T

he only thing Amaroq has ever loved was the sea.

He had been whelped on sea-ice in what passed for summer, when the sun never set but rolled along the flat horizion, dull and red. His nursery was foam and ice and turquoise water; he swam before he could walk. Sometimes, when he dreams, he is taking that first gasping breath with his head thrust above the surface, his nostrils slitted against saltwater and the gulls crying a frenzy overhead. Sometimes he remembers the leaping, fierce joy his people shared as they swam beneath the aurora, horns jutting like masts of pearl and bone, a savage, strange fleet beneath the stars.

Now he is the last, now he is the only. Now he is a ghost along a foreign shore, too loud, too warm, alone alone alone -

But at last it is winter. At last ice does not live in his veins alone, thick and sluggish as bad blood. The kelpie glides just below the surface, the gray and roiling sky on the other side of a pane of glass, and with a breath of magic he freezes that skein of water that separates him from the world. Now it is a fogged window he peers through, now the sea-birds winging above are blurred and distant.

It is quiet, below the waves. Here there are no icebergs to sing in the wind, no whales whose mournful voices carry across the empty miles. He dives deeper, swimming through a forest of kelp whose blades drift along his skin like slick fingers, grinning at fish who dart away like silver arrows.

At first he thinks it is a seal he hears, breaking below the waves into his world. Graceful as an orca he turns, licks his teeth, listens. Amaroq steals a breath from the surface then dives again, low and silent, ghostly in the blue. He is hungry for things other than meat, here in winter with the moon growing fuller by the night, but he is a predator and will not miss a chance to hunt.

But it is no seal.

Oh! The way his heart leaps in his chest to see her, plunging below the winter waves - for who other than one like himself would dare such a thing? He can just make out the red arch of her neck, the white slashes of her limbs as they cut through the water. Further, he wants to urge her, see me, and he begins to swim toward her as she turns back to shore. To watch her go - now his loneliness seizes him with teeth of desperation, threatening to shake him in its grip. Now he pursues her, froth in his wake, his heartbeat drumming stay.

When he surfaces he does not feel the cold bite of the air, not for the current of his hot blood and the hope that tightens his throat -

He stares at her across a few lengths of frigid water and begins to feel a winter gale howl within him. Saltwater streams from him in currents and his long hair clings to him, trailing away into the water like a drowned bride’s veil, while the drops of water rolling down his horn freeze in perfect pearls of ice. And all the while he is silent as snow, waiting to see what she is, if his hope will bloom to joy or rage.

H

e is savagely glad to be named.

It is the first time that any of them have spoken it - have given tongue to what he is, even in terms so vague. It spreads a grin along his mouth, too high, too far, like a crack splintering darkly through the ice.

At the same time it tells him that he was wrong, that his hope was misled, that she is not like him at all. They are both left with disappointment flaying their ribs like a fish-knife. When she names him he lifts his head, saying yes with the tilt of his chin, the swift run of his pulse just beneath his jaw, the proud glint to his pale eyes. Amaroq does not miss the change in her, either, the way her shift widens to a fighting stance, the knowing curve of shoulder and hip.

As another frigid wave eats up the space between them he wills her forward, nearer, nearer yet, close enough to meet the end of his horn. Close enough to see his grin and his disappointment sharp as the point of his bone-white teeth. The wind whines along the spirals of his horn, a strange music; the gulls cry warning and grief, but to which of them?

When she steps forward he watches her, rapt as a tiger watches a doe. The foam spills lace across her hooves, tugs at her ankles, urging her to him. She does not come.

When she questions him he exhales his own white cloud of breath. His tail lashes behind him, drawing meaningless patterns in the waves; what to tell her? That he is the only, then last, and therefor weak? He will not fall prey to a woman whose eyes are the color of old blood.

"There are other kelpies here,” he says at last, and narrows his gaze at the way her own strays past him, out to the featureless winter sea. "But I am the only one of my kind.”

