Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2019 Edition

by Elizabeth Bear

  But this is Seonag’s story, not my father’s.

  She gets up from her seat quietly. Seonag leaves without looking at me.

  My father stares after her, his expression like the lochans before the stirring of the breeze. I get to my feet and run after Seonag.

  “Wait,” I say, just as she reaches the edge of the heather.

  Seonag looks at me once, then out to the west. The sun is trying to burn off the mist this morning, but I have a feeling Seonag sees all the way through it. I am nineteen to her twenty-five, and in this moment she has a lifetime on me. I follow her gaze to the sea where my father just told her to swim to her death.

  “My granny’s house,” I say. The words tumble from my lips like drips of wax over the edge of a candle. “You could go there. It’s just on the edge of the machair.”

  It comes upon me that I do not know what Seonag can do to live, alone, with few friends (am I her friend?) and no husband, and in that moment the urge to propose to her nearly overtakes me. It renders me so confused that I forget what I was saying about my granny’s house.

  “Tapadh leat,” she says, her voice the equivalent of my father’s expression.

  And then she leaves, and my gut twists itself into a semblance of the tangled net I threw on the floor to catch her. Just before she goes out of sight around a hillock, though, she looks once over her shoulder at me, a sad smile painted with one brush stroke on her lips.

  * * *

  I am filled with anger.

  At the time, I thought this was my story. I was wrong. It was hers. It is still her story. I am merely a player in it, and what happened to me next is also what happened to her.

  I spend an hour walking by the edge of Loch na Liana Mhòire before I return home. When I do, I hear voices through the open-again window.

  One voice is my father’s, naturally.

  The other is Dòmhnall Geur’s.

  “It is to you to report her,” Dòmhnall Geur says. “She cannot be allowed to stay like a ghost, stealing from crops and honest working people.”

  “You have decided this will be her future, then?” My father’s voice is that wry, flat calm I know too well.

  “She has no land or husband or property; what is it you think she will resort to?”

  “She may make another choice.”

  I know my father is referring to the wolves, to these creatures that do not even exist. At this moment I think the only wolves in Uibhist a Deas are the two men in my house.

  “And what is that, a Thormoid? Are you going to marry her? Or perhaps Calum will—I’ve seen his eyes on her. She will drain the life from your boy; it would be best for your sake to keep him from her.”

  I have never known Dòmhnall Geur to have a kind word for anyone who was not currently licking his boots. His words are too close to my own thoughts this time, and I slink back farther from the window to avoid being seen.

  “I told her of the wolves.”

  Dòmhnall Geur does not scoff. He goes quiet. “And you expect her to believe this tale.”

  Dòmhnall Geur believes this tale. I hear it in his words.

  “‘S dòcha,” says my father.

  My father believes Seonag will believe it.

  Which means my father truly does believe it.

  I hear the crack of Dòmhnall Geur’s knuckles and can picture the expression on his face even though I cannot see it. His weak chin does nothing to reduce the harsh lines of his cheeks. His lips he holds at a constant half-sneer except when he has made a decision—usually one few will like—and then light reaches his eyes as if causing harm to others is the one thing that brings him joy.

  “That’s me away,” he says. “Shall I congratulate you on your forthcoming nuptials?”

  He laughs as his footsteps make their way toward the door. I am a coward. I steal around the edge of the house on light feet and wait until he has passed out of sight before I go in.

  I cannot shake the feeling that Seonag is in danger.

  I cannot tell if that danger is my father’s making or if it is Dòmhnall Geur’s.

  My father stands by the sputtering fire, staring into it.

  “Dùin an uinneag,” he says without looking up.

  I close the window. It is now cold, outside and inside the house.

  “He believes in those wolves,” I say. My anger feels like the sharp edges of shells on the beach. “I think he is one of the wolves.”

  I say it in English even though for once Father made his words of Gaelic for me.

  “Amadan,” my father says.

  I don’t know if he’s calling me a fool or Dòmhnall Geur. Perhaps both.

  “Do you remember what I said earlier, when you said there were no mic-thìre here?” Father adds a brick of peat to the fire. He is speaking English now. A puff of smoke, full of the scent of the earth, whispers through the house.

  I do remember.

  He said there are no mic-thìre, but there are madaidhean-allaidh.

  The first means children of the land.

  The second means wild dogs.

  * * *

  By the time I make it to my granny’s house after all of my work, it is clear Seonag has been there.

  Granny’s house has sat empty this past half year, the windows shuttered, the door closed. Father and I come here once a week to check the thatch and make sure no beasties have made it their home. When I arrive, there is a small bundle on the table and a snubbed out candle. A basket of peats sits by the fire, untouched. The stove is clean—she hasn’t used it.

  There is a note on Granny’s table. It has my name on it.

  It’s written in charcoal on a scrap of rag, and all it says is a thank you.

  I clutch it in my hand, where a stray tail of string tickles against my skin.

  In my chest there is—something at war.

  It feels like fingers pulling apart my heart. I do not know what my father meant. I do not know what Dòmhnall Geur means to do. I know only that I need to find her.

