Chapter 34
Chapter
Thirty-Four
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.
The last bundle is the one with the newest linen.
“Becca Rhys,” he says, and then nothing else, because there’s nothing he can say about her that isn’t an indictment, and he knows it.
He holds the bundle and he looks at me—the only other person on this earth who knows the truth of her, the woman I lied to two police officers about, the name I’ve been carrying like a stone since the morning the phone rang—and something passes between us across the boat that isn’t forgiveness, because some things don’t get forgiveness.
It’s just the truth, held in the open air at last, between the two people responsible for it being hidden.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her bones, because it’s the least I can do for my role in all of this. “The sea will hold you now. I’m so sorry.”
She goes down through the depths like all the rest.
And then the bags are empty, and the boat rides a little higher from the waterline.
Alasdair looks at the water with a frown.
“There’s words for it. There should be words.
Something should be said. A prayer.” Then he straightens and starts reciting in the old language.
I can’t understand a word of it, but after some time he stops, frustrated, because apparently neither can he.
“I’m sorry,” he says, giving me a tired look. “I can’t seem to remember any prayers for this situation or…I don’t know what to say that seems fitting.”
“I do,” I say, and pull a folded piece of paper out of my coat pocket.
He stares at me dumbfounded.
“I figured something like this might happen,” I explain, waving the paper.
“Or that there’d be a…I didn’t know what the protocol was, okay, there’s no book for this, so I looked some things up and I wrote out something.
It’s a bit Celtic blessing, a bit sea burial, a bit that I pulled from my witchy books.
It’s probably wrong but it does feel kind of right. ”
He’s still staring at me. “You looked some things up?”
“I googled it, Alasdair. While we were walking back from the castle and you made a joke about me having two different sets of eyes.”
A long pause. The boat lifts and settles on the open swell.
“Googled,” he repeats, tasting the world.
“Yes. Welcome to the real world. Do you want the words or not?”
“Aye, foxglove. Say the words.”
So I say the words, which sound pretty and hope mean something more.
“Go out with the tide and not back with it. What was taken from you, the taking is ended. What was kept of you, the keeping is done. No name of yours is held in any stone, no bone of yours in any well; the bay forgets you, the sea receives you, and the door is open. Go home by the western water. Be done with us. Rest with love.”
The sea breathes under the boat.
And I swear the water lightens, like a cloud comes off the sun, and the whole field of the water around the boat goes one degree brighter, clearer.
The swell flattens a little and far off toward the headland, where the loch’s mouth opens, something like a long exhale moves across the surface and is gone.
Alasdair makes a sound I’ve never heard from him.
I look over and he’s bent forward over his knees, his hand pressed flat to the middle of his chest. For one lurching second, I think, heart, mortal heart, something’s wrong, he’s having a heart attack. But then I see his face and it’s not pain, not physical anyway.
He’s…crying. For real. Shoulders going, the way someone cries when the crying has been waiting longer than the body’s been able to hide it, a cry I know too well.
The weight is coming off him, centuries of it, shelves of it, and a well full of it.
All of that weight now gone, sinking to the depths with the bones of his victims.
“They’re away,” he manages with an astonished gasp.
“Iris. I can’t feel them. The bay’s been full my whole…
the whole expanse of my monstrous existence.
There’s always been the weight of them in the water, like stones in a coat, and it’s…
” He lifts his head, tear-streaked and absolutely wrecked, and light. “It’s just water. It’s just water now.”
I shuffle along on the boat and wrap my arms around him, holding him, and the boat rocks under us, and he cries into my shoulder in the middle of the bright empty sea.
I look out over his shoulder at the place where the women went down and the place beyond it where Skye stands blue and the Hebrides lie like damp breath on the horizon, and I say nothing at all, because witness is still the job, and I think I’m pretty good at it now.
We don’t start the motor for a long time.
There’s no reason to. The day stays warm and the swell stays kind and the boat drifts and Alasdair comes back to himself little by little, washing his face with a handful of the cold sea.
Away from the looming mountains that make up the western Highlands, things feel open and bright and we share the tea from the thermos I brought and the chocolate from my pocket, and the silence between us is full and comfortable.
And maybe it’s the fullness that does it. This comfort that has now become easy between us. Or maybe it’s the damn emotional rollercoaster I’ve been on for the last two months finally evening out at the end.
And maybe it’s because I’m nosy, and I don’t forget things and I don’t want him to forget them either.
“So,” I begin, clearing my throat. “Two nights ago. In the chapel.”
“Mm.” He’s leaning back against the bow bags; eyes half shut against the sun.
“You were telling me why you’d never stand for Effie, and you said—and I’m direct quoting here, because I’ve thought about it a million times since—you said you’d felt the thing inside you close your hand on the woman you love.
” He stiffens slightly. “And then you just kept going, like it was a fact you’d mentioned.
Sea’s cold, castle’s old, love this woman, yadda yadda yadda.
And it occurred to me, out here, that everything you said back then, the glamour was still doing its thing. ”
I keep my eyes on the horizon, because I’m brave, but I’m not that brave. “Soooo I find myself curious how the fact is holding up. Now that it’s just you in there. And me here.”
The boat lifts on the swell and settles.
“Look at me, foxglove.”
I look at him. And even though I’ve looked at him countless times before, sometimes as this otherworldly creature, sometimes as this incredibly handsome man, all I can think is that it’s him and he’s beautiful and no matter what he says next, he is, in some way, still mine.
“I love you,” he says, and my ribs seem to contract around my heart, or maybe now my heart is too big for my ribs. The feeling is so immediate and all-encompassing I can barely breathe.
“It held,” he goes on, when it’s apparent that I’m speechless.
“It was the first thing I checked inside me. I went looking for it the way you’d go looking for the one thing you’d want out of a burning house, and it was there, and it was mine.
No lure in it, no pull, no creature’s wanting wearing my face.
Just a man’s love, the ordinary kind, the kind that dies when I do or perhaps lives on in the stars.
” He says it steadily, plainly, like coordinates. “I love you, Iris Galloway.”
I’m grinning at him like a fucking loon.
“And you…?” he prods, and is that a touch of red on his cheeks?
“I love you too,” I say, though I would rather drag it out for drama.
“I have no idea when it started. Somewhere between the kippers and the binding, in one of those moments in between. But it’s mine too.
I checked the same as you did, that whole horrible day you didn’t come back.
I stood in my kitchen with all the glamour gone and went looking for what was left, and it was all still there, Alasdair.
It turned out that I loved you, and there was no one else to blame for it.
” I wipe my face with the heel of my hand, because of course I’m crying now like a sap.
“So, there it is. Verified on both ends. Love, the ordinary kind.”
“The ordinary kind,” he agrees, but it’s the voice of a man agreeing to a miracle.
And then he crosses the boat to me, carefully, mortally, one hand on the gunwale because he can drown now and we both know it, and he kisses me in the middle of the bright water, and there is nothing in the sea but fish, and nothing in the man but the man, and nothing in the kiss but us.