While her attention is beyond him he takes a step nearer, and another. Amaroq reaches for his magic, and, obedient, it reaches in turn for her: ice fingers along the waves, turns the foam to frost, veils the wet sand around her in a frozen sheen. It is not enough; nothing is, in this half-life he lives, and he grits his teeth and wills the anger and disappointment in him to turn to ice, too.

“And you,” he says softly, but there is a snarl beneath it, for his foolish hope and the way it is dashed. “You are alone too.” When he smiles there is no joy in it, only weariness, and hunger.

S

he smashes his ice to shattered bits of glass, a tinkling of distant bells, and a savage grin slips onto Amaroq’s muzzle. Here is life, in the pinning of her ears and the thrash of her hooves and the wide curve of her nostrils, and it is life he knows and is hungry for.

Oh, the keplie has been a ghost since he arrived here, summer-weak and summer-thin. He has kept to the shores, taught the harbor seals and coastal deer to fear his shadow and his shape, but survival was not the same as living. The unicorn felt numb in his bones, a fading mist, a melting flake, a thing no more real than a beast in a book.

But now it is winter, and here is a foe who has submerged herself in the waves of his sea.

At last she looks at him, and his grin hints at teeth. His tail, braided with bits of bone and shell, lashes like a tiger’s when she steps nearer, and the pride in her voice lifts his own chin, tilts his spiraling horn to pierce the clouds. A friend, she says, and he blows out a harsh breath, the cold mist of a laugh. She should know, she must know, there are no friends between their kinds - there is only to hunt, there is only to kill or to die.

Or to haunt the edges, and never quite live.

Still there is something in her voice that keeps his feet set in the surf, even as he judges the distance between them, even as the sand sucks at his feet and each wave urges him forward, tugs him back. There is an umasked desperation, a want like despair, and Amaroq knows that feeling like he knows what it is to feel hot blood feel his mouth, to taste copper and salt.

She loves him. It is clear to the kelpie, clear as tracks in the snow or judging from a wisp of stratus cloud on the horizon that snowstorm will be on them. He wants to laugh at her, then, but he is curious, too, and he falls still where he stands. Even his grin fades away, and the only movement is his mane and tail riffled by the water and the wind and the slide of light down the slight curves of his long, sharp horn.

It has been a long time since he has seen love, even just a half of it, broken to sharpness on the edges.

And he would want to make you not alone. Yes - that is what a kelpie might say to its prey. Come away to the waters and the wild, come away and be not alone, come away and join me in a bond that is greater than love and we will take life between our teeth, we will drink the depths of the sea and rejoice beneath the aurora and all the world will tremble to see us, with longing and with awe.

He wonders why she had not joined him. He wonders if Orestes had loved her, too.

“I do not know this friend of yours.” Orestes - the name lives between them now, for she has made it so, and it carries a rhythm like the sea. Amaroq’s gaze is sea-ice, cold, alien, but with something stirring underneath. When she steps nearer it sparks to life and he leans forward, the wind sighing around his horn, the water sighing around their feet.

The unicorn considers her, and he does not show his teeth. Wolf-like he tilts his skull, wolf-like he regards her, and when he speaks it is almost soft, like the caress of foam around her feet, like the ice-shards she broke on the beach are forgotten. “How badly do you want to find him?”

He does not need to say I can help you. I can make it so that you might search each sea for him, and, once found, never leave his side. She knows what he is, she has named him.

"It is not good to be alone," he says, and the way he waits then is like a wolf, too.

H

e does not know her, to say where she does and does not belong.

Amaroq only knows that she is a warrior, that her eyes spark with fire but more than that with want, that somewhere within her is the same loneliness that lays in the dark of his heart like a rotten seed, scraping him hollow, eating him up. He knows that she is brave, and that she is a little bit a fool (to stand so near, to challenge him so, with her body in his waves) - but perhaps it is only that loneliness that makes her foolish, the loss and the want.

He understands that. He has watched his brethren die, for such foolishness, and has learned that to survive you must be cold.

So the kelpie does not tell her he won’t open this world to her.

