“Ow!” But before the echo of my cry died away, he had followed up with a long lick along the injured skin, which also lapped up the last of my tears. “What are you…?” I trailed off. I had been given ether once when I’d had my tonsils removed, and the anesthetic had produced something similar to what I was feeling.
“ ’Tis the quickest way.” Lachlan’s long-fingered hands held me up while I fought for equilibrium. My sudden and unexplainable dizziness left me feeling helpless and grateful for his careless support. I noticed more than a touch of sin in those dark eyes that studied me, but whether it was the beginnings of lust or sins more deadly, I couldn’t say.
I became aware of his scent, something sort of spicy, and I was suddenly glad that Lachlan didn’t smoke. Duncan had, and I hadn’t liked it. I agree with James VI that tobacco is a weed fit for nothing but diabolical fumigation, and Lachlan smelled too nice to have his odor hidden.
“Is that better?” he asked, as I rediscovered my knees and shook the cobwebs from my head.
“Y-yes.” And it was. I felt no pain in my ankle or where he had bitten me. My limbs were again warm and flexible.
“Let us go on then. The tide willna wait,” he warned, releasing me more slowly.
“I know.”
“Can ye think of nae reason why Fergus Culbin might have called the finman?” The question was abrupt, and he turned away right after.
“Maybe. I found some more books and it seems that he was hunting for Spanish gold from that sunken galleon.” I hadn’t meant to say anything about this, but in my dreamy state I felt compelled to answer Lachlan truthfully. Lying was not even considered.
“Was he in earnest aboot it?”
“Earnest enough to be making plans to kill the cat. He was going to try some divination ritual that needed a blood sacrifice.”
“Unpleasant, but that wouldnae necessarily involve a finman. Unless he thought to compel him tae swim tae the depths and bring up the treasure…”
This sounded reasonable.
“You’ve had no luck discovering who has called the finman back or why?” I asked.
“I havena. Not yet. But be ye sure that I shall. I cannae fail. Tae much rides on this resolution.”
“Rend your clothes and gird yourself with sackcloth,” I muttered, thinking of King David and his battle with Goliath.
“He’s one of the Old Testament killers, is he not, this David, King of the Jews?”
I opened my mouth to protest the description, but then reconsidered. To a non-Christian, the Old Testament’s violent heroes and prophets could seem quite crazy and their actions questionable enough to merit such a label. “More of a cad really. And in his own way, brave—in a sneaky sort of manner.”
“I recall him noo. ‘She saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord and she despised him in her heart.’ He is a strange man to admire. As a woman, he doesnae off end thee?”
“Who said I admire him?” I was very surprised that Lachlan would recall anything from the Bible, and flattered that he would ask me this question. Absolutely no one in my old life would have posed such a query. “And, yes, I find men who have relations with many women to be objectionable—particularly if they are married. I simply don’t dwell on it because he’s been dead for thousands of years and it would be silly to carry a grudge for that long.” Duncan was another matter. I was entitled to hate him forever if I so chose.
“Ah.” Lachlan stopped abruptly and looked upward. There was a narrow chimney overhead, smooth as glass and slightly wider than my would-be rescuer’s generous shoulders. My heart was somewhat gladdened when I saw the red light of sunset glowing above.
“ ’Tis a blowhole. A bit tight but serviceable.”
“We’re going up there?” I said doubtfully. I wanted out of that tunnel, but this seemed impossible to scale without rope.
“What for nae? I came down it safe enough when I heard ye running. I canna see why it shouldna take us back up again.” I realized that the heavier Scottish accent had reappeared and he sounded amused.
I looked down and could see clear tracks in the sandy silt at the bottom of the chimney that had fallen in from above. He had obviously passed this way, though why he should be near the caves at all was a mystery.
“Up with ye noo. The gair na mara is unhappy and tracking us hard,” he said, stooping down so that I could climb onto his back. I was embarrassed and somewhat reluctant to do this, but Lachlan was correct. The water gurgling behind us in an ever-growing voice of anger kept me from shilly-shallying.
