Page 33 of The Highland Ghost’s Virgin

He couldn't account for why tonight had felt different, why one glance across a supper table had settled into his chest the way it had. After turning the question over twice without profit, he gave up on the ledgers entirely and went looking for something that required less thinking.

He found Isobel in the small sitting room off the gallery, curled into the window seat with her mending forgotten in her lap and a book open instead, the same worn copy of Highland tales their grandfather used to read from, the spine cracked from decades of use.

"Ye're supposed to be hemming that," Alpin said, dropping into the chair across from her.

"I'm supposed to be doing a great many things. Reading felt more urgent." Isobel didn't look up from the page. "Ye're wandering the castle at an hour when ye're usually already asleep, so either something's troubling ye, or ye're simply bored. Which is it?"

"Neither."

"Liar." She finally glanced up, marking her place with one finger. "Ye have that look on yer face."

"I daenae have a look."

"Ye have several looks, Alpin, and I've catalogued every one of them since I was old enough to walk."

"Then ye'll be disappointed. There's nothing to tell."

"Mm." Isobel returned to her book, entirely unconvinced, though she let it go. "Ye ken what I was reading, before ye interrupted me with yer mysterious nothing?"

"What?"

"The story about Grandda and the selkie wife. Ye remember it?"

Alpin found the corner of his mouth moving before he'd approved the motion. "The one where he claims he talked a seal into giving him her coat back, out of pure kindness, and she granted him a wish for it?"

"That's the one."

"He made that story up entirely. There's nae a selkie within a hundred miles of this coast, and even if there were, Grandda couldnae talk a hungry dog into leaving a bone alone, let alone charm a magical seal-woman out of her own skin."

"I ken it's made up. That's nae the point."

Isobel closed the book gently, resting her hand flat on the cover.

"The point is he told it to me forty times if he told it once, and every single time he changed some small detail, just to see if I was still listening. The wish was different every telling. Once it was gold. Once it was fair winds for a whole season. Once, memorably, it was that his beard would grow in redder, which made no sense at all given the story, but he told it with such conviction I believed it for a full year."

"He was a terrible liar and worse at consistency."

"He was the best storyteller this glen has ever produced, and ye'll nae convince me otherwise." Isobel's voice went softer at the edges, fond rather than argumentative. "I miss it. Somebody making things up just to watch me face while I worked out whether to believe them."

"I could make something up, if it'd please ye."

Isobel's eyebrows shot up, delighted. "Go on, then. Prove ye've inherited something from him besides the height."

Alpin considered a moment, searching for something absurd enough to be worthy of the challenge. "There's a fish in the loch below the east ridge," he said, "grown so old and so large that it's outlived three generations of MacKay fishermen, and every one of them swears it took their best hook and swam off wearing it like an earring, out of pure spite."

The small solar off the main hall was warm, smelling of dried peat, lavender, and the sharp bite of tallow smoke from the iron sconces mounted on the stone wall. Heavy wool tapestries, faded by generations of damp sea air, hung over the narrow slit windows to keep out the evening chill.

Isobel sat near the hearth, her knees tucked beneath the heavy, dark green plaid of her skirt. She was clad in a thick wool dress the color of moss, her dark hair bound loosely at her nape with a plain leather thong. In her lap lay a basket of unspun sheep's wool, her fingers working lazily at a tear in her cuff.

"That's terrible. Grandda would be ashamed."

"Ye asked for something made up. Ye dinnae specify it had to be good."

Across from her, Alpin leaned his broad back against the dark timber mantelpiece. He wore his daily working tunic of coarse grey wool, open at the throat and stained dark at the cuffs from the stable grease, his heavy tartan draped casually over one shoulder. His long legs were stretched out toward the crackling fire, his boots spattered with dried mud from the lower glen.

"Fair." Isobel laughed, the sound filling the small room in a way that eased something in his chest he hadn't realized had gone tight. "Ye ken, ye should do that more often. Say foolish things. Ye're entirely too serious most days, Alpin. It's exhausting, watching ye carry the whole glen on yer shoulders every waking hour."

"Somebody has to carry it."