‘So,’ Mat said, when Gruff had finished telling her everything – the Weeping Stone, the blacksmith, the fateful, far-off day when a hammer had struck Dylan a near-deadly blow. ‘So, I’m a fish-person?’
‘Um…’ Gruff shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Like a syrenka. A mermaid.’
‘Dylan didn’t have a tail. I don’t know what he was.’
‘How can I be a fish-person and not know it?’ she asked, staring at her hands as if expecting them to sprout scales. She shuddered. ‘Weird. Really, really weird.’
‘Thanks for saving my life,’ Gruff said.
Mat half-laughed and rubbed her neck. ‘Thanks for stopping me from walking back into the sea.’
They sat on the grass of Top Field, their backs to the stone wall. Curious teenage lambs clustered nearby, nudging one another forward and prancing away in delighted fear if either Gruff or Mat made any sudden movements. The grinding crunch of busily chewing sheep mingled with the cries of gulls above. Gruff took a deep breath and relaxed against the wall. Mat believed him. He wasn’t alone.
‘So Dylan’s going to kill us all?’ Mat asked bluntly.
It sounded horribly real coming from someone else’s mouth.
‘The blacksmith says he will if we don’t finish making the sword she was making when she hit him,’ Gruff said. ‘But I don’t even know where it is.’
Mat pulled up a handful of grass and let the wind scatter it from her fingers. ‘You said the blacksmith dropped it,’ she said. ‘If it’s made of water it won’t have just sunk; the sea will have carried it away. We need to work out where the currents took it.’
‘Hundreds of years ago,’ Gruff pointed out.
‘So? It wasn’t far from land when she dropped it, it’ll have come back in. Just like rubbish on beaches. I was reading about it the other week, how some places get more rubbish because of the currents. If you drop something in at the end of the Sleepers, where would it go?’
Her determination kindled a spark of hope in Gruff’s chest. ‘The current took me to the right,’ he said. ‘I was being pulled past the end of the beach, past the headland. I’d have ended up out in the open water … but then … I don’t know.’
‘We need sea charts or something,’ Mat said.
Gruff grinned. ‘Let’s go see Iolo.’ He leapt to his feet, adrenalin spiking through him. Maybe there was a chance they could do this.
They arrived outside Iolo’s house just as Iolo himself appeared from the other direction, ambling back from his overnight stay in Trefynys after the festivities. He waved at them, but winced when they both started talking at once. ‘My ears are a little sensitive today,’ he said. ‘Let’s get inside and sit down, and let’s all talk in nice, quiet voices.’
They told him everything. Iolo frowned at his knees and listened intently. At last he got up and fetched a large, flat file like the ones Tim carried his paintings in to keep them safe. Inside were lots of clear pockets, and in each pocket was a map. Iolo flicked through, pulled one of the maps out and spread it on the table.
‘You need to tell your nain about this, you know,’ he said to Gruff.
Gruff thought of Nain’s anger when he’d been unable to explain what had happened last night and her disbelieving smile when he had told her Iolo thought the Sleepers were waking up. ‘She won’t believe me,’ he said sadly.
‘She will. Your dad too. They know these things, even if they don’t talk about them. Even if they try to convince themselves they’re not real. Your nain saw the stone weep when she was a child.’
Gruff stared. ‘What?’
‘Just before the storm that took half the farm with it. And half the flock. And almost her own da. That was when they had to sell Blacksmith’s Cottage, or they would have been forced mainland. They had little enough money before it happened.’
‘Half the flock?’ Gruff whispered. His heart panged in sympathy. He couldn’t imagine losing the sheep like that. It was bad enough when just one of them got poorly and couldn’t be saved. Half the flock in one go? ‘She never told me.’
‘You ask her,’ Iolo insisted. ‘Tell her you saw the stone weep. She’ll know what that means. We have to be prepared.’
Gruff looked out of the window at the sunny summer’s day. ‘So it definitely means a storm?’
‘Is Dylan really going to come for us?’ Mat asked in a very small voice.
‘Not if we finish making the sword for the blacksmith,’ Gruff replied, wishing he felt as certain as he sounded.
‘Right.’ Iolo spread his thick, calloused fingers over the map on the table. ‘If you dropped something in off the end of the Sleepers, it would go this way…’ He traced the current that had swept Gruff along the night before. ‘Out beyond the headland. And then…’ He followed the complex lines, back in towards the island, and tapped his finger on the boulder-strewn shoreline where the lifeboat had come to grief in 1958. ‘Here. It should be here.’
‘Hopefully,’ Gruff muttered.
‘It will be.’ Mat turned to him, her face set. ‘It has to be. We’ll find it.’
‘I’ll put the storm alert out on the walkie-talkie,’ Iolo said. ‘Everyone on the island will be warned before tonight.’
‘How long do we have?’ Mat asked.
Iolo shook his head. ‘We can’t know. It’s always the same with the Wounded Sea storms – they’re impossible to predict.’
Mat stood up. ‘We’d better get on with it, then.’
It was a silent journey. Gruff and Mat walked the shortest route, crossing Top Field diagonally and then Evan’s cow field before clambering over the wall onto the cliff path at the head of the cove. Gruff’s thoughts pounded with the revelation about Nain. She had always told him the old stories but he hadn’t realised she had experienced them herself. And to have lost half the flock like that – how horrible it would be to lose Guinevere and Baa-bara and Dave and Cai and the rest of them, and all of the mischievous lambs. Poor Nain.
