Free A Stranger Came Ashore by Mollie Hunter

down this track, and he sculled fast to try to bring it back to an even keel. It swung in a half-circle, bringing him round to face the cliff at the inner end of the geo; but where the line of the clifftop had been bare a moment before, there was now a man standing. With a jerk of surprise, Robbie recognised the man as Finn Learson, and it was this startled movement that finally cost him his balance.
    The boat rocked wildly, snatching the oar from his grasp, and he pitched overboard. The emerald water closed over him. The boat was spun away by the force of his splashing plunge, and he surfaced with his mouth open on a yell, for the water was very deep and he could not swim so much as a single stroke.
    A shout from the clifftop answered his yell, but Robbie was struggling too madly to hear this. Water sang in his ear. Water blurred his vision, so that black cliff and grey sky and emerald water became nothing but colours jumbling in a confused mass around him. Yet still he managed to gulp enough air to keep from choking; for the fact of the matter is that even a person in Robbie’s position can stay afloat like this for a good minute before he goesright under.
    No one had ever told
him
this, however, and so the terror of drowning was like a frenzy on him. Moreover, he was too blinded by water to see Finn Learson starting down towards him, and leaping swift as a cat from ledge to ledge on the cliff face.
    Half-way down the cliff Finn Learson paused, balanced for a blink of an eye on his perch, then dived; and Robbie’s first hint of rescue was the splash and surging backwash of this dive. A second later he felt a hand catch hold of his hair. An arm closed round him, pinning his threshing hands to his sides. A voice breathed in his ear.
    “Easy, now, easy!”
    The arm holding him kept his head clear of the water. Robbie drew a great breath of blessed air, and realised that Finn Learson was swimming strongly with him to the boat still drifting a few yards away.
    A hand came out over his head, reaching to grasp the boat’s gunwale, and Finn Learson prepared to swing him inboard. The arm holding him shifted position, and he realised something else. There was warmth like a furnace heat in the body pressed against his own, and the hand gripping him had fingertips that probed like steel into his flesh.
    A quick heave sent him tumbling over the gunwale, and he landed in the bottom of the boat with a clear, sharp memory of the only other time he had ever been held in such a grip, or felt a body so warm. It was that same afternoon, when he had picked up the young selkie – yet how could that be? How could there be selkie warmth in a man’s body, and selkie strength in a man’s hands?
    Robbie’s mind began to race, suddenly remembering his Old Da’s tales about selkies that took human shape and the Great Selkie that tempted golden-haired girls into his kingdom under the sea. In a flash then, he had the answer to both his questions, and the reason for everything that had ever puzzled him aboutFinn Learson.
    The “dream” of selkie music that had proved to be something he really
had
heard; the stare that had held Tam captive, the gold, the dancing, the magic escape from the Press Gang, the vision of Elspeth dead in bridal white – and above all, the smile, the secret little smile – he understood now the meaning of all these things. He knew now why Old Da had warned it was Elspeth who was in danger!
    Finn Learson’s hand appeared over the gunwale of the boat. The fingers that looked human and felt as hard as a selkie’s nails, tightened their grip; and a terror as sharp as the terror of drowning shot through Robbie; for there was one thing more he could guess at, now that the meaning of all these other things had become clear.
    Finn Learson had not rescued him out of kindness, any more than the saving of the sixareen’s crew had sprung from that reason. It was only a cunning desire to stand well with his parents that had