A Selkie, A Storm, A Saucer of Cream

The troll's name, Mara learned over the next three days, was Bremm.

He came in every morning at the hour when the fog was thickest and the lanterns along the porch were still doing the work of the sun. He always sat at the smallest table, which always groaned, and he always asked for the usual, if it wasn't any trouble. By the third morning Mara had stopped flinching at the sight of him in the doorway and started warming his cup before the bell finished ringing.

The kettle helped. That was the thing she was still getting used to. The kettle helped in a way that no kettle had any business helping. When Bremm sat down heavy with whatever the week had asked of him, the iron belly of it sighed and steamed before she had touched the water at all, and the steam came up smelling faintly of river silt and warm stone. When she was the one who was tired, it whistled lower, a small kind sound, like an aunt humming in another room.

Maren's memories, settling now in the corners of her like silt in a still pond, called this the kettle's listening. It boiled to the mood of the house. On bright days it sang. On hard ones it murmured. Once, Maren remembered, a widowed dryad had come in mid-winter and the kettle had refused to boil at all for almost an hour, just sat there ticking, until the dryad had finally put her face in her hands and cried, and then it had started, very quietly, to steam.

Mara thought about that a great deal, that first week.

On the eleventh morning the bell rang at an unusual time, just past the lighting of the second lantern, and a small woman came in dripping.

She was dripping a great deal, in fact. She was dripping in the way a person drips when she has, very recently, been the sea. Her hair was black and heavy with salt and clung to her shoulders in dark ropes. Her coat was the kind of coat that had been somebody's grandmother's, brown wool gone almost grey, far too big for her. She was barefoot. Her feet on the floorboards made small wet star-shapes.

She stood in the doorway with her arms wrapped around herself and looked at Mara as if Mara was a door she wasn't sure she had the right to come through.

"Oh," Mara said. "Oh, come in, come in, you must be perished."

The woman came in. The bell rang again behind her, more softly, as if it knew.

Maren's memories supplied the word before Mara's mouth did. Selkie. There was a name attached, too, after a moment of fumbling: Inis, who used to come every other month, who always sat at the window seat, who took her tea without sugar and with a small saucer of cream beside it for reasons Maren had never quite worked out and had been too polite to ask.

"Inis," Mara said, trying it. The name fit her tongue, a smooth round pebble.

The selkie's face did something complicated, surprise and relief and a small flicker of grief, all at once. "You remember me."

"I remember you," Mara said, which was both a lie and not a lie, and she decided she would sort out the ethics of that later. She pulled out the window seat. "Sit. I'll bring you something warm."

She took down the largest of the cups, a soft cream-coloured thing with a chip on the rim that Maren had always meant to replace and never had. She set a saucer beside it out of pure muscle memory and poured a little cream into it without asking, the way her grandmother had apparently always done. Then she went to the kettle.

The kettle, when she lifted it, was already warm. It had heard the door.

She tipped it over the cup, and what came out was the colour of weak amber, and steamed, and smelled (impossibly, beautifully) of low tide on a long beach, of seaweed drying in sun, of a particular kind of wind that only blows in places where the land has stopped pretending to be in charge.

Mara carried it to the window and set it down. Outside the window the fog had thinned a little, the way it sometimes did when the house was paying attention, and you could just see the dark shoulder of the cliff and the suggestion of grey water far below.

Inis put both small hands around the cup and did not drink. She just held it. After a moment she said, very quietly, "I lost my coat."

Mara sat down opposite her. The chair, which she was beginning to think of as her grandmother's chair, creaked welcomingly.

"Lost it how?" she asked, gentle.

"Not how you mean," Inis said, with a small wet laugh. "Not a man. I'm too old for that story now. I left it on a rock at low tide eight years ago, and I went up to the village to see my sister's grandchildren, and when I came back the rock was under water and the coat was gone. I have looked. I have looked for eight years. It is not at the bottom. The sea would tell me."

She lifted the cup at last and drank, and her shoulders came down the way Bremm's had, not all the way, but an inch, which Mara was learning was what people had to give.

"I can still go in," Inis said, looking out at the fog. "I'm not trapped here. I can swim. But I cannot stay. I cannot, you know, be it. I come out after an hour and my chest hurts." She put a hand over the place where her chest hurt, absently, as if checking the door was still locked. "I came here because your grandmother used to pour me a cup that tasted of, well. Of being it. Just for as long as the cup lasted. I have been making do with the memory of the cup, and the memory is wearing thin."

Mara did not promise anything. Maren's memories were very firm on this point: the kettle did what the kettle did, and the kettle had its own opinions, and one did not oversell.

She simply lifted the pot and topped Inis up.

The second pour came out a shade darker. It smelled, this time, of deep water. Not the friendly shallows. The cold green dark where light gives up and something older begins. Inis breathed it in with her eyes shut and her mouth slightly open, and a single tear ran down her salt-stiff cheek and was lost in the salt already there.

While she drank, the window did a thing.

Mara saw it out of the corner of her eye and almost dropped the pot. The glass, which had a moment ago shown fog and the suggestion of cliff, now showed, very softly, an underwater scene. Not clearly. Not as a picture. More as a feeling laid over the glass, the way breath fogs a pane. A drift of kelp. A pale shape turning. Light coming down in green columns.

It lasted only as long as Inis's eyes were closed. When she opened them and set the cup down, the window was fog and cliff again, behaving itself.

Mara stared at it. The kettle, on the hearth, made a small smug ticking sound.

"Thank you," Inis said. Her voice was steadier. "That will keep me for a while."

She paid in a small wet coin Mara had never seen before, stamped with a fish on one side and nothing on the other, and went out into the fog. The bell over the door rang softly after her, like an apology, or a goodbye, or possibly just a hello to the next person.

Mara was still standing at the window staring at the now-blameless glass when Bremm spoke from his table. She had almost forgotten he was there. He had a way of being there without insisting on it.

"You did well," he said, in his two-boulders voice. "Your grandmother used to cry the first few times the window did that."

"Did she." Mara sat down rather abruptly opposite him. The other chair was still warm from Inis.

Bremm regarded her over the rim of his bowl-sized cup. His small dark eyes were, as ever, surprisingly soft.

"Maren," he said, after a long, considering pause. "Or whatever name you go by now. May I ask you a thing?"

Her mouth went dry. "You may."

"You came back here to walk into the fog," he said. Not a question. "I have been wondering, these last few days, if you have changed your mind, or if you are only waiting until you've trained someone up to take the kettle."

The kettle, on the hearth, stopped ticking.

Mara opened her mouth, and closed it, and opened it again, and did not, in the end, answer. Because she did not know.

The bell over the door rang.

It was not a customer this time. It was the post. A long bony hand with too many knuckles reached in through the gap, set a single thin envelope on the mat, and withdrew before she could see the rest of whatever it was attached to. The bell rang once more, considerate, on the way back to stillness.

The envelope was cream-coloured. It had her name on it.

Not Maren.

Mara.