Adaira rolled her lips together, as if she wanted to say something else but decided against it.
“Should you tell me now, heiress?” Jack asked. His stomach was beginning to ache, wondering why Adaira needed him.
He wanted to get this over with and be gone.
“Yes,” said Adaira, crossing her legs. He caught a glimpse of her calf, the mud on her boots. “I suspected you enjoyed your life on the mainland since you never visited us here, and as you have many responsibilities at your university … let me be frank. I don’t know how long I will need you.”
“Surely you have some idea,” he said, tamping down his irritation. He lived by a schedule and hated to imagine floating through time. “A week? A month? If I’m not back in time for the autumn term, I’ll lose my position at the university.”
“I truly don’t know, Jack,” Adaira replied. “There are many factors at play, ones beyond my control.”
Jack’s first assumption was that she had called him home to play for her father, since the laird looked gravely ill. Which meant that Adaira was about to ascend as laird herself. Jack felt a pang of awe, imagining her crowned.
His eyes traced the thistle blossoms, tucked within her braids.
“You saw Torin earlier, yes?” Adaira asked.
Jack frowned. “I did. How did you—?”
“The wind,” she said, as if he should remember how it gossiped. “Did my cousin tell you about the two lasses who have gone missing?”
“Yes. But he didn’t provide much detail, other than that he believes the spirits are at fault.”
Adaira glanced across the room, her face solemn. “Two weeks ago, eight-year-old Eliza Elliott went missing on her walk home from school. We searched acres of land, from the school to her family’s croft, but we found little trace of her. Only a few places in the grass and heather, where it looked like she walked, only to vanish.” She paused, her eyes returning to his. “I’m sure you remember the ways of the isle, Jack.”
He did.
He remembered the perks as well as the dangers of straying from Cadence roads. The roads were pathways that resisted enchantments. The spirits couldn’t influence the roads, but they could toy with the grass and rocks and wind and water and trees of the isle. They could turn three hills into one, and one hill into four, but even then, there were ways of knowing the lay of the land, and which parts of it were prone to shift, and which landmarks remained fixed. Many children who didn’t know that secret map had gotten lost for hours if they wandered from the road.
“You believe the folk have tricked her?” Jack questioned.
Adaira nodded. “Not a week after her disappearance, another lass went missing. Annabel Ranald. Her mother says she went to tend to the sheep one afternoon and never returned. She is only ten years old. And we searched all the way to the northern coast. We searched their croft, every cave and loch, the hills and the glens, but there is no sign of her, save for a trail in a patch of heather that ends abruptly. As it was with Eliza’s disappearance, like a portal had opened to them.”
Jack raked his hand through his hair. “This is troubling, and I’m sorry to hear of it. But I don’t know how I can help in this endeavor.”
Adaira hesitated. “What I am about to tell you must remain between us, Jack. Do you agree to hold this confidence?”
“I agree.”
And yet she still faltered, doubtful. It irked him, and he said, “You don’t trust me?”
“If I didn’t trust you, I wouldn’t have called you home for this,” she countered.
He waited, all of his attention bent upon her, and she released a deep sigh.
“When my mum was still living, she used to tell me the most vivid stories,” Adaira began. “Stories about the spirits, about the folk of the earth and the water. I enjoyed her tales and held them close to my heart, but I never thought too deeply about them. Not until after she had died and my father fell ill and I realized I was about to be alone, the last of my blood. Not until Eliza Elliott went missing.
“Torin and I both went to my father, to seek his advice. For it was evident to us that someone in the clan must have done something to upset the spirits, and the folk had taken one of our own to punish us for it. My father instructed Torin to continue searching the east with his mortal strength—his eyes and his ears and his hands, to be ready at any moment for a spirit portal to open and lead him to the other side. But after Torin was dismissed, my da spoke to me alone. He asked me to recount one of my mum’s stories, the legend of Lady Ream of the Sea, which my mum often sang to us in the hall.
“So I did, although I hadn’t thought of my mum’s stories in years, for the pain they bring me. And yet even as I thought of Ream rising from the foam of the tides, I still didn’t grasp what my father was hoping I would understand on my own. It took me a few more stories before I saw it.”
She paused. Jack was transfixed. “And what was that, Adaira?”
“That in my mum’s stories and songs … she could describe the spirits in perfect detail. How they looked in appearance. How their voices sounded. How they moved and danced. As if she had seen them manifested.”
Jack instantly thought of the woman in the sea, how her hair had tickled his face. He shivered. “And had she?”
“Yes,” Adaira whispered. “It was something only she and my father knew. A bard can draw the spirits in their manifested forms, but only with a harp and their mortal voice. Old knowledge passed down on the isle for many years, kept hidden by the laird and bard out of respect for the folk.”
“Why would your mother need to sing for them?” Jack said, his palms beginning to perspire.
“I asked my father this very question, and he told me that it was a way to ensure our survival in the east. We remained in good favor with the spirits, he said, because her worship pleased them, and they in turn ensured that our crops grew twofold, and the water ran clean from the mountains into the lochs, and the fire always burned through the darkest and coldest of nights, and the wind didn’t carry our words over the clan line to our enemies.”
Jack shifted. He felt the weight of her words. He knew why she had summoned him now, and yet he wanted her to say it to him. “Why have you called me home, Adaira?”
She held his gaze, her face flushing. “I need you to play one of my mother’s ballads on your harp. I need you to invite the spirits of the sea to manifest, so I may speak with them about the missing lasses. I believe they can help me find Annabel and Eliza.”
He was silent, but his heart resounded like thunder and his mind spun like leaves caught in a whirlwind.
“I have a few concerns about this, Adaira,” Jack said.
“Tell me then.”
“What if the spirits answer the music, but they are malevolent toward us?” he asked. For while he worried about his own well-being, he was even more concerned about hers. She was the sole heiress, the only child of the laird. If something befell her, the east would be bewildered. Jack didn’t want that on his hands, to witness the spirits of the sea drown her.
“We’ll play at night. When the moon and stars shine on the water,” Adaira said, as if she had anticipated that he would ask this.