The Cirein-Cròin

When Granda passed away one rainy April day, Hendry and I inherited the Cairistíona and not much else.

Folks didn't strike it rich fishing on the North Sea — least not any folks we knew. Granda had done well to keep us clothed and fed all throughout our formative years, the years since Da and Mum had gone out on their boat to collect a certain type of bottom-dweller that only surfaced during storms. Bits of their boat had washed up the next morning, battered to splinters by the storm and the waves and the hidden rocks that rimmed the edge of the cove.

Their bodies were never recovered, and the folks round town said they likely were eaten up by all the vicious ling cod and sharks and wolf fish of the harbor before they even had a chance to drown, but of course that wasn't true, not Mum at least. Mum had siren blood in her, five or six generations back, or at least that's what the family stories always said. She'd have asked them to help her back to shore, and they'd have listened. They always did.

In the long years afterward, Granda rented a bungalow near the docks with a stone fireplace and a bunk bed in the tiny bedroom. After dinner, he'd collapse on the sofa with his boots on, and I'd drape his plaid quilt around him before retreating to my own bunk. Hendry would complain about his snoring, but it always reminded me of the sea, each breath a rolling wave, crashing gently along the shore.

I'd always enjoyed the bright, wild sea more than a stuffy classroom or workhouse. Hendry, though, kept a university pamphlet beneath his mattress, and he took it a bit harder when Granda passed and we had to leave school. He took his place at the helm of the Cairistíona, his calloused fingers gripping the boat's familiar edges and curves, staring out not at the sea itself, but somewhere beyond. I asked him once what he was looking for, and he'd just scowled and said I wouldn't understand.

I knew then, deep down, what it was.

It was the Cirein-cròin.

#

The first time Granda took us fishing, he warned us of the Cirein-cròin.

He stood at the helm with his salt-and-pepper hair tucked under his cap, scowling at the icy water as if it owed him something. Maybe it did. After all, it'd taken his wife, three children, and decades of his life. It'd turned his palms leathery and his muscles tense.

Hendry and I leaned over the boat's edge, enthralled by the dance of the nets as Granda lowered them into unfathomable depths. We gazed past our wide-eyed, wind-blown reflections, trying to spy the flutter of fins and shimmer of scales below.

"Sing to them, Ailsa." Granda winked. "Your mother used to lure them right up to my nets with her voice. She always brought in the best catches."

"You think I should?" I'd been calling flat flounders to dance with me in the shallows since I was small but wasn't sure I liked the notion of luring the poor things to their death.

Granda must have seen my frown, for he said, "Just once, to see if you can. I won't ask again if you don't want."

Tentatively, I leaned against the rail and sang out the sea-song that Nanna taught Mum before the sea had drawn them back to itself.

"I see them!" Hendry pointed. "They're coming!"

Granda leaned upon the weather-worn pulley to drag the nets back up. Hendry and I shrieked and clapped, enraptured at the hundreds of fish wriggling and flipping at our feet. In the writhing mass of gray-scaled fish, one stood out, its scales catching the light like a silvery shard of glass.

"There must be a thousand of 'em," Hendry said as he struggled to snare the silver-scaled fish. "Oh, Granda, did you see this one? It's so shiny!"

"Hendry." Granda's voice was ragged and sharp. His eyes formed a new shape—not the crinkled, scrunched-up shape of his silent laughter or the steady stare of quiet wisdom, but something tense and wild. Something afraid. "Give me that fish."