Page 102 of Bonetide

She looks at me for a long beat.

“You really want to know?”

“I want to know. I need to know.”

I need to know what the fuck I’m sleeping with.

“All right. Here, in these parts, we have the each-uisge.”

She says it easily. Ech-OOSH-keh. The ch in the back of the throat.

“Each-uisge?”

“Ech-oosh-keh. Like a loch.”

“Each-uisge?” I repeat, trying to really lay on the Scot’s brogue.

“Aye. Closer. Water-horse. The old word.”

“Horse!”

“Aye. Surely you would have seen that connection by now.”

“He’s a fucking horse!?” I exclaim, then quickly look around the shop to see if anyone came in without me noticing. It’s still empty.

“A horse that lives in the water,” she explains, her tone so matter-of-fact it’s almost comical. “They come up out of the lochs at certain times of the year, and they will let you ride them, but if you put your hand on them your hand will not come off. The horse will go back into the loch and you will go with it, and that is the last anyone will see of you. Your liver will wash up later, sometimes. That’s how they’re known.”

The liver. That’s what the locals at the pub had said, about the woman in Applecross, how only a liver remained.

“The white horse in his woods…” I say slowly, remembering how it watched me near the castle, how he warned me not to touch it.

“Aye.”

“The white horse is…Alasdair?”

She takes a sip of her tea.

“That is what it is.”

“He is the horse,” I repeat.

“He is.”

“And the man.”

“He is both. A shapeshifter. He has been one for a very long time.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know exactly. He was on this coast when my grandmother was young. He was on this coast when her grandmother was young, by what she told me. The records of this village do not go back as far as he does, you see.”

I try to let that fact sink in, but it’s hard. Every part of my brain wants to fight against what I’ve been told, even when I’ve seen some evidence of it. At the very least, I know that he’s been alive and hasn’t aged for a very long time, the paintings are evidence of that, and yet I still can’t seem to wrap my head around the rest of it.

“But I saw him riding a horse…”

“He rides them, aye. There are wild horses here that belong to him, running loose on the hills and the moors. They are kin, in a way.”

“He told me his last name…” I offer, feeling like I finally have some information she may not.