Page 21 of Fierce Highland Longing

She didn’t move.

“We don’t last up here without it. It’s not quick. I’ve maybe thirty years left, and I’ll spend the last ten of them unable to stand up. You can see it coming on my face. It goes gray at the mouth first.”

She had her eyes on my face and said nothing at all.

I waited for her to speak, but Mara was looking at me in a way that made it clear she had slipped out of ordinary time.

I surprised myself by saying even more. The story, once begun, came out with a strange, weightless ease, as if it were not being dug up but simply exhaled from somewhere behind my lungs.

“There’s one way it comes to me. It can’t be stolen. Take a skin, and it stays bound to whoever took it, forever, and it’s no use to either of us. It has to be given. By the one holding it. Freely, with nobody twisting an arm.”

I set the whole law down flat between us.

There was a place for the rest of it right there, and I went past it.

I did not tell her I’ve known where it was since the first night.

The water was over the low end of the ledge when we left, and the seals stayed where they were.

She went ahead of me in the passage. Full dark, deeper water, and neither of us able to see the other’s face.

Her voice came off the rock in front.

“I have it. I’ve had it since the night I found you. There was a woman there. She told me not to touch it.” She breathed. “I did anyway.”

Half a second. That’s what I had to work with.

I ran it through. Tell her I knew. Tell her I’ve known since the beach, and that everything since—the walks, the birds, the whisky, the pool—happened with that sitting underneath it. Then we’d come out into daylight, and she’d be standing in front of a man who explained the rule about giving before she said one word about having it.

My hand went in my pocket and found the stones.

“You have it.”

I put surprise in it. It was good.

It wasn’t good enough. She stopped in the dark with her hand on the wall and turned round, and she couldn’t see me and I couldn’t see her, and she held still one second longer than a person holds still.

Then she went on out.

I stood in the passage and listened to her breathing fade toward the light.

She knew. And she was still walking toward me.

That had to count for something.

Chapter Nine

What It’s Worth — Mara

Wewalkedhomefromthe cliff, and neither of us said much, and I spent the rest of that day deciding, and by dark I’d finished.

Isla went up at nine. I built the fire high, which she’d have told me was a waste of good peat, and then I went up the stairs and got the bundle.

The drawer. The dress. The oilcloth on top of it, stiff with salt and older than me.

That cloth had been folded. Corners in, top over, and over again, creased flat each time—the way you’d put away a good shirt.

I carried it down, and I put it on the table between us. My coat was on the hook by the door next to his, which was the first time in eleven days I’d been in a room without wearing it.