The Turning Read online

  Dedication

  In memory of my father

  Epigraph

  Another wave comes crashing down,

  The world is sudden strange.

  From pelt to skin and back again,

  Our life is naught but change.

  —Ancient Selkie Song

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Where It Started

  Part One: Ocean

  Chapter One: Longlimbs

  Chapter Two: The Kelp Forest

  Chapter Three: The Return

  Chapter Four: Come to Me! Come!

  Chapter Five: Riona the Brave

  Chapter Six: The Red Beak

  Chapter Seven: Alone

  Chapter Eight: Everyone Knew

  Chapter Nine: The Knife

  Chapter Ten: Like All the Rest

  Chapter Eleven: Him

  Chapter Twelve: The Harness

  Chapter Thirteen: The Journey

  Chapter Fourteen: The Spire

  Chapter Fifteen: Finn

  Chapter Sixteen: The Moon’s Ear

  Chapter Seventeen: Storm Waves

  Chapter Eighteen: The Pelt Cave

  Chapter Nineteen: What Really Matters

  Part Two: Land

  Chapter Twenty: Promises

  Chapter Twenty-One: The Spiderweb

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Spindle Island

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Maggie

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Acting Human

  Chapter Twenty-Five: The Cliff

  Chapter Twenty-Six: The Puffin

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Net

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Out of the Fog

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Song

  Chapter Thirty: The Rock

  Chapter Thirty-One: What Maggie Heard

  Chapter Thirty-Two: The Book

  Chapter Thirty-Three: The Aerie

  Chapter Thirty-Four: The Walrus

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Blue

  Chapter Thirty-Six: The Story Fire

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Tree Cave

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: The Rest of the Song

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: The Second Full Moon

  Chapter Forty: Speak

  Chapter Forty-One: Patterns

  Chapter Forty-Two: The Theft

  Chapter Forty-Three: A Circle of Light

  Chapter Forty-Four: The Tale of Westwood Pier

  Chapter Forty-Five: The Torrent

  Chapter Forty-Six: Birdtalk

  Chapter Forty-Seven: Jack

  Chapter Forty-Eight: Three Little Coins

  Chapter Forty-Nine: Too Dangerous to Handle

  Chapter Fifty: A Bit of Advice

  Chapter Fifty-One: The Keys

  Chapter Fifty-Two: Gone

  Part Three: Shore

  Chapter Fifty-Three: Lost

  Chapter Fifty-Four: The Cove

  Chapter Fifty-Five: Netted

  Chapter Fifty-Six: The White Room

  Chapter Fifty-Seven: The Puffin’s Plan

  Chapter Fifty-Eight: In This Skin

  Chapter Fifty-Nine: I Could See Everything

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Where It Started

  I’d thought being left on Spindle Island was the worst thing that could happen. I was wrong.

  People kept coming into the white room to stare at me, trying to get me to speak. But I hadn’t spent all those months alone at sea to give in to humans now. That’s where it started. When I dove from the cliff, searching for my clan, and the fishermen’s nets snagged me and hauled me up on deck. I was cold—me, who’d never been cold before—and the motor pulsed through me, drowning out the rhythm of the waves. “It’s him,” they said. “The boy from Spindle Island. The one they were searching for. The one they never found.”

  Or maybe it started before that. When Nellie brought me the words to the song, and they fell in the whitecaps, soaking the pages with salt. When we faced the walrus. When I thought she could be my friend.

  No. It started long before any of that. Before I’d ever seen a human. Back when I lived with Mam and the rest of the clan at sea, hauling out on rocks slick with spray, swimming in kelp forests, riding the waves. Before I knew the truth . . .

  Part One

  Ocean

  Chapter One

  Longlimbs

  We were heading home from hunting. I rode on Mam’s back because we had so far to swim. The sun slipped down between sea and sky, the last long rays painting Mam’s fur as pink as my skin.

  “Let’s dive,” I said.

