at first, she didn’t notice the dark haired, fully naked man standing in the garage bay door watching her. When she did look up, her small shriek was followed quickly by recognition and then the anger of embarrassment.

“Jeez Louise”, she snapped. “You scared the fire out of me!! What are you doing here?” “You needed help”, he responded, simply. “Well I didn’t need help wetting my pants in fright”, she retorted acidly. “And get inside the door before someone else sees you! Where’s your skin?” With one eyebrow quirked in a look that implied that she knew the answer to that question if she would just think about it, he calmly answered her request and not her question. “No one will notice me if I don’t wish them to do so.” Nevertheless, he stepped into the garage and up to the workbench where she now crouched preparatory to jumping down. Reaching up, he touched her hand and the terrified creature secured in it stopped bobbing its head from side to side in a frantic effort to free its wings. The small hummingbird sat still, quiescent, in her hand. Feeling somewhat calmed herself by his touch, she asked the man, “Will you take him please, so I can get down”. As she settled the bird into the palm of his hand and drew hers back, the Silkie didn’t close his hand around it as she had expected. But the hummingbird didn’t fly frantically back into the window, as it would have if she had opened her hand that way. It sat quietly on the man’s hand and just looked at him, as if waiting for his instructions. With both hands now free, she was able to settle into a seated position and slide off the bench. When she was back on the ground she reached over as if to pet the tiny creature with one finger, but stopped short of actually touching it. “It’s alright”, the Silkie told her. He needs to rest and find some nourishment, but he will be okay if you touch him. She stroked the small head gently and felt it bob slightly under her finger, but nothing more. Suddenly realizing what she had just been told she said, “There’s a honeysuckle vine on the back deck. That ought to give him plenty of nectar.” Without comment, the Silkie started for the back deck. Realizing that he was still completely naked, she whooped, “Wait!! Wait, just wait a minute.” She ran into the house and up the stairs to her room. Grabbing a pair of flannel shorts and a T-shirt from a drawer, she shot back down the stairs and into the garage. “Please put these on”, she said, holding them out to him. Again, she got “that” look. Blushing at her own thoughtlessness, she said, “Okay, pick up your foot then.” As she pulled the shorts up around his waist she closed her eyes to be sure she didn’t see anything more closely than she already had. When she stood up with the shirt still in her hand, she could tell he was laughing at her, but she just ignored him and stalked out of the garage and toward the honeysuckle vine. When they reached the Honeysuckle vines, the Silkie lifted his palm slightly and the small bird flew directly to the sweet blossoms and began to feed. The two rescuers stepped back out of the way and left him to accomplish the rest of his recovery on his own. As they stepped away from the Honeysuckle and it’s now happy harvester he turned to her and pulled the T-shirt from her hands, then pulled it over his head. As his head re-appeared from the top of the T-shirt he gave her a wicked grin and said, “Are you more comfortable now?” She laughed and threw her arms around the man’s neck and hugged him tightly. He hesitated a moment, but then she felt his arms move around her tightly and the soft breath of his laugh tickled her neck a bit. She pulled back out of the hug and said, “Where have you been? How are you doing? What’s going on under the water out there! I knew you were coming!! Hey, I thought you said you’d stay out of my dreams, but I sure seem to be dreaming a lot about your world!” Chuckling, he gently touched her mouth with his hand to still the flood of questions and commentary. Speaking so softly that she almost had to lean closer to hear him, he didn’t even try to answer all of her questions. “I have not been touching your dreams, you have been coming into mine. Sometimes I hear your thoughts even when I’m awake. I could sense you near to me the night of the celebrations.” He glanced at the remains of the mushroom rings, and said, “I tried to keep them from entering your dreams, but they seemed to know our thoughts were touching. I’m sorry if it disturbed your sleep.” “Not at all,” she responded. “That dream didn’t “disturb” me as much as some others did.” Blushing, she glanced back at the Honeysuckle as if checking on the small bird, which was no longer there. A soft smile slipped onto his face and he touched her hair gently. “I enjoyed the dance, too. What took you from me? You would have loved dancing within the water’s embrace.” “I - I- I got cold,” she stammered, confused by the light touch on her hair. “I had kicked off my covers and my feet and legs were freezing,” she said, recovering her composure. “Please don’t do that,” she asked him as she brought his hand back out of her hair, “ it distracts me.” “It’s supposed to,” he said. Scrambling for a way to keep him at arm’s length and change the subject, she fell back on her Texas upbringing. “Oh my gosh,” she exclaimed, heading up the stairs to the deck, “I’ve kept you standing out here in the backyard. Would you like to come inside and have a drink or something to eat? I was just getting ready to make some dinner.” She caught herself up short and turned to look at him. “What can you eat? I may have some salmon in the freezer, but I’m not sure if it’s still good.” Laughing at her again, he assured her that he could eat anything she could eat, but that he wasn’t hungry. He had come to visit her and to help her with the hummingbird. “But there wasn’t time,” she stammered, confused. “From the time I saw him there until you showed up at the door there wasn’t time to get out of your skin and hide it and then get up to the garage.” And,” she finished defiantly, “there is no way you could have known that I needed help with that bird.” “I knew,” he replied. “And you think of time as flowing at only one speed.” “Ah, ye-ah…., “ she cattily retorted. There was no way she was going to buy into alternate time lines with this guy. Star Trek be damned, this was the real world. Okay… A real world peopled by myths and legends, sure, but still the real world and there were no alternate time lines!!! Sensing her defiance, he turned to face the inlet, now visible to them again as they had reached the top of the deck stairs. Following his action instinctively, she turned too. He stood looking at the soft ripple of the water for a moment. When he spoke it was as if the sound of his voice lapped gently at the edge of her thoughts, soothing the defiance. “Do you see the ripples on the surface of the inlet,” he asked her. “Yes,” she responded. “They move gently, almost imperceptibly. But, below those slow ripples are many currents. They are swift in the center of the inlet and much slower here in the cove. All of those different currents are unapparent to you, here, on the surface.” He paused and stood looking at the water. Could he see the different currents moving beneath the surface from here, she wondered? “Time is much like that. Your people can only see the surface but there are many speeds of time below the slow surface ripples.” Again, he reached up to touch her hair and stopped short of contact. “I’m sorry. I’ll try not to distract you. It’s just an old habit.” A memory or two of his flashed into her mind at that comment. She must have blushed at them because he said, “I recall you once told me you only wanted to talk… So I have come to talk. I owe you that... and more.” She remembered telling him that. This time it was her memory. Talking to the large Seal in the cove here in back of the house, calling it a Silkie and telling it she would cry seven tears into the inlet to make it come to her… that she only wanted to talk to it. She reminded herself again to be careful what she wished for in the future. Suggesting that he remain on the deck while she went inside and made a quick pitcher of lemonade, she turned into the house cursing softly under her breath. Whether because he was only going to talk to her or because she was still shaken by the effect he’d already had with no more than a touch on her hand or her hair, she didn’t know for sure. It had never really occurred to her that he might consider anything more than just friendship, but the last thing she needed was a Silkie playing mind games with her. She knew, without a doubt, which of them would win that one. She stopped suddenly and thought to herself, “I wonder if that’s how they do it? Do they have such a power over our minds because we let them, because we think they do?” As she mixed up the instant lemonade, she mulled through it a bit, but decided it didn’t matter. She did want to talk to him and she definitely wasn’t prepared for anything else. So if he was willing to let it go at a friendly chat, she had no objection and was grateful for the opportunity to spend some time with a legend.
She walked back out to the deck rail where he was standing looking down on the Faerie circles below them. She remembered what he’d said earlier and asked as she handed him his lemonade, “What was the celebration for?”

