“A gift I’d meant to offer her. Now I offer it to you—with my own hands.”

“You haven’t got hands.”

“Not like this. Observe.”

She closed her eyes, concentrated, and it happened again.

Her body shrank. Its muscles compacted, its bones realigned. So did her eyes, and her lateral vision disappeared so she could only look straight ahead. Her hind legs slimmed, her front legs shortened, and her hooves changed to strange, soft things with wiggling fingers and toes.

Her hide grew softer too, losing its coat of short, coarse hair. The black hair on her head made up for that, falling down in a wet slap to the small of her back and still attractively accented with kelp.

She hadn’t had a real chance to examine her human body last night. Everything had happened too quickly. Now, Hæra looked down at herself.

Her shoulders seemed broad, her arms long, and her waist narrow. Her legs were long too, for a human. More dark hair lay between her thighs, covering her human genitals. She had breasts as well, although they didn’t look very big. Perhaps that was because of her musculature, which seemed well developed. Pleased, she sensed instinctively that this body was well suited to swimming. That was fitting.

She raised her head to see that Jonathan was staring at her with his mouth open again.

“Bloody fuck,” he said. “My head’s mince.”

There seemed no answer to that other than, “It’s all right.”

Her human voice was so strange! Softer, quieter, and without an echo. It lacked the crash of the water on the rocks. It was thus less impressive, but at the sound of it, Jonathan visibly relaxed.

She could see that easily. Her vision seemed to have lost none of its sharpness, even if it only pointed forward. Her hearing remained excellent too, as did her sense of smell—which might be unfortunate, given what the human had done to himself.

Hæra bent down—odd to do it from the waist, not the shoulders—and reached for the dropped coin. Her fingers seemed to know what to do: they closed around the coin and cupped it securely in her palm.

Then she walked slowly to Jonathan. The distance between them presented much more of a challenge than the short dash she’d made from Sister Madeleine back to the sea. Her arms wanted to move when her legs did, and she had to fight to keep them at her sides as she’d seen humans do. Her weight distribution was all wrong, and she still felt heavy out of the water. Her legs might’ve been strong in human terms, but they were nothing to her true form. The pebbles and rocks didn’t help, creating an uneven surface beneath her soft feet.