The shells that the sea had brought up that day, thought the little girl, were not so good as the ones from the previous week. She poked one of them with her crutch, the chipped grey striations barely forming a shape she could recognize from the book the liaig had given her. She carefully knelt, cautiously lowering herself to the grey sand, and picked it up with gentle fingertips, wincing as she adjusted her stump-leg and sheltered it with her skirt.
    “What are you lookin’ at?” called the blond boy who had ran ahead of her, turning to see why she had stopped.
    “This shell,” she said, holding it up to the sun. “It turns purple by the light.”
    The boy walked back towards her and stared at the variety, the nacre and luster of it, squinting hard. “Why’s it special?” he asked, a pinched look on his round little face.
    “I don’t see this color much,” said the girl. “I think it comes from…” She paused, pursing her lips as she searched her memory. “When a mollusk or something eats something purple.”
    “I don’t turn purple when I eat berries,” said the boy, raising his eyebrows in doubt. A small wooden boat dangled from his hand.
    “You would if you ate your weight in berries alone, I’d bet.” It was a teasing remark, and a quick smile flashed on her face.
    “You’re funny in the head,” said the boy with a grin, helping her up to stand. His blond curls swayed in the wind, and she thought he looked rather like a big flower that way, golden round little blossoms on one great stem as he walked along the shore.
    “I had that funny dream again,” she said, wishing not for the last time to kick at the sand and rocks beneath her, but not able to leverage it. “The one with the towers and the big silk curtains and the roses in the fountain.”
    “I don’t know how you dream of towers. You haven’t ever seen any! My mam says dreams are pictures that you have seen, and your mind gets all mixed up.”
    “Your mam has no imagination,” reprimanded the girl, looking out to the sea. “I can almost see it all being real if I look out far enough. I think it was Valopylvas in my dream. My da told me stories about it last he was here.”
    “When’s he coming back?” asked the boy, and the girl only shrugged.
    “When they’ve caught enough fish and the winds are good, I spose.” She yanked the braid her mother had done in her hair tighter, trying to keep it from sliding out with a firm adjustment. “I wish my da and your da were switched. It’s not fair that your da has all that gold and a real farm and stuff and my da has to go out and carry smelly old fish around.”
    “My da got it from his da and such on,” explained the boy. “One day he says I’ll have it.”
    “I’m not going to get to go around smelling like fish from my da.” She tilted her head. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
    “Well, there’s lots you cannae do,” said the boy. “I don’t think you could be a mam with one leg.”
    “You can so, but I don’t want to be a mam.” She squinched her face. “Sorley is such a bad baby, I wouldn’t want him at all.”
    “Is he still a baby if he walks and talks? He helps your mam, yeah?”
    “Not well.” The girl had only recently learned the difference the words well, and good, and was finding a glimmer of pride in using them properly. “I want to be a physician or maybe learn herbs, like Liaig Faolan.”
    “That, now, I think you could do.” The boy stopped in his tracks, looking at the cliffside wall.
    “We could go look at the cavern wall.”
    “My mam said not to go to the wall—“
    “Well, you don’t have to tell your mam.”
    “Merel,” he said, scowling at her, but Merel smiled innocently, pressing onward. “Merel, it’s weird that you like it so much. It gives nearly everyone the creeps.”
    “It sounds like you’re afraid,” said Merel, walking towards the cleft in the cliffside wall. “Where’s the candle? Didn’t you remember it for your toy boat this time?”
    “I don’t want to,” the boy wheedled, and Merel shot him a serious look.
    “Tadg, I promise, there’s nothing scary about the wall. Just don’t touch it, you big baby.”
    “What if the tides come in? We’ll be stuck in there and you can’t swim—“
    “Only a few minutes,” pleaded Merel. “It reminds me of my dreams.”
    Tadg dragged his feet as they walked side by side. It was far colder inside of the small cavern, the dark humid walls pressing inward like a strange, miniature cathedral. Reluctantly, the boy reached into his toy boat’s boiler, and pulled out a rump of a candle, its burnt nubs and trails of wax lending it a shape that reminded Merel of a very old castle all rounded out by wind and sea, half collapsed. She held it steady while he used his striker, and it lit up the dark passage. It was perhaps only a few dozen feet back, but Merel, with her unsteady foot and crutch, very much wanted to see what was on the ground so that she did not stumble. Tadg walked to the back of the wall, gazing at the carvings, and shivered.
