Burning Up

inside her shifted and flowed like the changing shore. As if he had power over the very landscape of her heart.
    The young fisherman raised his head and coughed. Or was that the barking of a seal?
    Her vision wavered. Her mind grayed. She blinked, watching as a figure with flying skirts and braids detached from the huddle onshore.
    “Colin!” The girl dashed to the water’s edge like a curlew darting in the tide.
    Morwenna smiled.
    Then the stones rose up sharply to take her, and the world faded away.
     
    W hen she woke, she could not hear the sea any longer, only the murmur of human voices.
    She recognized the smells of the taproom, beer and smoke, sweat and onions, and the clean soap-and-man scent that was Jack. His hard shoulder pillowed her cheek. His arms and legs supported her as if she rode before him on his horse. She felt cradled. Protected.
    Off-balance.
    “Never seen anything like it,” a rough male voice pronounced.
    Oh dear. She opened her eyes.
    Immediately Jack’s arms tightened around her. “Morwenna.”
    Only her name, but she felt another shift in her chest as everything readjusted. His lean, strong face was very close, his deep brown eyes concerned.
    “Are you all right?” he asked. “What were you doing out there?”
    More than she could ever tell him.
    She sat up cautiously, aware of the villagers gathered around the fire. She recognized the baker with his curling orange beard, the dark and nervous shopkeeper, the nasty man with the crow’s voice and the weasel’s name. Stoat? Sloat, that was it. The young lovers cuddled in the corner, the fisherman’s muscled arm around the girl’s round waist.
    Jack was waiting for her answer. They all were waiting. She was truly a part of their circle now, the focus of all eyes. She fought the urge to hunch her shoulders, to hide from their attention.
    “I suppose I must have fainted.”
    Jack’s mouth compressed. “Before that.”
    “I went outside.”
    “Into the storm,” he said flatly.
    She glanced out the windows to avoid meeting his eyes. In the wake of her magic, the setting sun had painted the sky orange and rose. “The weather is clearing, is it not?”
    “It is now,” Jack acknowledged. “What about the seals?”
    She moistened her lips. “They must have washed ashore. In the storm.”
    “Washed ashore.” His voice was stiff with disbelief.
    She smiled at him. “Like that lucky young man saved by the tide.”
    An old fisherman spoke from his place at the bar. “It wasn’t the tide that saved him. It was the selkie.”
    Morwenna’s heart beat faster. The seals she had called to her were ordinary harbor seals. But the old man’s guess was uncomfortably close to the truth. The selkie were water elementals like the finfolk, all children of the sea.
    Jack’s brows drew together. “The what?”
    “The seal folk. They live in the ocean as seals, see, and when they come ashore they put off their sealskins and walk around no different from you and me.”
    “Except better looking,” put in another. “And naked.”
    “Superstitious nonsense,” Sloat said.
    The fisherman stuck out his jaw. “I’ve seen them out there in the waves. Guided me home once in the fog.”
    The young man, Colin, lifted his head from the girl’s brown hair and looked at Morwenna.
    “My grandda said if you find a selkie’s pelt and hide it, the selkie must bide with you as man or wife,” the second fisherman said.
    Sloat sneered. “Your grandda was at sea too long. I knew you Scots had sex with sheep. But seals?”
    Jack silenced him with a look. “It’s a pleasant story.”
    Morwenna released a relieved breath. Story. He did not believe a word of it.
    Colin left his corner and stood before Morwenna, fumbling beneath the open neck of his shirt. He wore a leather thong around his throat and the silver sign of the mortals’ murdered Christ. He pulled the thong over his head and offered her the cross in his broad palm. “Thank you,” he said simply.
    The ache in her throat grew to a lump. She swallowed hard. “You owe me nothing.”
    Stubbornly, he held out his hand. “I know what I know.”
    She shook her head, aware of Jack watching them. But she could not spurn the young fisherman’s earnest thanks. Nor could she take his offering and send him away empty-handed.
    She curled her hand around the cross and traced a spiral in his palm, the sign of the sea. “I will treasure your gift and remember,” she said. “Go in peace over the