Free Changeling's Island - eARC by Dave Freer

again.”
    “Then why don’t you collect it and be on your way?” asked Áed, knowing the answer was important, and suspecting that he knew the answer already, but wanting it confirmed.
    The selkie smiled, a nasty smile, all teeth and no humor. “This place. The land. It binds, little one. It will bind you too. If I leave the ocean, it would bind me. I don’t want to age and die, trapped here. So bring it to me. Bring me the key, and I will free you too. I do not wish to do you, or your master, ill. I just want the key. But if I don’t get it, I will hurt him. Kill him, if need be.”
    She was lying. Only the master could send Áed away, and that would be in disgrace and back to the hollow hills, rather than freedom. “You will have to fetch it yourself. Or ask my master. It is his birthright.”
    The selkie had tried to splash him. That was pure spite, Áed knew. So were the names she called him as he left her sitting in the salt water.
    * * *
    For Tim the week came to a final low on Friday night. He was tired. Well, he had been tired every night, but he’d been coping pretty well, he thought. But then the phone rang.
    His grandmother answered it. “Yes,” she said. “Yer can talk to him.”
    Hearing his mother’s voice on the phone tore Tim up inside. In the background he could hear the sound of traffic. The sounds of Melbourne. “When can I come home? Please?”
    There was a long silence down the phone. A sigh. “I shouldn’t have called. My friend Melanie said to let you have a month just to settle. Look, you’re not coming back to Melbourne for now, Tim. I…I just called to let you know the police were here today. They’re investigating a case of arson at that store. I had to tell them where you were. Someone may want to talk to you.”
    “I didn’t do anything. I want to come home!”
    “You can’t. Look, it’s for your own good, Tim. You’re there to keep you away from…from that stuff.”
    “I told you I didn’t. I didn’t, I didn’t! I need to come home. I hate it here!”
    “Look, Tim, you’ll just have to get used to it. Maybe next year…”
    “A year! You can’t. You can’t!” he yelled his voice cracking.
    “You brought it on yourself. Now try and…”
    Tim slammed the phone down. He looked at the bare, empty dining room, with its single globe. At the darkness outside the curtainless windows. It still frightened him. He wanted to go off and…and just go . But where? How?
    He walked to his bedroom, slammed the door, and threw himself on the bed and lay there.
    He didn’t even answer when Gran called him for supper.
    He just lay there, wishing it would all go away. Wishing he could make all of them as miserable as he was.
    Gran didn’t call him again. And somehow he slept, a sleep full of troubled, angry dreams of burning stores, a weeping mother, and tall people on horses, with lances and pennants, riding across the night sky.
    He woke once, enough to think the last part of the dream was weird, but then burrowed back into sleep; even if it was odd in his dreams, at least it was escape from here.
    * * *
    When the woman phoned, Mary Ryan had been half tempted to give her an earful. Now, after sitting in the kitchen, listening…she really wished she had.
    She hadn’t thought how unhappy the boy must be. He kept his feelings in, and she couldn’t see his face well. He didn’t say much at all. Well, she didn’t either. But she’d heard those cries from the heart. It had not occurred to her that her grandson might not think of this place as “home.”
    She sighed. He’d also sounded just like her son, his father. Using words he’d used, later, when he’d suddenly decided he had to go out into the wide world, and that anything was better than Flinders Island.
    She’d always taken on the knock-downs by getting up and fighting on, even that worst knock-down, when her husband John had been killed. She’d had to, for her boy. Well, she had to now, for this boy. She