#your ancestors made an occult bargain probably to be gingers with visible eyelashes

[elodieunderglass]

Despite not being an expert on social etiquette he was certain that asking pretty girls if they were secretly horses was considered a faux pas.

Albert And The Water-Horse

It was a bright grey day, like a dove’s wing, and the surface of the sea was like glass. On a morning such as this, it was easy to forget the treacherous currents just out past the rocks or the out-of-town visitors who had drowned. Locals these days knew where and when to avoid the waters but there was always an outsider who failed to listen.

Albert had no intention of staying long. His obligations in town were sure to be brief and he was already looking forward to returning home. The farm was busy in early spring and his siblings needed him. Besides, the sea held little allure for a man of his nature. His heart belonged to the horses he rode and the green fields that raised him.

Even he could not deny the beauty of the day, however, as he strolled along the cliff path. He sang in a pleasant tenor, honed by many years of church hymns, enjoying thoroughly the experience of nobody interrupting him. The friend he was staying with was, he would grudgingly admit, dear to him but he had a teething baby and Albert’s patience only went so far.

Albert saw a flash of white out of the corner of his eye. Turning, he found his song dying in his mouth. He stared down at a white horse trotting brightly along the stony beach below him. Albert was no mean judge of horseflesh and even from this distance he could see that this was a magnificent creature. It clearly belonged to someone – a silver chain gleamed around its neck - but it was unattended. As he looked, it tossed its head and sent a strand of seaweed falling from its mane.

Albert looked around for a way down to the beach but there was none. No steps carved in the cliff, no ladder, not even a suitably rocky outcrop where he might scramble hand over hand. He could only stare helplessly at the finest horse he had ever beheld as its nostrils flared and, all at once, it bolted from him. It ran with extraordinary grace. Albert wished he knew whose horse it was and where they planned to race it. You could not have a horse like that and not plan to race it. It would be spitting on a divine gift.

White as an egret’s wing, the horse was a flash of light in the distance before Albert truly had time to think. It was gone, and he stood in silence, wondering who dared let something so beautiful roam so freely.

That night, Albert escaped the raucous little home where he was staying to walk alone on the beach. He told himself that it was merely to get some peace and quiet whilst the baby was settled down but deep inside there was the wild hope that he might spy that horse again. Perhaps it would still be running loose. Perhaps the owner would ride it down by the water.

Instead, as he picked his way over break-ankle ground, he heard music. It was sweet and haunting, a lament that curled out into the sky and seemed to make the stars flicker in sympathy. Almost without meaning to, Albert followed it.

Round a bend in the beach, he saw her: a girl upon the rocks. She was dressed all in white, with silver slippers on her feet and a silver chain around her neck. Her glossy hair was ivory and her skin like marble, her eyes green and cold as malachite. She played the violin with her eyes half-closed. The music seemed to stir the clouds above her and set the little many-legged creatures skittering in the rockpools at her feet. Albert stood, transfixed.

If she had noticed him while playing, she gave no sign but when she at last stopped and lowered her violin, her face showed no surprise to see him standing there.

“I heard you,” she said, and her voice had a sting to it. “On the cliffs this morning. I heard you singing.”

Albert did not ask how she knew it was him. He did not ask why she cared. He did not ask if she was a horse, because despite not being an expert on social etiquette he was certain that asking pretty girls if they were secretly horses was considered a faux pas. Instead, he removed his cap and nodded awkwardly.

“Sing for me,” she commanded.

“If it pleases you.” Albert would do a lot for a pretty face, human or equine. “What shall I sing?”

“Anything.” She dimpled when she smiled. “Everything.”

He sang every song he knew – the church hymns, the old folk songs, the playground ditties, the tunes that crackled from the radio his sister loved so much. All the while, he could not look away from those green eyes. They held him transfixed, drawing richness and timbre from him that his voice has never had before, till the music that rang out over the water was not the singing of a barroom tenor but someone for whom the opera houses of the world should hold open their doors. It was not Albert – he knew that. It was her. Something in her had the power.

When at last the well of music ran dry, Albert’s throat ached. A fine mist of rain was falling on them both. He was cold to his core but the horse-girl was smiling.

“You should go,” she said. “Back to dry land. The tide will be coming in.”

Albert glanced down at the wavelets lapping at the toes of his boots. “What about you?”

“Don’t worry about me.” When she smiled this time, he could see the glint of teeth a little too sharp to be human. “Run, before you are drowned.”

Albert stayed stubbornly put. “Will I see you again?”

“Tomorrow.” Her green eyes flashed. “If you are brave.”

She stepped down from her rock. As soon as her toe touched the water, she dissolved into seafoam. The mass of her bubbled and boiled at Albert’s startled feet until all at once she grew again, the gleaming white horse with the mad green eyes, rearing up to strike his chest with silver hooves, before she turned and fled into the waves from which she came. Albert picked himself up off the ground, squeezing saltwater out of his cap, and splashed thoughtfully back to the protective wall that kept the encroaching tide from swallowing the little town whole.

He was no fool. He knew what became of mortals who tangled with the water-horses and their ilk. But she had not drowned him, had not eaten him up and let his liver float to the surface. Albert was not afraid. He knew he would be back.

The very next night, sure enough, he found the water-horse once again sitting on her rock with her violin resting in her lap.

“Aren’t you afraid,” she asked him, “that I will eat you?”

“Aren’t you afraid,” he replied, “that I will bring an iron poker to stab you?”

“I could smell the iron on you if you had it,” she said loftily. “You would never know I was about to bite until I did.”

Albert agreed that that was true. “Bite me if you will. I want to know your name.”

The girl laughed. “You could never speak my name. It is this.”

She made a sound like the shushing of water over smooth sand, the delicate whisper of a tide coming in at the end of the day.

“My name is Albert.”

“Albert.” She wrinkled her pretty nose. “What does it mean?”

“I don’t know,” Albert admitted. “It means I am the eldest of my siblings, I suppose.”

“I have ten thousand siblings,” the water-horse confessed, “and I am neither older nor younger than any of them.”

“You must never be lonely.” Albert reflected on his own siblings, on the chaos of a small home crowded with people. “Maybe not lonely enough sometimes.”

She watched him as though waiting for a trap to spring. “There are millions of us. Everywhere a wave breaks, we are born. The little foals on the sandy beaches with the shallow tides. The great stallions where the surf rises higher than your people can build walls to trap it. The holy ones born where the deadening waves crash, where the herd runs as one to swallow the land.”

“Are they all your herd?” Albert asked.

