Excerpt from Merrow by Ananda Braxton-Smith, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"What does that mean?" I asked, but she'd finished with conversing. She said all that about reptiles and darkness, and then she shouted at me to go away.

So I did.

But the byre and the cows weren't far enough. It was the sea I needed. My aunt's words followed me, and the air swarmed with irritable humors. My feet pounded the path with a satisfying crunch and set gravel rattling down the cliff and onto the beach below. Collecting my stone sack from its hidey-hole, I dragged it past the rocks and to the edge of the water. Our spread of white sand and half-moon of foam made me welcome and filled me up with content.

One of the seals had chosen to whelp alone in our cove this year, though hundreds of her fellows were doing likewise just around the corner in the next cove. It was a strange thing for a seal to be so solitary. They commonly like the company of their kind and can't be persuaded away, even for fish. This lone mother lay on her side, head and tail both held off the ground, and watched me stamp past. The hungry pup at her teat stopped feeding to watch too as I, dragging my sack behind me, walked straight into the sea and raised a cloud of fussing gulls all about us. I waded into the warm water up to my waist, to my chest, to my shoulders, and when the sea reached my chin, I just took a deep breath and kept on walking.

At the last moment, I filled myself with air. I sucked it in until I felt I was mostly air and my body a ghostly thing. The sea rose over my face, and I opened and closed my eyes to accustom them to the salt. There was a rush in my ears, and all the din and heat dropped away. A few more paces and I was at the edge of the drop, where the sand stopped and fell away into dark water and the kelp forests.

Straightaway I stepped off the drop and into the dappled place. My sack was stuffed with stones and shells for ballast, and I sank to the seabed and settled cross-legged into the sand and grit. I gazed upward through giantess's ribbons of wrack and waving weed. Above me, the sun rolled over the water's surface like a silver ball and shot its cold light into the warm depths, reaching down even to where I sat, as far away from the surface as I could. Below me, the sand shifted and sea beetles wriggled up and out into the water, swimming here in the speckled world just as they fly above.

Half a furlong into the kelp forest, the water darkens and starts to drag at the weed. In some places the sea meadow is pushed flat and the whole sea seems to be rushing past. I feel the drag of it. At times it seems to want to pull me away. When that happens, I stuff more stones into my sack to stop myself sailing off like an untethered boat in a storm. Mostly, though, it's peaceful, and the best place to think.

The cove's creatures were good companions to me then, and almost as diverting as stories. This day a red crab unfolded itself inside some nearby bones and made a dash for the cover of its rocks, dragging a ragged lump of flesh behind itself like a smuggler's hoard. Its eyes, standing on their tall stalks, waggled over its shoulder as it sidled to its snug and folded itself away into the rock. There were times I'd felt that if I could become that crab or some other sort of creature, I would. I would move and talk in their simple way, eat and drink as they do without all the growing and tending and seasonal hungers. I would live among them without being insulted and told to go away. I knew this day for the first time that though they were my companions, the creatures could never be my friends. They just didn't understand.

How can a person be in between themselves? You're always just you, aren't you? It's not like there's a you here and a you there— and you're also in the middle somewhere. You can't be on the way to yourself; you're always just right where you are. Aren't you?

Excerpted from Merrow by Ananda Braxton-Smith. Copyright © 2016 by Ananda Braxton-Smith. Excerpted by permission of Candlewick Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.