"A new child was born to my people," he said. There are so few now, the newborns. So few since we avoid taking mates from your people. The match of our blood to the mother's is stronger among your kind, the connection is closer than it is with the seals. But the seals don't mind and they have never tried to destroy us, to drive us from their world for being what we are as your kind has done. Still, there are fewer Silkies born and more seals. There are so few now that a new birth is a cause for celebration."

"Wait a minute", she jumped in, "Are you telling me you just had a baby or are you telling me there's more than one Silkie in our inlet?"

With that slightly wicked grin he seemed to manage so perfectly, he responded, "Yes. I have a new "daughter" and so there are two Silkies in the inlet," he clarified, "for now."

"What do you mean "for now", "she asked him while digging through the Silkie memories stored in her mind for the answer.

"She will go to the Land of Song soon," he answered.

Bingo!! The appropriate memories had clicked into place in her mind at that moment. She(he) remembered sending off the young ones on several occasions to be raised in her(his) own world. It happened sooner with the children of the seals than with those of humans. The human children needed longer with their mother to be able to survive the journey than did those children born of seal mothers. Sooner or later, though, they all went to be raised in the Land of Song. She(he) remembered the weeping of the human mothers as they stood on shore and watched their beloved children leaving them forever. Some, she(he) recalled, had even tried to hide the children or to take them far from the ocean, thinking that would protect them from the inevitable. How little humans understood the power of the Fey to draw one another to themselves. How little humans understood the power of the Fey… period!

Shaking her head, in part at the foolishness of human mothers and partly to clear his memories from her mind and let her own thoughts return to it, she realized she had been quite still for long enough that he was watching her closely.

"I'm sorry," she said, "I was just... thinking about what you had said."

The look of gentle concern on his face surprised her. He reached toward her again, but this time he stroked her temple softly as he said, "I can take them from you again, if they trouble you."

Backing away in horror at the suggestion, but with a deep appreciation for the obvious concern that had triggered it, a concern not supposed to exist in his kind for her kind, "Don't you DARE", she exclaimed. She made herself grin at him, as wickedly as she could manage at that moment, and told him, "I think it may be useful, some day, to know how a Silkie sees the world! I think I'll keep them for now, thank you very much! It just takes me a minute or two to shuffle through them. They are not as familiar to me yet as they are to you, but they are really very interesting!"

