Read Online Water by Peter Dickinson, Robin McKinley - Free Book Online Page A

at the time of the peculiarity of his manner, for they had no attention to spare. But her
    mother had seen the relief on her daughter’s face when she heard that seventeen days had passed
    during her illness. And so now she told Jenny only the brief fact of Robert’s continuing
    attendance, without saying that he had become more insistent, in this last week, since she had
    admitted that Jenny was recovering. Without saying that when people asked about a new
    wedding date, she had been noncommittal in a way that let people guess there would be no new
    wedding date. She would have put off speaking of Robert at all, and spared her daughter’s
    convalescence a little longer, but that she feared he would find her one day when she was alone,
    without her parents to intercede, mediate—send him away for good. What she wanted was that
    Jenny be well and strong and happy again. So, briskly, even perfunctorily, she told her daughter
    that Robert washed to see her.
    Jenny went still in a way that was not just the natural lethargy of the invalid, and the cat in her
    lap woke up from its boneless sleep and gathered itself together again into four discrete legs and
    a tail, and looked up into her face. “I would prefer to avoid him,” she said, and that was all.
    It was a month before Jenny could ride again, and she still tired easily; so it was two months, and
    high summer, by the time she felt able to make a journey of more than half an hour from her
    parents’ gate. She did not tell her parents where she was going; and she took Gruoch with her.
    She rode to the bridge at the head of the harbour between the two towns.
    She had told her parents little of what had happened. She had let them think she had somehow
    gotten lost and wandered near the sea-shore before she realised what she had done, and been
    drenched that way; she let them think that what she had said in her fever dreams of angry,
    vindictive sea-men and tender, weeping sea-women were only the result of her belated
    recollection of the curse, her own terror of what might have happened to her if she had not turned
    her mare away from the harbour in time.
    She had not told them that even after her fever left her, she had gone on dreaming of a land
    beneath the sea, where the water was the air, but silvery and swirly, and the people walked on the
    sea-bottom with a curious, graceful, rippling stride, and there were horses with long slender legs
    and foamy manes and tails like little girls always wanted their ponies to have; and there were
    great grey-green hunting hounds not unlike her own dear Gruoch; and even the biggest trees had
    flexible trunks, and bowed and turned in the heavy air with slow elegance, trailing their frondy
    leaves, and that the fish nested in them like birds.
    She rode back to the bridge, but she halted a few steps from it, suddenly unsure of herself. The
    sea-king had let her go, despite his promise to drown every land-person who touched the bridge
    or set boat in the water or dock-post next to the harbour shore, for as long as his people’s
    memory should last; and perhaps to thank him was the worst thing she could do. The thanks of a
    land-person might be the last thing he wanted, the thanks of a land-person he despised himself
    for sparing.
    At the same time she remembered how his face had looked when he mentioned his son and his
    wife, and she remembered that when he set her on her horse, he had used his strength cautiously
    when he might have been harsh with her. But she feared that she remembered these things for the
    wrong reasons. Perhaps her desire to thank him was only an excuse to see him again, to see the
    person who lived in the land she dreamed of. And she felt ashamed of herself
    But as she stood hesitating on the bank, looking at the stones of the bridge but not daring to set
    foot upon them, the water below the bridge boiled up as it had done once before. This time the
    sun was sliding down the sky but nowhere near setting, and the