Methodically, the old man advanced. He swept the torch before him, down into crevasses between boulders and low over the rising water. He turned back to the children and called, ‘Here?’

‘Farther out,’ the girl answered in a near gasp.

The old man drew a knife from his belt. Its blade was thin, honed down to a sickle moon. He exchanged torch and knife from hand to hand, then edged farther into the tide. Standing waist-deep in the frigid water he decided that he had gone out quite far enough. He would step up onto the last remaining tall rocks standing like a bastion before the waves, then return to tell his grandchildren that the ghost had fled back to its salty rest.

Sister and brother watched their grandfather pull himself awkwardly up the very tall rocks amid the spray of the gathering tide, then disappear down into their recesses. They waited, silent, neither daring to speak. It seemed to the girl that her grandfather had been gone a very long time when her brother cleared his throat and whispered haltingly, ‘Do you think it got him?’

‘Shush! Of course not,’ the girl soothed. But she wondered, had it? And if it had, what would they do? Where could they go? The town? Pyre was a day’s walk away. And besides, what help would come from there?

The girl was brought back to herself by her brother’s hissed intake of breath, his chill damp hand tightening on her own. She looked up to see the ghost lowering itself down from the boulders. But it was not a haunt because it carried a torch and no ghost would carry one of those, no matter how potent a shade it might be. Watching her grandfather gingerly feel his way from rock to rock, a new, disturbing thought occurred to her: even though their grandfather was safely returned, how could she ever be sure the ghost hadn’t got him? For haunts, she had heard from many, were notoriously slippery things, and who could say what had happened out there in the darkness, hidden among the rocks and foam and sea?

When her grandfather stepped up out of the surf, smiling, he teased her brother. The spirit, he said, was long gone back to his home in the sea. The girl knew he was lying. The ghost had got him. She saw it in his eyes – something new that had not been there when he left them. Her brother was too young to see. It was there and did not go away even as he told them that sea-spirits might visit the shore from time to time, but that they all must return to the deeps, just as this one had. She nodded but was not fooled. She would keep a close eye on him.

Walking home the old man took no notice of his grandson’s tight grasp of his hand, or of his granddaughter’s thoughtful face as she trailed behind with the lantern. He saw instead the churning amber eyes of the man from the sea with hair like weeds – the Stormrider. The Rider had spoken to him and to his amazement he had understood. It had spoken a halting Korelan, the language of the isles south of the Cut where the Riders and Korel inhabitants continually warred over the Stormwall – the human-raised barricade that stands between land and sea. His own grandfather had claimed the family had come out of Korel ages ago, and had taught him bits and pieces of the tongue when he’d been a lad, enough to understand the Rider’s own crude mouthing of it. It made sense to him that the Riders should simply assume that Korelan was the human tongue.