"Really", he responded with a curious look on his face that she couldn’t quite understand. "I also find yours to be quite… enlightening." The pause that followed that comment mirrored her silence of a few moments before and gave her a moment of relative privacy in which to absorb the shock of realizing that, as she had acquired some of his memories, he had acquired some of hers. That brief moment of realization might have turned into a huge moment of panic had she not noticed the look of concentration on his face that seemed to be a reflection the confusion she felt when trying to sort his memories through in her mind.

"You know," she remarked with a chuckle, "It's really very rude to shuffle through someone else's memories while you're standing right in front of them… "

He chuckled, too.

"Come on, sit down on the swing with me and tell me all about your Daughter", she said. "Is she beautiful? DUH! All babies are beautiful! Will I get to meet her?"

They settled on the porch swing and she noticed a bit of a wild expression in his eyes. He was obviously still absorbing the human reaction to babies from her memories while trying to remember who he was and address her questions.

The conversation spun softly around children for a while and then began to shift as gently as the evening breeze from one harmless topic to another. The pattern of conversation weaving a blanket of exploration, discovery and laughter over the two very different creatures who sat together on the swing while the world nodded quietly off to sleep around them. As the small eyes of the night began to peer over her shoulder, she realized two things. One, his fingers were playing gently in her hair as he talked yet she could still think, in fact, had only superficially noticed the gentle touch for some time now and, two, the small hummingbird they had saved earlier had come to nestle in the crook of the leg she had curled up under her on the swing. That leg had now fallen asleep and the tingling was probably what had called her back to herself. She had not been lost in a trance of the Silkie's creation, but the trance common to any new friendship as it takes those first tentative steps from mere acquaintance into the possibility of trust.

She touched the tiny creature sleeping on her numb leg and it stirred softly. Then, as if realizing that it was being addressed, it swiveled its head around and looked across its folded wings at her.

"Everything from my bottom down is numb, little one. Would you mind if I moved and gave it a chance to wake up again", she asked the still somnolent hummer.

When it didn't move, the Silkie gently slid his hand under its tiny body and lifted it from her leg. She then slid around and put both feet under her and stood up, slowly. The tingling was actually quite painful for a moment, but she forgot the pain as she heard a whirring, almost like the
buzzing of a giant fly, at her left ear. The little hummer had decided that she was more comfortable than the Silkie and had come to ask permission to nestle on her shoulder under her ear. Well, maybe it wasn't really seeking permission, it just settled there quite as if it had every right to be there.

She looked up at the sky glittering with the pictures of ancient legends and fierce creatures, the constellations that she had known for her whole life, and wondered why they seemed so much brighter tonight than they usually did. She felt the man move to stand beside her at the railing of the deck. She felt the hunger in him, the need to return to the salt water that rustled now beneath the ruff of grass that fringed the bank of the inlet. As if in answer to the sorrow of his impending departure, a poem she had memorized as a child came, unbidden, into her mind.

"The night will never stay," she whispered. "The night will still go by, though with a million stars you pin it to the sky. Though you bind it with the blowing wind and buckle it with the moon, the night will slip away, like sorrow or a tune."

"I remember when you learned that," he said, the words a whisper, a breath, on her cheek. Or was it just the night breeze. Somehow, it didn't matter which. It was gentle and warm and comforting either way. "I go, but to return again, moth-like to the flame. Far from your side I cannot bide, I hunger for your name."

"Then we'll see you again, we two," she asked him, the little hummingbird fluttering lightly at her ear to be included in the question.

"Yes", the whisper of the breeze replied.

"And the wee one? Will I get to meet her someday, too", she asked.

"Yes", whispered the breeze against her cheek.

"Then good night, my friend. I'll wait for you where the moonlight meets the shore." She chuckled then, that just felt too much like a movie for her… "Or you can come to up to the house like a civilized person and I'll make you dinner!

The breeze drifted to her this time from across the yard with a soft laugh. As she turned to head back to the door of the house she noticed a small pile on the deck near her feet… a pair of flannel shorts and a T-shirt. Grinning at the visual image that popped into her head, she picked them up and headed for the doorway. Before she got there her small passenger whirred up from her shoulder and zipped off into the night.

Stepping from the night back into the darkened house, she felt a small note of wonder chime in the corner of her mind. He had come to visit. He had come and gone and would come again. They were friends. Friends! Now that was an amazing thing! A Silkie for a friend and maybe a hummingbird, too! Now, even she would never have believed that was possible! And she had come out of it unscathed.

Or had she? With a sudden bolt of fear she stumbled through the darkened house to the computer room. She flipped on the light switch and rushed to the computer. She had to check the date and time… No! She would not believe it had been anything more than a few hours. Oh dear God in heaven, please let it still be today. Why does it take so long for this stupid thing to boot up?!!!

