Free Home From The Sea: The Elemental Masters, Book Seven by Mercedes Lackey Page B

kept trying to wipe them with the handkerchief around his wounded hand. The sea-water in those deep scratches and bites must have burned like fire. She was not in the least sorry for him. After all, he’d brought every bit of his suffering on himself.
Evil to him that evil thinks
had never, in her experience, been so immediate.
    After opening and closing his mouth several times and getting a lung full of smoke for his troubles each time, sending him into a coughing fit, he gave up. Without so much as a “Good day”—although heprobably would not have been able to choke even that out for the smoke—he stalked off, heading for the road. She watched him leave, carefully. His tormentor tripped him twice more before leaving him alone—or perhaps at this point, between the coughing and the watering eyes, he simply couldn’t see where he was going very clearly. She sincerely hoped he’d been tripped into something nasty at least once.
    When she was sure he wasn’t coming back, and his figure was a stiff, distant little sketch nearing the road, she left the fire to tend to itself and took in her peas.
    Clearly he had been trying to get
some
sort of information out of her—presumably to use against her da. That was troubling, but no more than her da had expected.
He came out here, figuring I would tell him something that would give him a reason to call up da for killing mother. Or at least something that would let him link da to smuggling or maybe the anarchists.
Why? Maybe he figured since they lived so far from the village that the village wouldn’t care if he went after them. But why would he do so in the first place? Just because he was sour-natured? That didn’t seem right.
    She worried at that and worried at it as she put the peas to cook, and got a nice bit of salmon ready for frying. She still couldn’t untangle the puzzle. Why was he coming after the Protheros? Or was he doing the same in the whole village?
    Finally she just gave it up as being something she couldn’t puzzle out. That was when the memory of the seaweed-girl practically leapt up out of the back of her mind. The seaweed girl, who Constable Ewynnog had not been able to see… but…
    Who had been able to make the constable’s afternoon a misery.
    Which meant only one thing. That the creatures that only she could see, were, nevertheless, able to
do things
. Real things. Torment real people… and if they could do that…
    Here was her proof. They were not fever-dreams or the phantoms of a mind going mad. They were real.
    The revelation thrilled and terrified her. Thrilled, because who
wouldn’t
be thrilled to know that they were not going to end up tied to a bedpost, mad-eyed and raving. But terrified…
    Tylwyth Teg folk. They were not safe, no matter that they had been helpful to her all this time. They were not tame. They operated by their own rules, which often seemed to be as much whim as rules. If they liked you, as they seemed to like her, they could do you great favors. But you could not count on that liking to last, and when they were angry with you, they could do a great deal more than trip you up.
    These were dangerous waters. And she was going to have to try and recall every tale that old woman had told her, just to have an inkling of how to navigate them.
    She debated telling her da this, but given his reactions to her talking about her odd “friends” when she was a child… she finally decided, no. No, probably not a good idea. So instead, when her da came home, she laid out dinner and gave a faithful rendition of everything that had happened, including the constable’s mishaps, but
not
saying what had caused them.
    Her da was grinning as she spoke of the man getting savaged by the cat, and grinned wider at his clumsiness. “Must have been them city boots,” he said, with mock-gravity. “I imagine he was fair put out.”
    “I imagine so,” she said, and grinned a little herself. But then she lost the smile, thinking that it