Adaira took a step closer to the water, unafraid. She held out her palms and said, “You dwell in the sea, a vast place that surrounds our isle. Have you seen nothing then? Did you not witness Annabel Ranald and Eliza Elliott disappearing? Did you not see Catriona Mitchell walk along the coast yesterday?”

The spirits began to exchange glances with one another. A few of them grumbled and shifted in the water, but no one answered. They waited for Ream to speak for them.

“If we saw or did anything, heiress, we cannot speak of it.”

“Why is that?” Adaira’s voice was cold. Her anger was rising.

“Because our mouths have been sealed from speaking truth,” Ream replied, and her words were even more blurred than before, as if her tongue were caught. “You will have to seek your answers from those who are higher than us.”

Jack rose, stiffly. At last, he drew the gaze of Ream, and she looked at him with her iridescent eyes.

“Who is higher than you?” he asked. He didn’t know there was a hierarchy among the spirits. His mind began to spin, wondering how he could summon anything else from the water.

“Look around and above you, bard,” Ream said to him. “We are only greater than fire.” She set her gaze on Adaira again and struggled to say, “Beware, mortal woman. Beware of blood in the water.”

The spirits hissed in agreement, and the tide returned with vengeance. The ocean rushed forward, the tide pushing the waves far higher than it had before, and the spirits melted into the foam. Jack had no time to move, to reach for Adaira, as the waves swallowed them whole.

It’s happening, he thought, clutching his harp, as he frantically kicked to find the surface. The spirits are going to drown us.

He felt fingers in his hair, a painful yank. He opened his eyes, expecting to dimly see Ream smiling with her pinprick cache of teeth, ready to drown him. But it was only Adaira. She took hold of his arm and guided him up to the surface.

As they clambered up the Kelpie Rock, they had to fight the draw of the tide before the waves pulled them both under again. It was a narrow, uncomfortable rock; they had no choice but to sit back to back, shivering from the cold, and wait for the tide to recede.

Jack remained silent as he picked threads of algae from his harp strings. But he was inwardly overcome, astounded at what he and Adaira had done. At the power of Lorna’s ballad to summon all the spirits of the sea—the folk he had once heard about in the legends of his childhood. Faceless phantoms and mystical beings that rarely revealed themselves to mortals . . . he and Adaira had just beheld them. Conversed with them.

Summoned them.