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“Aye, she may appear to be,” Bronagh nodded. “But if she is a merrow, it is naught but appearance. Everything about her that you think you know is an illusion, Patrick Michael Martin.

“The merrow lives in the depths, venturing close to the rocky shore—do you know why? Because deep within her there is a compelling desire to walk upon the land, to see the dry world. It is a desire beyond reason, and there is but one way for her to fulfill that desire.” The witch leaned closer to Patrick, who was trembling now as if with cold. “She must entrust her red pearl cap—red this is, Patrick, though you probably cannot see that—to the keeping of a human man, a sailor most often. If she does this, she grows human legs, the webbing between her fingers recedes. And then she can walk the earth and see the sights she has longed to see all her life.”

Bronagh rose and went back to the fire. She swung the crane out from the flames, fished the egg out of the pot with a spoon, and returned to the stool, cradling the egg in her ratty apron.

“Once a merrow gives her cap to a human man, however, it is as if she has given him control of what little semblance of a soul she has. The freedom and the joy she once knew in the embrace of the sea is gone, replaced by a meek, compliant nature. She becomes a gentle wife, a patient mother, a woman without a thought for herself. The ocean that is her birthplace and her home is forgotten, along with all the spirit that it once gave her; merrows are creatures of immense passion and humor, daring and full of spit and vinegar in their natural state. Now she is a shell, a hollow shadow of her real self. And the man who holds her cap likes her that way. She tends to his needs, gives him comfort and sustenance, bears his children, keeps his home, all the while remaining ever young and beautiful, even as he ages unto death. It is hard to blame him, I suppose; what man wouldn’t want such a thing?”

“You’re daft, Bronagh,” Patrick said testily. “My father adores my mother.”

“No doubt,” the witch said dryly. “But he adores her as she is, diminished, obedient, shallow like the landscape you color-blind gos-soons see only in shades of grey, willing to believe that this is as the whole world is. It is not, Patrick—the world is a place of endless color, of vital, blooming color. Just because you do not perceive it does not mean it is not there.” The old woman sighed. “But, of course, in life men hold the reins, just as your father holds your mother’s cap in a sea chest buried deep in the forest.”

Patrick ran his finger over the tiny pearls in the fabric, white pricks of light against a flat, dark background.

“What if I were to return it to her?” he asked.

Bronagh tapped the egg against the knobby white wall, cracking it. “You will both lose her forever if you do,” she said seriously, peeling away the shell. “A merrow only remains with her husband because he has hidden her cap. Should she find it, or be given it back, she would immediately seek to return to her home in the sea. She will abandon house, husband, child, without a second thought. You will never see her again.”

“No,” Patrick said harshly. “You are wrong, Bronagh.”

The old woman’s dark eyes met his, and there was deep sadness in them. “You asked for the truth, Patrick Michael Martin, and I have given it to you. I am not saying this to decry your mother. But there is great magic in the sea, a magic much too strong to resist. Your own father knows it; ask yourself why he brought her here, to this rocky place in the lee of the tallest of Ireland’s mountains, when all his young life he plied the sea by choice? I suspect that you yourself have never seen the sea. Your father knows what Aisling would do were she to find the cap—every sailor is versed in the lore of the merrow. He took her from the sea. She has forgotten her life there. But if you give her the cap, she will remember, and she will abandon all she knows of this world for a chance to return to it. She has been a prisoner of sorts all of your life, and before,