The water-horse shook her pretty head. “Our herd is the bay. We run and run upon this beach, against these rocks. I ran here before the town came, so long ago, but I do not remember it well.”

“Why not?”

“There was nothing to remember. We run, we crash, we ebb and flow. What was there to watch but the birds?” She lifted her violin, evidently done with conversation. “I will sing for you now. It is my turn.”

Her voice was sweet and true, the language that of coral reefs and darting fish. She played sunlight on water and sang the swooping, diving gulls. She played shells forming great chalk cliffs and sang the waves sending them crashing down again. The longer Albert stood and listened, the less he seemed to be there at all. He was a pebble spun in the water, washed clean, ground smooth, adrift in the vastness of the ocean.

When silence fell, the moon was low in the sky. Hours had somehow passed. Albert shivered and pulled his jacket a little closer around him.

“You are cold.” The water-horse sounded troubled. “I have never been cold.”

“It will pass. You sing beautifully.”

“Yes.” She did not seem interested in that. “How does it feel, to be cold?”

Albert was not a man much given to flights of poetry. The question stumped him.

“It hurts,” he said, at last. “A sharp sort of hurt.”

The water-horse nodded solemnly as if he had imparted great wisdom.

“How does it feel,” Albert asked in return, “to run in the water like you do?”

“But that I can show you,” she replied. “If you ride on my back, you can see for yourself.”

Albert’s heart was in his mouth. “I would like that.”

“You truly are not afraid of me?” she wondered.

“I have never been afraid of horses.”

She laughed softly. “Do not fall. I cannot save you if you fall.”

She was magnificent transformed, as if sculpted from ivory by someone intent on portraying all that a horse should be. In awe, Albert ran his hand down her neck. He felt the coiled power in those muscles, the stillness where a pulse should beat. She nudged his shoulder with her proud head, urging him on.

With the rock as a mounting block, it was no hardship for Albert to swing onto her back. He wound his fingers into her sand-laden mane. He gripped his thighs tight against her wet glossy coat. He clung on for all he was worth, and his water-horse ran.

She ran fleet as the wind, faster than any ship, faster than any horse Albert had had the privilege to ride, out across the bay. Her hooves churned the sea into a drenching white wake. The salt spray in Albert’s eyes blinded him. When he dared to tilt his head back, he saw the stars racing by, wheeling in their constellations as they galloped in spirals, a grand carousel. Albert had never felt a gait so smooth, a pace so swift. Never had he had to fight so hard to stay on a broad back than now, muscles tight, hanging on by willpower alone. The sea below was dark and foreboding, black as ice on the road. He dared not risk falling.

A rocky outcrop approached too fast, jagged knives of stone protruding. Albert screwed his eyes up tight and braced for a swerve that never came. There was the sensation, for a moment, of strength and then… He opened his eyes as they drifted through the air, flung from a breaking wave, high over the rocks and glittering amongst the freezing spume. Albert threw back his head and whooped to the silent sky. His water-horse whinnied too as they crashed down into the water, plunging below till only Albert’s iron-tight grip on her mane kept him from being ripped clean away from her.

They broke the surface again to coast on the gathering waves. One bore them in, gentle as a leaf in a stream, spitting them out onto the slope of the beach. The water-horse never lost her stride for a moment, slowing to a trot and finally stopping back beside the rock where they had begun. Albert was so cold he could barely speak. Even as he slid from her back, he could not untangle his frozen fingers from her mane. His teeth chattered but his heart sang, his blood thrilled.

She changed form even as he held her, her mane becoming flowing hair, the warm strength of her shoulder supporting him becoming her small body, helping him down to sit upon the rock. She was still strong this way, all the power of her horse-form crushed into something so tiny and frail that it was a miracle her bones didn’t burst under the strain. She laughed the whole time, eyes dancing. She seemed to glow.

“I can feel your heartbeat,” she teased. “You are scared of me now.”

“I’m scared of hypothermia,” Albert grumbled but he couldn’t make his eyebrows frown. “I could never be scared of you.”

“Can people get so cold they die of it?” she asked. “I didn’t know.”

“I won’t die,” he promised, fighting to get his chattering teeth under control.

“You can let go now.” Her voice was softer, her fingers caressing the wrist of the hand that still held tight a lock of her hair.

“I don’t think I can.”

She unwound his fingers for him, prising them open. She held his hand like it was a foreign thing, tracing the veins, exploring the minute flaws in the skin. Her own skin was unnaturally smooth to the touch. Her lips, when she turned her head to kiss his palm, were powder-soft. Her open mouth gave off no heat but her teeth were razor sharp when she bit down hard.

Albert flinched but did not pull away. He held that wild green gaze even as he felt her fangs scrape against the bone and his hand throb in pain. She released him, drawing back slowly, cradling his wrist. Her pointed tongue darted out to lick the blood from the wound. Her eyes closed in satisfaction.

“Salt,” she said. “Just a little bit of ocean in you.”

“Is this the part,” Albert asked, “where you eat me alive?”

“Not yet.” She tasted his blood again. “I’m not ready yet.”

She dropped his hand suddenly and turned her face away. Albert, on the brink of leaning in to kiss her, was left with nowhere to go as she slid to the edge of the rock.

“Will I see you tomorrow?” he asked, but the girl was already a horse once more, galloping into the sea, splashing him with her tail.

Albert made his slow way back to his friend’s house, nursing his bleeding hand, unsure why he wasn’t angry that she had done it. Perhaps the thrill of that wild ride still had him in its grip and nothing else could matter. Perhaps it was simply that he had never doubted she would not kill him.

The next night, his hand bandaged, Albert made his way back down to the beach. He found his water-horse waiting for him, sitting on the rocks and playing a merry air on her violin. She smiled as he approached, teeth bared, dimples on show. Albert did not hesitate to sit down beside her, ignoring the leeching cold of the stone beneath him.

“You came back,” she said.

“Why wouldn’t I?” He placed his hand over hers. “I am not afraid of you.”

She plucked a single note and set her violin aside. “You are not from here, are you? I had not heard your voice before the other day.”

Albert shook his head. “I’m from a long way south of here, inland. My family, we have a farm. We race horses.”

“Do you have a big family?” There was a note of longing in her voice.

“Not by your standards, maybe. Not an easy family either.” Albert grinned at the thought of his young sister. “A family that’s nothing but black sheep, if I’m honest with you.”

“What does that mean? Black sheep?”

“Oddities,” Albert explained. “Strange types. Lawbreakers.”

“Lawbreakers…” The water-horse fingered the silver chain around her neck. “Do you break laws, Albert?”