But he wonders, now, how much she truly knows of him, of his kind. Amaroq knows little of the other kelpies, the inland ones and those from the southern sea. He does not know that they cannot work the change, that they are only born and never made - but he is beginning to see that she does not know his way. Or at least beginning to guess. Enough to be curious, enough that the line of his mouth turns softer, the color of his eyes more deep. Less like ice and more like the ocean below it, fathomless, almost gentle.

Nearer she comes, and further away, drifting on her own tide, only another piece of flotsam on the beach. For his part Amaroq stands motionless, though he watches her feet, watches the strength of her chest and the curve of her neck, judges the distance between them as any predator does. One lunge and his teeth could be at her throat, less than that and his horn could pierce her breast. And of course (for he is proud, and knows nothing of how well she has fought his kind) once he has her in the water there would be no hope for her. A thrashing in the surf, a clamor of gulls, white foam turned red. And then nothing. Even the waves would lap away her footprints and erase her from Novus.

But Amaroq does not lunge. He casts his gaze back to hers, crimson-dark like the inside of a throat.

Anything, she says, and he almost feels sorry for her. Enough that he shakes his head as he speaks, as if already woeful, as if they are both already gone.

“I could Make you,” he says, as the wind blows up the sea-mist in salty kisses along the arch of his neck, “I could Make you like me. And then you could search for him below every shore, in the trenches of the deep, in the corals and kelp forests. Everywhere.”

He does not say And when you find him you need never leave him. He does not ask And when you find him, will he hate you?

Instead he surprises himself - not a thing that happens often, not a thing that has happened since he left the constellations and the water he knew, each type of wind or ice a thing he could name. “And I would help you look.” It comes out rough, and low, a wave scraping against rock, and the unicorn tosses his head and the somber light glances off his spiraling horn and scatters like spray.

A

maroq is drawn to the life in her.

Where he is all stillness, an iceberg rigid and unyielding above the surface of the sea, she is alive as the flame that colors her eyes. The only part of the kelpie that moves as he watches her is his mane and tail, thick and light and pale as sea-foam, drifting in the wind off of the water. But although her mane is too short and her tail too leonine to be tousled by that wind, all the rest of her is alive and in motion - rolling eyes, flaring nostrils, tale lashing like a whip. He wonders if she is ever still, if there is any rest in her.

But for all his watchfulness the kelpie does not expect her to step nearer.

Maybe it is that surprise that keeps him from action. If he had thought she would heed his words, accept his offer, he might have taken her then. Amaroq wouldn’t even have to lunge to do it; they are so close, breath to breath, skin to skin, with the water already around their ankles. It would not be so difficult to drag her the rest of the way, even as her body resisted, even if she changed her mind and fought and thrashed.

Be still, he would tell her. Be still and be reborn.

Yet he had not expected it. And now his nostrils flare as he inhales the scent of her, smoke of bonfires burned from cedar and pine, spices he has no name for, the salt-sweat of her body even in the chill of winter. He can see the pattern of each stripe on her skin, the gleam of sunlight and water on her horns, each dark lash over her crimson eye. Amaroq wants to lick the ocean spray from her skin and his tongue touches the sharp points of his predator’s teeth and still he stands motionless like a cub, a man, a fool.

He realizes then that he is waiting for her to make the choice. Amaroq does not want to make it for her - not when he already knows what her heart wants, for the way that desperation shines through her eyes. How badly, he wonders, does she want to find Orestes? To what length will her love go?

I-I-I, she stammers, and he is leaning close, he is reaching to touch his muzzle to her throat (no teeth, only lips, only breath, only wanting that touch-)

She bursts away. Quicker than a seal in the water or a hare in the field, fast as a bird on the wing she is gone for him and he is left reaching and alone. Wordless Amaroq watches her flee and though there is anger beating hard in his breast (anger born from disappointment) there is a smile laying itself upon his lips like a crack through ice.

He knows he will see her again. And the next time he does he will not return to the sea alone.