Humiliated, I wave her concern away. “It’ll pass. Sorry.”

Agnet smiles, revealing the gap between her teeth. Overly conscious of it her whole life, Agnet has taught herself to smile close-mouthed. But not with me. I miss seeing that dark space.

“You need to find your sea legs, Kaspar.”

I snort up a laugh. An old joke between us. For someone who lives on the sea, I do not like the water. “I forgot them up at the house.”

She takes in the expanse of the bay that protects our hamlet from the harsher open water. “Did you get a good look at it?”

“No more than a glimpse. It was fast.”

Her brow knits into a curious crease. “Is it really what they say it is? It wasn’t a dolphin or a seal?”

“It was real,” I say, rising on unsteady legs. “I swear to God, it was real.”

Her eyes go back to the waves. “Where in the world did it come from?”

There is no answer to this question, so I do not respond. An awkwardness settles over me like a frost.

“Maybe I’ll catch it in one of my traps.”

“Are you still running those out of the hut?”

I nod. “It gives me an excuse to go there.”

Her smile drops away and she won’t look me in the eyes, now. I despise my own neediness.

“You’ll have a little competition to catch her.” She nods to where a dozen boys and old men have lined up along the quay to cast lines into the water. Some have baited their hooks with scraps of fish or small mice, but the old man nearest to us ties a silver ring to his hook.

Agnet asks him what it is and we trade sneaky glances when he tells us it is a wedding band. The luremaid, he says, is here to claim a husband to whisk away to her home beneath the waves. Bouncing the wedding band on its string, he grins and says: “How else does one bait a mermaid?”

We giggle at this until a voice bellows over the heads of the fishermen and quashes the mirth. A cable in Agnet’s neck tightens briefly at the sound of her husband’s voice.

“Duty calls,” she says in a clenched, irritated tone. The light in her eyes goes flat like a snuffed candle wick. She walks away, head down.

Bryndis and Pip find me and say it’s time to go home. Bryndis asks what I saw out there in the boat and Pip races ahead. He wants to be the one to tell father about the mermaid. When we get to the church, I tell my sister I am going to check my traps. Down to the crypt and down the dank passageway to the sea and the brittle wooden shack built over the rocks.