He admitted somewhat sheepishly that he did. The water-horse, if anything, seemed pleased by this idea.

“We do not have laws but we do have…ways that things are supposed to be.” Her troubled expression cleared. “Tell me more about inland. I’ve never seen it.”

So Albert told her. Once he had started talking, he found it difficult to stop. He told her about his siblings, about the scrapes he and Andrew got into as boys, about Augustine and his temper tantrums, about Alice-Rose dancing in the kitchen to the radio. His gruff love for them shone through all his insistence on their many sins and terrible natures. He told her about the fields of home, the turning of the seasons, the birds coming home to roost. He told her about hedgerows and vegetable patches and somehow, bathed in her enthusiasm for it all, even the tiresome chores took on a romantic glow.

And he told her about the horses. Oh yes, he told her about the horses. Every member of the little herd, every one who had ever passed through their gates, every point and foible of each. He told her about racetracks, about breeders and trainers and owners, about the place where he was utterly and entirely himself. Running. Free. With every word, he missed it more. He had been away nearly a week. He ached for home.

Through it all, the water-horse listened with rapt attention. She hung on his every word. Her green eyes glowed like stars.

“I wish I could see it.” Somehow, she had ended up pressed against his side, her head on his shoulder. “I have never been beyond this beach in all my life and I never shall. I should like to see the barley grow, just once. You shall leave soon and I shall not even hear about it then.”

“Come home with me,” Albert urged. “Let me show you everything.”

“I cannot.” She sat up, eyes fixed on the horizon. “I belong to my family and the water that made me.”

“Why?” Albert held her pretty little chin in his rough hands, turning her face to look at him once more. “Must you stay with them forever? Will they not let you go if you want it?”

Her tears had no salt in them. They were pure as snowmelt. “What I want does not matter. It is what I am.”

“It matters to me.”

The kiss tasted of brine. Her hands shook only a little more than Albert’s.

“Can you not outgrow them?” Albert demanded. “Are you never to leave the herd? Must you always be what they tell you you are?”

“Yes.” She kissed him again. “Yes, they would be so angry, you cannot know…you cannot imagine! I have a duty to my kin.”

Albert, on another day, might have understood but on that night all he knew was the horse-girl in his arms and the tears in her eyes. He did not want to let her go.

“Marry me.” He did not mean to say it until he already had. The moment it fell off his tongue he felt the rightness of it. “Be my wife. Let me take you away. You will have new kin, new duties. They cannot stop that, can they?”

“I am not human!” she protested. “I am not a woman.”

“That doesn’t matter to me.”

“There is not a church in the land that will marry us!”

“Is there one in the sea?” Albert clutched her close. “There are ways round everything, if you know who to ask.”

She clung to him, cold arms around his neck, face pressed against his cheek. He held her tight, the frailty of her, the strength, the sea-cold power and the ephemeral foam.

“Tomorrow,” she whispered against his ear. “Tomorrow, my beloved. Join me in the water. Grab hold of my bridle and don’t let go. Whatever you do, don’t let go.”

With a final kiss, she slipped from his arms and into the sea. Albert reached up to stroke, for a moment, the muscular neck of the most magnificent horse he had ever seen. She lowered her dished head to him solemnly, the fire in her eyes banked, before she turned and fled, dissolving into the waves.

The final night of his stay in the north, Albert went out to the beach again to collect his bride. He wore his strongest boots and a rose in his buttonhole. There was no girl waiting for him on the rocks this time. Albert felt a prickle of doubt but he pressed on. She had said to join her in the water and so he would. The sea was still that night, flat under a moonless sky. Weak currents tugged at his feet, leading him on.

The water was a shock of ice when it first rose above his boots. His feet were numb in seconds. It squeezed like a clamp around his legs, forcing the blood from them, but still Albert waded deeper. Little by little, the numbness spread up his body. When he was above his waist and the shore seemed so very far away behind him, his water-horse at last appeared.

She trotted forward and Albert reached out gratefully for her, twining his fingers into her sandy mane. She rippled and shifted till her girl’s body was there again, his hands in her hair, her eyes full of tears.

“What is it, my love?” He kissed her sweet cold lips. “Why so unhappy?”

“You must go,” she begged. “You must go now.”

“Come with me then!”

“They are waiting, Albert.” She clutched his hand tightly. “They know! They are going to eat you if you try to take me away. You must leave now and not come back.”

“I am not afraid of them.” Albert squeezed her hand reassuringly. “Come with me now and we will leave them all behind. They cannot threaten you.”

She shook her head urgently. “You do not understand. They are listening to everything you say. If I try to leave with you, they will kill you. You have to make it back to the beach. That’s all – just get to the beach and you’ll be safe.”

“What about you?” He tried to meet her eyes even as she avoided his gaze. “Will they hurt you?”

“They are my family. I will survive whatever they do to me.”

“No!” Albert kissed her fiercely. “I will not leave you here alone!”

“Please,” she begged. “They are my herd. They are my kin. I am of the waves. I cannot - I must not – go, I beg of you!”

“I love you.” He caught and held her wild green gaze. “Do you love me? Could you love me?”

She hesitated. She nodded. Her voice broke. “I could love you.”

“Then marry me.”

Albert folded her into his arms. He kissed her delicate mouth. He closed his hand upon the silver chain around her neck and, when she stepped back from him, did not let go. The silver was colder than ice, colder than anything Albert had ever felt. It burned into his palm but still he pulled. The clasp broke.

Suddenly, his water-horse was vast, a whinny screaming from her throat, hooves kicking the air above him before she plunged down into the depths, leaving him alone and trembling in the shallows. The silver chain still hung from his hand but even as he wound it tighter, it grew heavier and colder.

The sea rose around him. The clouds raced across the sky. The waves that had been lapping at the beach began to bite chunks out of it. Before Albert could strike out for the shore, a stallion burst from the water and hit him full in the chest. He was forced below the surface, mouth open in a startled shout. For an instant he grappled with the darkness, all direction lost. Bitter saltwater choked his lungs.

He surfaced, spluttering, only to be felled again by another horse as it flung itself madly at him. Silver hooves trampled. White manes shook. Nostrils flared and green eyes blazed. The silver chain was dead weight now, dragging him down, almost too heavy to keep above the sand of the seafloor.

Albert crawled. He stumbled. He fell to the terrifying weight of the horses, tumbled and tossed, pulled by the current, till it took all his effort to just stay in one place, avoid being swept out to sea. Every time he managed to get his head above the surface, he sucked in air only to be knocked down again, lungs screaming in protest, head swimming. The shore seemed so distant. Every now and then, sharp teeth tore at his clothes, nipped at his fingers, taunted him with the moment when they would finally rend flesh from bone and end it all. Still he did not let go of the chain.

