Chapter 31 #2
“Mhairi has a name for you.” I manage, ignoring the butterflies in my chest. “The old one, the one the old people used.” His face goes very still.
“The Lord of Drowning. That’s the thing the binding ends.
Not you…it. The lord goes down and the man stays up, and the man grows old, and the man dies, in fifty years or sixty, in a bed…
” I give him a steady look. “With me, because I’ll be growing old and dying right alongside you.
That’s what I’m asking. I’m asking you to let me cut the deathless part out of you and keep it in my pocket and walk you into the grave with me.
” My voice cracks and I let it. “And I have no right. I know I have no right. I’m nobody, Alasdair, I’m a plant illustrator in a dying industry with a failed marriage and a body that already doesn’t work.
I’ve known you half a summer and half an autumn out of all your hundreds.
And I’m standing in your chapel asking you to trade eternity for…
for this.” I gesture at myself, bruised throat, aching hips, all of it.
“So, you can say no. You’ve said no before, as is your right.
But I had to come and ask—because you can’t ask—and because if I didn’t ask, I’d be letting the thing win, and I—”
“Iris.”
He gets to his feet in one smooth motion and crosses the floor, the fog parting between us, and stops in front of me, close, not touching, his hands at his sides like he doesn’t trust them yet, maybe won’t ever fully trust them again.
“Effie offered me a leash,” he murmurs. “You’re offering me a life.
They were never the same asking.” His eyes search mine, glacial blue, all the way human.
“I cannot say the words. You know I cannot. The thing in me holds my tongue on it and always will. So, hear what I can say.” He bends slowly and rests his forehead against mine, cold against my fever-warm skin.
“I’ll stand for you. Tonight, before my courage goes.
Bring your iron and your salt, mo ghràdh, and do what the Galloway women were always meant to do. ”
We go down through the fog to the flat ground between the castle and the shore, where the old grass grows short over what might once have been a yard, or a church ground. He tells me where to stand, and how it has to go.
“You’ll turn your back,” he instructs. “What happens when I change is not a thing you need to see. You’ll turn your back, and you’ll keep it turned no matter what, and when it’s time, you’ll know.”
So I stand in the wet grass with my back to him and my eyes shut for good measure, the sgian-dubh in one fist and the salt jar in the other, and I listen to him walk away from me across the grass, and then I listen to the fog wisp around me.
There’s no sound of his transformation, which is odd and a little creepy.
I braced for the sounds you’d hear in a low-budget werewolf movie and there are none.
No tearing, no animal noise, nothing, only a long, drawn-out stillness in which the temperature drops around me by degrees, the deep smell of the loch washes over me, the hair stands up my arms and the back of my neck, and something behind me becomes large.
I can feel the size of it on my skin. I can feel it breathing.
When it’s quiet—a different quiet, a settled one—I open my eyes and turn around.
The horse stands in the fog ten feet from me, white as the birch, huge, and terrible, and staring at me with the patience of something that has existed before time.
Its mane hangs wet down its neck, and the wet runs in streaks along the shoulder, and its eye—black, depthless, the loch at midnight—is on me, and there is nothing of Alasdair’s anywhere in it.
I stare at the horse for a moment and it stares at me and I feel that pull that Sinclair did, the one that lead him to his death, and I’m suddenly reminded that we don’t have much time, that Alasdair is doing his best to keep him here.
I get to it. I pour the salt in a wide circle around the both of us, the way Mhairi told me, sunwise, closing us in together.
It feels silly, like so many magic-based things do, but it works.
The fog actually stops at the salt, pressing at the ring of it like breath on glass, and somewhere inside me a door I’ve been leaning on my whole life quietly opens.
Because I’ve played at this since I was a girl—the candles, the tarot deck I lazily pull from while half-believing, the wannabe witch with her crystals in her bedroom—and I always knew I was pretending.
But standing here in a salt circle, in the fog, with a knife in my hand, the words rising up in me sure and ready, I know that I’m not pretending.
I never was. It was waiting for water and blood to call it up.
Effie’s line runs through me like a vein of quartz through rock.
I am cunning folk. The recognition resonates so calmly it actually frightens me.
With this newfound confidence, I walk to the horse. It doesn’t move. Up close, the size of it blots out the fog, the cold pours off it, and its breath clouds against my face, smelling of the deep loch and seagrass. I lay my left hand flat on its shoulder, the shoulder Sinclair touched.
My hand does not stick. It rests there, on the wet hide, softly.
I say the words.
“Eachann, that the old folk named. Alasdair MacCoinnich, that the man was born. Each-uisge, water-horse, the Lord of Drowning—I name the whole of you, and I ask what cannot be asked, and you stand for me, and the standing is your answer.” My voice doesn’t shake.
My hands don’t shake either. “By iron and by salt and by my own hand, freely offered, freely given. Each gu uisge—the horse to the water. The man to me.”
And I set the little black knife to the hide of his shoulder, and I cut.