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 day, as it has turned out, is now unbelievably beautiful as we head out along the water. It’s sunny and warm and the sky is swept clean of clouds, that saturated blue that early autumn brings. The loch is a deep green for once instead of its forty shades of grey, and we motor out down the long arm of the bay with canvas bags resting in the bow like sleeping passengers.
I sit facing backward watching the cottage shrink and the castle slide by on its spit, and the further out we get, the more the waves slosh and the wider the world gets, the loch opening its mouth to the sea, the headlands peeling back until the horizon arrives all at once. I can see the great blue shoulders of the Isle of Skye off to the southwest, and beyond, faint as breath on glass, a low pale smudge that Alasdair says is the Outer Hebrides, and beyond that nothing but Atlantic until Canada.
“We should go somewhere,” I say, surprising myself. “When this is done. I’ve been in Scotland long enough, and I feel I’ve barely seen anything.”
“Where would you go?” he wonders, piloting around a piece of floating driftwood.
“Everywhere. Skye. I heard that place is lovely, these fairy rocks and pools and all that…” I trail off and squint into the sun at him. “Wait, don’t tell me fairies are real.”
He grins, his face looking stupidly handsome. “The fae are more real than the people are here. You should know this by now.”
Right. I suppose he is kind of fae himself.
Or was.
“Where else?”
“Oh. The islands. Shetland, of course, for the ponies.”
“You still like horses after all this?” he asks wryly.
“Ponies!” I repeat. “They’re a different kind of demonic hell creature—any six-year-old horse girl would tell you that. Oh, and Edinburgh. And then maybe the north coast. There’s a road, I read about it, it goes all the way around the top of everything. We could take a trip.”
“A boat trip?”
“No. No boats. A road trip. Car, land, tarmac, gravity. No boats, no water, not ever. I have had enough water, Alasdair, I have had a lifetime supply of water, you can show me Scotland from sea level or above, but never again from in it.”
He laughs, a beautifully human sound, and says, “A road trip, then, mo ghràdh.” The engine putters us out past the last of the headland, the floor of the sea dropping away beneath us into true deep.
He cuts the motor and the silence comes in like something that’s been waiting.
The swell out here is long and slow, the open sea breathing under the hull. Skye stands blue off the quarter, and the sun lays itself across the water in a hammered sheet, and Alasdair sits there looking at the bags in the bow for a long moment with his hands open on his knees.
Then he begins.
He takes them one at a time, draws each long bundle of linen-wrapped bone from the bags and holds it across his two hands and his eyes go somewhere in thought and then he says, quietly, who she is.
“Una.” A pause, the swell lifting us, setting us down. “She sang. Before. I heard her from the water, that’s how—” He stops himself; the how isn’t for today. He holds the bundle a moment longer. “She sang.”
The linen goes over the side with both his hands, lowered, not dropped, and the white of it wavers down through the blue and is gone.
“Margaret Brodie. She fought me. Hardest of any of them…she, she nearly reached the rocks.” He takes Margaret’s bones over, lowers them and then they’re gone. “Sileas.” Gone. “Mary.” Gone. A dozen more, some only a name, some a single sentence.
She had a dog that waited on the shore three days.
She was walking to her sister’s wedding.
She was with her child, and I let the child live.
The sun moves slowly on the water as I sit in the stern with my hands folded in reverence, letting the names go past me like a current. Somewhere in the middle of it I stop being horrified and start being something else, something more like a witness, which I understand now is what I’m out here to be.
Maybe I always was the witness. Maybe that was another Galloway job.
“Catriona Carmichael.” His voice catches its edge on this one. “Your Effie’s friend. She’d missed the last bus from Shieldaig.” He looks at the bundle a long moment, and then across at me. “Your aunt watched this water for decades knowing Catriona was in it, never able to say so to a living soul. Whatever else today is…it’s for Effie as well.”
“For Effie,” I say through a broken voice, and Catriona Carmichael goes down through the sunlight in her linen, to wherever the sea sends what the loch can’t hold.