Chapter 12 #2
Four of them poured out of the cart the moment it rolled into the courtyard, followed by two hounds that immediately set Brochan into a fit of half-hearted barking, and Mrs. MacKinnon calling instructions that none of them heeded.
Duncan had greeted the lot with delight, and within a quarter hour, he had settled MacKinnon himself by the hearth with a cup of whisky and an account of Morag’s latest escape that had already grown to include things that had not occurred.
Magnus took his ledgers to the far end of the hall and told himself the tax figures required his full attention.
They did not hold it long.
The eldest MacKinnon girl, no more than ten, had drifted toward Elspeth within minutes of arriving, drawn apparently by the ribbons woven in her hair.
She stood beside Elspeth’s elbow, watching with clear fascination, until Elspeth patted the bench beside her and the girl climbed up without further invitation.
“Did ye make these yerself?” the girl asked, reaching up to touch one of the ribbons with careful fingers.
“I did.” Elspeth tipped her head down so the girl could see them better, patient under the small, careful tug of fingers in her hair.
“They’re bonnie.”
“Thank ye.” Elspeth caught the girl’s hand before it could tangle further and gave it a light squeeze. “What’s yer name?”
“Isla.”
“Well, Isla, if ye like,” Elspeth tapped the tip of the girl’s nose, “I’ll teach ye how to plait before ye leave.”
Isla’s face lit up.
Magnus turned a page he had not read.
The younger boy—Hamish, Magnus recalled, seven years old and completely not mindful of caution—abandoned whatever game he had been playing with his siblings and installed himself directly in front of Elspeth, hands on his hips, studying her.
“Do ladies in yer lands truly eat cake every day?” he asked.
Elspeth considered the question with a gravity Magnus felt was undeserved. “Every single day.”
Hamish’s eyes went round. “Every day?”
“Aye. It is a great burden, bein’ a lady. We must eat cake constantly, or else we forget how.”
“That’s nae a burden.”
“Ye’ve clearly never had to eat quite so much cake, Hamish.”
He considered this with visible skepticism, then apparently decided the matter was settled. He dropped onto the rug directly in front of her, followed in short order by his brother and two sisters until they formed a loose, expectant circle at Elspeth’s feet.
“Tell us a story,” Isla said.
“What sort?”
“A good one.”
Elspeth folded her hands in her lap, and Magnus, four tables away with a ledger open before him and a quill he had not dipped in some time, found himself listening despite every other intention.
“Once,” she began, “there lived a selkie who came ashore on a night when the moon hung low over the water, and shed her seal-skin on the rocks to walk as a woman for a single night.”
“What’s a selkie?” Hamish asked.
“A creature who is a seal in the water and a woman on land, so long as she keeps her skin close by. Lose the skin, and she cannae return to the sea.” Elspeth’s voice had dropped, low and warm, the storytelling voice she had clearly used before on siblings or servants or herself alone in some quiet room.
“On this night, a fisherman found the skin lyin’ on the rocks and, thinkin’ only of his own loneliness, hid it away. ”
“That’s a terrible thing to do,” said the second girl, whose name Magnus hadn’t caught.
“Aye, it was. But the selkie, findin’ her skin gone and the dawn comin’ on fast, had no choice but to go with him, for a selkie without her skin is only a woman with nowhere to sleep.”
Elspeth’s hands moved as she spoke, shaping the story in the air, and the children leaned in as one, rapt.
“She lived with him for seven years. Bore him children. Learned to love the fire in his hearth as much as she’d once loved the sea.
But every night, she walked the shore, and every night, she searched. ”
Magnus set his quill down.
“Did she find it?” Isla asked, breathless.
“In the seventh year, her own daughter found it first, tucked beneath the floorboards where her father had hidden it all along, and brought it to her mother without kennin’ what it was.”
“And then?”
Elspeth’s mouth curved. “And then the selkie kissed each of her children on the brow and walked into the sea without lookin’ back.”
A chorus of protests went up at once, four small voices talking over each other, declaring this could not possibly be the ending. That surely, she would come back, that surely the fisherman found a way to bring the selkie back home.
“Some stories daenae end happily,” Elspeth said patiently, unbothered by the mutiny. “But if it comforts ye, on certain nights, when the moon hangs just so over the water, folks claim they’ve seen her swimmin’ close to shore, watchin’ the lights of the house where her children slept.”
Hamish did not look comforted. He looked deeply suspicious of the entire arrangement, and said so at some point, making Elspeth laugh. A bright, unguarded sound that rang clean off the stone walls of the hall and landed somewhere in Magnus’s chest with considerable force.
He picked his quill back up and dipped it in the ink. He stared at the figures before him and could not, for several seconds, recall the column he had been planning to add.
Elspeth told the children another story.
A fairy queen who granted a shepherd three wishes and took back two of them for his foolishness.
A knight who crossed three mountains for a lady who’d never once asked him to, and whom she rewarded upon his arrival by informing him she’d married someone considerably closer to home while he had been busy with the mountains.
The children howled with laughter at that one, Hamish loudest of all, and Elspeth changed her voice for each character as she went.
High and mocking for the fairy queen, low and mournful for the foolish shepherd, brisk and unimpressed for the lady who had married sensibly while her suitor climbed things.
Magnus told himself, for the fourth time, that the accounts required his attention.
Instead, he found that he had read the same line of figures without registering a single number.
That his eyes had drifted, without his permission, back toward the hearth, where Elspeth sat with four children arranged around her like a litter of pups, her hands moving in the air to shape castles and selkies and foolish knights, her voice pitched low and rich and warm in a way that filled the hall considerably and masked the crackle of the fire.
He found it mesmerizing.
And deeply irritating.
He had built his entire life on the principle that a man attended to what required attending to and nothing else.
The accounts required attending to. The MacKinnon land taxes required settling before the man finished his second cup of whisky and forgot the figures they’d agreed on.
There was no earthly reason his attention ought to keep sliding, unbidden, toward a woman telling children stories about seals who left their families for the sea.
And yet.
She laughed again at something the youngest girl had said, a sharp sound of delight that cut clean through the low rumble of Duncan’s remarks and MacKinnon’s whisky-warmed agreement. Magnus felt his jaw tighten, and not in a way that foretold a laugh.
He did not like it.
He did not like the way her laughter pulled his attention from figures that mattered toward a sound that had no business mattering at all.
He did not like that some part of him, however small yet persistent, wanted her to laugh again, wanted to hear precisely what had earned it, wanted to know if she would tell the same stories to children of her own one day, in this same hall, before this same fire.
He set his quill down.
By the hearth, Isla had fully climbed into Elspeth’s lap, her small fingers working at one of the ribbons in an attempt to replicate the plait she had been promised.
Elspeth guided her hands with patient corrections, speaking, weaving some new thread of story even as she taught, until the whole scene had the settled look of something that had always belonged in his hall and had simply been waiting for someone to evoke it there.
Magnus looked back down at his ledger.
The figures had not improved in his absence.
He picked up his quill again, dipped it, and began, with considerable and unnecessary effort, to review a column of numbers he had already reviewed twice.
Behind him, Elspeth’s voice rose and fell through another story. The children laughed, and something in his chest kept refusing stubbornly to settle back into its proper place.