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)
I should feel dread, I suppose. There’s a version of me that would have, the new man, twenty years ago, frightened of every shadow in the water. But I find what comes up in me instead, standing here in the last of the light, is something closer to recognition. The villagers have always said this loch has a tenant or two. It had one for hundreds of years, and the women of one stubborn family stood on this shore and kept the ledger and salted the sills.
And in the end one of them did what the others could not, which was walk into the fog with an iron knife and ask the question I was finally ready to hear. The loch is patient, but so, it turns out, are the Galloways. There’s a fresh one up the path right now that asked the water for its picture.
Whatever’s down there now, it’s young at this. It’ll learn the shape of the bay, the old rules, the smell of rowan and iron coming off a certain cottage. And someday—not soon, these things move at the speed of centuries, the speed that rocks evolve at—it’ll come to the edge of itself and look up the slope at a lit window, the way I once did.
Aye, well, let it look. The house it’ll find has a witch in it, and the witch has an heir, and the heir will be back, one day.
“Alasdair!” Iris, from up the path, the whisky-and-tea voice. “It’s getting dark, mo ghràdh!”
“Coming,” I call, and I mean it the way I’ve meant everything for twenty years.
I give the loch one last look over my shoulder, old neighbor to new, and then I turn my back on the water and climb the path home to the women and the fire and the rest of my one good life.
THE END