When the spirits of the sea are easily mollified.
Jack’s dismay didn’t ease; he recalled the sound of fingernails tapping on the hull of the fisherman’s boat, seeking a weak spot. The dim figure of the woman in the water, laughing at him as he desperately swam to shore. Did he truly desire to reel that spirit to him like a fish on a hook? To sing up that dangerous being?
So he tried once more and asked, “What if they don’t come to the sound of my music, my voice? What if they remember their fondness and respect for your mum and refuse to answer me, a bard who has been ousted by the clan?”
“You were never ousted by us,” Adaira said, intently watching him. And then she whispered, “Are you afraid, Jack?”
Yes, he thought, desperately. “No,” he said.
“Because I will be there with you, at your side,” she said. “My father was always with my mother when she played. I won’t let anything befall you.”
It was strange how much he believed her in that moment, given their troubled history. But her confidence was like wine, softening him. He could see why the clan adored her, followed her, worshiped her.
“Perhaps this will grant you clarity,” Adaira continued. “My da explained it to me like this: My mother couldn’t play with a skeptical heart. The folk came not just to hear the music, but to be adored by her. Because that is what they desire from us. Our praise, our faith. Our trust in them.”
Jack’s initial reaction was to scoff. How could he praise the beings that were stealing girls? But he swallowed his retort, remembering Mirin’s old stories. Not all spirits were bad. Not all spirits were good. To be safe, it was wise to fear them all.
He didn’t want to believe what Adaira was telling him, and his mainland opinions rose up in his mind. But then he thought, If she’s right and the spirits relinquish the lasses, I can return to the university within the week.
“Very well,” he said. “I will play this for you and for the clan. For the two missing lasses. Where is your mother’s music?”
Adaira rose and led him to a southern turret of the castle, up a stairwell, and into a spacious chamber Jack had never seen before.
The walls were carved deep with shelves, crowded with illuminated books, and the floor was black-and-white-checkered marble, polished so fine it caught his reflection as if he stood on water. Three large windows let in rivers of sunshine, and there was an oaken table, covered in parchment, inkpots, and quills. In the center of the room was a grand harp, exquisitely crafted. The strings gleamed in the light, aching to be played.
Jack walked to it, unable to take his eyes from the instrument. He knew who it had once belonged to. As a boy, he had listened to her play it in the hall. Reverently, he traced the shoulder of the harp, and he thought of Lorna.
“This harp has been well maintained,” he said. He had expected to find it dust ridden, its frame cracked by the weight of strings. “Do you play?” And he couldn’t explain why the mere thought of Adaira sitting at this harp, her fingers rendering music, made his breath catch.
“Very little,” Adaira confessed. “Years ago, my mum taught me how to care for the instrument, how to pluck a few scales. Unfortunately, the music never took to my hands.”
Jack watched as she sorted through heaps of parchment on the table, eventually bringing a few sheets to him.
It was a ballad, “The Song of the Tides.” And even though the notes and lyrics were silent on the parchment, waiting for breath and voice and fingers to rouse them to life, a warning swelled within him the longer he entertained the music in his mind.
Something about it felt dangerous. He couldn’t fully describe it, but his blood recognized the threat swiftly, felt the bite of its unsung power. Chills swept over his skin.
“I’m going to need some time to prepare,” he said.
“How much time?” Adaira asked.
“Give me two days to study it. That will give my hand time to heal, and I should be ready to play by then.”
She nodded. He couldn’t tell if she was pleased or disappointed with his answer, but he sensed a fraction of the weight she was carrying as the Heiress of the East.
He didn’t envy her status or her power as he had once.
“And where will I be playing this?” he asked.
“On the shore,” Adaira replied. “We can meet at midnight, two nights from now, at Kelpie Rock. You remember where to find it?”
It was the place where they had once swum for countless hours as children. Jack wondered if Adaira was choosing it because the rock held strong memories for them both. He vividly recalled bobbing on the waves as a lad and racing her to the shore, eager to beat her.
“Of course,” he said. “I haven’t forgotten my way around the isle.”
She only smiled.
Jack was carefully folding Lorna’s music into his harp case when Adaira said, “I suppose you are eager to see Mirin?”
He bit back a sarcastic retort. “Aye. Since you’re done with me, I’ll be heading that way to visit her.”
“She’ll be overjoyed to see you,” Adaira stated.
Jack said nothing, but his heart felt like stone. When he had first arrived at the mainland school, his mother had written him once a month. He had gone to a broom closet and wept every time her words had arrived. Reading of the isle roused his longing to return home, and he often skipped his music classes, hoping his professors would send him back. They hadn’t, of course, because they were determined to see him flourish there. The wild isle-born lad who would have had no proper last name if not for the generosity of his laird.
As the years passed, Jack had finally given himself up to the music, falling deeper and deeper into that world, and Mirin’s letters had become more and more infrequent, until they only arrived annually, when the leaves turned gold and the frost fell and he had aged another year.
“I have no doubt,” Jack said, and this time the sarcasm bled into his voice.
Adaira must have noticed, but she didn’t make a remark. “Thank you for your help, Jack,” she said. “Would you also be able to meet with me again tomorrow at noontide?”
“I don’t see why not.”
Adaira tilted her head, gazing at him. “You are quite overjoyed to be home, aren’t you, my old menace?”
“This place was never my home,” he said.
She made no reply to that comment, but her eyes softened. “Then I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He watched her leave. He stood in the music chamber for a few minutes more, to soak in the solitude.
The light was beginning to fade. He felt how late the hour was, and he knew he couldn’t delay the inevitable.
It was time for him to see Mirin.
Jack once reveled in the swiftness of hill travel. As a boy, he had been quick to learn which summits flattened and which ones multiplied, which rivers changed course and which lochs vanished, which trees moved and which ones held steady. He knew how to find his way back to the road should the folk succeed in tricking him.
But it might have been foolish of him to think that would still be the case a decade later.
The isle looked nothing like he remembered. He pressed west as he walked the fells, Torin’s boots wearing blisters on his heels, and suddenly the land around him was wild and endless. He might have once loved this place and its many faces, but he was a stranger to it now.