Corr's skin is hot against my legs – clingy… like when the current pushes your toes deeper into the sand. I feel his pulse in my pulse, his energy in mine…

I focus on the here and now, resisting his magic and denying his call to let go and let him carry me with him into the ocean, to rush out with the tide. Corr's power is a song in my veins that I want to feel reverberating through me until it drowns me.

But I have Puck to think about now.

I lean forward hard, reaching to tie knots in his mane to mute the magic, my chest pressed against Puck's back.

I feel my heart beating, fast but steady, beating, beating, beating its familiar rhythm. I have always known mine beats in time with Corr's when we ride together like this. And now, I feel Puck's heartbeat too, her breathing fast and shallow as she tries to keep her senses in the deadly tide of Corr's magic, not yet in time with ours. Not yet.

I want her to love him, the way I do.

The island spools out beneath the moonlight. We gallop parallel to the cliff edge…

We are back to where we started.

Puck dismounts, and I can't see her face clearly. I attend to Corr first, dropping salt in a circle around Corr and spitting in it to hold him there. Once done, I turn and walk over to Puck, who is a little distance away, watching me silently. Her hair is as wild as Corr's mane, and her expression… I wonder what I looked like, the first time I rode Corr.

I don't know. But I remember how I felt.

I reach out to take her wrist and press my thumb to her pulse, to see if she feels the way I felt all those long years ago. I feel her pulse leap unexpectedly at my touch. My own pulse surges up in response to hers, like waves rushing at the shore, no longer familiar to me. My blood rises in me like a tide, created by a moon newly risen in my sky.

Salt and bells, iron and knots. These are tricks I know to mute the magic of the capaill uisce. I do not know how to mute this fearful magic.

I release Puck's wrist but I can still feel the heat of her skin lingering on mine.

"I'll see you on the cliffs tomorrow," I say. And it's the only thing I can say, because it is far too late to save myself from this drowning.