Page 3 of Fierce Highland Longing

“Long road to anywhere, son. Where are you headed?”

“South.”

“You’ll not walk it in this.”

“I’ll manage.”

“There’s nothing south of here but weather.”

“Aye.”

He drove off shaking his head.

Ten years back a skipper at Fraserburgh would have asked me about the weather before he turned the engine. Men like that do not ask drifters. They ask men with a door somewhere.

I got another quarter mile before my legs quit, and I sat down in the gorse.

A selkie without his skin dies. Not fast. It takes decades, and it takes them from the inside. Last winter I could run the cliff path at Kilmuir Cove in nine minutes. Tonight I stopped twice on the way down and sat on the wet steps with my head between my knees like an old man.

I’ve owned no coat in nineteen years. Never needed one till this year. The boots are two sizes too big, off a fence post outside Rosehearty. Nobody came looking for them. I’d have given them back.

Before Elspeth I had a house at Crimond, a key that fit a lock that fit a door. I left it when the water called and came back when it was done with me. Nineteen years ago I lost the right to keep either side.

In my trouser pocket I carried two beach stones, worn smooth. I’ve done that for years. I set them out on windowsills in houses nobody uses—one stone for the rip off the point, one for the current running east under it. Maps of water I can’t swim in anymore. I don’t remember starting. I can’t stop.

The pull got stronger the farther down I went. I followed it along the beach to the old boathouse at the far end.

The door was still swinging.

I stopped in the doorway. I’ve passed this building four hundred times in nineteen years. Black timber, leaning inland, door hanging off true. I’ve sheltered in it. I’ve slept in it.

The smell hit me—tar and rot and salt, and underneath, faint and alive, the smell of my own hide.

The board was off the back wall. Off and set aside, propped neat against the beam. Inside the hollow behind it sat a small chest with hammered iron sheeting the inside of it, a brass corner plate gone green, lid open, the hasp bent bright and fresh where somebody had put a bar under it.

The chest was empty.

A cut length of twine lay on the planks. Creel twine, doubled, the kind every man in that village keeps in his shed.

An iron cross hung above the boards. Black, hand-forged, the length of my palm. Loose in its nails. The village hammers those up where they want their children to leave things alone. Nobody digs past the iron. Nobody asks why. Very tidy.

Nineteen years of tidy. My skin sat two feet behind a plank I could have kicked through with my boot, and a bit of blacksmith’s scrap kept me from sensing it.

My hands started shaking. I didn’t have the strength left to be angry.

Outside, the pull swung north along the beach.

Somebody was carrying it, and carrying it fast, and holding it close against their body, because the sense of it came to me warm and high off the ground.

Far down the tideline, going the other way, a lantern swung at walking pace. Unhurried. Somebody with business at this end of the beach in a storm.

I had nothing left for him.

I went after the warm thing.

The stones roll under my boots at the best of times. I cut across the wet shelf below the cliff to save forty yards. A man in my state takes the short way. It’s the wrong way, and I took it.

I knew what I could do and what I could not do.