  With a flip of her tail we slipped under the waves, swimming close to the surface where I could still see.

  Mam was in sealform, sleek and strong. Her muscles flowed beneath her beautiful pelt. One day soon I’d have my own pelt, have the flippers and tail—the breath!—to travel the ocean roads all by myself. I’d greet the deep-water whales and swim for hours in spiraling coils. My eyes would be huge and black, able to see in dark water.

  We rose so I could gulp in a lungful of air.

  “Deeper!” I said.

  Mam shook her head. “Not until you turn, Aran.”

  I sighed in frustration. Each day it grew harder to wait. For eleven years now I’d been stuck with legs instead of a tail. My skin was thinner than a translucent kelp leaf. My feet were as clumsy as chunks of driftwood, my toes as separate as pebbles on the shore.

  The sky deepened to purple. A pale glow appeared on the horizon, and the Moon began to rise. She was waxing toward full. Now the waves were tipped with silver, and drops of light hung on the ends of Mam’s whiskers.

  The shape of the waves shifted and the island rose before us, black against the starlit sky. I slid off Mam’s back to swim the rest of the way on my own. She slowed to stay by my side, her alert eyes scanning the sea.

  I rode ashore on a wave, jumping to my feet in a crunch of pebbles. I ran over to the tide pools and started searching among the sea stars for something good to eat. There was a fat cluster of blue mussels and I twisted one free. The Moon was so bright, I could see my moonshadow, like another, darker me.

  Mam stretched out long on the rocks above the reach of the tide. If it were just her, she’d have her tail in the surf, but for my sake she always settled higher up.

  “Aren’t you coming to sleep?” she called.

  “I’m getting a snack.” I cracked the mussel shell on the rocks and slurped out the meat. “Want some?”

  “Maybe a taste.”

  I brought her a handful. She crunched the shells with her teeth.

  It was a good haulout Mam had found this time, with flat rocks for sleeping and basking, and plenty of tide pools, and a cove too shallow for sharks. She found all our haulouts when the rest of the clan was away on the long journey. They’d been gone for almost two moons now. I sat gazing out across the waves.

  “Do you think they’ll be back soon?” I asked.

  Mam didn’t answer. I looked over; she was already asleep.

  When I was little, we’d watch the clan swim away, and Mam would wipe the tears from my eyes. “Once you have your pelt, we’ll go,” she’d say. “It will be soon enough.” She called the time we spent alone our special time, and filled it with games and songs and stories, and I didn’t mind that much. It was just the way life was.

  Besides, Mam used to change all the time back then, when we were alone. I’d ride on her back to a new haulout, and as soon as we slid ashore she’d get that special, inward gaze, the look of the turning. Her pelt would grow loose around her and she’d slip it off, the flippers hanging lank, the
black claws clattering on the stones. She’d give a long, luxurious stretch before carefully folding her pelt and stashing it in the rocks. Then she was in longlimbs, like me, except for the webbing between her fingers and toes. “You’ll have that, too, when you turn,” she’d say. She taught me the full-Moon dances, and we played chase, and legs seemed like a fine thing to have.

  But the bigger I grew, the less often she changed. And when the rest of the clan was around, she hardly ever turned. Why would she, when she had a pelt? She’d been born in hers. Most selkies are.

  I couldn’t stop asking how my pelt would come. Would I wake one morning to find myself flicking a tail? Or would it be waiting for me on the shore? Would it be silver, like hers, or brown with golden spots, like my hair? Mam didn’t know. “Trust in the Moon,” she’d say. “It will come when the time is right.”

  But I could tell Mam was tired of waiting, too. And though she’d never admit it, she was worried. It was dangerous, having me in longlimbs. Humans don’t believe there are selkies anymore; they think we’re seals, and it’s safest that way. One night I overheard Grandmam telling Mam, “You need to be more careful, Oona! What if they saw him, a boy living with seals? They’d take him away, that’s what they’d do! They’d trap him on land”—her voice dropped, and I crept closer to hear the rest—“and he’d never get his pelt, and his selkie-soul would die.”

