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)
By afternoon I’ve invented several catastrophes, each with full supporting detail.
The binding didn’t work and he’s still down there, horse forever, and I leashed him to a woman he can never come back to.
The binding worked too well and the man drowned with the horse, because the man was never separable, because Mhairi missed something, because the books were wrong and I said the wrong word.
The wives took him.
The loch kept him.
He surfaced somewhere down the coast with no memory and is wandering the A896 in wet trousers, about to be picked up by MacRae.
He’s fine, and he’s not coming, because now that the pull is cut, he’s under no obligation to want me, and what I felt go under with the horse was the only thing that ever brought him to my door.
It’s that last one that gets me. That’s the fear I keep, the one I feed with my anxiety-ridden obsessive spiral.
Because here’s what I haven’t let myself look at until now, pacing my kitchen on a flaring body with a monster’s heart upstairs: the pull is gone.
I mean, it’s hard to argue with because I did feel it go. Somewhere on the walk home, or in the night, or maybe the moment the loch closed over the horse, but the hook behind my sternum that’s been set since August, the tide-tug toward the bay, the thing that turned my feet toward the water and my eyes toward the castle a hundred times a day is now…gone.
I stand at the window and look at the far spit and feel nothing, no lean, no undertow, just a majestic view of a loch in the Highlands. It’s the quietest my body has been in two months and it’s terrifying, because I no longer know which of my feelings were mine.
Was any of it mine?
The wanting at the rocks, before I knew?
The walking into the water?
The way his voice went under my ribs and squeezed its way into my heart?
Glamour is a word for a thing that makes you feel what serves it. I’ve been inside a glamour the way you’re inside the weather, and now the weather’s passed, and I’m standing in the wreckage of my own life trying to piece it all together.
Maybe I loved him. Maybe I only weathered him.
I don’t know. That’s the truth I walk around the kitchen with all afternoon. I don’t know, and until yesterday I couldn’t have known, and there’s no test for it except the one coming for me whenever that door opens.
If it ever opens.
It opens at dusk.
Not the window. Not the bay-side darkness, not the tilt in the air, none of the old announcements. A knock—a knock, knuckles on wood, polite as the neighbor he used to be—and I cross the kitchen like lightening, pulling back the bolt and opening the door.
Alasdair stands on my step.
He’s wet, as usual, his dark hair plastered to his skull, but he’s wearing dry clothes, probably found somewhere in the castle, and he’s shivering.
That’s the first thing I notice. Before his face, before anything. Alasdair MacCoinnich is shivering. His shoulders are hunched against the cold, his jaw is tight with it, a tremor running through him that he can’t suppress because the cold is new to him now.
“I’d have come sooner.” His voice is hoarse, and there’s something underneath it I’ve never heard there before, and it takes me a second to name it because I’ve never had to—it’s effort. He’s slightly out of breath. From the walk over, from whatever adjustments becoming mortal he has had to make. “It took—the water held me a long while. And then I had to learn to swim again.”
“You had to what?”
“I’ve never had to before, not since after the loch took me,” he says. “It always carried me. It doesn’t carry me now. I went under at the castle shore and it was just…water. Cold water that wanted to kill me, same as it’d kill anyone.”
His eyes come up to mine, and they’re his, the glacial pale blue, but something’s different in them too and I can’t place it yet. “I nearly drowned, foxglove. Me. I had to remember arms and legs like a bairn. I crawled out at the point and I lay on the stones and my heart was going like a hammer and I—” He stops. His throat works. “I could feel it. My own heart. It’s beat all this while—you’ve laid your head on it; you know it better than I do—but it was never mine to notice. The loch kept it the way it kept everything, quiet and far off, like the tide. Something done for me, somewhere below. And now it’s mine, and it’s going like a fist, and it won’t stop, and it’s so loud, Iris. How do you all live with the noise of it?”