Page 143 of Bonetide

“Aye. You’ve the look, you do.” She comes round the counter, turns the sign on the door to closed, and the shop goes dim. “And you’ve been in the water since I saw you last. Properly in it. I can see that on you too.”

I blink at her. “How can you know that?”

She gives me a tight smile. “We cunning folk can smell the loch even when it’s been cleaned off.” She studies me a moment longer. “It tried for you, didn’t it, hen?”

“The wives.” My voice comes out flat. “They called me in. I couldn’t stop my own feet. He pulled me out.”

“He’ll not always be there to,” she replies, and that realization makes my chest pinch. “Can’t be everywhere at once. Come and sit. This is the conversation you came for the first time and weren’t ready to have. You’re ready now. Mind you, you’ll wish you weren’t, by the end.”

She sits me in the same chair by the cold radiator, skips the tea, and brings over the whisky, just in case. She takes her stool across from me, leaning in close enough that I can see the glints of gold in her eyes.

“I found something,” I say, getting right to the point. “I found a few more of Effie’s notebooks and letters, same day I saw the paintings. They were locked up in that storage room together. I was so taken back by the fact that Alasdair appeared to be immortal that I kind of pushed it to the side. There was something in them that I didn’t really understand at the time and I still don’t really.”

Mhairi just watches me, waiting.

“She wrote about a binding. Something with his hide. She tried it seventeen times across the years and it never once took. She wrote that she couldn’t do it alone…that he wouldn’t give it to her.” I make myself hold the old woman’s eyes. “I read that weeks ago and it meant nothing to me. I thought it was an old woman’s failed magic. I didn’t know I’d need it.”

“Aye.” Mhairi’s voice is quiet. “You weren’t ready to need it then. You are now.” Something settles in her face, grim and certain. “And there’s the whole heart of the thing in that one line—he wouldn’t give it to her. Not couldn’t be made to. But wouldn’t. Because it can’t be taken, hen. That’s the first thing you have to understand, and it’s also the worst of it.”

She clears her throat and continues while I brace myself. “The binding works on a piece of him, his hide, cut from him while he wears the horse. Not the man, not the in-between thing, the horse. You take a piece of that hide with your own hand and with iron, and you keep it, and so long as you hold it you hold him. He can’t take the water without your leave. Can’t raise the horse or the monster to do his killing, nor can they raise him. Can’t change his shape against your will. The leash is real and it’s yours for as long as the two of you last.”

“With my own hand. Iron. While he’s the horse…” I need it in order, I need every piece of it laid out, reaching for the structure of it even now, especially now. I take out my phone to take notes. “Tell me exactly what to do.”

“I’ll tell you all of it. But first you’ll hear the cruelty in it, because it’s the same cruelty that beat your aunt.” Her clear hazel eyes don’t move off mine. “It must be given, Iris. Freely. He has to stand the horse for you and let you cut him, knowing full well what it costs him, willing. A thing taken by force won’t hold. Effie proved that, apparently seventeen times over. It has to be his consent or it’s nothing at all.” She pauses. “And here’s the damning part—he cannot ask you for it. The creature’s not able to request its own leashing. It’s not in the nature of the thing. He can want it with every scrap of the man that’s left in him, and the words still won’t come. So. you’ll have to be the one to offer, and he’ll be the one to allow it. And there’s a knife’s width between those two, which you’ll be standing in with an actual knife in your hand.”

Oh god. A knife. I actually have to…cut a horse? I press my hands together to keep them still. “Does it have to be the horse? What about the…other thing.”

“Believe me, you won’t last five seconds with that other thing.”

I swallow hard. “And what does it cost him? The cost you said I’d wish I didn’t know.”

Mhairi sets her cup down.

“Bind him, and you make him mortal. The hide’s the deathless part of him,” she tells me. “Take it out and keep it, and the thing that’s not aged a day in all these centuries starts to age. Slow, at first, then like any of us. He’ll grow old, hen. He’ll grow old and he’ll die, the way men do, because you’ll have made him most of the way back into one. That’s the price of leashing the immortal thing. It doesn’t stay immortal.”

The room seems to tilt as I try to rein in what she’s saying. I came in here braced for the opposite. I came ready to lose him, ready for her to tell me the binding meant a wall between us forever, him on his rocks and me at my window, the two of us waving across the bay for the rest of my life and grieving the distance. I’d made my peace with that on the drive over, or started to. Or, at least, introduced the thought to my tired little heart.

I didn’t come ready for this.

“He’d die,” I repeat.

“Eventually, aye. With you, we’re hoping. Across a life, the both of you, into the ground together.” She lets that sit. “I need you to know what that means, because you’ll not be saving him by doing this. You’ll be killing him. Slowly, over years, but killing him all the same. The binding’s a death sentence, Iris. The only mercy in it is that you get to serve it alongside him, instead of leaving him here to take women off this coast for another five hundred years after you’re gone.”

I don’t say anything for a long time. I think of him in the bay, the claws and the black eyes, and the size of him, holding me up out of the dark while his own dead clawed me toward it. Nothing has you but me. I think of his face when he surfaced with me in his arms, the fear on it, the most human thing I’ve ever seen him do. I think of Mary’s eyes on me over the venison stew. Five this year. Getting worse.

“We die together.” I test the shape of it. “Old, hopefully.”

“Aye. That’s the whole of what it buys you. Not separation. Not safety. A shared grave, decades off.” She says it flat, unsoftened, and I understand by now that the flatness is her kindness. “Some would call that a love story. I’d call it the least bad thing on a short list of terrible ones. But it’s yours to choose, and you’re Effie’s blood, so you’ll choose it clear-eyed or not at all.”

I think about the wall I’d built on the drive here, the goodbye I’d been rehearsing. And I think about how fast it’s coming down, replaced by something that frightens me far more, because it’s so much easier to choose.

“There’s one more thing,” Mhairi says, before I can speak, and her voice drops. “About the policeman.”

I go very still.

Oh fuck.

She knows.