The Sea-Folk (Frank Delaney Storytellers Book 4)

What follows is a tale that might have come from a wandering storyteller who knew his Irish western coastline. The names of those seaboard counties throb with atmosphere - Donegal, Sligo, Mayo, Galway, Clare, Kerry, and down and around to Cork and Waterford. Who knows what creatures came ashore from there in days so dark that their shadows had shadows? Or observed humans from out in the tide? And who knows how they interacted with the people on the land?

The seanchai knew; that was his profession - to know the unknowable and tell it to the rest of us sitting around the fire. In some farmhouse, deep in the middle of a fertile county, where they never hear the surf, and never even glimpse a wandering sea-gull, they can only imagine the rampaging white horses of the waves as they gallop toward the shore, and the sad high notes of the mermaid's fatal song.