Page 6 of Fierce Highland Guardian

I froze. The fine hairs at the base of my neck came upright, and my body—older than this rock, older than the wall I worked—made a decision before my mind caught up.

This was familiar.

A man had walked this headland once with a small box that steals a face, asking a visitor’s questions in a voice too careful for a visitor. He’d come again. He’d spent the years since learning what he lacked, and he’d come for the Stone. The boot prints in the low passage were his. The chalk was his. The thing that had nearly taken this woman down into the sea while I hauled her out with a hand she never saw—that was the edge of what he’d woken, prying at doors that were mine to keep.

And under the man, under the woman, the Heartfire drew on me the way it drew every hour now — a slow pull at the blood, deeper today than yesterday. I shut the gate on the thought before it could travel to my own bones.

“You’ve gone somewhere,” she said. She was watching my face, instead of my silence. “You do it when you see this.” She touched the small silver thistle at her collar, turned it in two fingers,her eyes on me the whole while. “Every time. Your face—leaves. What is it you’re seeing?”

Notwhat are you. Notwhat came out of the water.

She asked about a trinket, and her interest seemed genuine with nothing held ready to trick me. She wanted the answer for the plain sake of it. She was waiting for it.

I couldn’t have told you the last time a living thing waited on my words. Stone waits. Stone doesn’t care what a man says into it. She stood in the wind and cared what came out of my mouth, and something in me set hard as old mortar came loose at the root and wouldn't fix itself again.

“It’s nothing you’d want to hear,” I said.

“Try me.”

“You’d sleep better not owning it.”

“I sleep four hours on a good night as it is.” Her mouth curved, soft, unafraid. “You’re a terrible liar, you realize. For something that’s had centuries of practice.”

I had always considered myself a master of the slow game. Patience, after all, was the only wealth allotted to the things that endured. I kept to my wall, to my cycles, to the thousand unremarkable habits by which a creature could survive centuries, and believed in the safety of inertia. But standing here, with the wind at my back and the woman in front of me, I found myself lagging behind—one move down in a contest I hadn’t realized had begun.

She was reading me with a fluency that belonged to neither the living nor the dead of this place: not the furtive fishermen, nor the superstitious widows, nor the parish priests with their Latin and long memories, but a new and dangerous animal that learned as it watched. Even now, the way she stood—weight braced, arms loose but ready—said she was expecting me to change the terms on her, to escalate or retreat or slip sideways. The thought left me as raw as the wind that salted my eyes.

I tried to reassert tempo, to recover a step, but her gaze never left mine, and there was no safe passage forward except through the truth. I could have tried the old methods: fear, or awe, or the cold indifference that had outlasted so many hopeful souls before her. But I saw the calculation in her, the way she kept a ledger of every word and gesture, and I knew it would be useless. The wall itself conspired against me, the stones setting my boundary more than hers. For all the muscle I had, all the brute permanence of my form, it was she who dictated the next move, and I who waited for it, hand fixed on granite, rooted and unready.

I glanced down and back up. She had me a step behind, at my own wall, this slight thing who’d have to climb the granite to meet my eye.

And here was the whole question laid bare between us, the one I’d been pretending wasn’t the question: there was a man come back for the Stone, and the Stone was souring, and I could not hold both the coast and this woman’s ignorance any longer. Either she went south tonight and stayed a fool and safe—or she knew everything, and helped me, and was never safe again.

Turn her away, or take her down.

There was no third road, and I’d run out of the will to pretend there was.

Every law I owned said turn her away. Make her doubt, make her small, make her go. So I didn't have to kill her. The man with the ink was coming. The Stone was drinking me down. I had no room left in a failing life for a woman who walked toward the monster.

Every reason stood in a row, shoulder to shoulder, a shield-line, and every one of them held.

“You’re not going to tell me,” she said. Not angry. Nearer to disappointed—the small offense of a person who’d decidedI owed her something true. From a woman I’d met the night before.

And that undid the last of it. Not her nerve. Her disappointment.

I set my hand on the one loose stone in the wall.

“If you truly want to know what’s under these cliffs"—the words were out before the older, wiser part of me could close its fist on them—"then come. But you don’t get to unknow it after.”

CHAPTER FIVE

The Cathedral Underneath - Fiona

I’dreadthereportson women who follow strange men into the dark. In my professional opinion, they had it coming.

I went down anyway.

He glanced my way. “I go by Craig. You?”