Page 149 of Bonetide

When it’s quiet—a different quiet, a settled one—I open my eyes and turn around.

The horse stands in the fog ten feet from me, white as the birch, huge, and terrible, and staring at me with the patience of something that has existed before time. Its mane hangs wet down its neck, and the wet runs in streaks along the shoulder, and its eye—black, depthless, the loch at midnight—is on me, and there is nothing of Alasdair’s anywhere in it.

I stare at the horse for a moment and it stares at me and I feel that pull that Sinclair did, the one that lead him to his death, and I’m suddenly reminded that we don’t have much time, that Alasdair is doing his best to keep him here.

I get to it. I pour the salt in a wide circle around the both of us, the way Mhairi told me, sunwise, closing us in together. It feels silly, like so many magic-based things do, but it works. The fog actually stops at the salt, pressing at the ring of it like breath on glass, and somewhere inside me a door I’ve been leaning on my whole life quietly opens. Because I’ve played at this since I was a girl—the candles, the tarot deck I lazily pull from while half-believing, the wannabe witch with her crystals in her bedroom—and I always knew I was pretending.

But standing here in a salt circle, in the fog, with a knife in my hand, the words rising up in me sure and ready, I know that I’m not pretending. I never was. It was waiting for water and blood to call it up. Effie’s line runs through me like a vein of quartz through rock. I am cunning folk. The recognition resonates so calmly it actually frightens me.

With this newfound confidence, I walk to the horse. It doesn’t move. Up close, the size of it blots out the fog, the cold pours off it, and its breath clouds against my face, smelling of the deep loch and seagrass. I lay my left hand flat on its shoulder, the shoulder Sinclair touched.

My hand does not stick. It rests there, on the wet hide, softly.

I say the words.

“Eachann, that the old folk named. Alasdair MacCoinnich, that the man was born. Each-uisge, water-horse, the Lord of Drowning—I name the whole of you, and I ask what cannot be asked, and you stand for me, and the standing is your answer.” My voice doesn’t shake. My hands don’t shake either. “By iron and by salt and by my own hand, freely offered, freely given. Each gu uisge—the horse to the water. The man to me.”

And I set the little black knife to the hide of his shoulder, and I cut.

It doesn’t hurt him. I’d braced my whole soul for it to hurt him—for a flinch, a scream, blood sheeting down the white—and there’s nothing, no blood at all, barely even a wound. The hide parts under the iron like wax from the seal, like something that was only ever resting there waiting for the right hand to lift it. A piece half the size of my palm comes away whole and clean, white on one side and silver-dark on the other, and where it came from the hide beneath is already smooth, unmarked, as if there was never anything to take.

The horse breathes out, long and shuddering, and the breath goes through the fog and through me, and something in the night changes pressure, like the whole bay swallowing. I exhale in the same way, the thought of hurting an animal, let alone Alasdair, had rested heavy on my soul for days.

But it’s done. It was that easy and at the same time, it was that enormous.

The hide is warm, for some reason. The night has dropped in on us, freezing. and the horse itself is as cold as the loch, but the piece of him in my hands is warm as a living thing, and I wrap it in the cloth I brought and put it in my inside pocket, against my chest, feeling the weight of it settle there like a second heart.

I break the salt circle with the toe of my boot, the way she taught me, and the fog comes rolling back in.

We walk to the water together, the horse and I.

It walks beside me, down the long flat ground to the seaward shore, past the castle, slow, matching my failing pace, its great head low, and the fog parts ahead of us and closes behind us Neither of us is in any hurry, because both of us know what this walk is. The loch appears out of the white at the last moment, flat as poured metal, silent and waiting.

At the waterline the horse stops.

It turns its head and looks at me with that black eye, and there’s no asking in it—the binding is done, it goes nowhere now without my leave—and that’s exactly why it’s looking at me. Waiting. For permission to do the last thing.

“Go on,” I whisper. My face is wet, and I don’t know when that started. “Go home one more time.”

The horse walks into the loch.

It goes the way it has always gone, unhurried, the water rising up its legs, its chest, with no splash and no sound, the surface folding around it, rather than breaking. The white of it grows dim in the black water, and then it’s swimming, then it’s a slash of cream, and then the loch closes over the place where it was and the fog drifts across the water and the bay is empty.

The horse never comes out again.

I stand on the shore a long time, my hand pressed flat over the warm weight in my coat, and I watch the still water, and I let myself understand what I just watched: that was the last of it. The thing that has come up out of this loch for centuries, the terror of this coast, the lord of all its drownings. I just watched it go under for the final time, and no one will ever see it again unless I decide it.

Somewhere out in the fog, the man is in the water. Or the man is becoming possible. I don’t know how it works from here, Mhairi’s instructions ended at the cut and the keeping. So I do the only thing left, which is turn around and start the long walk home and trust that what comes up out of the loch tomorrow, or tonight, or whenever the water is done with him, will be Alasdair.

Mortal.

Mine.

And aging from this hour forward, because of what I did to him with my own hand.

The fog stays thick on the walk back and the fibro comes up with every step now that the ritual’s let go of me, my hips grinding, my hands throbbing around nothing. I walk through it and I cry on and off, quietly, in the undramatic way you cry when you’re alone, and maybe partly pretending you’re an actress in some foreign film festival entry.

Because here’s what I keep circling back to: who am I, that he did that?