Chapter Two
Nineteen Winters — Tavish
My skin woke three nights ago.
I was a hundred miles up the coast, standing on wet shingle in the dark, when something opened behind my ribs. Like a door coming unlatched in a house you thought was empty. I put my hand on my chest. The pull came from the south, low and steady, and it had one name.
Mine.
Nineteen winters since a man shut my sealskin in a box lined with iron and hid it somewhere along this shore.
Iron does one thing to my kind. It blinds us.
With the lid down I couldn’t sense my own hide from six feet away.
I searched anyway. Every winter. A hundred miles of rock, north to south and south to north, until I stopped counting the years and started counting the beaches.
I stood there a long time waiting for the pull to stop, because things like that stop. It didn’t.
Somebody opened the box.
I started south inside the hour.
Three days on the coast road. I slept maybe four hours of it. A van slowed beside me the second night, out past Cruden, the window coming down on a face I didn’t know.
“Long road to anywhere, son. Where are you headed?”
“South.”
“You’ll not walk it in this.”
“I’ll manage.”
“There’s nothing south of here but weather.”
“Aye.”
He drove off shaking his head.
Ten years back a skipper at Fraserburgh would have asked me about the weather before he turned the engine. Men like that do not ask drifters. They ask men with a door somewhere.
I got another quarter mile before my legs quit, and I sat down in the gorse.
A selkie without his skin dies. Not fast. It takes decades, and it takes them from the inside. Last winter I could run the cliff path at Kilmuir Cove in nine minutes. Tonight I stopped twice on the way down and sat on the wet steps with my head between my knees like an old man.
I’ve owned no coat in nineteen years. Never needed one till this year. The boots are two sizes too big, off a fence post outside Rosehearty. Nobody came looking for them. I’d have given them back.
Before Elspeth I had a house at Crimond, a key that fit a lock that fit a door. I left it when the water called and came back when it was done with me. Nineteen years ago I lost the right to keep either side.
In my trouser pocket I carried two beach stones, worn smooth. I’ve done that for years. I set them out on windowsills in houses nobody uses—one stone for the rip off the point, one for the current running east under it. Maps of water I can’t swim in anymore. I don’t remember starting. I can’t stop.
The pull got stronger the farther down I went. I followed it along the beach to the old boathouse at the far end.
The door was still swinging.
I stopped in the doorway. I’ve passed this building four hundred times in nineteen years. Black timber, leaning inland, door hanging off true. I’ve sheltered in it. I’ve slept in it.
The smell hit me—tar and rot and salt, and underneath, faint and alive, the smell of my own hide.
The board was off the back wall. Off and set aside, propped neat against the beam. Inside the hollow behind it sat a small chest with hammered iron sheeting the inside of it, a brass corner plate gone green, lid open, the hasp bent bright and fresh where somebody had put a bar under it.
The chest was empty.
A cut length of twine lay on the planks. Creel twine, doubled, the kind every man in that village keeps in his shed.
An iron cross hung above the boards. Black, hand-forged, the length of my palm. Loose in its nails. The village hammers those up where they want their children to leave things alone. Nobody digs past the iron. Nobody asks why. Very tidy.
Nineteen years of tidy. My skin sat two feet behind a plank I could have kicked through with my boot, and a bit of blacksmith’s scrap kept me from sensing it.
My hands started shaking. I didn’t have the strength left to be angry.
Outside, the pull swung north along the beach.
Somebody was carrying it, and carrying it fast, and holding it close against their body, because the sense of it came to me warm and high off the ground.
Far down the tideline, going the other way, a lantern swung at walking pace. Unhurried. Somebody with business at this end of the beach in a storm.
I had nothing left for him.
I went after the warm thing.
The stones roll under my boots at the best of times. I cut across the wet shelf below the cliff to save forty yards. A man in my state takes the short way. It’s the wrong way, and I took it.
I knew what I could do and what I could not do.
I could catch the thief. Even wrecked, even three days without food, I could catch a person on a beach and put my hand inside their coat and take my own skin out of it, and taking it would finish me.
A skin taken by force stays bound to whoever held it. Steal it, and the fur is in my arms and the sea is still shut against me, forever, and there is no undoing it. Our oldest law, and the cruelest one. The skin has to be given. Freely. By a hand nobody twisted.
I gave mine away once, to a woman I loved, because giving is how you prove you mean it.
She sold it.
So I ran after a stranger in the dark with no plan at all.
The wave arrived out of rhythm.
I read water the way other men read a page, and I read that one wrong. The shelf went out from under my boots. The sea took my legs, spun me once against rock, and closed over my head.
Cold has never troubled me. I was born in it.
What came was worse.
The whole North Sea poured through me—in my ears, my mouth, the hollow under my ribs. The sea wanted me to change. It’s wanted that every day for nineteen years. I couldn’t. I was a man in the water. Nothing else.
I came up on the stones in a foot of surf, facedown.
Lifted my head. Set it down again. My body barely responded to the signals I sent it. All I had left was pain and the stubborn animal urge to breathe despite it.
I tried again. This time, my head came up an inch, and I saw the blurry arc of the sky, clouds streaked orange and gunmetal with the oncoming dawn.
I didn’t know how long I’d been on the ground or how far I’d been dragged by the undertow.
Maybe I’d been here a minute, maybe half the night.
I let my head fall back, accepting the shudder of defeat but not the finality.
There it was—a sound. Not ocean or storm, but boots scraping across the beach, stones popping under a hard heel. I blinked away the sting, vision clearing just enough to catch a flash of motion through the haze.
Boots on shale. Stopping. Coming again, quicker.
Hands hooked under my arms.
She was nowhere near strong enough. She got me a yard and put me down.
“Okay. Okay.”
She wiped her face on her upper arm and got me another yard, and her grip slid. I went down on the stones.
“Sorry. God, sorry. You’re heavier than I thought.”
She braced a boot against a rock and hauled again. Her free hand never left the front of her coat. It stayed there, holding the wool shut, the whole time she worked.
My cheek came against it.
My skin lay under the wool an inch from my mouth. Still warm. Nineteen years and still warm. Two inches. I could raise my hand two inches and hold it.
I curled my fingers into the shale instead.
“Stay with me. Can you hear me? What’s your name?”
“Tavish.”
Nothing else. Not one word of the rest.
She got her grip and hauled me up the beach with my own skin inside her coat, and I let her.