What he did then I cannot explain, but somehow he managed to spring upward, grip those glassy walls with fingers and toes, and pull us both up that stone chimney. His muscles flexed and rippled under my clinging limbs and in less than a minute we clambered out onto a flat rock surrounded by the beautiful feather grass nature sometimes sows on her stony shores. The fronds shook like a snoring gnome’s hoary beard. The wind was sharp with the smell of coming rain, and as I had feared, I was very cold. Especially when the clouds covered the setting sun and further depleted the sky’s dying light. I felt rather as if something had reached inside me, grabbed at my lungs with icy fingers and ripped my voice away.
I slipped around to the sheltered side of a largish rock, trying to hide from the wind, and startled a covey of fall-muted grouse seeking shelter in the grass and a lone winter-coated ptarmigan that froze in terror at our approach. I knew how he felt. Lachlan sometimes affected me that way.
“Thank you,” I said, when I found breath the cold had momentarily stolen.
“Cha ghabh mi luach,” he murmured. I’ll take no reward. I was made nervous by his sudden affability and found myself turning away so I wouldn’t have to confront that intent gaze and the strange half smile on his lips. Or that mostly naked chest. How was it that he did not feel the cold? I was already half numb.
“Nam bithinn-sa thusa, bhithinn as a so am mairech.” If I were you I’d be out of this tomorrow. My Gaelic was not fluent but I had no trouble understanding him.
“Unfortunately, leaving isn’t an option. The ferry won’t come for several more days, and it may not be able to moor even then if the weather does not moderate.”
Also, I had nowhere to go.
Clouds thickened as I watched, forming hellishly fast. They carried the eye down to the horizon and the heaving sea, which was being driven inward by the wind. And I was suddenly certain that I had seen this once before.
“Yer knowing this place then.” The voice was languid, hypnotic. He moved closer.
Looking about confusedly as I mastered my uneven breath, I could see my cottage in the distance, and beyond it the steeple of the kirk painted orange by the last of the setting sun on the horizon that hadn’t been swallowed by the clouds. The rest of the town was invisible and mute, embraced in the hollow of the shifting dunes that hissed and whispered slyly. Talk about the foolhardiness of building a house on shifting sands! Both buildings were dark and deserted, and I was struck with the unwanted knowledge that we were in a place whose time was past—not far past perhaps, but still belonging to an age and people who were gone, amputated from the rest of the world by the Storm that had buried it years ago. We were trespassers in a dead place and Findloss’s inhabitants were living on borrowed time. This filled me with a vague sort of atavistic fear and also resignation. I should have been more alarmed, but terror of other things had exhausted me and mild concern was all I could muster as the deadly cold crept into my bones.
“Come on. Yer shivering. We shall speak of this later,” Lachlan said, laying a hand on my arm and pulling me to my feet. I didn’t explain that it was the chill in my soul more than the one on my flesh that made me tremble. Though I was embarrassed, I turned my freezing cheeks against the heated flesh of his chest and allowed myself a moment to warm both skin and spirit.
Lachlan did not repulse me, and after a moment even stroked a hand over my fallen and now wild hair. “What a strange lass, ye are, and it’s mad I
maun be. Yer tears have driven me here. I’d nae thought of this ever happening again.” I could not swear that he said this aloud, yet I heard him.
Behind us, the gair na mara—that mocking laughter of the sea reported by fishermen—bellowed loudly and then spat cold green water out of the chimney we had just climbed. I knew that, had Lachlan not found me, I would be dead, my lungs filled with green water and my body battered against the walls of the sea cave until it took me back out to the depths. The thought had me shuddering in spite of the immense comfort I found in his arms.
“Donnae think on it. I was there,” he said, and turned me toward the cottage. “Ye called tae me in time.”
Had I called to him? Surely not aloud, though he had been in my thoughts when I cried with despair.
However he had known of my predicament, I was grateful that he had come.
