Chapter Nineteen
A rran, meanwhile, was chaos.
For the first time in decades, he was uncertain about something. About whether he was making the right decision. About letting Moss go.
It made absolutely no sense for his resolve to be wavering, he told himself. It was wrong to keep Moss here. Regardless of how much he wanted the snarky little brat to stay by his side.
But Moss kept questioning him, and every time he said ‘What’s the hurry?’ it fuelled Arran’s doubt.
He found himself mulling over the fantasy of waiting a whole year. Of pretending to own Moss for just a few months longer. Of allowing the chance, perhaps, for Moss to provoke him one time too many, and to let it all come crashing down.
There had been a change in Moss since Arran had revealed his plan to visit the witch. Moss seemed to walk taller. More sure of himself. He was stronger—and yet also inexplicably softer.
Arran was imagining it, he was sure, but it seemed to him that Moss kept reaching out with small, affectionate gestures. A gentle graze of a hand against his as they passed. The warmth of his body simply standing in Arran’s space. Leaning into him when they sat together.
How deeply Arran wished he wasn’t reading too much into this. How desperately he desired to pull Moss into his lap during the daytime, and into his bed during the night. He’d lain awake, listening to Moss’s peaceful breathing, feeling so very cold despite his thick fur.
Moss was happier because he was going to be free, he reasoned. The end of his confinement with Arran was in sight.
Despite himself, Arran delayed the journey. He kept finding new excuses to draw out his preparations. The smoke cave ought to be cleaned before they left. The sheepskins should be beaten and hung up to air. The larder needed to have an inventory taken.
There was one errand that was genuine, and more important than the rest. Arran was keen to make a final trip to his neighbour on the cliffs to deliver one last parcel before they left.
‘It could be months before I return,’ he explained to Moss. ‘I don’t wish to leave her wanting.’
Moss regarded the size of this parcel—basket, in fact, which Arran had filled to overflowing with all the fresh produce from the larder, and a great deal of the preserves too.
‘You’re a good friend, wolfie,’ Moss said. There was a strange lilt to his voice, a tenderness that made Arran’s breath catch.
Arran set a slow pace for the hike to his neighbour’s house. He felt guilty for it, but he wanted to stretch out his time with Moss just a little longer. After this final errand Arran would be left with no more excuses and they would start the journey south, over bleak moorland and across tumultuous sea to Orkney, and then on again to the Scottish mainland. It would not be comfortable, and might even be a little fraught if the weather turned bad. Adding in the stress of hiding from humans once they were close to civilisation again, Arran knew they were in for a taxing voyage.
When his neighbour’s cottage came into sight, Arran suggested Moss hide by the old stone road marker, as usual. He crept forward to place his basket by her back door, seeing as it was too large to place on the open windowsill.
Arran’s body froze, his senses picking up on the wrongness before his brain had processed it.
He smelled death.
‘No,’ he keened softly.
Arran rose from his crouched position and stared at nothing. The scent of decay mixed with the scent of pollen from the garden.
He was tugged from grief by a pale tendril of roots wrapped around his wrist. Arran looked back to Moss, who watched him with a troubled expression. Moss mouthed a question. What’s wrong?
Arran beckoned him over. ‘I’m afraid she has passed.’
‘Passed?’ Moss’s eyes widened. ‘Oh.’
Moss stared at the basket. ‘You said she was old.’ Arran half-expected this to be followed by a quip, but instead Moss’s hand curled into his paw.
‘There’s nothing you could have done,’ Moss said, gazing earnestly into his eyes. ‘She probably went peacefully.’
He is comforting me, Arran realised, thickly. How had Moss become so good at reading his emotions?
Arran was overcome with the sense of loss, and at Moss’s willingness to catch him. For years, for decades, Arran had tended to his lonely neighbour.
She hadn’t always been alone. He found himself saying this out loud.
‘She had a husband, once,’ he said, his voice rough. ‘Children, and grandchildren too, I think. They visit perhaps once a year. It shall be months before they discover her.’
He’d watched her grow up on these cliffs. Watched as she’d grown a whole family up, and then watched as it disintegrated around her. Arran felt a kindredness with her for this. With all humans, really. There was always something, if you watched for long enough. Something that would link your lives together, make you a little bit the same—the breadth of human experience was so vast.
‘We should bury her,’ Arran said.
Moss nodded and squeezed his hand. ‘Okay.’
Inside the cottage, Arran found his neighbour in her bed. Her face was free of pain. She hadn’t been dead for long. Her normally plaited grey hair spilled in loose curls over her shoulders, as though she’d decided to leave the world as she’d entered it, young and vibrant.
Moss picked up a piece of paper from her bedside table. ‘I think this is for you.’
