Page 9 of Fierce Highland Longing

The fire was a red seam by then. I sat by the window with my back to the hearth, and the harbor showed four yellow lights and a lot of black moving water.

I had the two stones out of my pocket by habit. My thumb went over the flat one, round and round.

So. What could I do?

Taking it wasn’t the answer.

I couldn’t ask for it either, and this is the part that has ruined more of my kind than iron ever did: a skin given under pressure isn’t given. Corner her, plead, tell her the truth about what’s in her wardrobe and what it’s doing to me—and every one of those is a hand on her arm. She’d hand it over and the binding would hold. I’d have made her a jailer without her ever choosing it.

Which leaves the one road.

She has to want to give it to me.

So I’ll be worth giving it to.

I sat with that. It’s not cruelty, I told myself. I’ll be honest with her about everything except the one thing. I’ll be good company. She’s a woman on her own in a village that doesn’t talk, and I know this coast better than anyone alive, and there’s no lie in any of that.

I hesitated for about a second and a half.

I was going to do it anyway.

A hundred and forty years old, and I’d got as far as sitting in the dark with two rocks in my hand, working out how to be worth something to a woman whose name I hadn’t asked.

Outside the glass, the wind had gone off the water for the first time in three days. I’d slept forty feet from my own skin, and my hands had stopped shaking. Both those facts had the same cause. Neither of them seemed of comfort.

She’d talked the whole time she dragged me. Nonsense, half of it, low and fast, and she’d apologized to a man she thought was unconscious.

I held on to the memory, and put the stones away.

Isla was up before me. She had the kettle on, and she didn’t ask where I was going.

“There’s bread on the board.”

“I’ll not be long.”

“You never are.”

I went down the cliff steps in the dark and didn’t stop once. Twenty-four hours ago I’d sat down twice coming the other way.

The water at the bottom churned gray, absorbing the light. The sea was still angry. It had stopped being furious, and it made the sound it makes on a falling tide over stones—a long haul out and a rattle coming home. Nineteen years I’ve listened to that from the land side. It’s like standing outside a house you grew up in, hearing your own people talking, and the door not opening.

The boathouse was as she left it.

Board off the back wall, propped against the beam. The chest open, iron sheet inside it, brass corner plate gone green, hasp bent bright where the bar went under.

The smell of my own hide was still in the place, and it was thinner than it had been two nights ago. A day out of this building, and it was diminishing. Give it a week, there’d be nothing in here but tar and rot.

Above the boards, the cross.

Hand-forged, black, the length of my palm, hanging loose on nails driven into wood gone soft with a hundred years of old holes.

I put the back of my hand against it.

Nothing. No burn, no sting, no heat. There never was. The iron doesn’t hurt my kind. It never has—it only blinds us.

I stood there with my hand on it.

Eight generations of this village have hammered these up where they want their children to leave things alone. Somebody’s great-grandmother stood on a box to reach that nail. Not one of them meant me any harm, and that scrap of blacksmith’s iron kept me from my own life while I slept twenty feet under it, four winters running, out of the rain.