Page 68 of A Scot in the Storm
“Good lass.”
After he left, Abigail sat staring out of the small window, then with a shake of her head, she shoved on her boots, wrapped her shawl tight around her shoulders, and left the castle without speaking to anyone.
The wind hit, making her shiver the moment she cleared the yard. She walked past the tower and scaffolding, then farther out along the cliffs where the path narrowed to little more than a sheep track above the sea.
The North Sea crashed below in violent white bursts against the rocks.
“If you brought me here for this,” she said aloud into the wind, feeling ridiculous, “the least you could do is show up.”
Nothing answered. No silver-haired woman, no raven, no ancient goddess emerging dramatically from Scottish folklore to explain what exactly had gone wrong with her life.
Only gulls wheeling overhead and the endless roar of the Buchan coast.
She hadn’t truly expected an answer. The Cailleach didn’t strike Abigail as a supernatural entity particularly interested in customer service.
Still. It would’ve been nice.
You’re here for a reason. You’re not here for a reason. Go home. Stay. None of this was your fault. All of this was your fault.
Anything.
Eventually she turned back toward the castle, half-frozen from the cold and the wind.
The small kitchen stood empty when she returned. Bread waited beside a bowl of hearty stew gone lukewarm. Abigail ate standing at the table because sitting felt like more of an emotional commitment than she could currently manage.
Mrs. Gable hadn’t looked at her that morning, but she’d still made certain there was food waiting with Abigail’s name on it.
Back upstairs she opened the journal Rory had given her.
The man who brought me into this house is writing to a mother who lost a son, and to a woman whose husband drowned on a reef my calculations couldn’t save.
She stopped, thinking, then put quill to paper again.
He’ll blame himself either way because he’s built his whole life around keeping a promise to his dead brother.
The words sat quietly upon the page.
I contributed to tonight’s failure. I didn’t cause the deaths that followed from it, the ship chose to follow the light knowing it was a test.
Sam would say, “Abs, did you personally steer the boat onto the rocks? No? Then stop spiraling and help fix the thing.”
Despite herself she smiled faintly, hearing his voice in her head, the ocean in the background, someone’s radio playing. He was probably eating something profoundly inadvisable for an immunocompromised person.
The Cailleach hadn’t answered her out on the cliffs, but somehow Sam had found his way onto the page. She supposed that would have to be enough.
Rory didn’t come downstairsthe next day either. Mrs. Gable moved through the house with the brisk efficiency of a battlefield nurse. Meals went upstairs. Plates came back mostly untouched.
Abigail hauled water from the well, scrubbed kitchen floors, and helped beat dust from blankets and rugs that smelled faintly of damp wool and smoke, anything to occupy herself.
At night she worked. Thermal calculations, bearing redesigns, grease cup sketches, and margin tolerances. She recalculated bronze expansion at four separate temperatures, redesigned the lubrication system twice, and didn’t sleep well at all, the dreams waking her several times during the night.
Elrick returned to work on the second day and refused to look directly at her when she crossed the yard. On the third day he crossed himself when she entered the kitchen, subtle enough he probably thought she hadn’t noticed.
On the fourth morning Ewan found her elbow-deep in linens in the wash house.
“Lass, the captain wants ye in the lantern room.”
She dried her hands quickly and followed him upstairs where Rory sat on the floor beside the seized bearing with her journal pages spread around him.
