The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan

that they were all safe now. The coracles seemed to be tiny, fragile things but they had been through many storms, bobbing up among the roughest waves, weathering the wind and salt-spray like miniature fortresses. The sea had never tried to claim one of them. Perhaps she did not bother with such small prey.
    Melia turned to face Whitby, pressing herself into his body to lessen her shivers, and listened to the waves and the wind shriek and boom against the hull. In the center of a storm, it was easy to believe the old superstitions. The gods of the deep, hungry for revenge; the earth as a flat plane, with the seas tipping over the edge into nothing. Here Be Dragons.
    Melia smiled and rested her damp face against Whitby’s shoulder, letting his heat dry the rain from her forehead. Colors and shapes began to flicker behind her eyelids as she drifted into sleep. She’d weathered worse storms, and lying awake all nightwould only make her tired, less able to carry out any repairs in the morning. She let herself drift.
    A wave boomed against the next coracle—North’s coracle, and wouldn’t her poor bear be frightened by all this noise?—and Melia pictured its motion behind her closed eyelids. Cresting the wave, tugging on the taut chain, righting itself on the swell. Safe, like always. Even as it thudded into the side of their coracle hard enough to knock her teeth together, she knew it was safe.
    Under the sea’s tantrum, she heard another sound. Slosh-suck, slosh-suck: the rhythm of the waves, but closer and clearer. She opened her eyes to check that the canvas was still tight.
    The boat tipped on the waves, and Melia saw a small circle of stars; it tipped back and the stars were gone, replaced by blackness and the slosh of water. Melia understood what had happened before the words could form in her mind. A crack. There was a crack in the hull. Their coracle was sinking.
    “Whitby!” Melia’s fingers scrabbled at the buckles of the bunk strap. “The hull!”
    Melia crossed the coracle on her knees so she wouldn’t fall, the thin layer of water numbing her legs. She lit a lamp and held it high. Whitby was out of bed, reaching for scraps of oilcloth, reaching for the tin of tar, his movements calm and precise. She held the lamp closer to the hull. The crack was the size of an egg, and she breathed a sigh of relief. Whitby could patch that.
    But, but. The oilcloth was too small. The lid was stuck on the tin of tar. And with each swell and push of the waves, the crack widened.
    Whitby held the scrap of oilcloth to the weeping hull, but now it was not big enough to reach the edges. Melia grabbed another.
    Lid, tar, fingers, oilcloth.
    It was not enough.
    It would not stick.
    They were still on their knees, the water now halfway up their thighs, salt-stinking and dark. Melia felt sure that the coracle was sitting lower in the water. Panic blurred her thoughts. Her legs were numb. The light from the seal-fat lamp jerked against the sides of the coracle: her hands were shaking, and knowing that they shook was not enough to make them stop.
    “Hush now,” murmured Whitby over the shriek of the wind and rain, and she realized that she’d been making a sound of distress, a low moan in the back of her throat, the same pitch and beat as the waves.
    Whitby turned away from the hull, eyes casting around the coracle, looking for something that was big enough to patch the gap. Melia wanted to help him, but she could not tear her gaze away. As she watched, the crack spread wide as a yawning mouth, revealing a tumble of stars and the sea’s white teeth. The coracle tipped into the swell of a wave. Water poured through the gap, knocking Melia and Whitby on to their backs in the freezing water.
    “We can’t,” said Melia. “It’s too big. We need to get out.”
    Whitby did not reply; Melia was not sure he could bring himself to say the words. He tugged down two loops of the long rope they used for their show and knotted them around