Look at me, his fingers played between the notes he plucked. Give your attention to me.

Instantly, all the glimmering eyes returned to him. Ah, yes, they seemed to say. The mortal man still plays for us. They listened and softened once more as Jack crooned at them. All of the spirits in their manifest forms adored him.

Save for one.

It was the one spirit out of the dripping horde whose form most resembled a human woman. She stood thin and reedy on two legs in the heart of the gathering, the water lapping at her barnacled knees. Her skin was pale with a sheen of pearl, and her hair, like kelp, fell long and thick to clothe her body. Her face was angular, but she had an upturned nose, a mouth like a hook, and two eyes that were iridescent as oyster shells. She held a fishing spear in one hand, and her fingernails were long and black. She could almost pass for a human. But there were elements of her that exposed her as a spirit. Gills fluttered in her neck, and patches of golden scales adorned her skin. Traces of her magic that she couldn’t disguise.

It was Lady Ream of the Sea. The one who had threatened to sink the fisherman’s boat, who had darted past Jack and laughed with the tide when he had swum to the shore.

Jack studied the spirit, marveling, but Ream paid him no heed. She stared at Adaira.

The song reached its end.

For a moment, all was silent. The spirits wanted more; he could sense it. And yet he felt empty, sucked dry to his bones.

“Why have you summoned us?” Ream asked Adaira. Her voice was muted, warbled. It would sound clear and crisp beneath the water, Jack suspected. “Do you seek to ensnare and bind us with the mortal man’s song?”

“No,” Adaira said. “I seek your wisdom and insight, Lady of the Sea.”

“About a mortal matter, I presume?”

“Yes.”

Jack didn’t move as he listened to Adaira describe the troubling events. She spoke of the missing children and told Ream there was no trace of where the girls might be, if they still lived. She spoke of the third girl who had vanished the day before after playing on the shore with her siblings. There was no suspicion in her voice, nothing that betrayed Adaira’s belief that the folk of the tides were at fault.

“And what do we have to do with mortal children?” Ream questioned. “Your lives on land are far more amusing to us than beneath the water in our domain, where your skin prunes and you must remain in a bubble to survive.”

So they had held mortals below at some point, Jack thought with a flash of alarm.