Page 59 of The Highland Ghost’s Virgin

Alpin was quiet.

"Of the sea," she said. "Of the water, the way it looked that morning. Very dark. And him in it." She paused. Her voice was low and careful. He'd trusted that voice his whole life. "He was nae at rest, Alpin. In the dream. That's what I felt. That there are things unfinished. Things the water is still holding that ought to have been settled long ago."

The cold from the shore was still in his boot leather. He could feel it in his ankles.

"It was a dream, Mòr."

"Aye." She didn't argue it. She never argued it. She said aye and let the weight of whatever she'd just put in the air stay there, between them, without asking him to carry it out loud. That was the thing about her, she never asked. She just opened the door and stood back from it. "I thought ye'd want to ken. In case ye dreamed the same."

"I sleep fine."

She looked at him again.

He looked back at her. Small, ancient, wrapped in her black shawl, with a hairless cat at her heels and pale eyes that hadn't changed in the twenty years he'd been looking into them. She had held him through his fever. She had sat with his mother through the long nights after his father didn't come back. She had been in this castle since before he had a memory to put her in. No version of his life didn't have Mòr standing somewhere near the edge of it.

"He was the bravest man I ever knew," she said. Quietly, like something private. "Yer grandfather. He never let a debt lie, that man. Never once let a wrong thing sit unanswered because answering it was too hard." She let go of his arm, finally, her fingers drawing back into the fold of her shawl. "That's where ye get it. That's the Herston in ye, the part that kens when something is nae finished."

He said nothing.

She nodded, as though he'd answered anyway, and turned back toward the dark of the passage. The cat rose without a sound and followed her, its long tail held low. She moved with that same unhurried, drifting step she always had, the one that never seemed to match the hour or the darkness or the coldness of the stone.

"Sleep well, young Laird," she said, without turning around.

He stood in the corridor and listened to her go.

The ember-light from the hall doorway threw a long, thin line of orange across the flags, and he watched it until the sound of her footsteps faded entirely and the passage was quiet again. Sgàil's yellow eyes caught the light once more, right at the edge of the dark, and then were gone.

That's where ye get it. The part that kens when something is nae finished.

He didn't go to bed. He stood there another minute, his hand at his side, and thought about his grandfather in the water with his white hair plastered flat and blood from the gash on his temple staining the swell pink. Thought about the calm in the old man's eyes. Thought about what it meant — had always meant, underneath everything he'd built on top of it — that the calm was there. That a man facing that, in that water, had been entirely at peace with what he was doing.

Unfinished things.

He found himself moving before the thought had fully formed, back down the passage the way he'd come, past the dead tallow dips and the cold stone and the dark doorway of the great hall. He pushed out through the postern gate without stopping for a plaid.

The air off the firth hit him full in the face, cold and salt-heavy, and the stars were still thick over the Minch the way they'd been an hour ago when Niall had stood beside him on the shingle and said what he'd said.

Alpin walked down to the water's edge.

The tide had turned while he was inside. It was coming in now, a long dark line of foam advancing across the wet sand, slow and certain, indifferent to whatever a man had decided between one hour and the next.

He stood where the sand went firm under his boots and let it come toward him, and looked out at the black shelf where the deep water started, three miles out, where the lights of the keep were too small to see from.

He didn't know how long he stood there. Long enough for the tide to reach his feet. Long enough for the cold to settle back into his heels.

The water moved in the dark, and he listened to it, the way he always had, because there was a part of him that Mòr knew and Niall knew and Isobel knew and he would not yet say out loud — the part that had been standing on this shoreline for twenty years waiting for the sea to tell him what to do next.

Above him, in the east tower, the candle was still burning.

The mornings were still good. He’d sit with Nora propped against his arm, watching Grisselle come down with flour on her cuff, and hand her the bread without a word. He kept waiting for the familiar cold weight at the back of his mind to drag it all thin, but the warmth remained, solid and unfamiliar.

Then the light changed.

By late October, the Minch turned from grey-green into the deep, deliberate slate of winter. The swells lengthened, and the sea began its annual pull.

On the fourth day, he took the cliff path down to the shore before supper. The tide ran hard against the granite shelf, white water boiling over the rocks under an iron sky.

A break in the wind made him turn.