When the computer screen finally blinked sleepily into life, she flipped to the settings menu and checked… Initiating the shut down sequence, she calmly headed back out of the den and up to bed. It had been a long day, but it had only been one day! And she was looking forward to her dreams that night. As she settled into bed a few minutes later, she thought she heard the sigh of the breeze tinkling the little wind chime outside her bedroom window. Was it a sigh or was it a chuckle, she wondered briefly before she drifted off to sleep.

Her dreams that night were far from what she had expected. If her thoughts, her dreams, were linked to his somehow, then his, most assuredly, were linked to those of his daughter. The images were vague, more emotional responses than actual sensory impressions. Warmth, safety, the smell of mother’s fur against her nose as she lay curled in a tight ball beside her. The cool brush of water on her skin as one of the other seals rolled off the boom for a fishing run. Floating in a cocoon of complete peace, she knew that these smells identified those who would protect her, shelter her from any and all harm. It was a night of restful peace, the kind only the very young could know. What an amazing experience to waken and find that cocoon of warmth still shrouding her mind with its peace.

Maybe it was having spent the evening and night in close, in intimate proximity to the Silkies, but when she rolled out of bed that morning all she could think of doing was to pull out the kayak and hit the water. Before she headed for the beach though, she pulled a clean pair of flannel shorts and a clean t-shirt out of her drawer and tucked them neatly into a gallon sized zip-lock bag along with a pair of old flip flops. With the paddle and a small towel over her shoulder and the kayak skirt already strapped on around her waist, she headed for the beach.

Turning the kayak over and giving it a quick wipe down to remove any accumulated cobwebs along with their creators and any other bugs, she pulled it off the concrete bulk head and trotted it the 10 feet or so to the water’s edge. Once into the kayak with the skirt in place she pushed off the rocky beach and felt the cool glide of the water under the flat keel of her river kayak. A bit more unwieldy in the flat, still water of the inlet than a sea kayak would have been, the orange kayak still seemed to glide, with little effort on her part, across the smooth water.

As she rounded the point on the south end of her cove, she could see the old log boom that was home to the seals as they calved each spring and summer. You weren’t allowed to get within 200 feet of the boom and the seals that sheltered there, but there was really no need to do so anyway. The seals of Henderson Inlet were quite friendly and would come out to the passing kayaks and canoes just to “chat” with the rowers. They would slip up along side the kayak and, if you talked to them, would actually look at you as if they understood every word. They would often glide along side for a good few minutes before rolling into the water and getting back about their seal business.

This morning she was looking for a particular seal, a large, dark furred seal…

Well before she ever reached the boundary of the protected zone, she had to slow her paddling in order to not actually hit one of the many seals that had ventured out to meet the kayak this morning. Today the curious seals seemed to linger a bit longer than was their pattern, but she couldn't be sure that it wasn't just her imagination or wishful thinking.

As she lingered near the edge of the restricted zone, she tried to think of how to find him, or to let him know to come find her. If, she reasoned to herself, their minds could connect while she was sleeping, then maybe, even though she was awake, if she thought of him, concentrated very intensely on him he might sense that she was out here on the water… looking for him. She sat very still and tried to call him in her mind. She didn’t really knowing what she was doing, or if she was just sitting there making a complete fool of herself "thinking" at her own imagination. She was about to give up in frustration, with a bit of humiliation tossed in for good measure, when he surfaced just to the left rear of her kayak. As he spoke her name, she turned her head and looked into large, dark eyes filled with the now familiar laughter.

"Hello Silkie," she answered. “How are you this morning? I wasn’t sure how to find you.”

"I am well," she heard the answer, but she knew that he had not "spoken" to her. He surprised her with his next comment. "You don’t have to think hard to reach me. We were bound by the healing dreams. If you think of me, I know it.” Before she had a chance to absorb the full implications of that comment, he continued, “You want to meet the child. She is too young to transform, yet."

At that he rolled back under the dark water and disappeared. She thought for a moment that she had been "dismissed", but very quickly he resurfaced near another seal and a pup that had been lingering about 25 feet away from her kayak. She turned the small boat toward the three seals and they, in turn, began to move toward her. The mother seal tried briefly to keep herself between the kayak and the pup, but the Silkie apparently soothed the worried mother and the young pup slipped up next to the kayak and looked up at the woman who gazed back with joyful delight at the small, dark face.

There was a quiet recognition between the pup and the woman who had shared her dreams of the night before. She reached her hand down to the water's surface, but didn't actually touch the pup. She wiggled her fingers an inch or two in front of the pup's nose and then she said quietly, "Ciao, bella."

The tiny pup nuzzled the wiggling fingers and the woman wondered for a moment if she was about to be bitten. Instead the little pup wriggled under her hand and let her rub its little snub nose gently with her fingers. It was a moment of complete exhilaration for the woman. To sit there in her kayak and have a tiny little seal snuggle with her hand as if she were an old friend. The thrilling interlude lasted only for a moment, then the pup rolled under her fingers and beneath the surface of the water. It popped up quickly between its parents and snuggled up against its mother's side.