  The memory made me shiver.

  Now I sat up tall and lifted my face to the Moon.

  Please, I prayed. Please.

  The rest of my prayer didn’t have words. I closed my eyes and imagined the Moon—she who calls the waves—calling to me. I pictured myself with graceful flippers, my pelt sleek and shining.

  I opened my eyes and spread my fingers wide, searching for webbing, a sign of the turning, the beginning.

  They still looked the same.

  Maybe the change was too small to see. I ran a finger down from the top of my thumb and along the arcs of skin.

  Mam sighed. She was awake, her eyes following my finger as it traced every dip and rise. Her mouth set as she tried not to show me the ache she felt, the place in her heart as hollow as the gaps between my fingers. The place that only my pelt would fill.

  Chapter Two

  The Kelp Forest

  The sun peeked over the rocks and nudged me awake. Mam wasn’t there and my stomach growled; she must be getting breakfast. I ran down to the surf as she came scooting out of the waves, a little silver fish flapping in her jaws. She dropped it at my feet. I snatched it up and crunched off its head. The rest soon followed.

  “I’m still hungry,” I said. “Where did you catch it?”

  She pushed at a scrap of fish skin with her flipper. “A lovely kelp forest, a short swim southwest.”

  I edged into the shallows. “I think I’ll go catch another.”

  Her head jerked up. “Not on your own, you don’t. What about orcas and sharks? What about—”

  “There hasn’t been a boat in weeks,” I said. But she was already splashing in beside me.

  I kept up a steady stroke as the sun rose higher and higher. A short swim for her was a long swim with legs. When the sun was past its midpoint, Mam said I should ride the rest of the way. I climbed on her back and we sped away, splashing through the crests. In no time at all, she was twirling to spin me off.

  It was one of the prettiest kelp forests I’d ever seen. A wall of rock towered up to the surface. Sun seeped down thick, waving strands of bull kelp. Everything was dappled with light, from the specks of algae and miniature wiggling shrimp to the kelp’s great, round air bubbles.

  Mam swished up behind a young rockfish and gulped it down before it even had time to look surprised. Hunting was so easy with those teeth and curved black claws. All I had was fingernails, and those were worn to stubs from scrambling on rocks.

  I swam along the rock face, searching among the sea stars and corals. I reached in a crevice and snatched out a baby octopus, then kicked up a warm current to the surface. I rode up and down on the waves as I ate.

  I filled my lungs and dove again. I chased an anchovy through the waving fronds. There was a flicker of red on the seabed—a crab, a beauty! I swooped down and grabbed its shell by the sides, then swiveled around to show Mam. She was nowhere in sight.

  My chest was growing tight. It was my stupid lungs, straining toward the surface like the bubbles in the kelp. I didn’t have the air in my veins yet. In sealform, your blood carries enough air to stay underwater a long time. You close your nostrils and dive, and you don’t have to worry about breathing for ages.

  I flapped my arms to force myself farther down. The crab had to swish along, its eyes waving on their long stalks. Suddenly it twisted and snapped. A sharp pain sliced through the back of my hand.

  “Ow!” The last of my breath escaped in a rush of bubbles.

  The crab scuttled away as I kicked upward, my chest straining, my ears pounding. I burst through to the surface and gulped down a lungful of air.

  A bright ribbon of blood trickled down my arm.

  Mam swam up beside me, a green strand of kelp dangling from her mouth. “Here,” she said, laying it across my arm. “Wrap this around it and then hop on for a ride.”

  I glared, embarrassed. “I can swim.”

  She shook her head. “You know perfectly well about blood and sharks.”

  “There aren’t any sharks,” I grumbled. But I climbed on her back, wrapped the seaweed tightly around my hand, and lay down flat for the ride back to shore.

  Mam swam without speaking. It took forever. We swam and swam and still we were only halfway back.

  That’s when I felt the water change.

