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)
Halfway around the bay, where the track passes the little lochan in the woods, I see her.
A woman in white, standing at the edge of the water, in among the birches. Pale dress, dark where it’s wet at the hem, a stillness to her that nothing living has. My heart goes off like a flushed bird and I stop dead in the track with the fog moving slow between us, and I stare, and then…
Then the figure begins to resolve, or perhaps dissolve. It’s a birch. Just a stunted birch, white-barked, leaning at the water’s edge with a rag of old mist caught in its branches.
Just a birch…right?
I stand there another moment anyway, because the fog shifts and for half a second the proportions are wrong again, the trunk too soft, the lean too deliberate, and I think about the wives and how they called me in once already, and how they’re losing him tonight too, in their own way.
I walk faster. I don’t look back at the lochan. If the birch is still standing there in the morning, it was a birch.
The castle comes up out of the fog all at once, not approaching but appearing, the black bulk of Caisteal Eachainn suddenly above me with its broken crown lost in the white. There’s no light in it, no smoke from the chimneys. I go in through the courtyard with my heart beating loud and my hands aching and no idea at all what I’m going to find—the man, the monster, the wreckage of both? It’s hard to say since it feels empty inside, the great hall is empty and cold, the hearth dead, and I stand in the dim of it and listen.
And…I think I hear him. Above me. A voice, low, rising and falling through the stone.
I climb the spiral stair to the next floor, past the corridor that leads to the tower he’s never shown me, and I follow that low cadence to the chapel.
It’s a ruin of a room, the roof half down at the far end, the tall window over the altar still holding most of its stained glass, saints’ colors gone to lead-grey in the dark. Tonight the fog is coming in through the broken panes in slow ropes, moving along the floor, pooling in the corners, and kneeling in the middle of it, in front of the bare stone altar, is Alasdair.
He’s on his knees and his head is bowed, his hands folded in front of him, and he’s speaking, low and steady. I assume it’s the language he learned as a boy—the one no one speaks anymore, the one that has no one left to hear it—and the fog moves around him like it’s listening because maybe it is.
He’s praying.
This centuries-old monster is on his knees in a ruined chapel, praying, and while I have no idea who he prays to, I know desperation when I hear it. I stand in the doorway and my throat closes, and I almost turn around. This wasn’t meant to be seen.
But I didn’t walk all this way through the fog on a flaring body to turn around.
“Alasdair,” I say quietly, hating to intrude but needing to all the same.
The prayer stops. His shoulders go still and it’s that total stillness, the animal one.
“I’ve come to ask something of you,” I announce.
He doesn’t turn around. The fog ropes between us like snakes, as if sniffing me out. It’s colder than it should be, almost corporal in its form.
When he finally speaks, his voice is wrecked low. “You shouldn’t be here, Iris. You shouldn’t be anywhere near me. You saw what—” His breath drags. “You’re wearing what I am on your throat.”
“I know what I’m wearing.” I come into the chapel, slow, my footsteps loud on the old stone. “And I know what you are. Which is why I went to Mhairi…and you were right, you know, I went behind your back. I did and I’m sorry for the back part but not for the going part. Because she told me what Effie knew. She told me about the binding.”
His head lifts, just slightly. He still doesn’t turn.
“The hide,” I say. “Cut from the horse, with iron, with my own hand. Given, never taken. I know Effie asked you, Alasdair. Seventeen times across sixty years, she tried, and you denied her every time. I read it in her own hand. He will not give it to me.”
“Aye.” Barely a word at all. “I denied her.”
“Why?”
A long silence. The fog moves through the dead saints’ window.
“Because Effie was my keeper, and I loved her the way you might love the wall that holds the sea back,” he says finally. “She kept me, and I honored her, and she asked me to die for her…because that’s what it is, foxglove—whatever soft words the cunning women wrap it in—and I looked down all the years I had, all the years I’d ever have, and I couldn’t put them in an old woman’s hands. There was always more time. There was always another keeper coming. That’s the truth and it’s an ugly one. I let her go to her grave a failure because I was a coward with eternity in my pocket.”