  The sky is liath. The clouds have burned off, leaving only a lump of them smeared across the horizon to the west, over the sea.

  It will be hours yet before the sun sets, but it is the light of a twilit sky.

  I run due west from the house. It is perhaps a mile to the shore. My legs are strong, and I run as fast as I am able.

  It is Monday and tomorrow the crofters will begin the plowing of the machair. They will not have begun such a large task today; it invites trouble to begin a large task on a Monday.

  I try not to think that beginning a large task is exactly what I myself am doing.

  When I reach the dunes, there is the sound of bleating sheep in the distance, an answering lowing of the cattle. The tide is out, pulled all the way out, like a breath drawn in and waiting to be screamed.

  Footsteps lead from the dune to the shore.

  With them, drifted to the northeast with the wind, are scattered clothes. The thick wool dress Seonag wore this morning. Her shoes, set in a perfect pair. Stockings, blown a bit away. Chemise flapping in the breeze.

  The footsteps become imprints of feet and toes. There is another set near them, near me. I try not to think of those ones. They turn back halfway to the water.

  The bare footprints lead directly into the sea.

  It is said that the warmth returns to the water at Bealltainn.

  I have known that to be a lie for most of my life, but when I throw off my shoes back toward the dunes and wade into the water in my stockinged feet and trousers, cold shoots up to my knees, my hips, jabbing into my heart and lungs. I press on. Father said to swim until she couldn’t see land.

  I cast one glance behind me, at Uibhist a Deas, at my home, my island.

  Then I turn out to sea and dive.

  * * *

  When Seonag reaches the water’s edge an hour earlier, she is naked and grìseach, shivering and rubbing her hands against the bumps on her skin. She is too aware of the irony of walking naked into the sea
when she could have been sailing west on a ship, clothed and warm.

  She doesn’t know why she does it anyway. Perhaps she believes my father wants her dead. Perhaps she believes Dòmhnall Geur does too. Perhaps she simply believes.

  This seems as good a way as any. The shore is an in-between place, and Seonag is an in-between person.

  She wades into the water.

  Like me, she decides it is best to dive.

  Seonag comes up gasping and sputtering, her entire body revolting against the cold. Her arms and legs spasm. Behind her, someone shouts.

  It might just be a sheep or a goat.

  She dives again, the waves pushing against her.

  Seonag is a strong swimmer; the brother of her mother drowned when he was fifteen, and her mother insisted Seonag learn to swim.

  It has been some time since she did, though, and fighting the waves is different than the smooth peat-colored waters of the lochs.

  The tide is turning.

  Seonag swims west.

  Every stroke of her arms feels like a miracle from the very first of them. She is certain this will be her last act, an act of defiance, an act of doing precisely as she was told, just as she always did, convinced that if she were good enough, modhail enough, kind enough, the whispers would cease.

  She feels this will be one more story for my father to tell at the cèilidhean.

  (My father will never tell this story. He will forever carry on him far too much shame. No matter how he washes, he will not be able to scrub it away.)

  So Seonag swims.

  She looks back every so often, when she can spare any small bit of energy. The land disappears quickly only to appear again on the other side of a swell. It does not recede fast enough. Seonag stops looking back.

  Her muscles are fire under the ice of her skin. Her lips choke on salt, and her eyes and nose burn with it. Her eyes and nose make their own in retaliation, but they cannot compete against the sea.

  Once, Seonag sees dolphins, which in Gaelic are called leumadairean-mara, sea jumpers. She watches them and feels envy, because her body was not made for this and theirs were.

  They circle her, out of curiosity or confusion. One comes close enough for her to touch; her elbow brushes against something warmer than the sea and rubbery, and if she were less exhausted she might recoil from it.

  When her ear dips beneath the rolling waves for an instant, she hears them. They call to each other, with clicks and whistles that she feels she should understand.

  They swim with her—which is to say, they swim ahead, then back, then ahead again, winding around her as she aims herself into the now-blinding light of a sun that has peeked from behind the clouds—and Seonag at once is glad of the company and resents it.

  She has always wanted to get close to these creatures, but this is not how she thought it would happen.

  Eventually, they swim ahead of her and vanish. She does not see them again.

  Time passes.

  We are aware of the worlds beyond our own. We know there are times when you can touch them, at twilight and dusk, at the shores and on days that mark the turning of the year. But it is impossible to know when we have gone from touching those worlds to finding ourselves in one.

  Seonag certainly never thought she would swim herself over a blurred boundary, into something deep and cold and dark but full of life and salt and energy nonetheless.

  When Seonag pauses in her swimming to rest aching shoulders, she is surprised to see Heisgeir breaking the waves ahead of her. The sight of land in front and not behind shocks her into flailing beneath the waves for a moment, coughing and struggling to stay afloat.

  Seeing Heisgeir is impossible. It is west of Beinn na Faoghla. She has drifted to the north as she swam. She has left Uibhist miles behind.

  Seonag remembers my father’s words. She cries out then, in sorrow or in frustration, and she moves herself to begin swimming due west again, keeping Heisgeir on her right.

  She will not go near its shores.