Her hands found him, warm and human. Her arms still had the wild strength of the ocean in them. He clung to her and she dragged, spitting and screaming in a language like rock scraping against rock. Her family crashed around them, over them. He choked for air. He coughed up water. He felt sure that his arm would be ripped from its socket, that his hand would be torn from his wrist and sink into the sea with the terrible chain.

But there was the beach ahead. The sand turned to pebbles beneath his scrabbling hands. There was the rocky incline and his bride pulling him up, pulling him forward, as the horses dashed themselves recklessly against the rocks around them.

“The tide!” she shouted. “They will bring the tide!”

The water was climbing higher and higher around them, swallowing up the beach, trying to cut them off from the protective seawall ahead. She battled through it, screaming and begging, never letting go of his arm. The chain pointed like a compass needle out to sea, drawn by its own strange magnetism towards the horizon. It was all Albert could do to move an inch or two at a time. The cold was in his aching bones. His lungs seemed stiff in his chest, frozen solid, unable to draw breath, even as the sea retreated, even as he found himself staggering on dry land towards the rusty rickety ladder that would see them safely onto solid ground.

“They’re giving up,” he gasped out, but she only shook her head, dragging him on.

By the time they made it to the ladder, the wind was strong enough to blow branches from nearby trees. Albert risked a glance over his shoulder – and saw, at last, what his bride was so afraid of. A vast wall of water, clear as glass, and above it the foaming, churning madness of the herd, running as one.

“We weren’t fast enough.” She bent his failing fingers around the rusty ladder. “Hold on.”

The hand that clutched the chain could not be persuaded to grip anything. Albert had barely hooked his thumb around a strut before the sea hit him in the back and all was noise.

Albert clung. He felt the chain rip his skin. He felt the bones of his hand break. He felt his lungs fill up with water. He felt the hooves of the herd on his back, his head, his limbs. He could not let go. He would not let her go. He held on tight as the current ripped past him, through him, drowning him; as his broken bones screamed in white-hot pain; as his sturdy boots were torn from his feet by the sheer strength of the water.

The waves broke – and ebbed. The horses were sucked back from the beach. Albert reeled, half-blind, the world spinning and fractured. He scarcely knew with what strength he was climbing the ladder save the relentless pull of his bride’s arms, dragging him to safety. He collapsed onto solid stone just as a second wave hit. They reared up above him, tossed on the spray, blinding white and screaming, but they could not reach him now.

There was silence on the beach. The sea was a dead calm. The wind died away to a gentle breeze. The silver chain, wound so tight around Albert’s broken hand, now weighed nothing at all. Every part of him hurt. The world span in doubles around him. He knelt on the ground and hacked up a lungful of water, coughing and retching till only bile remained. He fell back, flat, staring at the uncaring sky. When he raised his shaking hand above him, he could see hoofprint bruises on his arm, as if he had lain down on the racetrack to be trampled.

But there she was, his bride, his water-horse. No longer was her skin marble but flesh, living and real, flush with blood beneath the surface. No longer were her eyes the madness of the deep water but grey-green, sparkling, human. When she reached out to him, fell laughing, sobbing, against him, he felt her warmth, her solidity, her personhood. He folded her in his arms as she wept freshwater tears into his chest.

“We’re safe.” His voice crackled wetly in his throat. “We’re safe, my love.”

“Stupid, stupid!” She sat up, face blotchy, hair a mess. “I told you they would hurt you! I told you to save yourself!”

“I’ll live.” He reached out to wipe the tears from her cheeks. “How about you? Will you live?”

She nodded, blowing her nose. “Like a mortal woman.”

It took all Albert’s strength to force himself upright. He knew broken ribs when he felt them. He was sure, too, that one eye would be too swollen to see through within the hour. But he sat up nonetheless because how else was he to kiss his little wife?

“I will take you home with me in the morning. You will be happy. I promise.”

“Won’t your people mind?” She seemed, for the first time, shy. “A wife with no name and no family?”

“Catherine is a good name.” Albert chose at random. “I have family enough for the both of us.”

“Catherine…” She weighed it on her tongue. “Catherine….Catherine…”

“Mrs Catherine Tiernan.” Albert laughed suddenly. “I never told you my family name.”

“I didn’t know humans had those,” Catherine admitted. “They will not think I’m strange?”

“They will not mind that you are strange.” Albert caressed her cheek. “My little love, you have nothing to fear.”

They sat there in the cold night till Albert felt strong enough to stand. He limped, his arm around his bride, down into the town, watching the blisters of frozen flesh where the chain had bitten deep turn to silver-white scars.

So it was. If the Tiernan family thought its newest member anything other than fully human, they never passed comment on it. The silver chain sat in an old jewellery box belonging to Albert’s mother, tucked safe at the back of a little drawer where nobody could stumble upon it. It never tarnished. Albert took it out occasionally, lay the links over the scar they had left and tried to remember the weight of it, the dreadful pull of the current. It was still a little colder than it should be. No matter how long he held it, it was never warmed by his skin.

Catherine never went near the sea again. She thrived, his tiny wife, on the farm, blessed him with a son and heir – and more besides. She delighted in the horses, in the barley growing in fields around the village, in the birds of the hedgerows and the songs that they sang. If she regretted her choice of husband, she never said so. But sometimes when the wind was blowing cold from the faraway coast, she sat on the steps outside and played her violin with notes so sweet and aching that Albert’s heart broke just to hear her and he would swear, if only for a moment, he could smell saltwater in the air.

---

I just really liked the idea of the horse-bride. I thought it was whimsical, and the mysterious Catherine Tiernan reminded me a lot of my great-great-grandmother Catherine, who was also a tiny Irishwoman who married an older man against cultural taboos, was a brilliant musician, and would absolutely have eaten a man alive if she was given the opportunity. This isn't my best work but I'm tentatively pleased with it and my therapist says that Killie-fangirling is actually good for me so I guess this is medically necessary fanfiction. It's the middle of the night and I haven't edited this. I'm really crossing my fingers and praying there aren't any glaring mistakes.