    “Don’t touch it,” nagged Merel, catching up to him.
    “I don’t get why you care about it. They’re just scratches on the wall, all dented in and such. It’s nonsense. It doesn’t have any pictures or words or anything.”
    “To you,” said Merel, her fingertips tracing the air in front of the wall, entranced as the candlelight flickered. “Someone must’ve put it all here for a reason, though. Liaig Faolan says everything people leave behind has a reason.”
    “D’you really think that?” said Tadg. “S’pose I took a shite right here, and left it behind, would that have a reason?”
    “I think that is hardly the same at all.” She glared at him as he kicked at some driftwood that had come in with the last high tide. “I think it’s very old. Older than Moras, maybe.”
    “How’s something older than Moras?”
    “In a book the liaig gave me,” Merel explained, “it said that Moras has only been Moras for six hundred years, and they called it something else long ago, and before that, and before that.”
    “You read so many books,” said Tadg with a tone she couldn’t quite place— not envy, but not dismissal.
    “But this is very old,” she said softly. “It does feel like it’s in my dreams. Like I saw these before. Maybe a long, long time ago.”
    “And last week you turned seven,” said Tadg. “So I don’t quite know how you’d feel something old like that.”
    “Neither do I,” said Merel softly. “But it means something, I know it does. I’m going to grow up, and I’m going to figure it out. I just know it.”
    “I bet a whole lot of people have said that,” said Tadg. “My da says there’s scratches in caves like this as far as Uterni.”
    “Well, I’ll figure it all out,” said Merel. “I will. I swear.” She set down the violet shell at the base of the wall, where she had laid shells before, and a few of them had not even been carried away by crabs yet. They remained, silent little sentinels that marked that she, too, had seen the wall. But she also knew that there were little living things that would take them back to the sea, if the high tide itself would not claim them when the water came.
    “Tadg!” A call from somewhere up the beach— Merel knew the voice to be one of Tadg’s older sisters.
    “Damn it,” murmured Tadg, whose foul mouthedness came more from the joy of using forbidden knowledge than any vulgar tendencies. The moment a child is told that a word is rude or entirely off limits for practical use, of course, it becomes an object of great delight for them. Tadg was no different. “Merel, she’s going to tell my mam.”
    “Then blame me,” said Merel. “My mam doesn’t care, so if yours talks to mine, neither of us will get in trouble in the end.”
    “That isn’t the point! It’ll hurt her feelings that I did something I oughtn’t, even though she said not to.” He squinched his face. “If we’re quick, Tomnat won’t notice where we are.”
    “Then be quick. I surely can’t.” She hiked up her skirt and began her slow crutch-step-walk. Tadg scurried ahead, ducking behind the rocks as he scanned the beach for his sister. Certain the coast was clear, he slipped out of Merel’s view. She paused in the arch of the crevasse, listening cautiously.
    A yelp. Merel’s head whipped around the edge of the crevasse.
    Tadg was caught by the ear by his older sister. “Why were you back at the wall?” She scowled at him with her lips pursed, her brown eyes deep with frustration.
    “It was Merel’s idea!” squawked Tadg. “Please don’t tell Mam, Tomnat. Please. Merel made me! She made me, she said she couldn’t hold the candle and her crutch both, and that she’d go in with or without me, and I was scared the tide would come!”
    “Is he lying to me?” said Tomnat, her sharp eyes looking up to Merel. Tadg was still only six, thought Merel. Not the mature, grown up seven that she was, as of the last week. This meant that Merel needed to be responsible, and honest.
    “No,” said Merel, looking away from Tomnat nervously. Tomnat was eleven, and large for an eleven year old girl, and Merel was rather frightened of her, though she could be as jolly as she could be temperamental. “I made him come with me. He did argue,” said Merel pointedly.
    “Then we tell your mam, Merel,” said Tomnat, “and I know your mother said not to go down to the beach on your crutch.”
    “My mam doesn’t care,” retorted Merel, but this was a lie. The many times Merel had gotten stuck on sand and had needed help, made up the charges in a large case her mother had levied against her.
