"I'm aware."
"I'm just noting it for the record."
"Twyla."
"I'm done. I'm drinking my tea." The lake moved gently between the rocks at their feet. "How are your hands?"
Isla looked at her palms. The faint charge that lived in them on bad days had settled to nearly nothing, the shoreline work having done what she'd needed it to. "Better."
"Good. Because I need to say something and I want you to actually hear it rather than armor up."
Isla waited.
"Your father was not careless," Twyla said. "He was isolated. There is a difference, and it is significant. I knew storm fae before him who made it to old age because they understood that difference. The ones who burned out, who took things down with them when they went, they were alone too long. They had no anchor outside themselves." She set down her cup. "You have been alone a long time, Isla."
"I'm here, aren't I?"
"You're on the edge of here. There's a buffer zone, as you well know." Her voice had no judgment in it, which somehow made it worse. "I'm not telling you to throw yourself at the town. I'm telling you that the weather last night was not random and we both know it, and if you want to talk about what stirred it up, I have more tea and nowhere to be."
Isla looked at the lake for a while. A heron stood in the shallows thirty feet out, motionless, indifferent to both of them.
"There was a name in my head when I woke up," she said. "My mother used to say that sometimes the sky answers thingsyou haven't said yet. I woke up with a name that wasn't mine and I couldn't put it down."
"Whose name."
"Someone I'd rather not discuss."
Twyla nodded slowly. "Someone from before."
"Yes."
"And the captain arriving on top of that."
"I didn't know he was arriving. I wasn't — it wasn't aimed."
"I know it wasn't." Twyla picked her cup back up. "But you felt the ship in the water. Through the connection."
Isla said nothing.
"That's not a thing that happens with every vessel that comes through," Twyla said carefully.
"I'm aware of that too."
"Are you?"
"Don't."
"I'm just asking the question."
"You're not asking the question, you're leading me to an answer you've already decided on and I'm not going there." Isla turned to look at her, and Twyla looked back with those ancient eyes in that young face and said nothing, which was its own kind of answer. "He's angry about his ship and he has every right to be. That's the beginning and the end of it."
"Of course," Twyla said pleasantly, and refilled both their cups.
They sat until the light started to go, the lake going from silver to pewter as the sun dropped behind the ridgeline, and Twyla talked about her niece who was visiting and a dispute between the Tansley brothers about inventory and whether the spring fair should be moved up by two weeks, and Isla listened, letting the ordinary conversation do its work. By the time Twyla gathered her bag and said goodnight, the charge in Isla's handshad dropped to nothing, but she still stayed on the shoreline until after dark.
It was an old habit, sitting with the water at night. The lake was different after dark, its sounds lower and more serious, the mist that hung at the surface taking on an opacity that daylight burned off. She had her knees pulled to her chest on the flat rock and was watching the far bank when she felt it; a thread of something wrong moving along the river road to the east.
She went still, all her attention narrowing to the source. Whoever it was, they were moving quietly with the kind of quiet that was practiced and careful. She felt them the way she felt weather fronts, not visually but as pressure, as a disruption in the ordinary texture of the night air, and what she felt was unfamiliar in a way that went past just being a stranger.