  My muscles tensed. “Something’s coming,” I said.

  Mam swam faster. She could feel it, too. We were in open water—no islands, no rocks, not even a chunk of driftwood to climb out on.

  “Hold on,” said Mam in the crisp voice that signaled danger. “Sharks look up, not down. When I nod, take your deepest breath and I’ll dive.”

  My arms tightened around her neck. The end of the seaweed flapped loose in the waves.

  The beast was approaching fast. Mam would never get away with me on her back. I started to let go—

  “Don’t even think about it,” she snapped. “Don’t—”

  The beast zoomed beneath us, rocking us in its current. My heart was pounding hard enough to burst from my chest. Why hadn’t it attacked from below? Was it playing with us?

  I raised my fist. It was the only weapon I had.

  Chapter Three

  The Return

  A black head broke through the waves a stone’s throw away. Mam gasped—why wasn’t she baring her teeth to fight?—and now it was surging toward us, water sheening its broad back—

  It swerved to a stop a whisker away.

  “Lyr!” cried Mam, her voice rich and warm.

  That sleek black pelt, those whiskers—it was Lyr, our chief, the fastest, strongest selkie in the sea.

  “You’re back!” I cried.

  Lyr drifted forward to nuzzle Mam’s nose. Then, with a swish of his flippers, he was bobbing upright in the water, gazing at her with delight.

  “Ah, it’s good to see you, Oona.” His voice rumbled dark and deep, like waves at night.

  Mam was too busy smiling to answer.

  If Lyr was back, then the rest of the clan was, too, home from the long journey. I sat up higher, scanning the waves for their shining heads.

  Lyr followed my eyes. “They’re not here yet,” he said. “They were messing around an old shipwreck. I came ahead to find you.”

  My grin stretched as wide as an orca’s.

  He wore the special expression that was for me alone. “Look at you, Aran! You’ve grown a flipper’s length since I last saw you.” He grinned at Mam. “How can you still be carrying that pup? Why, he’s as big as you are!”

  He was joking, but the air sighed out of Mam, like an anemone closing back in on itself.r />
  I shrugged it away. There’d be so much to do now that the others were back! We’d have chasing games, and lively discussions that Mam always said weren’t really arguments, and more kinds of fish than you could count on all your claws put together. And stories. Grandmam’s stories.

  Lyr asked Mam if we’d found a good haulout, and she told him how to reach our cove. “Perfect,” he said. “I’ll fetch the clan and see you there.” He somersaulted backward and was gone.

  I slipped off Mam’s back and started swimming. When she flicked up beside me with a frown, I paused to show her the cut wasn’t bleeding anymore, and then I took off again.

  We were a small clan. It was just the seven of us, and I was the only pup. I could hardly wait to see them—bold Cormac, and Mist with her gentle wit and sweet smile. Even Maura, who meant well. But most of all I was thinking about Grandmam and the briny smell of her pelt, and the way she always tickled my ear with her whiskers.

  After a while, I stopped to tread water and catch my breath. Mam asked if I wanted a ride; I shook my head. Then, staring across the waves so I wouldn’t be looking at her, I asked, “What did Lyr mean?”

  “About what?”

  “About you still carrying me. Am I too old to be riding?”

  Her smile went off-kilter. She was thinking hard how to answer. Finally she said, “Being born in longlimbs is special. It doesn’t happen very often. Lyr’s never known anyone else who had to wait for their pelt. He doesn’t always see that we need to do things differently.”

  She’d only raised more questions.

  “Does anyone know when I’ll get my pelt?” I asked.

  “The Moon knows,” said Mam.

  It was about time for the Moon to tell me. I splashed past Mam, swimming as fast as I could toward my clan.

  Chapter Four

  Come to Me! Come!

  We swam around the point and there they were, scattered on the beach like sun-silvered driftwood.

  “Hey!” I called, stopping to tread water so I could shout louder. “Over here! It’s me!”

  One of the logs arced up a shining head.