Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
The room seems to tilt as I try to rein in what she’s saying. I came in here braced for the opposite. I came ready to lose him, ready for her to tell me the binding meant a wall between us forever, him on his rocks and me at my window, the two of us waving across the bay for the rest of my life and grieving the distance. I’d made my peace with that on the drive over, or started to. Or, at least, introduced the thought to my tired little heart.
I didn’t come ready for this.
“He’d die,” I repeat.
“Eventually, aye. With you, we’re hoping. Across a life, the both of you, into the ground together.” She lets that sit. “I need you to know what that means, because you’ll not be saving him by doing this. You’ll be killing him. Slowly, over years, but killing him all the same. The binding’s a death sentence, Iris. The only mercy in it is that you get to serve it alongside him, instead of leaving him here to take women off this coast for another five hundred years after you’re gone.”
I don’t say anything for a long time. I think of him in the bay, the claws and the black eyes, and the size of him, holding me up out of the dark while his own dead clawed me toward it. Nothing has you but me. I think of his face when he surfaced with me in his arms, the fear on it, the most human thing I’ve ever seen him do. I think of Mary’s eyes on me over the venison stew. Five this year. Getting worse.
“We die together.” I test the shape of it. “Old, hopefully.”
“Aye. That’s the whole of what it buys you. Not separation. Not safety. A shared grave, decades off.” She says it flat, unsoftened, and I understand by now that the flatness is her kindness. “Some would call that a love story. I’d call it the least bad thing on a short list of terrible ones. But it’s yours to choose, and you’re Effie’s blood, so you’ll choose it clear-eyed or not at all.”
I think about the wall I’d built on the drive here, the goodbye I’d been rehearsing. And I think about how fast it’s coming down, replaced by something that frightens me far more, because it’s so much easier to choose.
“There’s one more thing,” Mhairi says, before I can speak, and her voice drops. “About the policeman.”
I go very still.
Oh fuck.
She knows.
“I’ll not make you say it.” She holds my gaze, steady, unflinching. “A man came round these parts asking after the missing women, and now there’s a quiet where his asking was, and I’ve lived on this coast my whole life, I know what that kind of quiet means. So, hear me. If you bind that thing and end the killing, if you stop our women being walked into the loch, then whatever happened to that policeman happened nowhere near you. You came to me for bread that day, and this day, and nothing else. Are we understanding each other?”
“You’d lie,” I manage to say. “For me.”
“I’d lie for the women he doesn’t get to take next year. You’re only the hand on the leash. Don’t go thinking it’s about you.” But there’s no unkindness in it, and something almost like sorrow underneath. “Now. You wanted it exact. Every step, every word, the iron and the hide and the willing. So, listen close, hen, for I’ll say it the once.”
And she tells me.
When I come out of Mhairi’s, the light’s gone dark grey with storm clouds brewing and the afternoon’s half spent. I stand on the narrow road lined with stone walls and quaint shops, the soothing waves lapping the pier. The whole conversation keeps replaying in my head—every step, every word, the iron, and the hide, and the horse, and the willing—the cost of it all sinking in my chest.
I came here ready to give him up. I drove over rehearsing a goodbye, bracing to be told the only way to stop the killing was a wall between us forever.
And I’d have done it. I’d have grieved him across the bay for the rest of my life and called it the right thing to do, and I would have hated it, and then myself, because who hates themselves for doing the right thing?
Instead, I’ve been handed something worse, because I don’t have to give him up at all. He’s the one who has to give it up, give everything up. I only have to take a blade to him while he stands there and lets me. He has to want it and can’t ask for it. And when it’s done, he’ll start to die. I mean, so will I, eventually, as everyone does, as I already have been since the moment I was born. But it will be the both of us together, into the same ground, into that same end.