Chapter Eight
Leave untended the herd, The flock without shelter; Leave the corpse uninterr’d, The bride at the altar.
—Sir Walter Scott, “Gathering Song of Donald Dhu”
With food in my stomach and a glass of whisky in hand—I wanted brandy but wasn’t willing to drink anything in Fergus’s hidden room, since who knew what he had been doing with it—I was feeling much less undone. And a bath, once the water had finished heating, would conclude the repairs to the inner woman. The outer woman would have bruises for a few days.
Knowing it wouldn’t calm me but feeling compelled nonetheless, I picked up one of Fergus’s books and began reading where he had translated the text in the margins:
And she was delivered of a boy childe. Pushing the gamp [midwife] aside, the tall and ferocious man who had paced at the bedside, his gown of blackest velvet which looked more like the fur of some beast, snatched up the infant and retired to the fire he had blazing in preparation. He threw the babe into the flames and crushed it with his bootheel until its body disappeared into the coals. When the gamp attempted to rescue the child, he choked the life from her. He said to the babe’s mother that he would have no selkie bastards in his house.
Nauseated, I put the book aside. Knowledge came at too high a price. I wasn’t ready to seek out any more answers.
“It wasnae Fergus’s ancestor wham did this. If ye care,” Lachlan said softly from over my shoulder. I hadn’t heard him reenter the cottage, but his presence didn’t surprise me. “It was the finman. And his ‘gown of velvet’ was a selkie skin—the wee murdered bairn’s father. The woman’s name was Heather Macbeth. She took her own life a few days later. This happened right afore the village was buried.”
I shook my head, unable to comprehend such evil.
“The Culbins were nae sae innocent themselves, though. Fergus Culbin’s father should hae been put tae the horn and hanged—and likely wadha been had the family been less feart in the village.”
I thought for an uncharitable moment about how much simpler my life would be if someone had wiped out the Culbins before Duncan had been born.
“I don’t know why, but I’ve been thinking of my husband today,” I answered, speaking the words aloud before I had time to consider the wisdom of inaugurating another unpleasant and extremely personal subject. Some minds are backward-looking; mine is not usually so, and I had to consider why it was harkening consistently to the past when I prefer to face forward. Perhaps some part of me knew that answers to my current problem waited there.
“Aye?”
“I’m wondering—still—why he married me. The longer I consider the matter, the more I see that it was all very deliberate. He wooed me without love. With affection, perhaps, in the beginning, but not out of romantic attachment.”
“For protection mayhap,” Lachlan said.
“From what?” I hoped I didn’t look as stunned and stupid as I felt. Protection?
“Frae his family. Yer a MacCodrum, after all. They would have avoided ye. Or perhaps he feared the finman and hoped you would repel him as well. Yours is a race of olden renown, hunters and killers every one.”
I still felt stunned and stupid. My family was renowned? For being killers? Me? My mother? My granny? That might explain my father’s dislike of his in-laws, though.
“But why? And how? For heaven’s sakes, we had an ocean between us and Scotland. How could there have been any danger to Duncan from his family or the finman?” My questions were mostly voiced in a tone of denial rather than inquiry, but I knew Lachlan would answer.
“Normally an ocean wad be enough. But this situation is far frae normal. The finman is after something and he wants it verra badly. Perhaps badly enough tae chase down your husband aen the other side of the warld.”
I thought of that letter from Scotland. Could Fergus have broken the news of the finman’s return? Had that sent Duncan into a depression or an orgy of fear, especially when he came to believe that I couldn’t do anything to help him after all? My ankle twinged and I realized that I was beginning to feel more myself again, both physically and mentally. I wasn’t sure it was an improvement. I don’t like being out of control, but for a time it had been nice to feel comfortably numb in both body and mind.
“Not that I would dream of complaining,” I said to Lachlan’s back as he poked at the fire. “But what exactly did you do to me in that cave? I’ve felt drugged and alienated from mind ever since.”
