Chapter One

Longlimbs

We were heading home from hunting. I rode on Mam’s back because we had so far to swim. The sun slipped down between sea and sky, the last long rays painting Mam’s fur as pink as my skin.

“Let’s dive,” I said.

With a flip of her tail we slipped under the waves, swimming close to the surface where I could still see.

Mam was in sealform, sleek and strong. Her muscles flowed beneath her beautiful pelt. One day soon I’d have my own pelt, have the flippers and tail—the breath!—to travel the ocean roads all by myself. I’d greet the deep-water whales and swim for hours in spiraling coils. My eyes would be huge and black, able to see in dark water.

We rose so I could gulp in a lungful of air.

“Deeper!” I said.

Mam shook her head. “Not until you turn, Aran.”

I sighed in frustration. Each day it grew harder to wait. For eleven years now I’d been stuck with legs instead of a tail. My skin was thinner than a translucent kelp leaf. My feet were as clumsy as chunks of driftwood, my toes as separate as pebbles on the shore.

The sky deepened to purple. A pale glow appeared on the horizon, and the Moon began to rise. She was waxing toward full. Now the waves were tipped with silver, and drops of light hung on the ends of Mam’s whiskers.

The shape of the waves shifted and the island rose before us, black against the starlit sky. I slid off Mam’s back to swim the rest of the way on my own. She slowed to stay by my side, her alert eyes scanning the sea.

I rode ashore on a wave, jumping to my feet in a crunch of pebbles. I ran over to the tide pools and started searching among the sea stars for something good to eat. There was a fat cluster of blue mussels and I twisted one free. The Moon was so bright, I could see my moonshadow, like another, darker me.

Mam stretched out long on the rocks above the reach of the tide. If it were just her, she’d have her tail in the surf, but for my sake she always settled higher up.

“Aren’t you coming to sleep?” she called.

“I’m getting a snack.” I cracked the mussel shell on the rocks and slurped out the meat. “Want some?”

“Maybe a taste.”

I brought her a handful. She crunched the shells with her teeth.

It was a good haulout Mam had found this time, with flat rocks for sleeping and basking, and plenty of tide pools, and a cove too shallow for sharks. She found all our haulouts when the rest of the clan was away on the long journey. They’d been gone for almost two moons now. I sat gazing out across the waves.

“Do you think they’ll be back soon?” I asked.

Mam didn’t answer. I looked over; she was already asleep.

When I was little, we’d watch the clan swim away, and Mam would wipe the tears from my eyes. “Once you have your pelt, we’ll go,” she’d say. “It will be soon enough.” She called the time we spent alone our special time, and filled it with games and songs and stories, and I didn’t mind that much. It was just the way life was.

Besides, Mam used to change all the time back then, when we were alone. I’d ride on her back to a new haulout, and as soon as we slid ashore she’d get that special, inward gaze, the look of the turning. Her pelt would grow loose around her and she’d slip it off, the flippers hanging lank, the black claws clattering on the stones. She’d give a long, luxurious stretch before carefully folding her pelt and stashing it in the rocks. Then she was in longlimbs, like me, except for the webbing between her fingers and toes. “You’ll have that, too, when you turn,” she’d say. She taught me the full-Moon dances, and we played chase, and legs seemed like a fine thing to have.

But the bigger I grew, the less often she changed. And when the rest of the clan was around, she hardly ever turned. Why would she, when she had a pelt? She’d been born in hers. Most selkies are.

I couldn’t stop asking how my pelt would come. Would I wake one morning to find myself flicking a tail? Or would it be waiting for me on the shore? Would it be silver, like hers, or brown with golden spots, like my hair? Mam didn’t know. “Trust in the Moon,” she’d say. “It will come when the time is right.”

But I could tell Mam was tired of waiting, too. And though she’d never admit it, she was worried. It was dangerous, having me in longlimbs. Humans don’t believe there are selkies anymore; they think we’re seals, and it’s safest that way. One night I overheard Grandmam telling Mam, “You need to be more careful, Oona! What if they saw him, a boy living with seals? They’d take him away, that’s what they’d do! They’d trap him on land”—her voice dropped, and I crept closer to hear the rest—“and he’d never get his pelt, and his selkie-soul would die.”

The memory made me shiver.

Now I sat up tall and lifted my face to the Moon.

Please, I prayed. Please.

The rest of my prayer didn’t have words. I closed my eyes and imagined the Moon—she who calls the waves—calling to me. I pictured myself with graceful flippers, my pelt sleek and shining.

I opened my eyes and spread my fingers wide, searching for webbing, a sign of the turning, the beginning.

They still looked the same.

Maybe the change was too small to see. I ran a finger down from the top of my thumb and along the arcs of skin.

Mam sighed. She was awake, her eyes following my finger as it traced every dip and rise. Her mouth set as she tried not to show me the ache she felt, the place in her heart as hollow as the gaps between my fingers. The place that only my pelt would fill.