Horse head within flowing mane

Ada gave her salt bread and a bucket of barley, and the mare ate it with her head bent low, her ears nearly touching the step. Each evening she came back. She let the children plait the long hair at her neck and never once bit them. The old men said she was a selkie's horse, and the women said nothing, because they had seen how her mane lay in the wind, in loops that folded back toward the land, as if she were always turning to look at something behind her.

In the spring the Hollin boy went out in a squall after the last of the crab pots and did not come back. The mare stood on the headland for three days. On the fourth she walked into the surf until the water covered her withers, and Ada, watching from the cliff path, saw her turn and bow her head to the grey sea.

The boy came ashore at Moor Cove that evening, chilled and alive, with a rope round one wrist and no memory of how he had got there. Ada never asked the mare anything. She only put out the bucket each night, and the mare came up the shingle to drink, her mane curling in the lamplight into a shape Ada thought was only the wind's doing.