He paused to search for a word, I am sure, rather than to find a careful explanation for me. When he chose to answer my questions, he usually answered straightly. Finally he turned. He spoke in formal English, facing me. His switch in diction was odd, almost as though he were offering a quotation, and underlined that he was being especially serious.
“I anesthetized you. My saliva has certain properties, among them, the ability to block pain.”
Lachlan had a habit of saying things that no other person could or would. On another evening, this reply would have upset me. That night I was still too drugged, or too exhausted, to protest.
“Yes, indeed you did—and thank you. I couldn’t have walked so quickly without aid. I’m just grateful that the paranoia and mental deterioration that went alongside were short-lived. I can’t say I enjoy being estranged from my…will, or seeing all those bizarre and frightening things.”
“Paranoia?” he asked interestedly, putting up the poker. “Did ye sense something in the cave?”
“Maybe that isn’t the best descriptor of my state. If I were more…” It was my turn to search for a word. “If I were of a fey turn, I would call what I felt out there the second sight.”
“Would ye now? And how so? Ye saw a vision?”
“No, but…Findloss is going to be buried again. Soon. Isn’t it? That’s why that corpse candle was so large. Something is going to happen.”
Lachlan’s eyes widened. “Now, that is a verra interesting question, lass. And that ye saw the candle is most odd.” But more than that about the subject he would not say. I was beginning to know him.
“The bite and salt I gave ye opens the doors of perception,” he pointed out.
“Opens them? For a moment I thought they’d come unhinged and I’d never be able to shut them again. Is there any way I can control what I see?”
He shook his head. “Nay. Ye see wha and wham ye see. That is the way of it.”
“Wonderful.” I sighed. “Is Gaelic your native language? You seem to use it when you are surprised.” Or annoyed.
He blinked. “Nay. ’Twas the first human language I learned and the one I’ve used the longest. It reminds me of happier but dead days when my wife still lived. She was human just as you are, a spaewife—a healer.”
I made an involuntary sound. “You were married?”
“It was long ago. There are twa worlds and I live in both as need be, but belong to neither anymore. I think my time is passing. Especially here. I shall not long be able to come and go among yer kind. The more industry ye have, the more dangerous ye become. The more ye poison the warld for my kind.” He smiled a bit, but not with humor. “Yer inkling
hard, lass. What troubles ye? Surely nowt my marriage.”
I was troubled but would rather die than admit it. My eyes grew tired of looking at Lachlan, who was handsome but so very strange, now that my mind was clearing out its mental cobwebs and able to perceive his uncanny and inhuman stillness. Instead I looked at the dining room table squatting to the left of him and felt a stab of sharp disfavor. The entire room was being subordinated to the unattractive relic I loathed. It was suddenly important that I move it.
“Lachlan, are you very, very strong?” I asked.
“Aye.” He didn’t hesitate to answer, but I sensed no bragging in his reply. I knew he was watching me carefully but couldn’t think why he would be so intent. “Why dae ye ask this?”
“Might we move this table? Over there against the wall?” I would have shoved it out the door and over a cliff, but realized it wouldn’t fit through the opening. Which meant that the cottage had been constructed around it, hundreds of years ago. This thought, though only at the very back of my mind and not fully examined, made me shiver. Who builds a house around a piece of furniture? Only someone who is convinced the furniture is very important.
“Perhaps. Ye wish tae examine the floor beneath?”
The thought hadn’t occurred to me, but once voiced I found that I did indeed wish to examine the floor. Though curiosity was mixed with a large helping of trepidation. If this was indeed some sort of altar, might there be something buried below? It suddenly seemed certain that there was, but I was not completely certain I wished to see whatever it hid.
“Unless you think this unwise,” I replied. “It has been here a long time. Perhaps we should leave it.” And let sleeping dogs—or demons—lie.
“Nay, I am now most curious tae see what may be hidden aen the floor.”
“Wait!” I begged, and Lachlan raised a brow. “Your bite and its properties. Would one of them be…presentiment?”
The Selkie Bride Page 7