[sweetlyfez]

Elodie's tags: #over many generations this family have evolved a very niche pickup game. step one. dont ask if theyre horses. step two. re#remember to blink. not too much! we are trying for a careful balance of eye contact.#be witty and charming by perhaps pretending that the person is a horse.#step 4? maybe? stare up at them winsomely through your eyelashes. decent ones have been provided for this purpose. despite being gin#your ancestors made an occult bargain probably to be gingers with visible eyelashes#it’s the best we can do for you. in the unlikely scenario of the person you like being SHORTER than you - this never comes up but#you can try kneeling and then look up at them through the eyelashes etc while at their feet. works pretty well.#step 5 remember to STOP talking if they start making a face like 😗#step 6 really really try not to talk about horses the whole time.#ok that’s it you’re good. it’s always worked.#sorry in conclusion! love this story

Horse grandma *and* an occult bargain to be ginger with visible eyelashes, damn these guys have a lot going on

Albert And The Water-Horse

It was a bright grey day, like a dove’s wing, and the surface of the sea was like glass. On a morning such as this, it was easy to forget the treacherous currents just out past the rocks or the out-of-town visitors who had drowned. Locals these days knew where and when to avoid the waters but there was always an outsider who failed to listen.

Albert had no intention of staying long. His obligations in town were sure to be brief and he was already looking forward to returning home. The farm was busy in early spring and his siblings needed him. Besides, the sea held little allure for a man of his nature. His heart belonged to the horses he rode and the green fields that raised him.

Even he could not deny the beauty of the day, however, as he strolled along the cliff path. He sang in a pleasant tenor, honed by many years of church hymns, enjoying thoroughly the experience of nobody interrupting him. The friend he was staying with was, he would grudgingly admit, dear to him but he had a teething baby and Albert’s patience only went so far.

Albert saw a flash of white out of the corner of his eye. Turning, he found his song dying in his mouth. He stared down at a white horse trotting brightly along the stony beach below him. Albert was no mean judge of horseflesh and even from this distance he could see that this was a magnificent creature. It clearly belonged to someone – a silver chain gleamed around its neck - but it was unattended. As he looked, it tossed its head and sent a strand of seaweed falling from its mane.

Albert looked around for a way down to the beach but there was none. No steps carved in the cliff, no ladder, not even a suitably rocky outcrop where he might scramble hand over hand. He could only stare helplessly at the finest horse he had ever beheld as its nostrils flared and, all at once, it bolted from him. It ran with extraordinary grace. Albert wished he knew whose horse it was and where they planned to race it. You could not have a horse like that and not plan to race it. It would be spitting on a divine gift.

White as an egret’s wing, the horse was a flash of light in the distance before Albert truly had time to think. It was gone, and he stood in silence, wondering who dared let something so beautiful roam so freely.

That night, Albert escaped the raucous little home where he was staying to walk alone on the beach. He told himself that it was merely to get some peace and quiet whilst the baby was settled down but deep inside there was the wild hope that he might spy that horse again. Perhaps it would still be running loose. Perhaps the owner would ride it down by the water.

Instead, as he picked his way over break-ankle ground, he heard music. It was sweet and haunting, a lament that curled out into the sky and seemed to make the stars flicker in sympathy. Almost without meaning to, Albert followed it.

Round a bend in the beach, he saw her: a girl upon the rocks. She was dressed all in white, with silver slippers on her feet and a silver chain around her neck. Her glossy hair was ivory and her skin like marble, her eyes green and cold as malachite. She played the violin with her eyes half-closed. The music seemed to stir the clouds above her and set the little many-legged creatures skittering in the rockpools at her feet. Albert stood, transfixed.

If she had noticed him while playing, she gave no sign but when she at last stopped and lowered her violin, her face showed no surprise to see him standing there.

“I heard you,” she said, and her voice had a sting to it. “On the cliffs this morning. I heard you singing.”

Albert did not ask how she knew it was him. He did not ask why she cared. He did not ask if she was a horse, because despite not being an expert on social etiquette he was certain that asking pretty girls if they were secretly horses was considered a faux pas. Instead, he removed his cap and nodded awkwardly.

“Sing for me,” she commanded.

“If it pleases you.” Albert would do a lot for a pretty face, human or equine. “What shall I sing?”

“Anything.” She dimpled when she smiled. “Everything.”

He sang every song he knew – the church hymns, the old folk songs, the playground ditties, the tunes that crackled from the radio his sister loved so much. All the while, he could not look away from those green eyes. They held him transfixed, drawing richness and timbre from him that his voice has never had before, till the music that rang out over the water was not the singing of a barroom tenor but someone for whom the opera houses of the world should hold open their doors. It was not Albert – he knew that. It was her. Something in her had the power.

When at last the well of music ran dry, Albert’s throat ached. A fine mist of rain was falling on them both. He was cold to his core but the horse-girl was smiling.

“You should go,” she said. “Back to dry land. The tide will be coming in.”

Albert glanced down at the wavelets lapping at the toes of his boots. “What about you?”

“Don’t worry about me.” When she smiled this time, he could see the glint of teeth a little too sharp to be human. “Run, before you are drowned.”

Albert stayed stubbornly put. “Will I see you again?”

“Tomorrow.” Her green eyes flashed. “If you are brave.”

She stepped down from her rock. As soon as her toe touched the water, she dissolved into seafoam. The mass of her bubbled and boiled at Albert’s startled feet until all at once she grew again, the gleaming white horse with the mad green eyes, rearing up to strike his chest with silver hooves, before she turned and fled into the waves from which she came. Albert picked himself up off the ground, squeezing saltwater out of his cap, and splashed thoughtfully back to the protective wall that kept the encroaching tide from swallowing the little town whole.

He was no fool. He knew what became of mortals who tangled with the water-horses and their ilk. But she had not drowned him, had not eaten him up and let his liver float to the surface. Albert was not afraid. He knew he would be back.

The very next night, sure enough, he found the water-horse once again sitting on her rock with her violin resting in her lap.

“Aren’t you afraid,” she asked him, “that I will eat you?”

“Aren’t you afraid,” he replied, “that I will bring an iron poker to stab you?”

“I could smell the iron on you if you had it,” she said loftily. “You would never know I was about to bite until I did.”

Albert agreed that that was true. “Bite me if you will. I want to know your name.”

The girl laughed. “You could never speak my name. It is this.”

She made a sound like the shushing of water over smooth sand, the delicate whisper of a tide coming in at the end of the day.

“My name is Albert.”

“Albert.” She wrinkled her pretty nose. “What does it mean?”

“I don’t know,” Albert admitted. “It means I am the eldest of my siblings, I suppose.”

“I have ten thousand siblings,” the water-horse confessed, “and I am neither older nor younger than any of them.”

“You must never be lonely.” Albert reflected on his own siblings, on the chaos of a small home crowded with people. “Maybe not lonely enough sometimes.”