He passed over the page, which was covered in a rickety scrawl of handwriting. Arran silently read the words she’d left behind.
To him what finds me. I expect it’ll be you. Doctor says I don’t have long. But he said that last year too. Tonight feels different though.
I’ll leave the door open for you. You’ll know that, because you’re reading this. Of course you will. My mind’s all muddled.
Help yourself to anything in the house. Except the china dogs over the fireplace. They’re for my great-grandson. And the jade necklace is for Diana. I don’t care what happens to the rest.
Bury me in the garden. I know you’ll do right by me. I don’t need no gravestone.
Look after yourself, old man. The rest will take care of itself.
‘Not even a thank you,’ Moss said, frowning at Arran’s side.
Arran carefully folded the letter into his pocket. ‘She has never owed me anything.’
‘I know. I think I understand.’
Moss stood back as Arran lifted his neighbour from her bed, wrapped in a pastel green bed sheet. They found a clear spot in the garden, sheltered by shrubs and overlooked by a hardy rose.
‘Do you want me to create a hole?’ Moss asked, as Arran returned from the small garden shed with a shovel in hand.
‘I would rather dig. I can honour her with my labour.’
Moss took the shovel from him. ‘I want to help.’
He cut into the soil. Arran joined him with a second shovel, and together they sweated over the digging of a grave. The warm summer wind whisked around them, restless like a living thing. Perhaps her spirit rode on it, watching them.
Arran kneeled to gently lift her body into its final resting place. She was so small, nestled in the earth. A tiny piece of something much greater. A tiny piece that made the greater thing great.
When they were finished filling in the grave, Moss signalled to the rose with one hand. It uprooted and crawled over the ground, settling at the foot of the grave.
‘She didn’t say there couldn’t be flowers,’ Moss said, in answer to Arran’s impassive gaze.
‘I think she would appreciate it.’
Next, Arran turned his attention to the house. Or tried to. His heart was heavy, and in no mood to pick over the threads of a person’s life.
Looking through her meagre belongings, it was obvious just how lonely his neighbour had been. Her name was Ruth. She kept a phonebook with the names of telemarketers who had called her. A raft of useless utensils still wrapped in plastic was evidence of their vulture-like exploitation of her.
Arran sank deeper into melancholy, considering how empty Ruth’s final days must have been. That was the reality of living in the wilds of nowhere.
Meanwhile, Moss was bold and curious. He discovered clothes she had put into storage, perhaps her husband’s or a son’s. Moss danced into the kitchen in a new outfit: comfortable brown slacks and a loose white shirt that went well with his frock coat.
‘I’m going to burn these,’ he said happily, brandishing his old clothes in a screwed-up bundle. His smile dropped on seeing Arran. ‘Shall we go home, wolfie? We don’t need to do this now. We can come back tomorrow. Or the day after.’
Arran shook his head sharply. ‘No. We need to start our journey as soon as possible.’ He resumed packing tins at random from a low shelf into a carrier bag.
‘Do we, though?’ Moss asked, popping up over his shoulder. ‘There’s no hurry.’
Arran dropped his tins with a clatter and rounded on Moss. ‘I have explained this,’ he said savagely. ‘The seasons shall turn. Winter here is punishing , Moss. You must leave before it arrives.’
‘ I must leave?’ Moss quirked an incredulous eyebrow. ‘I’ll bet I’ve been through worse, wolfie. A little bit of cold isn’t going to hurt me.’
Arran’s teeth grated against each other. Moss didn’t know the lengths he’d gone to, to keep him comfortable. Didn’t know how much tougher it was going to get.
But of course, that wasn’t the real issue, was it?
The beast snarled in agreement. His determination to leave was renewed by Ruth’s death, and his desire to protect Moss was inflamed by it. Her loss threw into sharp relief the bleakness of Arran’s life. An existence out here wasn’t worthy of Moss. He deserved so much better than this island. He deserved so much better than Arran.
Arran snatched up the half-full bag of tins and stalked toward the open door. ‘This will do. Let’s move.’
As his feet touched the earth, a burst of grass roots shot up and held him in place.
‘You clearly need to grieve.’ Moss slipped past Arran and conjured a mat of vines to form a mound so that he could step up and be face-to-face with him. ‘So, slow down, wolfie. Breathe. Let’s go home and start from there.’
Arran couldn’t breathe. Something like terror gripped him as he stared into Moss’s calm emerald eyes.
‘You must leave now, Moss. You must be free. ’ The words ripped out of Arran with a fierce growl. ‘Free of me, do you understand? You cannot let me own you. This curse must be broken and you must go home.’
‘What home is that, wolfie?’ Moss’s nose scrunched and a little bit of viciousness entered his voice. ‘My old grove? You couldn’t force me to go back there. It was taken from me, and now it harbours the traitor I thought I loved. I don’t fucking want to go “home”.’
