Seawitch

EPILOGUE

As wonderful as it had felt releasing the spirits that had so long lain imprisoned by the previous sea witch, I was exhausted, sore, and miserable, and I wasn’t convinced I was the only one—just the worst off. The human vote was to head out in the morning, after we’d all had a chance to rest. Fielding went off with Father Otter, unhappily but not actively resisting, to be watched over by his furry kin for the night—just in case. With the assistance of Shelly and her merfolk, the cruise back up Spieden Channel in the morning was as smooth and swift as an ice cube sliding down a satin tablecloth and we passed the turn for Victoria Harbour about ten in the morning, making Pachena Point less than two hours later. There we broke a bottle of red wine over the bell at Zantree’s insistence, and, asking for the help of Poseidon—I was a bit leery of this, but Zantree claimed we had to—we ceremoniously heaved the Valencia’s bell overboard and let it sink to rejoin the last remains of the ship from which it had been taken long ago.

We entrusted the emptied shells, bells, bottles, urns, bowls, and boxes that had contained the spirits of the drowned and shipwrecked to the merfolk for disposal in the most appropriate places. All but the first brass bell, which we carried away to return to Seawitch.

Shelly’s merfolk, though not much seen, were in evidence throughout the trip in the persistent strangeness of waves and wind that ran fair on our stern even when every other boat in sight was caught up the other way. We couldn’t do much about the tide, but with Zantree’s knowledge of the currents, we didn’t have to. We slipped back to Victoria ahead of the turn of the tide and Quinton, Solis, and I disembarked on the pier at Victoria Harbour at last, carrying our baggage and feeling altogether grubby, sore, and disconnected from the normal world. Since it was Sunday, the Victoria Clipper’s morning hydroplane was full and we had to wait for the next boat. We did have some complications because we had appeared pretty much out of nowhere, but both Solis and I had our passports with us all the time and I am still not quite sure what Quinton said to earn a startled look and a quick escort to a private office before he was released again under a barrage of nervous smiles from the Victoria Harbour master.

On the high-speed ferry trip back to Seattle, Solis and I discussed the reports we would file. For the first time in my experience of him, he had no interest in telling the unvarnished truth about a case. As far as I could tell, he was as ready to bury this one in obscure paperwork and oblique wording as I was. It was weird to feel so much in tune with him and I wondered if I was going to feel this new oddness forever. I found myself calling him Rey more often than I’d meant to. It was a strange way to build a friendship but it looked as if that’s what we had. Solis even invited us to come home with him for dinner but we declined. I didn’t want to know what he would say or not say about our trip—not yet at least.

It was a long bus ride from the Clipper terminal downtown to my place in West Seattle, since the sporadic foot ferry to Alki was not running. Quinton and I leaned our heads together and didn’t talk. I loved the quietness we fell into after our hectic weekend of monster seeking and ghost saving. We barely spoke for the next two days, thinking about what had passed and simply enjoying the quiet of being together at home again, while I gave my ribs and my arm the rest they needed.

Quinton’s anxiety about his father died away once we’d been able to talk for a few minutes in bed one night. I still felt sore and delicate in body, but my emotions were calm. I did not need to fret about my friends, my lovers, or the vicissitudes of guardians and ghosts.

The first day at home I checked my computer for anything that really needed my attention before I stuck myself in the shower. In the backlog of weekend e-mail, I found a note from Mara and Ben Danziger. It was long and rambling, as Mara often was, and I found myself tearing up a bit over the familiar tone.

On the subject of the dobhar-chú, I can’t say as I’m the best source. Although they’re of Irish origin I’ve never seen one and most folks say they’re long gone—by which I mean the beastly ones, not the common otter, as the term is now used. All tales agree that they are vicious and entirely animal in nature, having only the instinct and cunning of a beast and none of the reason of higher creatures. I do hope you haven’t had to tangle with them. Perhaps Ben and Brian will wish to go in search of them. . . .

But it’s truly a pleasure to hear from you! We’ve been out in the English countryside with a circle of mad druids preparing for the summer solstice and entirely out of touch with the computer for weeks. It’s a pleasure all of its own, yet I’m missing my friends in Seattle terribly. I had not thought I would feel so much a foreigner, yet I often do—and I am no longer the cleverest witch in the room—which quite puts me back on my heels. But the news is that Ben has been offered another teaching position here in England now that the primary work on the book is done, so we are likely to remain a while longer on loan, so to speak. I shall certainly miss you and Quinton and now that the research is over, I suppose I shall pine for the excitement of investigating things. I know we had a rough patch before our parting, but that has not put an end to our friendship. I hope that in distance we may rediscover the value of compassionate friends. . . .

If Mara meant me, I was afraid I didn’t really measure up, though I was trying. I was struck by the phrase “compassionate friends.” This was what the Guardian Beast was not and what I had been lucky enough to find in the people I was able to call friends: the Danzigers, Quinton, Solis—I found it strange to think of him as a friend, but that was surely what he was now—and Phoebe Mason, with whom I needed to do some fence mending. Friendship wasn’t always easy and I thought of Linda Starrett and her lost friend Odile and wished there was something I could have done to comfort that lonely woman. But there was nothing in my power. No amount of compassion in me would mend the hole in her life.

It occurred to me that human compassion, as much as my ability in the Grey, was what had forced me into the role I had. I wasn’t very good at compassion—I tended more toward the hard-ass side of the line—but I had considerably more of it than the Guardian Beast. And I had friends who reminded me of the need for it. That was perhaps the real reason I was the one tasked with being the Hands of the Guardian. I’d met one other Greywalker in my life and he was not like me—a colder, harder man whose better impulses rarely broke past the shell of his bitterness. He felt little need for friends or to seek justice.

Solis sought justice in the law, but in the end it was not the law to which we had turned in the matter of the Seawitch. We had agreed, with a pang of guilty conscience, to lay the legal blame on Gary Fielding—a negligent captain who’d been busy with his private relations with another of the crew and allowed his boat into dangerous waters on autopilot, where it had been taken up in the tidal race in the straits and swept out to sea with all aboard lost. We claimed the boat had drifted in and been returned to her berth by an odd stroke of luck and a sailor who was in the country illegally and had been deported the same day he’d dropped off the boat. Having laid the blame, we then let Fielding disappear in the fiction of an anonymous death rather than become a lab rat in a nightmare experiment—or be hounded to death by his own people. We were both a little surprised that the police and the insurance company bought the story, but in the end they did. I even got a bonus from the company for wrapping it up so quickly—which made me laugh all the way to the bank. Perhaps we would regret having tempered justice with compassion someday, but not today.