As mother and child rolled into the water, the Silkie moved back toward the bright orange kayak. She leaned slightly over toward him and said, "Thank you. Thank you so very much. She's a beauty. She must have gotten her good looks from her momma!"

At that the Silkie turned and began to move away from her small boat, but she heard the whisper of his laughter in her mind. Before he disappeared under the dark, cold water she called to him and told him that she would leave dry shorts and a shirt in the upturned kayak for him, if he wanted to come up for dinner later on.

She beached the kayak a few moments later and, popping the waterproof “skirt” off of the kayak she clambered awkwardly out. She pulled the kayak up onto the bulkhead again, but before she settled it into place she picked up the ziplock baggie containing the clothes and set it into the hollow keel of the Kayak. Then she rolled it completely over with the opening down to prevent it from being filled with rainwater, which was still an issue this time of year.

She was about halfway up the steep boat ramp when she stopped abruptly and spun to look out across the water past the point at the southern end of the cove. What had he said? That they had been bound by the healing dreams… anytime she thought of him he would know it? “Holy Shhhh… !” she thought to herself. “Oh that’s Not Good! That is very Not Good!” In a state of extreme panic she began trying to sort back through all the times she’d thought of him. She felt the flush of embarrassment start under her scalp and she only stopped noticing its progress when it got to her stomach. At which time she began trying to think of not throwing up!

Turning, almost unconscious with panic now, she started back up the boat ramp. Although her brain had not kicked back into function, she began to hear a persistent pounding somewhere in a back corner of it. A thought, desperately trying to make itself realized, was hammering away at her numbness.

What had she thought about him, what hideously embarrassing secrets had she disclosed to him without ever knowing she was displaying her private, innermost imaginings to him. She climbed the steps of the deck.

Oh no, she was thinking about Him now! He must know she was totally panicked, that he had her so disjointed that she couldn’t think. “Oh Noooooo,” her mind wailed as, almost blindly, she put the paddle and skirt back somewhere in the vicinity of the corner of the deck where they were stored.

“I can never have a private thought again,” she moaned to herself as she turned, blankly, to stare out again at the empty water. Instead, she came eyeball to eyeball with the small hummingbird of the night before.

Whirring frantically as it held its position before her uncomprehending eyes, the little creature bobbed a bit closer. It stopped just far enough from her face to avoid actually touching her, but close enough that she felt the wind from its busy wings touch her cheek like a gentle hand. Dazedly, she looked at the small creature fanning its wings almost at the tip of her nose and realized it was getting tired from hovering there watching her.

Without thinking, she invited her tiny, worried friend to rest, “Come on then, little one, settle down for a bit.” It nestled contentedly under her left ear again, as it had the night before, and touched her ear with the tip of its long beak.

At that gentle touch, she felt the tears start down her face and, with the rupture of the emotional dam, came a sympathetic rupture of the dam that had formed in her mind. The thought that had been hammering behind the wall of shock & horror suddenly broke through into the daylight. Yesterday he had said he wasn’t coming into her dreams, that she was touching his mind at night while she slept. What if the “bridge” crossed both ways? Could she hear his thoughts if she tried to hear them? How would she go about “listening in”? Wouldn’t he know she was “listening”? Could he block her mind? Suddenly a shudder wracked her mind… What if he couldn’t block her out? Did she really want to listen to his thoughts? To know what went on in the mind of a Silkie?

She had to know. She tried to think of him, but the urgent need to blow her nose after her big cry kept her from being able to focus on him. She certainly didn’t want him peering into her thoughts while she was wondering whether or not she had phlegm running down her face. She closed down any thoughts of him by focusing on the little bird on her shoulder. She tried to explain to it that it might want to sit somewhere else or it needed to be prepared for a whole new experience. She pulled a tissue out of her pocket, folded it in half and she blew her nose. The little bird seemed quite startled. It almost seemed, for a moment, as if she could sense its thoughts. Of course, the fact that it actually shot up off her shoulder and buzzed off to the deck railing could have been a significant impetus to her sensing its surprise.

She laughed at the whole comedic scene and that little bit of normalcy gave her the grounding in “reality” that she needed to face the experiment ahead. She had a firm grasp again on who she was and with that sure and certain self-knowledge as her anchor, she calmed her mind and closed her eyes. She did as he had indicated and she simply thought of him. She felt the touch of his mind immediately. It was quiet, like a whisper, but clear as a nearby bell. He was half out of his skin. He had been frantically struggling with the transition, as he had on the beach at Cape Alava, but this time he had been struggling against the uncontrolled panic in her mind. She could tell that he knew she was calming down and that helped him get his own panic under control.

She didn’t acknowledge the greeting he spoke to her as she touched his mind, she just started trying to move “past him” and into his thoughts, but it didn’t take long for her to realize that she didn’t know how to do that. How did she bring up her own thoughts, could she do that in his mind?

Then it occurred to her… his memories, the ones she had from their encounter on the beach at Cape Alava, might be the key to touching his mind. When she had touched his dreams in her sleep, had it been because his memories had surfaced in her mind and that had formed the link between them… those memories that they both held in common, his in her mind and hers in his mind?

