Page 97 of Bonetide

“Aye. Suits you, too. Like you were made for this place.”

He says it casually, and yet I take it with some weight because I’ve never felt like I was made for any place. So the fact that he’s saying this now has my chest feeling tight with too many feels that have come out of the cottage’s very old woodwork.

He sits across from me at the table and his eyes go past me to the windowsill, where Effie’s wooden box has been sitting beside the salt jar for three days.

“And that?” he wonders with a nod.

“That’s Effie’s box. No idea what’s in it. I can’t figure out how to open it.”

“May I?” he asks, politely placing an open palm across the table.

“You’ve made yourself at home,” I say wryly as I get up and place the box on the table. “Please, have at it.”

The box sits between us now and he doesn’t touch it, not right away. Instead, he looks at it for a long beat. Then he reaches for it, delicately, and his long fingers find the carvings on the lid, those letters in the alphabet I don’t know, the ones I’ve been running my thumbs over for ages now without finding a single seam. Watching him is like watching someone read Braille—he only stares at the carvings for a moment before his gaze goes off to the window. With an absent look on his face, he continues to run his fingertips over them.

He carefully turns the box in his hands, slow, two revolutions. Then he nods, as if deciding something for himself, and presses two of the carvings at the same time, his thumb on one and his middle finger on the other, and then with his other hand he slides the lid sideways instead of lifting it, and the lid comes off in a way I haven’t even thought to try, because boxes don’t usually open sideways.

But this one did.

And he did it.

The box is open.

Ta-da.

He gently sets the lid down beside it on the table and peers into it as I do.

Inside, is a thick pouch of oiled wool the color of old butter.

He reaches in and opens the pouch, pulling out a Gothic skeleton key and laying it on top of the wool.

It’s fairly large. Maybe gold, maybe some tarnished metal. Very old, long shaft, a single bit at the end, the head a worn quatrefoil that’s gone soft at the edges from age.

Both of us stare at the key in the box for a moment, and then he glances up at me.

“Iris?”

“Yeah?” I breathe.

He lifts the key out of the wool. He holds it across the table to me on the flat of his palm.

“This is for you.”

I take it.

It’s heavier than it looks. The metal’s cold and the bit at the end’s worn unevenly on one side from use. I close my hand around it and the shape of it presses into my palm. It feels…good.

And I know exactly where this key leads.

I’ve known since the night I found salt at the base of the closet door.

Alasdair is watching me hold it. The face is the carefully-chosen stillness I’ve seen on him before, but I can see now that the stillness is for me, not for him. He’s letting me have this moment without putting anything of himself into it. He’s letting me find what I need to find.

“How did you know how to open it?” I inquire quietly, feeling like the air we’re breathing from that long-closed box is sacred, or something.

He swallows audibly. “I’ve seen a box like it before, lass.”

“Where?”