The Sea Thief

Chapter I

"... and then, I threw my spear right into the shark's mouth!"

The twins squealed in delight as Tora spoke. She could already see one of them reaching for a spear while the other pretended to choke on her own thumb.

Tora raised a finger to her lips to quieten them. It was so late that the stars were already shining like sand over black marble. All the other Selkie were sure to be sleeping, and Tora just knew that the clay walls of their lumpy hut would not be enough to muffle her sisters' giggling.

She squeezed her seal coat dry while she waited for the twins to settle down. When they finally stopped chasing each other around the stick nests and mossy stones inside the hut, Tora leaned closer.

"You should have seen it, girls," she whispered. "The spear went right into its mouth, and even came out from the other side."

This time, only Tammera shrieked and clapped with joy. Tiesha stopped choking on her finger and stared at her older sister with wide eyes and a sheet-white face.

"What happened next?" Tammera demanded. "Did the shark die? Did its blood get on your hair? Did you cut it into strips?"

Tora tried not to wince. Her sister was only eight, and yet, she seemed to know more about hunting than Tora did.

But, then again, Tora had only gone hunting once. And that was six years ago, when she was ten. Her tooth had barely nipped the fin of a fish, but as soon as the slightest drop of blood had touched her tongue, Tora had gone swimming home.

Her sisters didn't know that, though. Even Mama and Papa didn't know that. They didn't need to.

"Then, I put my hand into the shark's mouth and pulled out one big fish," Tora told her sisters. "And that's how I got your dinner."

She hoped that her sisters didn't see the way she flinched as she finished her story. She hoped they didn't hear the quiver in her voice.

Because it was a lie. A stupid, fat lie that she had been telling her whole family for the past six years.

The truth was that she couldn't hunt. She hated the feeling of live fish squirming in her mouth, she hated the sound of her spear whistling as it whizzed into its mark, and the blood-

Thinking about the blood alone was enough to make Tora want to hurl.

"When do we get to go hunting?" Tiesha asked.

Hopefully, never, Tora wanted to tell them. But instead, she smiled as she ushered her sisters away from their seal coats and towards their sleeping nests. "Two more years. Then you get to throw your spears into shark mouths and use fish bones to scratch their eyes-"

"Ew, stop," Tiesha cried out.

Tammera scoffed. "Are the fish bones even sharp enough?"

"Anything is sharp enough if you're strong enough," Tora told her. She waited for her sisters to curl into their rolls of kelp before smoothing down the colourful rags they wore over their bodies – rags that they thought Tora had found on the ocean floor.

It was yet another lie Tora had been telling them.

The truth was that she had stolen them. She had stolen them from the Narenji markets, where she went every morning to steal fish for their dinner.

Except, this morning, she had been careless. She had left something behind.

Once she could hear her sisters' soft snoring, Tora grabbed her seal coat and slipped out of the hut. The rocks beneath her feet were slippery as she weaved through the clumps of huts in the cavern, each with its own pattern of branches and browned bracken along the mud-clay walls.

She was certain that no one could hear her rasped breaths and her pounding heart. It was her favourite part about living behind a waterfall – no sound could drown out the torrents of water that crashed against the grey rocks.

Which worked perfectly for Tora. If someone heard her sneaking out – worse, if someone told her parents that she was sneaking out while they were busy crafting spears in the forge – she would have to come clean about everything.

She would have to tell them about how she had been abandoning the hunt and exploring the human country. She would have to tell them about the fish she had stolen from the humans. She would have to tell them about how she had accidentally left her spear – the one they had made for her – on the human shoreline just this morning, where any human could find it and use it to track down the cavern of Selkies.

Tora was so close to the waterfall that she could smell the moss and lichen along the rocks. The curtain of white water stood before her, spraying her face.

In about an hour, her parents would be home. That gave her only minutes to swim to Narenji, find her spear, swim back and dry her seal coat.

It would be a close call. That, Tora was sure of.

Before she even had the chance to raise her seal coat to her chest, she heard a voice shake the shimmering, silver walls around her.

"Are you looking for something, Tora Urchadainn?"

Tora spun around and bit back her growl.

It was another Selkie. His lips were curled into a snarl as he raised his hands in the air. In one hand, there was his seal coat, as brown as rust and lined with thin hairs.

And, in his other hand, was Tora's spear.

Tora's gaze darted from the spear to his wicked grin. Then, she felt her heart sink to the floor.

Busted.