Free The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan Page A

outside. Instead the pair took their time, pecking around the floor, shivering their feathers, regarding Callanish with their tiny black dots of eyes. Finally they made it to the door and opened their wings to the wind. They were stronger than the Resting graces, and soon disappeared.
    When all the graces had flown she closed the metal shutters over the windows, then stood for a moment on the porch. It was almost beautiful: the water chopping up in white waves like petticoat lace, the delicate arches of the empty grace-cages, the clouds piled up in layers from charcoal to bruise-blue to black.
    She wished that she could dive down into the water, that she could live down there under the water; that she could drink water and breathe water, let water support her limbs and lay a comforting weight on her shoulders. Down there she’d be safe from the storm. On the surface the waves and the wind could tear the world to tatters, but she’d be safe down in her watery cocoon. She went into the house and bolted the door. She waited.

6
MELIA
     
    M elia had not feared a storm since the day she’d met Whitby. All damplings have their own relationship with the sea, and Whitby’s attitude was one of respect and acceptance, tempered with a generous helping of lust.
    “The sea does not need us,” he would announce to Melia in the warmth of their bunk, bodies tucked together like spoons. “That fickle mistress, it’s all the same to her whether we live to be a hundred or drown before we even take a breath. We’re parasites. Eating her offspring, drinking her salty blood, cutting through the waves of her belly. We’re living off her spoils. No wonder she wants to devour us all.”
    “So we should give up and jump overboard?” Melia would tease back, clasping her hands with his, stretching their arms together until the joints cracked. “Let the sea have us?”
    “You’re assuming it’s our decision to make, my love. She’ll only take us when she wants us. I for one look forward to the embrace of the sea, when she decides that it’s time.” At this he would wrap his arms around Melia, biting kisses along her shoulder. “Just think of her rhythm! Her passion! Her relentless, depthless wetness! Oh, sweet relief for this unworthy man!”
    At this, Melia would clamp her hand over Whitby’s mouth, but could never resist turning her body in his grasp, replacing her hand with her mouth. Then they would make love, pressed close in the narrow space of their coracle, moving together with the rhythm of the waves. Their bodies wound up speckled like eggs, white on tan, from the touches of one another’s chalky palms. Melia took care to kiss every one of Whitby’s scars, built up over their years of performances at dozens of different circuses. Other damplings were born and worked and died as part of the same crew, treading the same deck, hoisting the same sails their whole lives. But Melia did not need such ties; Whitby was the only home she needed. With their skills, it was not so hard to buy their way on to a new ship.
    Melia could not remember whose idea it was to sow misinformation about their relationship when they joined the Circus Excalibur. They were not siblings and they were not married, and Whitby found it endlessly amusing that anyone could believe either. They were simply lovers, though there was nothing simple about that. They were aerialists, the two of them: many ways to fly, but only one way to fall.
    Afterward, sweat-damp and tingling, Whitby would bury his face in her shoulder and whisper,
we are the sea
.
    They had not had such an exchange last night after their drinking session in the mess boat. By the time they made it back to their coracle, they were so booze-slurred and woozy that theycould barely manage to tie their canvas shut and strap themselves into their bunk before their eyes closed.
    In the abyss between waking and sleeping, Melia thought of her own relationship with the sea. She did not lust for the sea