Chapter 31 #3
It doesn’t hurt him. I’d braced my whole soul for it to hurt him—for a flinch, a scream, blood sheeting down the white—and there’s nothing, no blood at all, barely even a wound.
The hide parts under the iron like wax from the seal, like something that was only ever resting there waiting for the right hand to lift it.
A piece half the size of my palm comes away whole and clean, white on one side and silver-dark on the other, and where it came from the hide beneath is already smooth, unmarked, as if there was never anything to take.
The horse breathes out, long and shuddering, and the breath goes through the fog and through me, and something in the night changes pressure, like the whole bay swallowing. I exhale in the same way, the thought of hurting an animal, let alone Alasdair, had rested heavy on my soul for days.
But it’s done. It was that easy and at the same time, it was that enormous.
The hide is warm, for some reason. The night has dropped in on us, freezing.
and the horse itself is as cold as the loch, but the piece of him in my hands is warm as a living thing, and I wrap it in the cloth I brought and put it in my inside pocket, against my chest, feeling the weight of it settle there like a second heart.
I break the salt circle with the toe of my boot, the way she taught me, and the fog comes rolling back in.
We walk to the water together, the horse and I.
It walks beside me, down the long flat ground to the seaward shore, past the castle, slow, matching my failing pace, its great head low, and the fog parts ahead of us and closes behind us Neither of us is in any hurry, because both of us know what this walk is.
The loch appears out of the white at the last moment, flat as poured metal, silent and waiting.
At the waterline the horse stops.
It turns its head and looks at me with that black eye, and there’s no asking in it—the binding is done, it goes nowhere now without my leave—and that’s exactly why it’s looking at me. Waiting. For permission to do the last thing.
“Go on,” I whisper. My face is wet, and I don’t know when that started. “Go home one more time.”
The horse walks into the loch.
It goes the way it has always gone, unhurried, the water rising up its legs, its chest, with no splash and no sound, the surface folding around it, rather than breaking.
The white of it grows dim in the black water, and then it’s swimming, then it’s a slash of cream, and then the loch closes over the place where it was and the fog drifts across the water and the bay is empty.
The horse never comes out again.
I stand on the shore a long time, my hand pressed flat over the warm weight in my coat, and I watch the still water, and I let myself understand what I just watched: that was the last of it.
The thing that has come up out of this loch for centuries, the terror of this coast, the lord of all its drownings.
I just watched it go under for the final time, and no one will ever see it again unless I decide it.
Somewhere out in the fog, the man is in the water.
Or the man is becoming possible. I don’t know how it works from here, Mhairi’s instructions ended at the cut and the keeping.
So I do the only thing left, which is turn around and start the long walk home and trust that what comes up out of the loch tomorrow, or tonight, or whenever the water is done with him, will be Alasdair.
Mortal.
Mine.
And aging from this hour forward, because of what I did to him with my own hand.
The fog stays thick on the walk back and the fibro comes up with every step now that the ritual’s let go of me, my hips grinding, my hands throbbing around nothing.
I walk through it and I cry on and off, quietly, in the undramatic way you cry when you’re alone, and maybe partly pretending you’re an actress in some foreign film festival entry.
Because here’s what I keep circling back to: who am I, that he did that?
I asked and he stood. A creature older than the village let me cut the eternity out of him, and for what…
for me? I’ve known him for just shy of two months.
We’ve never even said the word love. He might have said so earlier in the keep, but he didn’t really tell me, it was just a fact to him, an aside.
Love. I think it and flinch, because what if this isn’t that?
What if this is glamour, or loneliness, or two broken beings mistaking their fitting for fate?
What if in ten years he wakes up in an aging body next to an aching woman and understands what he traded, and hates me for asking?
What if I deserve none of it? Not the binding, not the man, not the line of cunning blood that lit up in me tonight like it had been waiting?
I don’t have answers.
But the hide stays warm against my chest the whole way home, warm as a heart—his heart—the deathless piece of him keeping me company through the cold, and the cottage finally comes up out of the white.
I go inside, and I bolt the door out of habit, and I put the piece of him in that box Effie left me, buried under the floorboards of her secret storage room.
Then I go downstairs and look out at the darkness of the bay.
“Come back to me,” I say to the fog. “Come back a little older.”