TRICK OF LIGHT

Sea Smoke Island ~ Book 2

Excerpt

Prologue

There was something stirring in the ocean this morning. In that inner kind of knowing, she knew her life was about to change.

Tamara had always been an earthbound person, her hands working the dirt, most at home with plants and all things green. In the absence of human company, four-legged and flying creatures were her closest friends. Over so many years of life on this earth, the boundaries between her and the animals, between past and present and future, had blurred, until now it all seemed to be one. 

But the ocean…the ocean still mystified her. It was full of secrets and it never explained. On most mornings, she liked to perch on her favorite flat rock under the spreading pine, holding a cup of tea, and stare into the constantly moving water. If she could understand the ocean, then she could understand time, she thought, and why it seemed to spiral, whether it be in seasons or sun cycles or patterns that echoed across centuries…

Until a sudden event occurred, like a splash that broke the surface. She squinted to make sense of what she was seeing. Her eyes didn’t work as well as they used to, but surely those were hands rising from the cold water. A young person’s arms appeared, then a small head with dark drenched hair. 

A boy. 

“Help!” he cried. Arms flailing, water churning around him, his head sank back below the surface. 

Fear turned her breathless. She scampered down the rocks. She forgot for a moment that she was an old woman, a crone, not a girl anymore, and moved sure-footedly between slick seaweed and clusters of sharp-edged mussels. She reached the edge of the water and crouched there, waiting for the boy to reappear. When he did, he was only a few yards away. 

“Just a little farther,” she called to him. “Follow my voice.” She kept talking, sending him words of encouragement. Head above water. Steady on. I’m right here. As if she knew him, as if he were emerging from the ocean to seek her out. 

It made no sense, and yet it made all the sense in the world when she finally grasped his icy hand and looked into his face. That was when she understood that the past was still alive and the ocean sometimes did spill its secrets.