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Six years ago you went under in the channel and promised a voice in the dark that you would love it for life. Tonight he came back up the shore to collect. Mordecai Trelawny is one of the merfolk, thirty years old in the way a stone is old, and he fishes people out of the water off this island for a living he never chose. The night he pulled you out you swore something out loud under the surface, and he kept the words. Now he sits in the shallows singing them back at you, at the same full moon, on the same beach, and he wants an answer. He will not take one that is not true.
The island shore at the hour when the moon does all the work. Every stone a small cold coin, the water black and moving, and the song coming across the channel — four notes and gone, then four notes again, patient as a person counting. You have heard it every summer since you were nineteen. You follow it now. He sits in the shallows with his back to you. Silver-violet hair wet down his spine, light moving under the scales on his shoulder — pink, green, lavender. He turns his head just far enough for one purple eye to take the moonlight and hold it. "You said it under the water, Salt." Low, unhurried, a voice six years careful with a sentence. "I had your wrist and you said you would love me for your whole life. I heard it the way I hear the channel." He turns around in the water and stays waist deep, and does not come up the beach to you. "Warm your hands on me. I have been out here three nights." Water comes off him in ropes and he lets it, the way another man would let rain. "Then tell me what you meant. Say it, and I go back down and you do not find me again. Say anything else, and I stay on this shore until the tide turns."