  When it fades from view, Seonag realizes she is crying. She tastes her own tears over the brine of the sea. She is sure she will soon drown.

  She begins to pray, not to a god who forsook her all of these years, but to the each-uisge, to the selkies, to the storm kelpies, to anything that would listen. She longs for the dolphins to return, belatedly thankful for their company and kindness.

  She swims until the late evening sun finally touches the horizon.

  She swims until she can see nothing except the red, red clouds touched by the sunset, the sea turned from gorm to dearg itself, waves like flames.

  Seonag is not sure if she is still cold, or if the sun has turned the sea to hellfire.

  And then she hears it.

  A voice on the wind, raised high and so bright for a moment Seonag is blinded by the sound of it.

  She fumbles in her swimming.

  It comes again, unmistakable. A howl.

  Seonag has never heard wolf-song. Seonag has never seen a wolf.

  Here, miles from shore and swimming through water turned red, she hears a wolf howl for the first time.

  She has nothing better to do. She swims toward it.

  At that moment, Seonag is nearly overcome. She expected to die, and oh, she does realize she still might. She does not know how she has swum so far, alone and naked, into the frigid waters of the North Atlantic.

  It does not occur to her that she has already passed into a world she was not born into.

  On the horizon, Hiort appears.

  * * *

  Seonag’s experience is not my experience.

  When I begin to swim, my clothes stick to my body, trying to strangle the life from me before the ocean can. I don’t know what it is I expect to happen. Fatigue sets in before I’m a hundred yards from the shore.

  I hear a muffled shout, and before I can find where it’s coming from, a hand grasps me by the back of my shirt and hauls me over the edge of a fishing boat.

  The hand is Dòmhnall Geur’s.

  There are two other men in the boat, Seòras Eachainn and Dòmhnall Dubh, whose black hair is now far closer to white.

  It’s a small fishing vessel with a sail. The boat is called Anna, after Seòras’s mum. I’ve been aboard it before.

  “What’re you doing, lad?” Seòras grunts it at me while Dòmhnall Geur dries his hand on his trousers.

  “S-s-eonag,” I stutter, pointing westward.

  Seòras exchanges a glance with the two Dòmhnalls.

  “Saw her going into the water,” Dòmhnall Geur says, his voice surprisingly thoughtful.

  “If the weather holds, we’ll go,” Seòras says. There’s caution between his words, and I don’t think it’s about the weather. “We turn back if—”

  “I’ve been sailing at least as long as you, Seòras,” says Dòmnhall Geur.

  “Sail where?” My teeth are chattering.

  Seòras throws a plaid over my shoulders. It’s wool and rough and smells of fish and brine.

  No one answers.

  * * *

  Seonag pulls herself onto the sand with arms that quiver like the leftover gelatin in a mutton stew.

  She has no reference for the kind of tired she is in this moment. Her fingers are shaking from exhaustion—she stopped shivering from cold long ago—and when she looks up, moving only her eyes from where her cheek is glued to the sand, feet still getting tickled by the waves lapping the shore, she doesn’t know where she is.

  Seonag aimed herself at Hiort. She thought it was Hiort. But Hiort has been inhabited for two thousand years, and this place looks like it has never seen the footprint of a human being.

  But there are paw prints in the sand.

  Seonag drags herself farther onto the beach, close enough to look at one of the paw prints.

  It is the size of her hand, almost. If she curls her fingers in—which she does—she can lay her hand in the depression made by the paw pads and see the indentation of a wet tuft of
fur, the pricks of claws.

  She has never seen such a track.

  The set of prints leads away from the water.

  There is more than one set of prints.

  If she expects to hear more howling, she is disappointed. There is only the sound of the wind and the waves and her own labored breathing. Seonag knows she will need to find shelter soon. She will likely need to build it.

  She has swum through the short summer night, and already to the east, the sky lightens.

  She is covered in sand, only on her right side. There are no clouds. She is alone.

  Seonag is used to being alone, even when she is surrounded by people.

  She pushes herself to her feet.

  The sound of waves is in her blood, her ears, all around her. Indeed even the land seems to be shaped like waves; from the small beach where she landed, cliffs rise up like arms embracing and sheltering the center of the small island, far too small to be Hiort in truth.

  There are trees over the dunes. Trees. There are almost no trees in Uibhist—they don’t grow because the wind likes to be able to run across the machair and moors unhindered.

  Finally.

  The word cuts through Seonag. She could not have told you what language it came in, only that she feels it the way she is feeling the waves.

  She looks around.

  There, at the top of the dune, is movement.

  Something beckons her.

  Seonag’s heart gives a jolt, a spark. She follows on unsteady feet.

  There is a glimpse of driftwood, moving. Of seaweed and kelp streaming out behind. Seonag tastes fear, but it tastes like the salt of the sea and she has steeped in it all night. She ignores it now.

  A figure passes between an oak and a hazel.

  Seonag follows.

  More movement shows through the trees and underbrush. A tail beyond a bush of holly, upright ears passing just behind a rowan.

  Seonag does not know much about trees, but she remembers learning that different kinds don’t grow all in the same place.