“Yes,” he answered her. “Yes.”

She ignored him. She drew to her mind one of the memories of racing under the water’s surface as if she were flying. She felt his elation at that memory. She ignored him again. He was the enemy! She had to ignore him and stay focused.

Abruptly, she felt a horrible anguish overwhelm her. A sorrow she could not measure and had never felt before, in all her very long life, tore at her when she realized that he felt she was the enemy. She didn’t know that he had not understood the nature of the binding between them. It was so simple and so deeply feared among her people that it was impossible for anyone not to know of it. How could she have realized the ignorance of his race, so long separated from hers that they had forgotten even the important tales of the older days? Had he not told her yesterday that he thought it might be “useful to know what a Silkie was thinking”? She had known then that he understood the binding and accepted it, but now, he considers her “the enemy”. Their minds and lives were bound beyond severing, she had been changed irrevocably by that binding and she was “the enemy”.

She tore her mind out of his almost screaming in her hurt and sorrow. Sorrow at the changes that made her almost alien to her own people and hurt at his anger and seeming enmity towards her. How could …

“Oh no. This is worse than the memories. When our minds are touching, I can’t even tell his thoughts from mine. How can I ever handle this,” she asked herself. She closed her eyes and felt the tears spilling through her fingers. It had, indeed, gone from bad to worse. Oh yes, she had been right all along. You can never come out unscathed from a contact with the fey.

The aching sorrow in her heart had not lessened with the breaking of the contact between their minds. It was at the point when she realized that the ache was still there, that she remembered why it had come to her in the first place. She started laughing and crying at the same time. Well, at least the fey don’t always come out unscathed from a contact with mortals, either.

“We almost never do.” His voice behind her left her frozen with the fear of him, again. He touched her hair and asked quietly, “Shall I take the memories from you now? It is the only hope you have of being truly human again.” His voice was soft and touched, still, with the sorrow she had felt earlier. It was a sorrow that suddenly fell into place in her mind, as it had not really done until now. He was deeply hurt by the anger she had felt towards him. Her thoughts, tied with his by the shared memory at the exact moment when she had felt her anger, her fear, boil into definition, had become so confused with his that she had forgotten that it had really been his pain, not hers, that she was feeling.

She rose from the bench and stepped away from him, fists clenched at her sides to keep them from shaking. When she thought she had herself as under control as possible, she turned to face him. She almost broke then. She could see the pain in him, he held a fear of his own tightly in check. She realized that, had she not been into his mind, she would never have known any such feelings existed in his world, but having been there, she could sense them and feel them as clearly as if they were her own.

Reminding herself of her anger in order to keep her focus on what she needed to do, she spoke as coldly as she could make herself sound. “Before I agree to anything with regard to you, I want to know all of the things you think I already know! Everything! IF I doubt you, if I suspect you are hiding a truth from me, then I will touch a memory and tear the truth from your mind myself. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Then start.”

His voice was the quiet whisper of the breeze that she remembered from the night before. Soft and quiet enough that within a few sentences she had moved closer to him, without realizing it, in order to be able to hear every syllable.

“In the older days, a time when the veil between our worlds was not so great, one of the fey, a dryad, formed, by accident, the same bond that you and I now share with a human male. It was an accident that drove the Kingdoms of Man and the Kingdoms of the Fey apart forever. It was a binding that changed both the dryad and the human so that they were never truly human or truly fey again. They became something different. Each acquired something of the other and that something marked them so greatly among their own folk that they were never completely at peace with anyone, except each other, again.”

“This was a time when we greatly feared war with your kind and we had not yet been able to find the way to secure entry into our kingdoms from your world. When it was understood that the human, who was a warrior and a leader among his kind, had, with the binding between them, been given great knowledge and understanding of us and of our world, it was believed that she had betrayed the fey intentionally out of love for the mortal. She was cast forth from the Kingdoms of the Fey by the combined power of the Lords of the Kingdoms and forbidden to enter them again upon pain of death. She became a great guardian of the humans against her own kind.”

“In the end, whatever the human had acquired of her power and her knowledge, he was still mortal, and when he died, she carried his body through the veil between our worlds and into the Kingdoms of the Fey. As she stepped through the veil, the bane fell upon her and she was executed where she stood. It is the only time in all the long years of our memory, that one of the fey has ever been executed by our people.”

“Before she had passed through the veil, she cast forth all her powers upon the forest that had been her haven for all her life. Wherever her power touched a tree, that tree took a new form that had never been seen in either world before. The new trees grew white blossoms and deep red berries. To this day, those trees bear her name and are a true and infallible protection against any power or spell of my people.”

“The horror of her punishment and her death have left their mark on my people, for we have very long memories. Only twice since that time has the Bond of Rowan touched another of our own. Both have been under circumstances when one of us has been in grave danger and they have been unable to protect themselves in any other way. The binding is for life. The second time it happened, the banshee who had formed the bond with a human, this time he was a bard, was not punished by the Lords, but she died of sorrow within days of her love’s death.”