She watched him as though waiting for a trap to spring. “There are millions of us. Everywhere a wave breaks, we are born. The little foals on the sandy beaches with the shallow tides. The great stallions where the surf rises higher than your people can build walls to trap it. The holy ones born where the deadening waves crash, where the herd runs as one to swallow the land.”

“Are they all your herd?” Albert asked.

The water-horse shook her pretty head. “Our herd is the bay. We run and run upon this beach, against these rocks. I ran here before the town came, so long ago, but I do not remember it well.”

“Why not?”

“There was nothing to remember. We run, we crash, we ebb and flow. What was there to watch but the birds?” She lifted her violin, evidently done with conversation. “I will sing for you now. It is my turn.”

Her voice was sweet and true, the language that of coral reefs and darting fish. She played sunlight on water and sang the swooping, diving gulls. She played shells forming great chalk cliffs and sang the waves sending them crashing down again. The longer Albert stood and listened, the less he seemed to be there at all. He was a pebble spun in the water, washed clean, ground smooth, adrift in the vastness of the ocean.

When silence fell, the moon was low in the sky. Hours had somehow passed. Albert shivered and pulled his jacket a little closer around him.

“You are cold.” The water-horse sounded troubled. “I have never been cold.”

“It will pass. You sing beautifully.”

“Yes.” She did not seem interested in that. “How does it feel, to be cold?”

Albert was not a man much given to flights of poetry. The question stumped him.

“It hurts,” he said, at last. “A sharp sort of hurt.”

The water-horse nodded solemnly as if he had imparted great wisdom.

“How does it feel,” Albert asked in return, “to run in the water like you do?”

“But that I can show you,” she replied. “If you ride on my back, you can see for yourself.”

Albert’s heart was in his mouth. “I would like that.”

“You truly are not afraid of me?” she wondered.

“I have never been afraid of horses.”

She laughed softly. “Do not fall. I cannot save you if you fall.”

She was magnificent transformed, as if sculpted from ivory by someone intent on portraying all that a horse should be. In awe, Albert ran his hand down her neck. He felt the coiled power in those muscles, the stillness where a pulse should beat. She nudged his shoulder with her proud head, urging him on.

With the rock as a mounting block, it was no hardship for Albert to swing onto her back. He wound his fingers into her sand-laden mane. He gripped his thighs tight against her wet glossy coat. He clung on for all he was worth, and his water-horse ran.

She ran fleet as the wind, faster than any ship, faster than any horse Albert had had the privilege to ride, out across the bay. Her hooves churned the sea into a drenching white wake. The salt spray in Albert’s eyes blinded him. When he dared to tilt his head back, he saw the stars racing by, wheeling in their constellations as they galloped in spirals, a grand carousel. Albert had never felt a gait so smooth, a pace so swift. Never had he had to fight so hard to stay on a broad back than now, muscles tight, hanging on by willpower alone. The sea below was dark and foreboding, black as ice on the road. He dared not risk falling.

A rocky outcrop approached too fast, jagged knives of stone protruding. Albert screwed his eyes up tight and braced for a swerve that never came. There was the sensation, for a moment, of strength and then… He opened his eyes as they drifted through the air, flung from a breaking wave, high over the rocks and glittering amongst the freezing spume. Albert threw back his head and whooped to the silent sky. His water-horse whinnied too as they crashed down into the water, plunging below till only Albert’s iron-tight grip on her mane kept him from being ripped clean away from her.

They broke the surface again to coast on the gathering waves. One bore them in, gentle as a leaf in a stream, spitting them out onto the slope of the beach. The water-horse never lost her stride for a moment, slowing to a trot and finally stopping back beside the rock where they had begun. Albert was so cold he could barely speak. Even as he slid from her back, he could not untangle his frozen fingers from her mane. His teeth chattered but his heart sang, his blood thrilled.

She changed form even as he held her, her mane becoming flowing hair, the warm strength of her shoulder supporting him becoming her small body, helping him down to sit upon the rock. She was still strong this way, all the power of her horse-form crushed into something so tiny and frail that it was a miracle her bones didn’t burst under the strain. She laughed the whole time, eyes dancing. She seemed to glow.

“I can feel your heartbeat,” she teased. “You are scared of me now.”

“I’m scared of hypothermia,” Albert grumbled but he couldn’t make his eyebrows frown. “I could never be scared of you.”

“Can people get so cold they die of it?” she asked. “I didn’t know.”

“I won’t die,” he promised, fighting to get his chattering teeth under control.

“You can let go now.” Her voice was softer, her fingers caressing the wrist of the hand that still held tight a lock of her hair.

“I don’t think I can.”

She unwound his fingers for him, prising them open. She held his hand like it was a foreign thing, tracing the veins, exploring the minute flaws in the skin. Her own skin was unnaturally smooth to the touch. Her lips, when she turned her head to kiss his palm, were powder-soft. Her open mouth gave off no heat but her teeth were razor sharp when she bit down hard.

Albert flinched but did not pull away. He held that wild green gaze even as he felt her fangs scrape against the bone and his hand throb in pain. She released him, drawing back slowly, cradling his wrist. Her pointed tongue darted out to lick the blood from the wound. Her eyes closed in satisfaction.

“Salt,” she said. “Just a little bit of ocean in you.”

“Is this the part,” Albert asked, “where you eat me alive?”

“Not yet.” She tasted his blood again. “I’m not ready yet.”

She dropped his hand suddenly and turned her face away. Albert, on the brink of leaning in to kiss her, was left with nowhere to go as she slid to the edge of the rock.

“Will I see you tomorrow?” he asked, but the girl was already a horse once more, galloping into the sea, splashing him with her tail.

Albert made his slow way back to his friend’s house, nursing his bleeding hand, unsure why he wasn’t angry that she had done it. Perhaps the thrill of that wild ride still had him in its grip and nothing else could matter. Perhaps it was simply that he had never doubted she would not kill him.

The next night, his hand bandaged, Albert made his way back down to the beach. He found his water-horse waiting for him, sitting on the rocks and playing a merry air on her violin. She smiled as he approached, teeth bared, dimples on show. Albert did not hesitate to sit down beside her, ignoring the leeching cold of the stone beneath him.

“You came back,” she said.

“Why wouldn’t I?” He placed his hand over hers. “I am not afraid of you.”

She plucked a single note and set her violin aside. “You are not from here, are you? I had not heard your voice before the other day.”

Albert shook his head. “I’m from a long way south of here, inland. My family, we have a farm. We race horses.”

“Do you have a big family?” There was a note of longing in her voice.

