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

I don't know how long I sat in the drop, but suddenly I knew I wasn't alone. Urchins, sea horses, red crabs, and such don't trouble my solitude. Only something like me can do that: something warm-blooded and with a type of sense and loyalty. A seal can trouble me, an otter too — and other creatures that come and go but I never see up close, like whales passing on the other side of the wrack. My breath was almost gone now and I felt my body straining toward the air, but there was something there, something hidden in the kelp, and it was something human-like. I leaned forward and stared deep into the forest.

A stillness among the moving curl and tangle of wrack drew my eye. A long shadow rocked in there. Two wild, black eyes were watching me as I watched. A mottled body stretched away back into the speckled light, two tiny hands parted the kelp, and I saw the tail, sinuous, and a face. Its mouth parted in what looked like a grin, and bubbles rose from its lips and nose as if it tried to talk. Then, as quickly as it came, it turned and slipped like a ghost back into the forest of dim beams and rays.

Only a year before, I would have run to tell Auntie Ushag, but all that had changed. I didn't know any longer how to talk to her. She would only roll her eyes and tell me to go away. After all the trouble over a dream, I wasn't about to lure her jibes and temper again. My breath rushed out of me, and I emptied my sack and rose to the sun.


I can't help seeing what I see. It's in me to notice things. I don't mean to.

I sweated that summer through in the heat of my need to know everything my aunt wouldn't tell. I needled and poked and kept on until she told me I put the lie to the old saying that it's better to be quarreling than lonesome. She said that lately she envied lonely people. If she wouldn't start talking, there were others who wouldn't stop. I had an eye for them.

Monthly market days in Shipton were the only days my aunt and I mixed with the others. It was there I'd overheard the talk about us. Why would the Marreys choose to live out there in that wild and shattered place, the earwigs muttered, two women alone and far from humankind? Nothing but the sea to look upon, they told each other, slipping me pitying looks that made me want to bang their heads together. Nobody but each other. . . and the girl growing up now, they whispered, casting cold eyes upon Auntie Ushag.

Last market day of the fall, I'd overheard them in the baker's snug. That Neen Marrey looks to have grown into a sweet girl, one said, and they all made what would have been sounds of agreement, were they not all three sheets to the wind. As it was, they ounded like a coven, cackling and spitting and slap-ping the table. I pressed closer into the wall shadows to hear more. Baker's Cushie said, What she needs is company of her own age, and Ushag should be ashamed, hiding her away in that dark corner of the island to rot and lose all her chances. . . . The young one's like a shy little wood violet. The table of women shrieked like gulls trailing the boats.

You know, she went on loudly, full of herself now that she had them all listening. I've heard that violets grow sweeter when grown near something bitter . . . like onions. The onions draw to themselves the foulness in the soil, see, leaving all the sweetness to the violets. She made a vinegar mouth, and then, as if she couldn't wait, she spat ale and almost burst. That would explain a lot about those two, now, wouldn't it?

Their nasty whispering made me angry. They had a neat way of tucking their point inside something soft-seeming and neighborly. The cutting edge was hidden in a joke or a piece of advice. It was like being sliced by a tiny blade hidden in a goose feather; it took a moment to realize the wound. Every market day, there was a barb for my aunt, and one for me. We were nothing but a type of pastime to them, and it made me even angrier that in one thing their nasty whispers were right. I would have given just about anything to have a friend who wasn't a cow.

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.