His entire body ached. It had taken greateffort to get the words out past his raw, scratched throat, butColin tried again. He was certain someonehadbeen thereonly moments before. Or was it hours?
“HULLO!”
This time a shriek of seabirds was his onlyanswer. Taking in a painful half breath, he tried to move his feetin the shallow pool. They moved, though it felt as if they weremade of lead. Colin succeeded in taking only three steps before hehad to sit down on the edge of a rock. The world was spinningaround in his head.
Water. Rocks. And on each side of the protectedtidal pool, rock-studded banks dotted with occasional patches ofsea grass sloped upward from the turbulent sea.
The Macpherson ship had been sailing north when theweather had taken a turn for the worse. It shouldn’t have beenunexpected, though. The Firth of Forth was famous for its foul andquickly changing moods.
Half o’er, half o’er, from Aberdour. It’s fiftyfathom deep. And there lies good Sir Patrick Spence, with the Scotslords at his feet.Well, Colin thought, at least he had washedashore…wherever he was.
The last clear memory that Colin had was shoving oneof the sailors to safety in the aft passageway. The lad was nearlyunconscious after being slammed against the ship’s gunwales as thegreat vessel had continued to heel before the tempestuous blast ofwind.
The storm had come on fast and hard, but they’d beenriding it well. Colin and Alexander, his eldest brother, had beenstanding with the second mate at the tiller when he’d seen theyoung man go down. The sea sweeping across the deck had nearlycarried the lad overboard.
Colin fought the urge to be ill. The foul, salty,bilge taste rose again into his mouth.
The lad had no sooner been secured when Colin hadheard the cries of the lookout above. The dark shape of landappeared, not an arrowshot to port. And then the ship’s keel hadstruck the sand bar.
He remembered being bounced hard across the deck,only to have the sea lift him before plunging him deep into thebrine. After a lifetime thrashing in the dark waters, he’d finallysputtered to the surface. All he’d heard then was the howlingshriek of the wind before another crashing wall of water drove himunder again. Somehow he’d survived it all, though he had no ideahow.
He stared again at a seal, who was watching himintently. For an insane moment, thoughts of legends told by sailorsclouded his reason.
A gust of cold wind blasting mercilessly across thestormy water instantly sobered him. He was soaked through andchilled to the bone. Colin managed to push himself to his feet andclimb out of the tidal pool.
Another image of dark eyes looking down at himflashed through his mind. The eyes of a young woman. He rememberedmore now. Someone pulling him through the water. Propping him onthe rock. She had been no apparition. Colin braced himself againstthe wind and let his gaze sweep over his surroundings.
“WHERE ARE YOU?” He shouted over the wind. There wasnot a boat or person, not even a tree in sight, and the risingslope of rocky ground straight ahead hampered Colin’s vision ofwhat lay beyond.
“And where am I?” he muttered to himself.
The Macpherson ship had been too far north for himto wash ashore on English soil. The storm could not have driventhem as far east as the continent. This had to be Scotland.
Colin knew he could die of the cold once night fell.He had to determine his whereabouts and find a protected place towait out the storm.
He looked around again at his surroundings. Hecouldn’t shake the sensation that he was being watched, and hedidn’t think it was just the seals. There was no one else in sight,though. His hand reached for the dirk he always kept at his belt,but it was missing. He picked up a solid branch of driftwood andstarted up the rise.
His trek was slow, but the distance was short. Uponreaching the crest of the brae, he sat on a boulder jutting throughthe long grass. One look and he recognized the place.
Colin Macpherson had grown up sailing aboard ships.Standing on the stern deck beside his grandfather, his uncle, andlately his older brother, he’d covered this coast many times overthe years. Colin was familiar with every port, every inlet, everyisland from the Shetlands to Dover in the east, and from Stornawayto Cornwall in the west. He’d sailed from Mull to France and backagain a dozen times. And he knew the history of this Scottish coastas well as he knew his clan’s name.
He was on the May, a small island east of the Firthof Forth. It was well known to sailors as a graveyard for errantships. Many vessels, passing too close to the jagged rocks aboveand beneath the surface, had met their end along its western shore.And the sand bars to the east were just as deadly. A hill, thehighest point, rose up almost at the center of the island. To thewest sharp bluffs dropped off to the sea. To his right, he couldsee the sloping stretches of rock and sea grass that ended at thewater. To his left, the low walls and the five or six ruinedbuildings of an abandoned priory.
Knowing where he was eased Colin’s mind a greatdeal. He was safe here, and it was only matter of time beforeAlexander would turn his ship around and come looking for him.
The wind at his back cut through his wet clothing,and he shivered as he pushed on. It was said that the island hadonce been a destination for religious pilgrims, drawing many acrossthe water year after year. The priory, built centuries ago, hadbeen dedicated to a St. Adrian, who’d been murdered here bymarauding Danes in the dark time.
As Colin made his way toward the buildings, herecalled hearing that the monks had deserted the island before hisgrandfather’s time. Only an old man and his wife lived out herenow, feeding the occasional pilgrims and lighting a large fireduring storms to warn the ships off.
Colin didn’t remember seeing any fire in his oneglimpse of the island before being swept overboard. But he didn’tbelieve the face he’d seen—a face already etched in his mind—hadbeen very old, either.
He fought off the fatigue that was gathering aroundhim like a fog, and approached the stone buildings of the oldpriory. To his right he saw a protected hollow where a small flockof sheep huddled together out of the wind. Ahead, he couldn’t tellwhich of the decrepit buildings might have housed the couple.
“HULLO!” At his shout the animals shuffled about andbleated loudly. Colin wished he knew something more of the keeperand his wife—even a name would have been a good place to start. Noone was showing themselves, and the gray stone buildings showed nosign of anyone living inside of them.
Crossing a moor of knee high grass, Colinfound himself on a path, of sorts, that led past a little patch ofland protected from the west wind by a grove of short, wind-stuntedpines. The remains of what looked to be last year’s gardensaffirmed that the couple still lived on the island.
It wasn’t until he was past the first lineof buildings that he saw wisps of smoke being whipped from arecently built chimney above a squat, two-story building. As Colingrew near, his excitement grew at the tidy condition of theprotected yard.