    “Then we’ll see,” said Tomnat, marching Tadg by his wrist down the beach. Merel tried to keep up with them, but had little luck in this endeavor. They reached the end of the docks a full five minutes before her. Her mother had been mending nets today, and Merel felt shame color her cheeks a dark red beneath her freckles as she realized that Tomnat was surely telling her mother what she’d done. Merel inched forward, not from the difficulty of managing on her crutch or from fatigue, but from a desire to put off the confrontation as long as she might.
    “Merel Pedler, you get over here right now,” called her mother, a big blond woman with golden curls that grazed her shoulders. “What’s this I hear about you dragging Tadg down the beach to that cavern at the end of the cliffs?”
    “Mam,” said Merel, trying very hard to look as small and meek as she might, “I promise I meant no harm.”
    “Thank you, Tomnat,” said Niamh, her voice clearly subdued, but gentle. “Don’t get Tadg in too much trouble.”
    “I won’t,” said Tomnat, bounding off. Her little brother ran at her heels, calling for her to wait, and leaving Merel alone, standing on the dock before her mother as her little brother played with a basket.
    “Do you want to tell me what happened?” asked Niamh. She looked at Merel calmly.
    “I went on the beach with Tadg, even though I know I’m not supposed to and I can’t always get out by high tide alone and it’s dangerous. And it was because I wanted to go see the wall.” Merel knew better than to lie to her mother.
    Niamh pondered that a moment, her fingers deftly working in loose ends along the edge of one of the nets. “I wonder why you do the things you do, Merel.”
    Merel shrugged, leaning lazily on her crutch as she looked out at the water. She could imagine the towers again, and thought of her dreams. In her dreams, her hair had been long, its black tresses longer than even she was. In her dreams her voice was grown up, and there were thousands of people listening to her. In her dreams she often felt like she had to do something very important, but she never knew what. “I don’t know, Mam,” she said quietly. “I just want to look, and it’s boring to not go down to the sea. All the fun is at the beach or the docks or the cave, and the cave is…” She stopped herself.
    “The cave is what?” said her mother.
    “It just seems…” Merel searched for the right word, the right value she could place on it. No simple word would do. It had to be one that she’d learned, just for such an occasion as this. “Consequential.”
    “Listen to me closely, Merel. I— I would like to be angry with you, honestly.” Niamh pulled another net from the water and set down the completed one. “But it isn’t fair. I know the other kids around your age do these things and there’s nothing wrong with it. Tomnat may have gotten onto Tadg, but their mother is very protective of them both. The other little girls play on the beach, I’m sure you see them.”
    “They don’t let me play with them.”
    “I know,” said Niamh, her voice barely betraying a hint of irritation. “But it isn’t fair that you can’t do the same things as them. And I know it must feel very unfair. Your father and I spoke of this back when—“
    “When my leg happened?” she asked softly.
    “Yes,” said Niamh. “We talked about how we never, ever want a little girl as bright as you are to feel like you must dull the things you want, for them to be worth having. You’re twice as clever as I was at your age, you know. But Merel, it’s important for you to learn the difference between things that are stopping you from doing something you want to, because they don’t believe that you can— and things that are for your safety. Why do I tell you not to go down to the beach?”
    “Because if the tide comes in, and I get trapped, I can’t swim, and I might drown.”
    “Right,” said Niamh. “It’s for your safety. You need to learn to care for these things, and make these judgements, on your own. You’re not always going to have me and your da. I want you to be the most perfect, clever, intelligent girl in all of the whole world, and I know you can be. But you have to trust what other people say, sometimes, about staying safe. Do you think your da or me ever want to see you hurt?”
    “No, Mam,” said Merel quietly, feeling little tears prick her eyes.
    “Can you trust the things I say to keep you safe?”
    “Yes,” said Merel, and she threw her arms around her mother apologetically. “Are you going to make me in trouble?”
    “No,” said Niamh with a sigh. “You won’t be in trouble. But this week you’re going to help me with the flax spinning instead of going out to play in the mornings, understand?”
    “Not fa—“
    “Very fair. You’re still free to go to the liaig afterwards.”
    “Fine.” Merel frowned as her mother set down the last net, and they began to walk home. Her mother scooped up Sorley, wrapping him on her back carefully, then they began to walk back to the two-room shack at the top of the hill. “You mean all of that, though?”
    “Of course I do,” said Niamh, rubbing Merel’s back affectionately as they walked.