“For she had loved him. She had loved him so much that, to protect him from the pain of being forever alone among his own kind, she took from him the memories he had collected from her during the binding. He did not remember her at all, but he would dream sometimes of a banshee that he did not fear. He lived his life without knowing her or the sorrow that she felt every moment that she lived without him, but with his every thought tearing at her mind.”

He had stopped speaking several minutes before she felt the spell of his words drop from her mind. It was not a spell of his casting in the traditional sense, she understood now that he had no such power over her. It was a spell cast by the sorrow of the story and the full realization of what the bond between them meant to him. It was a death sentence. His life was now bound to the length of hers.

With deep remorse, she suddenly remembered the thought that had brought this conversation to a head. She turned her face up to his and said, “I’m sorry. You are not now, nor were you ever, the enemy. I was wrong to be angry with you and I was wrong to … “

“No,” he stopped her apology with his expression as much as his words. “The regret is mine, for thinking that you could remember the ancient lessons of our peoples. They are older than your memories. I understand that now.”

She turned from him and walked down the deck to the swing they had shared the night before. She sat down, leaned forward and buried her face in her palms. As she felt him settle beside her, she started to ask the question she knew she had to ask next. “You said there had been two occurrences since … “ She stopped, the name she had been about to utter connecting to a memory in her mind, a memory from her own life this time. “Her name was Rowan?”

“Yes”

“Even I know that Rowan trees are said to provide ward against fairies and such. Wow! Ancient memories! How long ago was that?”
“Long. Long ago.”

Remembering her originally intended question, “Who was the last one,” she asked. “What was their story?“

Surprisingly, he chuckled at that question. “You know them, you know them well. You know them from your childhood and you know them from my memories. She was a Naiad and he was a war leader among his people. He led his people in a great fight for freedom. Because he was the beloved of the Lady of the Naiads, herself, and had brought the fey that dwelt in his kingdom under his protection, we fought with him in his great war. Those are the memories of him that you have from me. I stood with him against the children of the dragon ships.”

“When he grew old, she brought him to the Kingdoms of the Fey with her. She brought him to us hoping that being in the Kingdoms of the Fey would be enough to extend his life. We accepted them among us because he had been a friend to us, the first since the sundering of the Kingdoms. We welcomed him to our world. He is the only human who has ever been granted asylum in the Kingdoms of the Fey. It did not save him, but she was among her own kind when he died and she survived longer than had the others before her. Almost a year after he died.”

He turned to her and asked, “ Do you know them? Can you not guess who I mean?”

She looked at him, almost hoping she was about to make a complete fool of herself, and guessed, “Arthur. King Arthur and the Lady of the Lake?”

“Yes. That is the name they bear in your legends, yes.”

With the wonderment palpable on her face and in her voice, she said, “So even some of the legends about him have a basis in truth? You know, I don’t think I’m quite ready for all this “truth” after all.”

They sat quietly in the swing together then. Not talking, not touching, just sitting. When the tiny hummingbird came back to settle on her lap she stroked it without really noticing what she was doing. A memory popped into her mind, the memory of her demand to know all that he thought she knew. She turned to him, answering the memory as if he had spoken her name, her head cocked slightly to one side in question.

He reached over and touched the small bird in her lap. “This is one of the things I thought you understood. Animals will trust you as they do me. I think they have always trusted you a bit, but now they will come to you for companionship, for comfort or for assistance and you will understand them, but not their words. It will grow stronger as you live longer with that of me which is now you.”

“Oh,” she said. “I think it’s already happened with this little guy. I didn’t realize it until now, but it makes sense somehow.” With a sigh, she asked, “Anything else you can think of that I should know?”

I think it is different with each bond. Each of those involved has been of a different race of the fey. We are not all alike, as you humans are, basically, all alike.” With a hint of the wicked grin she remembered from last night, he finished, “Or so you seem to us.”

She laughed. Somehow, it felt good to laugh again. It felt important to find some way to lighten the weight of the disclosures she had been facing.

“Okay,” she answered, “We’ll take this one step at a time. But if you realize something that you think I know… please tell me. Please.”

“Yes,” he agreed. Then, as if offering a compromise, he finished with, “I can take the memories from you and you can be yourself again.”

She considered that offer quite seriously. She felt strongly inclined to accept the offer and return to a “normal” life. Then she remembered facing him just a few moments before and seeing the pain and fear held so tightly in check. This time he turned to her, as if answering her thought. She made up her mind in that moment, and she was content and at peace with the decision.

“You would be all alone then. There would be no one of your people or of mine, who could understand you completely. We live like that all the time, we humans, but apparently the fey don’t.”

“I knew what I was doing when I moved to help a hurt Silkie out of his skin,” she continued. “I may not have realized how much it would change my life, but I cannot regret help offered to someone who needed it so desperately.”