They climbed down into the cove and stared at the jumble of rocks. Some of the boulders were bigger than a car, some as small as their scrunched-up fists. The tide was on its way in, but the steep drop into deep water here meant that all the cove’s boulders would be above water for a while longer.
‘What did it look like again?’ Mat asked, breaking their silence.
‘It was a sword hilt,’ Gruff said. ‘The bit you hold, and the bit that protects your knuckles. It had fish and whales and seals and a sea dragon all knotted round each other like carvings, but they were moving. It looked like it was made of water, but she held it like it was solid.’
Without another word, Mat set off for the right hand side of the cove, picking her way through the boulders. Gruff watched her go, the impossibility of finding something made from water in a watery place threatening to overwhelm him. Then he turned and climbed through the rocks to his left and began to search.
He worked his way up and down the cove in tight, thorough passes. He searched round every rock, moving the smaller ones and peering into the nooks and crannies between those too big to shift. He found an angry crab who had a really good go at removing two of his fingers, a broken plastic buoy washed in from a fishing net, three plastic bottles, a metal oil drum and a lump of whale bone, smoothed by years at sea. Nothing glinted at him, blue-silver and watery.
He glanced round occasionally to see Mat inching ever closer towards him, a little pile of treasure and rubbish growing on a flat-topped stone she had chosen for the purpose. Plastic bottles, crisp packets, a toy metal car, a cracked bucket shaped like a sandcastle.
By the time they met in the middle, the sun had moved an hour further on in the sky. The wind blustered and they huddled behind one of the larger rocks to keep away from its cold fingers.
‘That didn’t work,’ Gruff said unnecessarily.
‘It should be here, though,’ Mat groaned. She put the end of one of her plaits in her mouth and chewed it. ‘If she dropped it off the end of the seventh Sleeper, this is where it would have come.’
Gruff shook his head, voicing the worry that had been building inside him with every fruitless minute. ‘It might have come here to start with, but there must have been hundreds of storms since then. It could have been washed out again, into a different current. It could be anywhere round the island – or Ireland, or Wales, or at the bottom of the sea.’
‘It’s made of water, so it can’t have sunk to the bottom of the sea,’ Mat insisted. ‘I bet it didn’t go far from here, even with a storm. Let’s try the next cove round.’
‘It’s made of water,’ Gruff repeated, a thought blossoming neatly in his mind.
Mat got to her feet. ‘I’m going to the next cove.’
‘No, wait,’ he said. ‘I think I know where it is.’
She caught the excitement in his voice and grinned. ‘Really?’
‘Really.’
Gruff ran across the uneven stones to the edge of the water and found himself a nice flat boulder that wouldn’t try and poke a hole through him. He lay on his front, rolled his jumper up above the elbow and plunged his arm into the water. Goosebumps prickled to life and he shuddered, but he didn’t pull his hand back out.
Mat crouched beside him, chewing on her plait again. ‘What’re you doing?’
‘I don’t know, really.’ Gruff closed his eyes and tried to remember what he had seen last night. ‘The blacksmith put her hand in the sea and felt around for a bit, then she pulled out the hilt. What if it was only there because she was looking for it? What if it could be anywhere in the sea, and you just have to want it?’
In his mind’s eye he saw the blacksmith again, fishing around in the water as though she was feeling for something that she knew was there, but wasn’t sure of the exact place. Gruff moved his hand about in the water, imagining the hilt, seeing it as he had seen it the night before: blue-silver, squirming sea beasts, simultaneously solid and insubstantial.
And there it was in his hand. He felt it firm in his palm, a resistance of water that he could wrap his fingers around.
Heart soaring with victory, he opened his eyes and began to pull his arm out of the sea. He saw the form of the hilt through the rippling water as he brought it up towards the sunlight, and Mat saw it too and whooped in excitement.
Gruff’s hand broke the surface and the hilt shattered into a million droplets, his numb, wet fingers closing on nothing.
‘No!’ he yelped. He threw himself down on the boulder and plunged his arm back in.
It happened again. Gruff felt for the hilt and there it was, solid in his hand, but it returned to fluid water as soon as it met the air. He tried a third time, He tried a third time, but still he couldn’t bring it out of the sea. He sat back and scrubbed his wet, freezing arm with the sleeve of his jumper. ‘I can’t get it,’ he said flatly. ‘That’s really annoying.’ He brightened. ‘But I did find it!’
‘Can I try?’ Mat asked.
Gruff shrugged. ‘Yeah, if you want.’
Mat rolled the sleeve of her hoodie up and chose her own boulder, a little way away. She lay full-length and stuck her arm in the sea, letting out a small squeak at the cold. Gruff watched her, flexing his fingers to try and get some life back into them. After a few seconds he saw a tremor of excitement run through her and knew she must have felt the hilt form itself in her hand. She pulled herself into a kneeling position, drawing her arm up and out of the sea. Gruff waited for the moment when the hilt would reach the surface and burst into water droplets.
But Mat’s hand was free of the water and she was standing up and turning to face him, her pale, dripping arm lifted in triumph. Glinting in her grasp, sea creatures curled and shifted through the hilt of the blacksmith’s sword.