A choppy wave slapped against the base of the seventh Sleeper and shot spray up around them. Gruff was splattered but Mat got the worst of it: it soaked her wetsuit and ran from her face in rivulets. She let the sword fall from limp fingers. It burst into water droplets and vanished into the sea.
Gruff’s heart skipped a warning. ‘Mat!’
Without any sign she had heard him, Mat rolled forwards onto the balls of her feet and dived into the water.
‘Mat!’ he screamed. He leapt for her but she was gone, swift as an eel, streaking away into the Irish Sea. The rain came harder and Gruff brushed the water from his eyes, his heart thumping with shock and adrenaline that told him to do something when nothing could be done. He couldn’t swim after her. There was no way to bring her back.
She’ll be fine, he told himself. So long as she stays in her sea-state, she’ll be fine.
Unless she forgot who she was and never came back.
‘Mat!’ he called again, but he could see no sign of her in the heaving, slate-grey sea.
‘You must try to talk to him,’ a voice said in Welsh beside him, and Gruff nearly fell off the Sleeper. A hand snatched out and steadied him — the blacksmith. She gave him a quick, serious smile and Gruff saw that the raindrops plastering his hair to his head did not touch her soot-smudged face.
‘You’re not really here,’ Gruff said.
‘Not until Dylan and I are released will I be fully anywhere,’ the blacksmith said. ‘But you and I are both standing on the threshold. Can’t you feel it?’
‘Threshold?’ Gruff was lost.
‘In the air. You must feel it.’
Gruff stared around. In the air. Did she mean this electric feeling, where everything felt fresh and clear and hyper-real? He had thought it was his own excitement, but perhaps there was more to it than that. It had affected Mat too. She had been full of the sea as soon as she had stepped onto the seventh Sleeper. She must have held the feeling back like a coiled spring throughout the blade-forging, right up until that wave hit her and she could resist no longer.
‘Can you help me get Mat back?’ he asked.
‘Mat?’
‘She held the sword.’
‘Oh, the morgen.’
‘The – wait, what?’ Something stirred in Gruff’s memory. Something Nain had said, when she sang him the song about the Sleepers being a bridge. Something about a morgen being like a mermaid? ‘A mermaid?’ he asked.
‘Morgens are merpeople, yes.’
‘Don’t mermaids have tails?’ Gruff said, wondering with alarm if that was going to be the next stage for Mat.
‘No tails,’ the blacksmith smiled. ‘They have scales, and gills, and webbed hands and feet, and an incredible strength at swimming. But you know what they look like. You saw Dylan.’
‘So Mat is like Dylan.’ Gruff bit his lip. ‘Does that mean she’ll stop living on land?’
‘If she chooses. The potential for full transformation comes if a morgen reaches the point of drowning. Most just live their lives as very good human swimmers.’
The point of drowning. The blacksmith’s words dripped cold down Gruff’s spine. If Mat hadn’t been a morgen, she would have drowned that night she leapt off the Sleepers. And he would have drowned trying to save her.
Spray splattered Gruff’s legs. He became suddenly acutely aware of where they were standing. ‘We can’t stay here,’ he said, above the wind. ‘We’ve got to get to shore.’
‘No,’ the blacksmith snapped. ‘We have to talk to Dylan – you have to talk to him. I cannot. He doesn’t hear me or see me except when we play out our parts, and that will be very soon now. Once it begins, I can’t talk to you, and you can’t reach Dylan. Do you understand?’
‘No.’ He was sick of not understanding.
The blacksmith kneaded her hands together, increasingly agitated. ‘I’m stuck in between, neither here nor there, and so is Dylan. I didn’t kill him that day but nor can he heal. I can’t help, and I can’t cross the threshold!’
Gruff staggered in the wind. ‘What threshold?! To what?’
‘We’re on it. Here, on the edge of the land and the sea, the layers of life between this world and Annwn are thin. All magic is stronger and even mortals can pass across.’
‘What’s Annwn?’
‘The otherworld. The immortal realm.’
‘The otherworld?’ Gruff’s reality expanded uncomfortably. ‘Like in Nain and Taid’s old stories?’
A threshold between worlds. No wonder Mat had been drawn to her magical side. And that must be why the sword had to be forged from this stone.
Seven Sleepers on the sea, bridging is their work.
A bridge to the otherworld of myth and legend.
‘I can help you call Dylan,’ the blacksmith said. ‘I taught others in the past, before the bridge was broken by a man who hoped to stop contact with the otherworld. He didn’t realise what a terrible mistake he was making. He didn’t foresee the storms the island would suffer without any way to reach Dylan and calm him. Since then even fewer people have been able to see me, and only then at times of great danger.’
Speaking to Dylan might calm him? Might stop the storm? Gruff planted his feet firmly and scrubbed his eyes free of rain. ‘What do I need to do?’
‘To call him, you must say: Dylan Ail Don, ni thorrodd don o dano erioed; a wnewch chi siarad â mi?’
Dylan Ail Don, beneath whom no wave ever breaks; will you speak with me?
‘I hope he comes,’ the blacksmith added, almost to herself. ‘If he’s too lost in his pain, he won’t hear. This storm is set to be one of the worst we’ve seen. The conditions are as they were that terrible day.’ She took a small step backwards so Gruff stood alone. ‘If the storm can’t be stopped, remember the sword.’
‘What does it do?’
‘If you have forged it well,’ the blacksmith said, ‘it should cut water.’
Gruff half laughed. ‘What? Anything can cut through water. It’s water! It’s not solid!’
‘The sword doesn’t cut through water: it cuts water,’ the blacksmith snapped. ‘We’re running out of time. Call him. Please.’
Gruff squinted out into the choppy waves. His mind filled with the memory of cold, webbed fingers tearing at his own, trying to wrench the hammer from his grasp. But then he remembered the Dylan he had seen in the played-out past, the Dylan before the hammer strike. The curious Dylan who had swum towards the beautiful sword-forging music, fearing no harm.
Could that Dylan still be there, underneath the anger and pain?
‘Dylan Ail Don, ni thorrodd don o dano erioed; a wnewch chi siarad â mi?’ Gruff shouted, in as clear a voice as he could. The wind threw his words into the sky and smashed them against the waves. For a long minute the rain pattered down and the spray splashed up and nothing broke the surface of the sea.
A movement, right beside the rock – but it was only a cormorant, bobbing up to swallow its catch. A kittiwake skimmed low past the seventh Sleeper, buffeted by the wind. The cormorant dived again, hunting for pudding.
Gruff thought he saw Mat’s dark head appear far away to the right, but the next second he realised it was just a seal. His heart thumped hard. He should be out looking for her – but how?
Still no Dylan. Should he say the words again? He half turned back to the blacksmith but she whispered, ‘Arhoswch.’ Wait. So he waited, and tried not to think about how long it had been since Mat dived into the sea.
A head surfaced close in front of him.
Dull, grey scales, dark slashes of gills, human eyes imbued with a swollen sea.
Dylan Ail Don had come at Gruff’s call.