“Not by your standards, maybe. Not an easy family either.” Albert grinned at the thought of his young sister. “A family that’s nothing but black sheep, if I’m honest with you.”

“What does that mean? Black sheep?”

“Oddities,” Albert explained. “Strange types. Lawbreakers.”

“Lawbreakers…” The water-horse fingered the silver chain around her neck. “Do you break laws, Albert?”

He admitted somewhat sheepishly that he did. The water-horse, if anything, seemed pleased by this idea.

“We do not have laws but we do have…ways that things are supposed to be.” Her troubled expression cleared. “Tell me more about inland. I’ve never seen it.”

So Albert told her. Once he had started talking, he found it difficult to stop. He told her about his siblings, about the scrapes he and Andrew got into as boys, about Augustine and his temper tantrums, about Alice-Rose dancing in the kitchen to the radio. His gruff love for them shone through all his insistence on their many sins and terrible natures. He told her about the fields of home, the turning of the seasons, the birds coming home to roost. He told her about hedgerows and vegetable patches and somehow, bathed in her enthusiasm for it all, even the tiresome chores took on a romantic glow.

And he told her about the horses. Oh yes, he told her about the horses. Every member of the little herd, every one who had ever passed through their gates, every point and foible of each. He told her about racetracks, about breeders and trainers and owners, about the place where he was utterly and entirely himself. Running. Free. With every word, he missed it more. He had been away nearly a week. He ached for home.

Through it all, the water-horse listened with rapt attention. She hung on his every word. Her green eyes glowed like stars.

“I wish I could see it.” Somehow, she had ended up pressed against his side, her head on his shoulder. “I have never been beyond this beach in all my life and I never shall. I should like to see the barley grow, just once. You shall leave soon and I shall not even hear about it then.”

“Come home with me,” Albert urged. “Let me show you everything.”

“I cannot.” She sat up, eyes fixed on the horizon. “I belong to my family and the water that made me.”

“Why?” Albert held her pretty little chin in his rough hands, turning her face to look at him once more. “Must you stay with them forever? Will they not let you go if you want it?”

Her tears had no salt in them. They were pure as snowmelt. “What I want does not matter. It is what I am.”

“It matters to me.”

The kiss tasted of brine. Her hands shook only a little more than Albert’s.

“Can you not outgrow them?” Albert demanded. “Are you never to leave the herd? Must you always be what they tell you you are?”

“Yes.” She kissed him again. “Yes, they would be so angry, you cannot know…you cannot imagine! I have a duty to my kin.”

Albert, on another day, might have understood but on that night all he knew was the horse-girl in his arms and the tears in her eyes. He did not want to let her go.

“Marry me.” He did not mean to say it until he already had. The moment it fell off his tongue he felt the rightness of it. “Be my wife. Let me take you away. You will have new kin, new duties. They cannot stop that, can they?”

“I am not human!” she protested. “I am not a woman.”

“That doesn’t matter to me.”

“There is not a church in the land that will marry us!”

“Is there one in the sea?” Albert clutched her close. “There are ways round everything, if you know who to ask.”

She clung to him, cold arms around his neck, face pressed against his cheek. He held her tight, the frailty of her, the strength, the sea-cold power and the ephemeral foam.

“Tomorrow,” she whispered against his ear. “Tomorrow, my beloved. Join me in the water. Grab hold of my bridle and don’t let go. Whatever you do, don’t let go.”

With a final kiss, she slipped from his arms and into the sea. Albert reached up to stroke, for a moment, the muscular neck of the most magnificent horse he had ever seen. She lowered her dished head to him solemnly, the fire in her eyes banked, before she turned and fled, dissolving into the waves.

The final night of his stay in the north, Albert went out to the beach again to collect his bride. He wore his strongest boots and a rose in his buttonhole. There was no girl waiting for him on the rocks this time. Albert felt a prickle of doubt but he pressed on. She had said to join her in the water and so he would. The sea was still that night, flat under a moonless sky. Weak currents tugged at his feet, leading him on.

The water was a shock of ice when it first rose above his boots. His feet were numb in seconds. It squeezed like a clamp around his legs, forcing the blood from them, but still Albert waded deeper. Little by little, the numbness spread up his body. When he was above his waist and the shore seemed so very far away behind him, his water-horse at last appeared.

She trotted forward and Albert reached out gratefully for her, twining his fingers into her sandy mane. She rippled and shifted till her girl’s body was there again, his hands in her hair, her eyes full of tears.

“What is it, my love?” He kissed her sweet cold lips. “Why so unhappy?”

“You must go,” she begged. “You must go now.”

“Come with me then!”

“They are waiting, Albert.” She clutched his hand tightly. “They know! They are going to eat you if you try to take me away. You must leave now and not come back.”

“I am not afraid of them.” Albert squeezed her hand reassuringly. “Come with me now and we will leave them all behind. They cannot threaten you.”

She shook her head urgently. “You do not understand. They are listening to everything you say. If I try to leave with you, they will kill you. You have to make it back to the beach. That’s all – just get to the beach and you’ll be safe.”

“What about you?” He tried to meet her eyes even as she avoided his gaze. “Will they hurt you?”

“They are my family. I will survive whatever they do to me.”

“No!” Albert kissed her fiercely. “I will not leave you here alone!”

“Please,” she begged. “They are my herd. They are my kin. I am of the waves. I cannot - I must not – go, I beg of you!”

“I love you.” He caught and held her wild green gaze. “Do you love me? Could you love me?”

She hesitated. She nodded. Her voice broke. “I could love you.”

“Then marry me.”

Albert folded her into his arms. He kissed her delicate mouth. He closed his hand upon the silver chain around her neck and, when she stepped back from him, did not let go. The silver was colder than ice, colder than anything Albert had ever felt. It burned into his palm but still he pulled. The clasp broke.

Suddenly, his water-horse was vast, a whinny screaming from her throat, hooves kicking the air above him before she plunged down into the depths, leaving him alone and trembling in the shallows. The silver chain still hung from his hand but even as he wound it tighter, it grew heavier and colder.

The sea rose around him. The clouds raced across the sky. The waves that had been lapping at the beach began to bite chunks out of it. Before Albert could strike out for the shore, a stallion burst from the water and hit him full in the chest. He was forced below the surface, mouth open in a startled shout. For an instant he grappled with the darkness, all direction lost. Bitter saltwater choked his lungs.

He surfaced, spluttering, only to be felled again by another horse as it flung itself madly at him. Silver hooves trampled. White manes shook. Nostrils flared and green eyes blazed. The silver chain was dead weight now, dragging him down, almost too heavy to keep above the sand of the seafloor.

