Page 3 of Fierce Highland Guardian

I let out a harsh breath.

It didn’t come.

The tide outside the cave worked itself up into a quarrel with the little shingle beach; rain ratcheted against the stones above, and somewhere in the deepest dark of the cave’s throat the Stone pulsed with a pulse I could count in the bones of my feet. I should have felt safe. I’d come here to change, after all, and the only witnesses were three walls of igneous black and one of sea. Instead, the quiet twisted in my gut, sharp as a broken rib, and brought the dead with it.

It happened every time I lost hold of the present. In the drag of the in-between, with my body half-wrecked by change and my senses tangled with my own, the walls went soft, and memory walked in like it owned the place. The first was always the ring of standing stones, standing up under a bruise-gray sky, the horizon so low it felt like a lid. The wind just high enough to flick hair into my eyes, so that, when I blinked, the dead assembled: a cohort of men, some of them not much older than boys, drawn tight together in a wedge, holding pilums as if they could keep the world from coming apart by sheer force of grip. All of them, every one, knew what I was. All of them, every one, had bled at my side, and none of them had flinched for it. There was a virtue in that, a kind of raw, animal loyalty I would have died for.

Behind them, the face. A woman’s—a scholar from the long city, hair the color of the sky before a storm, eyes so dark Iremembered them as black. She’d worn truth the way others wore armor, head unbowed, mouth always a fraction from laughter. She’d known the whole of me, from the claws up through the fire and back to the start, and found it worth loving anyway. That was the first cruelty: that the world made you show every ugly thing you had, and sometimes, if you were lucky, someone met you in the dark and said,Show me more.

I remembered the chain. I remembered the way it came up out of the earth, long fingers of iron where nothing should grow but salt and lichen. Cold as the deep bedrock, colder than the surface air by far. The links were black with oil and old blood, and they fit themselves to me as if the world had been waiting for this moment to finish its trap. I remembered her hands, steady as a surgeon’s—first at my brow, once, brushing away sweat, and then at my wings, right behind the joint, where the chain cut deepest. Her mouth didn’t even tremble. She smiled at me with the same smile she’d used for reading Greek in the morning, or for lying tangled up with me in the old house under the city, or for saying that love was a kind of hunger she trusted only in herself. I’d wanted to believe it. I’d been built to believe it.

The world gave you trust as a promise, and took it away as a punishment. That was the second cruelty. Every time I changed, every time I ran to the water or the sky, I carried that knowledge with me, as if it had been soldered to my ribs.

I made myself see it. She’d worn the same look pulling the links tight that she’d worn saying she loved me. I learned the whole of my life in the space between those two moments—that the seeing and the smiling and the loving were the bait, and the chain was the truth, and I had been fool enough to believe it ran the other way.

The ones who see you are the ones who use the seeing as the blade.

I pushed the dead under again where they keep and got to my feet. My legs held. I crossed to the Stone the way a man goes to the one warm thing left in his house.

It sat on its black plinth, crimson and gold, veined like something with a pulse. Slow as a sleeper’s breath, that light, rising and falling. I put my hands on it.

It climbed my arms, glad of me. That’s the only honest word. Glad, the way a hound left too long in an empty house is glad, pressing its whole weight into the first hand that comes home. The warmth ran into my wrists and up under my ribs, and for a moment the shaking stopped, and I stood in the one place in the world that had never asked me to be less than I am.

Then I heard it. Under the song, beneath the good deep note that lives in the rock and aches in the teeth. A sour half-step. A grinding, a mill wheel run dry, threading through the pulse where no wrong note had ever been.

I’d been calling it nothing for months.

I pressed my palm flatter and listened, and the wrongness didn’t ease. Here is the whole of it, the thing I have never had to say aloud because there has never been anyone to say it to: a thing that goes unwitnessed goes mad. The Stone was made to be seen—to hold what happened on this coast and have that holdingknown, one keeper looking on it and saying, yes, this was real, this mattered, I remember. Three hundred years it had had only me, one ruined guardian and no other eyes, and I had watched it curdle by inches the way a mind curdles alone in the dark. It needed witnessing the way fire needs air. I was the only witness it had, and I was not enough.

My hand came off the rock before the thought could finish. There was a place it wanted to travel—toward my own bones, toward the reason my strength went out of me a little more each winter—and I wouldn’t go there tonight.

The woman was the danger. It wasn’t what she said. Nobody sane would believe her, and I’d made certain of that for centuries. The danger was the plain fact of it. She had seen. The seeing was the wound, always.

So I’d go up before the light. Find her. Turn her gaze aside the way I’d turned aside ten thousand others—made them doubt, made them leave, made them small and safe and gone. Clean. Simple. Duty, and nothing more.

I heard the lie in my own head before I finished thinking it.

I already knew, gods rot me, that—when I climbed that cliff and found her—I wouldn’t be turning her away.

CHAPTER THREE

The Charm and the Watcher - Fiona

Here’swhatarationalwoman does the morning after she watches the sea stand up: she goes back and proves to herself it didn’t.

I drove up the track before the ticket booth opened, thermos of bad guesthouse coffee sweating in the cup holder, and told myself the sensible version out loud, because sensible things sound truer when they have air around them. I’d gone up for the last markers on no sleep to speak of. Storms bend light, and the eye fills gaps with whatever the brain’s been chewing on, and my brain, God help it, had been chewing on a four-year-old who got told to grow up.

Here’s what the rational woman doesn’t say out loud, because saying it makes it real: if I saw what I think I saw, one of two things is true. Either the world is enormous and secret and I’m the least reliable narrator ever handed a piece of it—or I’ve started seeing things on a cliff alone, which is the exact word my ex used,seeing things, and which, said about a woman in my field, is the end. Not a rough patch. The end. You don’t come back fromshe reported a dragon. There’s no grant on earth forthat. So the stakes of this quiet, stupid morning drive were huge. I was going up to find out whether I still had a mind I could trust, or a career, and I was fairly sure I couldn’t keep both.

The castle disagreed with all of it. It sat there being seven hundred years old and made of granite, gulls back on the parapets like nothing had happened, the North Sea flat and gray-blue and behaving itself all the way to the horizon.

So I worked. I reshot the storm damage on the curtain wall, rechecked my markers, and opened the survey file to pull the density anomaly the software had flagged the night before—the void that shouldn’t exist, deep under the crypts. The coordinates were right there. I read them, and my eyes slid off the numbers the way they had in the storm, greased, refusing to settle. I closed the file. Bad rock, old kit.

Exceptbad rock, old kithad never once, in fifteen years, failed to comfort me before, and it didn’t now the anomaly was real. My instruments had found it twice. Whatever my eyes wouldn’t hold, the machine held fine — and I trust the machine. That’s the whole architecture of me: trust the machine, distrust the woman running it. But the machine was telling me there was a hollow under this castle deep enough to swallow a cathedral, and something had comeupout of the sea last night with a mind and a face, and I am a professional, and professionals follow the evidence even when the evidence is walking them somewhere they’d rather avoid.

I went down into the lower vault to finish, and that’s where the morning stopped cooperating.

Boot prints. In the silt, past where the rope barrier said tourists don’t go.