“No. Thank you for your offer and the great sacrifice it would be, but I think I need to stand by you in this. That’s what friends do for each other. Even when they can’t really help with a problem, they ride out the storms together.” Then she touched his hand, her fingers sliding around between his thumb and fingers to fold his hand into hers. She squeezed it softly, then almost fiercely.

As he squeezed back she decided that the first step to surviving anything was to find steady ground. That old Texas upbringing rose to her aid again. If you can’t cure something, then you bring food and you make everyone eat! Eating was steady ground, especially when she realized she had talked with him through dinner last night and still had not eaten today. It had to be almost noon.

“Come on,” she said, let’s go get some lunch. You can explain the rest of this to me when we’ve eaten. That way, if it scares the willies out of me again, I’ll at least have something to throw-up this time.”

There was the laugh! She knew he had still had it inside him somewhere. She just felt better seeing that he could still laugh. He had been dealing with this knowledge since the encounter on the beach several months ago, she guessed. If he had come to terms with it, she could too. After all, they were of “one mind” now, weren’t they?



They had talked that night into the wee hours of the morning. They had run, over and over again, through each of the previous instances where such a joining of the minds had occurred until she knew every detail of them and until she could not have kept them sorted in her mind to save her life. He had wanted to just give her the memories, but she thought that if he told her about each couple, she might “hear” something in his recounting of the stories that she would not notice if she just absorbed his memories. If he didn’t notice a fine distinction because he was so used to the memories, would she absorb that complacency with the rest of the memory?
She had had him run through numerous of his “encounters” with others of her species to determine what the difference was, why no similar bond was formed with the forming of a child. All that she could conclude at the end of the night was that there was some exchange that was uniquely part of the sharing of strength, of the healing process itself, that was not inherent in the act of intimacy. He had laughed and assured her that she had come to the same conclusion that his kind had come to many long years ago. There had to be a piece missing. There had to be. It was too cruel, even for this world, for love to be a death sentence without any hope of reprieve.

As she felt weariness tugging at her mind, she felt a desire for the water and his other form tugging at his mind and she called a halt to the inquiry for the night. It had been a long day and both of them needed time to absorb all that had happened between them. She saw him to the steps of the deck and gave him a hard, long hug. Holding him for a moment in her mind as she held him in her arms, she had sensed that he needed to know that she was still at peace with her choice so she extended the hug for a moment or two longer than she would have felt to be comfortable the night before. Tonight… tonight it seemed like it was a lifeline to which they both needed to cling. Then she pulled back, kissed him gently on the cheek and whispered, “I’ll see you in our dreams.” He was gone then, with that same soft breeze on her cheek. She turned back into the house, locked the doors and headed up to the bed that she suspected would offer her little sleep that night.

She was wrong. The emotional exhaustion of two days of surprises followed by more surprises had wearied her. She was asleep within moments of laying her head on her pillow. Asleep, but not resting. She found herself wandering through his memories of the other relationships after all. Apparently, it was still on his mind as much as it was on hers. As she wandered through his memories she began to notice an odd sensation, a “whispering” at the edge of her dreams. It took a while before she realized that this was not just one of those weird dream sensations. In fact, she drifted back into her own mind and into consciousness as two realizations crept into her unconscious mind, one fast on the heels of the other.
The first was the realization that she had not one, but two Silkie’s dreams playing in her mind that night. His mind, closely tuned to that of his new daughter, had been listening to the baby’s dreams while she had been walking through his dreams. That was the odd whispering she had heard, the little one’s dreams rustling about at the edges of his dreams. When she recognized it for what it was, she had let herself slip from his dreams into the quiet dreams of the sleeping child. It was a soft relief to share dreams not yet filled with the great events that torture the dreamer.

It was as she floated in that innocence that the second realization struck her. While the act of intimacy didn’t create the bond of mind and soul, it might solidify the existing bond into an unbreakable force. Did the joining of two lives so irretrievably that mind and soul merged into one make it impossible for one half of the joined union to live without the other half. If only the intimacy of the other relationships could be avoided, maybe death was not inevitable for the Silkie when hers came to pass. It was too late to avoid the joining of minds. That had occurred on the beach without either of them fully realizing that it was happening. Their souls had joined when she had finally understood the implications, for him, of their joining and he had offered to relive her, at the cost of ultimate loneliness for himself, of all knowledge of his existence and, thereby, all suffering. Her choice to remain aware and a part of his life had joined them, soul to soul, forever. The only joining they had not made was the joining of their bodies. That, at all costs, must never be allowed to happen.

She closed her mind, as best she could, to all thoughts of her sudden insight and of the predicament in which they found themselves. There was time enough tomorrow for discussions and decisions. Tonight they both needed to rest and sleep. She closed her eyes and sought again the peaceful lull of the baby’s dreams. It seemed like the only safe haven her weary mind could settle upon and she was quite content to share the peacefulness of that small, safe world. As she drifted into those quiet dreams, she felt another mind, an equally worried mind, nestle into the edges of her thoughts. As one, they floated into the peace of the little Silkie’s quiet dreams.

To Be Continued