The beast snarled, itching to sink teeth into whatever monster had hurt Moss before him. And had Moss, before him.
‘Back to the fae realm, then,’ Arran said gruffly. ‘You can build a new grove.’
‘I’ve already got one,’ Moss said matter-of-factly. He pointed into the distance. ‘It’s already called home and it’s where we’re going.’
Arran’s heart swelled and shattered at the same time. ‘You don’t mean that—’
‘Stop fucking telling me what I mean or what I want,’ Moss yelled. ‘For someone supposedly so good at observing, you’re practically oblivious. Do you know what’s going to happen, after we break my chains— if we break them?’
Moss seized the scruff of Arran’s fur at his throat and pulled him closer. ‘We’re going to march right back here and I’m going to sit on your knot like you want me to and you’re going to spend the rest of eternity shagging my brains out. Got it? ’
Yes.
No.
He can’t mean that.
Arran wrenched against his restraints, snapping the frail grass roots with ease. He had to make Moss understand.
‘I will never let you go!’ Arran all but roared in his face. ‘You will never be free of me, Moss! If you try to run from me I shall hunt you for the rest of time. You will be mine until you die. ’
‘Yep,’ Moss replied, shocking him to a standstill. ‘I heard you the first time. I’ve thought about it. And I choose it. I choose you, Arran.’
The pale roots holding Arran fell away. Moss rose a little on his mound so he was looking down on Arran, and crossed his arms. ‘What about you, wolfie? What do you choose?’
Arran realised his teeth were bared. His heart stormed, a chaotic squall of longing. The beast tensed, ready to pounce. Moss’s eyes bored into him, seeing the truth of him.
Flòraidh’s passing had left such a deep scar, but not nearly as deep as the ones Arran had inflicted on himself. Who did he really have to blame for his loneliness? Whose choice was it to live in isolation? To flee the warmth of what friends and family he had left, and fade into nothing in the dark?
And yet here was Moss, extending a rope to pull him back into the light.
Arran grasped a length of the thin grass roots and looped them in a collar around his neck. He held the leash out to Moss, trembling. ‘I don’t choose, Moss. I am yours. My life is yours. My heart is yours. To crush or to cherish.’
Moss took the leash reverently. He stroked the line of Arran’s jaw and chuckled. ‘That’s the real deal, isn’t it, wolfie? After all that talk of not wanting to hurt me. You’re more afraid of being hurt by me.’
‘Because of you, not by you,’ Arran replied softly. ‘I could not bear to lose you, or see you suffer. I fear you will suffer in a life with me, Moss.’
Moss swooped down. He buried his face in Arran’s neck, arms holding on tight around him. Roots mirrored his fervent embrace, swarming over their bodies to lock them together.
‘I’ve tried love without suffering, and it turned out to be fake,’ Moss whispered in Arran’s ear. ‘I don’t want cold fae perfection. I want whatever this messy shit between us is.’
Arran gripped Moss back, grateful and awed by him. His tail began to wag.
‘Besides, I’m not some wilting rose dropping petals when the days turn bitter,’ Moss continued, tangling his fingers in Arran’s fur. ‘I’m a pervasive dandelion. I’m gonna keep coming back no matter what you do to me.’
Arran released a soul-rending growl. ‘I will treasure you for eternity, Moss. I will shelter and sustain you. Your roots are my roots, and I shall do everything I can to nourish them.’
‘That’s some good plant talk, wolfie,’ Moss cackled, and finally they parted. His eyes flicked to Ruth’s grave and his fingers stroked over Arran’s cheeks again. ‘Can we go home, now?’
Yes.
‘Yes,’ Arran growled with his beast in unison. He caught hold of Moss’s wrist, tracing the rope tattoo. ‘Even if we cannot break this, Moss, we shall redefine it. I will own you, and that is deeper than any mortal magic.’
Moss’s pupils dilated, his chest hitching. ‘Yes, please.’
Moss tugged on the spindly leash and let it disintegrate around Arran’s neck. Arran felt it there still, a spiritual tether, warm and comforting against his throat.
He retrieved the basket meant for Ruth and bowed to her grave. ‘Thank you for the years of kindness and company.’
Moss fell into step with him as he left the garden. Arran automatically shortened his stride to make it easier for Moss to keep up. They pushed headfirst into the Shetland wind, with the ocean crashing below and the sky cloudless and serene overhead.
Arran’s heart was full, his clamouring mind finally at peace. After millennia of being uprooted and wandering, always an outsider looking in, he finally belonged in the world again. He belonged with Moss. He belonged to Moss.
And he would until the end of his days.