Twin Sisters of the Midnight Sun

Prologue

The sun is only just beginning its languid slide toward the western horizon.

This far north, in the months of summer, it’s in no great hurry to set.

As I finish digging over the furrowed beds of the kailyard, I allow myself a moment to admire my handiwork, stretching out the ache in my back to survey the ridges of loam, enriched with seaweed from the beach, their undulating a pattern mimicking the waves beyond the dunes.

Then I gather my tools and trudge back toward the croft.

Leaning one hand against the grey stones of the cottage wall for balance, I untie the laces of my work boots at the door, knocking them together to dislodge sand and soil from the ridged soles.

The wind catches the fine grains as they fall, whisking them away, back to where they belong.

On this fragile, tenuous farmland, every particle is precious.

The Atlantic Ocean would make short work of my neatly tended vegetable beds and devour the hay meadow filled with wildflowers, were it not for the rocky shore and the line of dunes protecting them from the hungry waves and the fury of the storms that lash this low-lying land.

But, then, there’s an air of defiance about Shetland.

These scattered smatterings of land, moored in a northern ocean and honed by the strong hands of the wind, are timeless and elemental.

Ancient people made their homes here, even before the Vikings came, and their descendants, who’re still here, have seen it all: the booms and busts of fishing, whaling, and oil; the talk of wind farms and wave power.

Human endeavors come and go. It’s the land that remains.

Behind the cottage, where the peatland begins to rise, the acid ooze of the moor is good for growing nothing but tough sedges and woody tussocks of crowberry and heather.

The croft lands are precarious havens, each smallholding carefully worked and nurtured for centuries by those who’ve had the determination and courage to endure the hardships and carve out a home for themselves in this remote, northerly place.

We’re a disparate, seemingly random collection of people who make up the community here.

Some, like Isobel and Geordie in the next croft over, are Shetlanders born and bred.

Others, like Hanna, Jamie, and I, have washed up here, like flotsam and jetsam on the shore, setting our feet a little unsteadily on this rough ground, making our own tentative, transient marks on these wild, untamable islands.

Once you get to know us, though, you will recognize that there’s strength in our fragility; that we are bound together by the roots we’ve put down here, just as the marram grass on the dunes knits the fine grains of sand together beneath the surface, anchoring them to this place.

From the chimney of the bigger farmhouse, a field’s breadth away from my little cottage, a wisp of peat smoke smudges the clear blue of the sky before the wind snatches it away.

On Hanna’s washing line, a white cotton nightdress dances, its long sleeves endlessly reaching, yearning for something or someone.

And I think of another dance in another place and time: a bride in a handmade dress, waltzing at the end of the world. Fragile, yet defiant.

I smile as I remember how Hanna resented my presence here when I first arrived, two years ago now, and how reluctant she was to tell me her story.

It took a while to gain her trust, and even longer to piece together the things she told me.

I understand, now, how she came to wash up on these shores.

How her own fragility and defiance bind her to this land.

And how, when the storms of life rage, even when all hope is gone, we can still find a way to endure and—perhaps—even to heal.