Page 58 of The Highland Ghost’s Virgin

"That's what I said to ye."

"Aye, but I daenae mean the castle." He let go, and his boots shifted on the gravel, turning toward the path back up the cliff. "Ye ken what I mean."

He walked. No parting shot, no final word to land the point harder. Just the steady crunch of his boots on wet shingle going up the slope, fading as the incline took him, and then only the wind off the firth and the pull of the tide going out.

Alpin stood where he was.

The water moved in the dark the same way as it had been for twenty years. He looked at the place where the point turned, where the rocks at the shelf dropped off into the deep shelf, and the color of the sea changed from grey to black.

His grandfather had known that water by its moods. Had put names to the seals on it. Had taken a ten-year-old boy out on it on the best day of that boy's small life and come back without himself, and the boy had spent twenty years standing at the edge of it trying to understand why he had to die that day.

The seal was quiet now.

Alpin turned away from the water. It wasn't a dramatic thing. He didn't stand there and mark the moment or make a decision about it. He just turned and walked toward the path, his boots finding the same line of wet stones they always found in the dark without his having to look for it.

The lights of the keep showed yellow through the arrow slits above him as he climbed, and the wind off the high ridge carried the smell of peat smoke down the face of the rock, warm and sharp and exactly the same as it had smelled for two hundred years. He put his hand on the postern gate.

Somewhere above him, in the east tower, a candle was burning.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

He almost missed her.

The passage between the great hall and the stairwell was the darkest stretch of the keep at this hour, the tallow dips burned down to stubs, and nobody left awake to replace them.

Alpin moved through it by habit, one hand skimming the rough stone of the wall, his boots quiet on the flags after the wet gravel of the shore path.

He felt a hand on him. Small fingers closed around his forearm, certain and unhurried, and he stopped.

Mòr stood in the shadow beside the stairwell door, Sgàil a dark shape at her ankles, the cat's yellow eyes catching the last of the ember-glow from the hall behind her. She was always doing this, appearing in the dark parts of the castle as though she'd grown there, as though the stone itself had put her there to wait for him. He'd stopped being startled by it years ago. He wasn't sure that was a good thing.

"Ye're up late," he said.

"So are ye." She didn't let go of his arm. Her grip was light, the fingers of an old woman, but she always held on a breath longer than necessary, long enough that moving away would require a decision rather than a drift. "Have ye been sleeping, young Laird?"

"Aye."

She looked at him. That was all she did — looked at him, with those pale, steady eyes that had looked at him across every crisis of his life since he was ten years old and dripping salt water on the healer's flagstones. She had a way of doing it that made him feel she was reading something written on his face that he hadn't put there himself.

"Ye look like ye havenae, me Laird," she said.

He didn't answer that. He'd learned a long time ago that arguing with Mòr about what she could see in his face was a waste of both their evenings.

The cat moved along the wall, its hairless skin the color of old ash, and sat a foot further up the passage, facing back toward them as though it had been asked to wait there.

"The anniversary is coming," Mòr said.

There it was.

She never missed it. Every year, when the autumn tides started running longer, and the light went thin and grey off the Minch the way it had been that morning, she found him. In the corridor, in the armory, once at the postern gate before dawn with the rain coming sideways off the firth.

She never made a ceremony of it. She never stood in front of him and said I know what this time of year does to ye in the way Isobel sometimes did, with her careful, worried eyes. She just appeared, touched his arm, said the words, and let them sit.

He'd told himself for years that she did it out of love. He still believed that. He just hadn't examined, not closely, what the love was for.

"I ken the date, Mòr."

"Aye." She said it gently. Her hand moved on his arm, not letting go, just shifting. "I dreamed of him last night."