Ship to Shore: Spindrift, #2

By Jules Jones

When myth comes to life, love becomes legendary...

When writer Richard Dunn moved to a remote Scottish village, all he was looking for was peace to write. He never dreamed that he'd find love, and the truth at the heart of a legend. Now Richard is one of those protecting the village's secret--a few, terribly few now, of the seals near the village are more than seals. They're silkies, shape-changing fairy folk. And one of them is Richard's partner Niall.

Their village offers a relatively safe home for silkies, with most tourists looking only for the pretty scenery or the good fishing. But the silkies are threatened by the arrival of a group of tourists who are interested in hunting more than fish--and the first seal they find is Niall's sister. She chooses to stay in seal form rather than betray the secret, even when she's attacked and injured.

With Ailsa's life hanging in the balance, the villagers band together for defense... but it's up to Richard and Niall to protect each other and the community they've grown to trust.

18,000 words. Reprinted 2019. First published 1/11/2005.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jules Jones
• Release date: Sep 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393154488

Jules Jones

Jules Jones is a materials scientist with a degree in maths and physics, and as such should really be writing hard sf. The output is in fact sf & fantasy, erotica and romance, often all at the same time. Jules has lived in more countries than she wishes to think about. She has moved often enough to have learnt that there is in fact such a thing as too many books, and and even too much yarn. Her novel Spindrift was an Eppie finalist, and both the novel and its sequel were nominated for the Gaylactic Spectrum Award. You can find Jules online at: [e-mail] http://www.julesjones.com http://julesjones.dreamwidth.org http://twitter.com/bookfetishist http://www.librarything.com/profile/JulesJones http://www.goodreads.com/JulesJones

Book preview

Chapter One

All villages have secrets, but some secrets are more important than others. Sometimes there really is something to be kept hidden from outsiders at all costs. And sometimes the secret slips out anyway. I should know; I was the outsider for one such secret. So there’ll be no real names or locations in this story, because it’s an oral history for the people it concerns. And if none of them are left to hear it, well, then there’ll be none left to be harmed by its telling elsewhere.

Now, this tale concerns what happened some time after I learnt the secret, but it has its roots in how I learnt it. When I discovered that legends sometimes have truth at their core. I stumbled into a secret on the beach one night and was asked to look after it, and him, for a bit. And when he didn’t need looking after anymore, he stayed on with me for other reasons. Though he kept on with the work he’d always done, casual labour on the fishing boats that had once been the lifeblood of this small coastal village.

So that’s why I was waiting at the harbour on the fine spring evening when this story begins, waiting for his boat to come in after an overnight trip. I’d had a ship’s radio installed at home, to pick up the gossip amongst the boats, and so I’d know when Niall’s boat was due in. I work at home, so it’s easy enough to check the radio traffic every so often and make sure I’m down at the harbour in time to greet him.

There are places I wouldn’t openly wait to greet my lover, but this village has its own notions of what counts as odd, and a gay couple doesn’t rate very highly for novelty value, not when one half is who he is. It’s not perfect, mind —there were certainly those who didn’t approve of me, because I was an outsider, or because I was gay, or both. Some of them didn’t mind making their opinions known about it, either, but it was easy enough to ignore them, when I had the ready support of the friends I’d made amongst some of the fishermen.

I wasn’t too happy to see one such person arrive on the dock while I was waiting for Niall that day. I could ignore most of them, but William was different. If it hadn’t been for William, I’d never have met Niall, and there was a tangle of emotions there that none of us cared to look at too closely. Not when William couldn’t forgive us for being happy together while William ached for the woman he’d driven away. Not when William’s reckless pursuit of Niall’s sister had put Niall in my path, and my bed.

So I was pleased enough when William only gave me a sour look, then settled himself down on a bench far enough away that we could each pretend the other wasn’t there. He wasn’t someone I wanted to talk to, and the feeling was mutual, so it was better if we didn’t try.

Only, after a bit, William said, Is she all right?

There was only one ‘she’ William could be talking about. Ailsa’s fine.

I haven’t seen her since ... He paused for a moment, then went on, They won’t even tell me if she’s all right.

Niall would tell you if anything happened to her. And I thought they were talking to you again.

William, refusing to accept that the woman he loved didn’t love him, had committed an act that had become a shunning offence in this village, one that could not readily be punished in any other way because in the outside world it wasn’t reality but the stuff of legend.

He’d stolen a silkie’s skin.

Aye, they’re talking to me. I gave it back unharmed, so they’re talking to me, and Kenneth and Brian are working with me on the boat again, though they’re careful about where they change. But they’ll tell me nothing about her. They’ll never stop punishing me for it.

I resisted the temptation to tell him he’d brought it on himself. He knew that all too well. I’d overheard his silkie friends telling him what they thought of him, when they’d finally started talking to him again. And they’d only done that because he’d returned the skin of his own free will in the end.

Talk to her for me, would you? he said. It’s not as if you didn’t get something out of it.

I’d got something out of it, all right. I’d got love, and the pain of watching Niall terrified that he’d be trapped on land for ever, and the heartbreak of thinking I’d lost him when William finally returned his sealskin. The skin William had stolen in the belief it was Ailsa’s and had refused to return when he’d realised his mistake. Without that theft, I would never have found Niall, so maybe William thought I owed him something. I owed him nothing, not after what he’d put Niall through, but I could understand what had driven him to do it. So in that complex tangle of emotions, it was pity that predominated as I said, She doesn’t want you, William.

I know that. I’ve been told it enough. Then the despair broke through as he said, "But I still care