Page 20 of Fierce Highland Longing

She sat too, a yard off, with her boots in the water.

I put my hand in the pool.

I’ve had my hands in the sea most days of my life, and it has never once done me any good. This was different, and I couldn’ttell why. I left it in there a long while and watched the light run up my wrist, and I didn’t move, and nothing in my chest hurt for as long as I kept it there.

“There’s a shelf up there.” I lifted my chin at the wall behind her. “Dead barnacle, the whole way along. That’s where the water used to come to. It doesn’t reach it now.”

She turned around to see it. The light off the pool was on her face from underneath, which is not how a face is meant to be lit, and it took the tiredness out of her and put softness and vulnerability in.

“How old is that?”

“Older than anything in the village.”

“And nobody comes down here?”

“They come as far as the beach. They don’t come in.” I took my hand out of the water. “There’s iron nailed up over half the doors in that place. They know where they stop.”

“You came in twice as a boy. Who with?”

“My mother, the once. A man called Aonghas the other time, who’s been dead sixty years and would want mentioning.”

She laughed, quiet, and it went around that chamber and came off the walls.

We sat there and said nothing for a long while after. I counted the drips coming off the roof and got to something over three hundred and stopped counting. Just being there with her was the best part of the day.

Then a seal came out on the far ledge.

It hauled up, shook itself, and settled. Another after it. Two together, another, one more, until seven of them lay along that shelf in the green light, and none of them moved.

They weren’t watching her.

Nineteen years I’ve walked this coast and not one seal has come inside a hundred yards of me. They came out of that waterone after another and lay on the ledge with their heads up, facing me across forty feet of it.

“Do they always do that?”

“They like the ledge. It’s dry, and the rock holds heat.”

Also true.

She got up on her knees at the edge to see them better and put a hand down on the wet stone. Then she went still.

Two seconds. Three.

She threw herself backward and sat down hard with her palms flat behind her.

“God. Sorry. Vertigo. I looked straight down, and there’s no bottom to it.”

I understood exactly what had happened to her. I let her have vertigo.

“I’m not what you think I am.”

She turned her head.

“I’ll not be good at this. I’ve had nineteen years to work out how to say it, and I’ve spent them walking instead.”

She waited.

“I was born in the water. I had a skin, and I could put it on and go, and nineteen years ago a man took it off me while I slept and shut it in a box. I’ve been on land ever since.”