Albert crawled. He stumbled. He fell to the terrifying weight of the horses, tumbled and tossed, pulled by the current, till it took all his effort to just stay in one place, avoid being swept out to sea. Every time he managed to get his head above the surface, he sucked in air only to be knocked down again, lungs screaming in protest, head swimming. The shore seemed so distant. Every now and then, sharp teeth tore at his clothes, nipped at his fingers, taunted him with the moment when they would finally rend flesh from bone and end it all. Still he did not let go of the chain.

Her hands found him, warm and human. Her arms still had the wild strength of the ocean in them. He clung to her and she dragged, spitting and screaming in a language like rock scraping against rock. Her family crashed around them, over them. He choked for air. He coughed up water. He felt sure that his arm would be ripped from its socket, that his hand would be torn from his wrist and sink into the sea with the terrible chain.

But there was the beach ahead. The sand turned to pebbles beneath his scrabbling hands. There was the rocky incline and his bride pulling him up, pulling him forward, as the horses dashed themselves recklessly against the rocks around them.

“The tide!” she shouted. “They will bring the tide!”

The water was climbing higher and higher around them, swallowing up the beach, trying to cut them off from the protective seawall ahead. She battled through it, screaming and begging, never letting go of his arm. The chain pointed like a compass needle out to sea, drawn by its own strange magnetism towards the horizon. It was all Albert could do to move an inch or two at a time. The cold was in his aching bones. His lungs seemed stiff in his chest, frozen solid, unable to draw breath, even as the sea retreated, even as he found himself staggering on dry land towards the rusty rickety ladder that would see them safely onto solid ground.

“They’re giving up,” he gasped out, but she only shook her head, dragging him on.

By the time they made it to the ladder, the wind was strong enough to blow branches from nearby trees. Albert risked a glance over his shoulder – and saw, at last, what his bride was so afraid of. A vast wall of water, clear as glass, and above it the foaming, churning madness of the herd, running as one.

“We weren’t fast enough.” She bent his failing fingers around the rusty ladder. “Hold on.”

The hand that clutched the chain could not be persuaded to grip anything. Albert had barely hooked his thumb around a strut before the sea hit him in the back and all was noise.

Albert clung. He felt the chain rip his skin. He felt the bones of his hand break. He felt his lungs fill up with water. He felt the hooves of the herd on his back, his head, his limbs. He could not let go. He would not let her go. He held on tight as the current ripped past him, through him, drowning him; as his broken bones screamed in white-hot pain; as his sturdy boots were torn from his feet by the sheer strength of the water.

The waves broke – and ebbed. The horses were sucked back from the beach. Albert reeled, half-blind, the world spinning and fractured. He scarcely knew with what strength he was climbing the ladder save the relentless pull of his bride’s arms, dragging him to safety. He collapsed onto solid stone just as a second wave hit. They reared up above him, tossed on the spray, blinding white and screaming, but they could not reach him now.

There was silence on the beach. The sea was a dead calm. The wind died away to a gentle breeze. The silver chain, wound so tight around Albert’s broken hand, now weighed nothing at all. Every part of him hurt. The world span in doubles around him. He knelt on the ground and hacked up a lungful of water, coughing and retching till only bile remained. He fell back, flat, staring at the uncaring sky. When he raised his shaking hand above him, he could see hoofprint bruises on his arm, as if he had lain down on the racetrack to be trampled.

But there she was, his bride, his water-horse. No longer was her skin marble but flesh, living and real, flush with blood beneath the surface. No longer were her eyes the madness of the deep water but grey-green, sparkling, human. When she reached out to him, fell laughing, sobbing, against him, he felt her warmth, her solidity, her personhood. He folded her in his arms as she wept freshwater tears into his chest.

“We’re safe.” His voice crackled wetly in his throat. “We’re safe, my love.”

“Stupid, stupid!” She sat up, face blotchy, hair a mess. “I told you they would hurt you! I told you to save yourself!”

“I’ll live.” He reached out to wipe the tears from her cheeks. “How about you? Will you live?”

She nodded, blowing her nose. “Like a mortal woman.”

It took all Albert’s strength to force himself upright. He knew broken ribs when he felt them. He was sure, too, that one eye would be too swollen to see through within the hour. But he sat up nonetheless because how else was he to kiss his little wife?

“I will take you home with me in the morning. You will be happy. I promise.”

“Won’t your people mind?” She seemed, for the first time, shy. “A wife with no name and no family?”

“Catherine is a good name.” Albert chose at random. “I have family enough for the both of us.”

“Catherine…” She weighed it on her tongue. “Catherine….Catherine…”

“Mrs Catherine Tiernan.” Albert laughed suddenly. “I never told you my family name.”

“I didn’t know humans had those,” Catherine admitted. “They will not think I’m strange?”

“They will not mind that you are strange.” Albert caressed her cheek. “My little love, you have nothing to fear.”

They sat there in the cold night till Albert felt strong enough to stand. He limped, his arm around his bride, down into the town, watching the blisters of frozen flesh where the chain had bitten deep turn to silver-white scars.

So it was. If the Tiernan family thought its newest member anything other than fully human, they never passed comment on it. The silver chain sat in an old jewellery box belonging to Albert’s mother, tucked safe at the back of a little drawer where nobody could stumble upon it. It never tarnished. Albert took it out occasionally, lay the links over the scar they had left and tried to remember the weight of it, the dreadful pull of the current. It was still a little colder than it should be. No matter how long he held it, it was never warmed by his skin.

Catherine never went near the sea again. She thrived, his tiny wife, on the farm, blessed him with a son and heir – and more besides. She delighted in the horses, in the barley growing in fields around the village, in the birds of the hedgerows and the songs that they sang. If she regretted her choice of husband, she never said so. But sometimes when the wind was blowing cold from the faraway coast, she sat on the steps outside and played her violin with notes so sweet and aching that Albert’s heart broke just to hear her and he would swear, if only for a moment, he could smell saltwater in the air.

---

I just really liked the idea of the horse-bride. I thought it was whimsical, and the mysterious Catherine Tiernan reminded me a lot of my great-great-grandmother Catherine, who was also a tiny Irishwoman who married an older man against cultural taboos, was a brilliant musician, and would absolutely have eaten a man alive if she was given the opportunity. This isn't my best work but I'm tentatively pleased with it and my therapist says that Killie-fangirling is actually good for me so I guess this is medically necessary fanfiction. It's the middle of the night and I haven't edited this. I'm really crossing my fingers and praying there aren't any glaring mistakes.