Chapter Four
The Sound of a Held Breath — Tavish
I stepped away as she shut the door, then hesitated.
My skin was in that room. Bottom of the wardrobe, under something soft, four feet in from the door and low to the floor. Nineteen years I couldn’t sense it through an inch of iron sheeting. Out of that box, in an ordinary room, it’s a lit window on a black hillside. You don’t need eyes for a light.
A hand’s width of pine does nothing.
I put my hand on the handle.
Brass. Not iron. Nothing in that building was in my way—not the door, not the latch, not the woman on the other side of it, who’d hauled a man up a beach four hours ago and had nothing left. I could have been out the front door with it inside three minutes.
There was nothing to prevent me.
Every muscle in my arm held like a wire, vibrating with the memory of water and the echo of her voice on the other side of the panel.
Six steps would have put me to the wardrobe.
One silent wrench could tip the hinges, creak the door, let me slip inside on a draft and out again with the bundle tucked close to the heart.
I imagined its exact weight, the way it would pull at my bones, the way the hairline scars on my wrists would flare and close like gills once the hide touched me, even wrapped in a blanket or coat.
I measured the temptation, slow and careful, the way a man measures the tautness of a rope before cutting, or a fisherman tests the certainty of a knot that will keep him from drowning. It would take less than a minute to ruin myself utterly and forever.
I stood with my hand on the brass and made myself say it in order.
A skin taken is a skin bound. Take it, and I hold my own hide for the rest of my life and never wear it. The sea stays shut. Every day after that one is this day.
That’s the reason a man can say out loud.
Here’s the other. A long while ago on this coast I gave my word about what I’d be. There was a thing I was for.
Nineteen winters I’ve failed at it. Nineteen winters this shore has taken weather no other stretch of coast has taken, and boats have gone off it, and men with them. I’ve never told anybody why.
Whatever I was for, it wasn’t robbing a woman who came back down a beach in the dark for a stranger.
I took my hand off the brass.
The print stayed on it. I watched the shape of my fingers go off the metal and then the metal was clean, and I went down the stairs.
The fire was a red seam by then. I sat by the window with my back to the hearth, and the harbor showed four yellow lights and a lot of black moving water.
I had the two stones out of my pocket by habit. My thumb went over the flat one, round and round.
So. What could I do?
Taking it wasn’t the answer.
I couldn’t ask for it either, and this is the part that has ruined more of my kind than iron ever did: a skin given under pressure isn’t given.
Corner her, plead, tell her the truth about what’s in her wardrobe and what it’s doing to me—and every one of those is a hand on her arm.
She’d hand it over and the binding would hold.
I’d have made her a jailer without her ever choosing it.
Which leaves the one road.
She has to want to give it to me.
So I’ll be worth giving it to.
I sat with that. It’s not cruelty, I told myself. I’ll be honest with her about everything except the one thing. I’ll be good company. She’s a woman on her own in a village that doesn’t talk, and I know this coast better than anyone alive, and there’s no lie in any of that.
I hesitated for about a second and a half.
I was going to do it anyway.
A hundred and forty years old, and I’d got as far as sitting in the dark with two rocks in my hand, working out how to be worth something to a woman whose name I hadn’t asked.
Outside the glass, the wind had gone off the water for the first time in three days. I’d slept forty feet from my own skin, and my hands had stopped shaking. Both those facts had the same cause. Neither of them seemed of comfort.
She’d talked the whole time she dragged me. Nonsense, half of it, low and fast, and she’d apologized to a man she thought was unconscious.
I held on to the memory, and put the stones away.
Isla was up before me. She had the kettle on, and she didn’t ask where I was going.
“There’s bread on the board.”
“I’ll not be long.”
“You never are.”
I went down the cliff steps in the dark and didn’t stop once. Twenty-four hours ago I’d sat down twice coming the other way.
The water at the bottom churned gray, absorbing the light.
The sea was still angry. It had stopped being furious, and it made the sound it makes on a falling tide over stones—a long haul out and a rattle coming home.
Nineteen years I’ve listened to that from the land side.
It’s like standing outside a house you grew up in, hearing your own people talking, and the door not opening.
The boathouse was as she left it.
Board off the back wall, propped against the beam. The chest open, iron sheet inside it, brass corner plate gone green, hasp bent bright where the bar went under.
The smell of my own hide was still in the place, and it was thinner than it had been two nights ago. A day out of this building, and it was diminishing. Give it a week, there’d be nothing in here but tar and rot.
Above the boards, the cross.
Hand-forged, black, the length of my palm, hanging loose on nails driven into wood gone soft with a hundred years of old holes.
I put the back of my hand against it.
Nothing. No burn, no sting, no heat. There never was. The iron doesn’t hurt my kind. It never has—it only blinds us.
I stood there with my hand on it.
Eight generations of this village have hammered these up where they want their children to leave things alone.
Somebody’s great-grandmother stood on a box to reach that nail.
Not one of them meant me any harm, and that scrap of blacksmith’s iron kept me from my own life while I slept twenty feet under it, four winters running, out of the rain.
I pushed the cross flat to the boards, the way it was. I set the plank back against the wall in the same place, at the same angle, then stepped away and checked it from the door like a man tidying a room he’d no business in.
Which is what I was doing, even though I stopped here every trip up and down the coast.
Outside, under the lee of the wall, the rain hadn’t reached the ground.
There was a strip of wet sand over the shale, and prints in it.
Hers going in and hers coming out, small, the toes deep where she’d run.
And under hers, a bigger set. Boots. In and out, walking both ways, no hurry in them at all. Sand had run into the edges and started to close them.
They were there before she was.
I straightened and looked out at the water.
The tide was turning. The storm was easing. And for the first time in nineteen years, I had a plan.