6. Isla
ISLA
She was at the shoreline for an hour before the water started listening.
The lake was patient with her in a way people rarely were.
She stood with her boots off and her feet in the cold shallows and let the connection run loose, not trying to control it so much as give it somewhere to go that wasn't the sky.
The afternoon had gone gray and soft, the kind of overcast that meant nothing threatening, just clouds moving through, and she breathed with it and let the tension in her hands drain down through her feet and into the water.
It helped. Slowly, grudgingly, it helped.
What didn't help was that every time she got close to quiet, his face came back.
The moment he'd let go of her wrist and gone still, the anger just dropping out of him, replaced by something else.
She could not read that man, and that bothered her more than the confrontation had.
His anger she could work with. His silence was something else.
She picked up a flat stone from the shallows and turned it over in her fingers, the cold weight of it grounding her the way cold things did, and made herself think about what she actually knew.
He was a wolf shifter. He ran river trade and had been through Hollow Oak before.
He was stranded because of her storm and he had every right to be furious, and she had apologized, and she had meant it.
She had also told him that the town accepted her and he could deal with it, which was true, and she was not going to feel bad about saying so.
She threw the stone. It skipped four times before it sank.
Her father had never made it that far. Two skips, maximum, and he'd laugh about it every time, this big man with silver in his hair and salt on his jacket, standing at the edge of whatever water they'd found that week, throwing stones like he was trying to leave something behind him.
He'd been the last of them besides her. Storm fae thinned out over generations the way fires thinned out when they burned everything available, and by the time Isla was ten there were only the two of them, moving from coast to coast and staying a season before the weather made them unwelcome.
He'd died on a dock. Different dock, different crew, same story.
His storm had caught a fishing fleet in a bad turn of tide and two boats went under and the men who survived came back to shore with their losses and their grief and they'd found her father because he was the weather and the weather was him.
She was seventeen and had watched it from the tree line because he'd told her to run and she had.
She had never stopped running until Hollow Oak.
She'd heard rumors of the town for years.
A place that knew what magic was, that had its own relationship with the uncontrollable.
A place that might let her stay and understand.
She'd tested that theory carefully. A year of careful.
Another stone. Three skips.
She was so focused on the water that she didn't hear Twyla coming until the woman was fifteen feet away, picking her way along the shoreline path in soft leather boots, a cloth bag over one arm.
Twyla Honeytree looked, as she always looked, like someone's lovely younger sister who happened to have seen every war ever fought and remembered all of them.
Wheat-colored hair loose over her shoulders, light brown eyes with those flecks of brightness that caught the light like something alive in them, a face that suggested late twenties and a presence that suggested something considerably older.
She ran Griddle and Grind, she matchmade, she meddled and she knew things she had no business knowing, and she was the closest thing Isla had to a friend in Hollow Oak.
"You don't have to look like I'm here to collect a debt," Twyla said, setting her bag down on a flat rock and pulling out a thermos. "I brought tea."
"I'm fine."
"I know you're fine. I brought tea anyway." She poured two cups without asking and held one out until Isla took it. "I felt last night from the café. Woke me up at three in the morning, which I thought was rude."
"I'm sorry."
"You apologize like it's a reflex." Twyla sat on the rock beside her bag and wrapped both hands around her own cup and looked at the lake with the comfort of someone who had sat beside a great many bodies of water over a great many years.
"What happened wasn't catastrophic. The dock held.
The town held. You held." She paused. "Mostly. "
"The ship didn't hold."
"Ships get repaired."
"Tell that to the captain."
Twyla's eyes moved sideways at her with a brightness that Isla had learned to be cautious about. "I saw you two outside Diana's inn this morning."
"Then you saw me walk away."
"I saw you walk away after a considerable conversation." The brightness did not dim. "He's been through here before. Lupeus. Runs a clean operation, fair trade, doesn't cause trouble. Rowan speaks well of him." She sipped her tea. "You know he's a wolf."
"I'm aware."
"I'm just noting it for the record."
"Twyla."
"I'm done. I'm drinking my tea." The lake moved gently between the rocks at their feet. "How are your hands?"
Isla looked at her palms. The faint charge that lived in them on bad days had settled to nearly nothing, the shoreline work having done what she'd needed it to. "Better."
"Good. Because I need to say something and I want you to actually hear it rather than armor up."
Isla waited.
"Your father was not careless," Twyla said.
"He was isolated. There is a difference, and it is significant.
I knew storm fae before him who made it to old age because they understood that difference.
The ones who burned out, who took things down with them when they went, they were alone too long.
They had no anchor outside themselves." She set down her cup.
"You have been alone a long time, Isla."
"I'm here, aren't I?"
"You're on the edge of here. There's a buffer zone, as you well know.
" Her voice had no judgment in it, which somehow made it worse.
"I'm not telling you to throw yourself at the town.
I'm telling you that the weather last night was not random and we both know it, and if you want to talk about what stirred it up, I have more tea and nowhere to be. "
Isla looked at the lake for a while. A heron stood in the shallows thirty feet out, motionless, indifferent to both of them.
"There was a name in my head when I woke up," she said. "My mother used to say that sometimes the sky answers things you haven't said yet. I woke up with a name that wasn't mine and I couldn't put it down."
"Whose name."
"Someone I'd rather not discuss."
Twyla nodded slowly. "Someone from before."
"Yes."
"And the captain arriving on top of that."
"I didn't know he was arriving. I wasn't — it wasn't aimed."
"I know it wasn't." Twyla picked her cup back up. "But you felt the ship in the water. Through the connection."
Isla said nothing.
"That's not a thing that happens with every vessel that comes through," Twyla said carefully.
"I'm aware of that too."
"Are you?"
"Don't."
"I'm just asking the question."
"You're not asking the question, you're leading me to an answer you've already decided on and I'm not going there.
" Isla turned to look at her, and Twyla looked back with those ancient eyes in that young face and said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.
"He's angry about his ship and he has every right to be.
That's the beginning and the end of it."
"Of course," Twyla said pleasantly, and refilled both their cups.
They sat until the light started to go, the lake going from silver to pewter as the sun dropped behind the ridgeline, and Twyla talked about her niece who was visiting and a dispute between the Tansley brothers about inventory and whether the spring fair should be moved up by two weeks, and Isla listened, letting the ordinary conversation do its work.
By the time Twyla gathered her bag and said goodnight, the charge in Isla's hands had dropped to nothing, but she still stayed on the shoreline until after dark.
It was an old habit, sitting with the water at night.
The lake was different after dark, its sounds lower and more serious, the mist that hung at the surface taking on an opacity that daylight burned off.
She had her knees pulled to her chest on the flat rock and was watching the far bank when she felt it; a thread of something wrong moving along the river road to the east.
She went still, all her attention narrowing to the source.
Whoever it was, they were moving quietly with the kind of quiet that was practiced and careful.
She felt them the way she felt weather fronts, not visually but as pressure, as a disruption in the ordinary texture of the night air, and what she felt was unfamiliar in a way that went past just being a stranger.
She stayed on the rock and extended the connection toward it, keeping the touch light, not wanting to be felt in return.
The presence moved along the river road and then stopped near the dock turn and stayed there for a while, and she sat with her feet in cold water listening to the dark and tried to determine whether the wrongness she felt was pointed at her or at something else. At someone else.
She pulled back from the connection and sat with that for a moment, then went inside and latched the door. She stood at the kitchen window looking out at the dark water until the presence on the river road moved on and the night went quiet again.