Page 35 of Bonetide

Then the white resolves itself into something more concrete: A neck. A back. A flank.

A horse.

It’s just a horse.

Which kinda seems peculiar in its own way. I’m used to seeing horses in fields, not hidden by trees in a forest.

It’s standing in the clearing perfectly still, its head turned toward the track, watching me. White, more dapple grey-white really, with a long mane streaked with pewter, hanging in heavy wet ropes against its neck as if the fog has soaked it through. It’s substantial through the chest and has slight feathering at the hocks. I’m guessing a Highland pony, or something like that…bigger than a Highland, smaller than a Percheron, the kind of horse you see in old paintings. What can I say, the horse girl to plant girl pipeline is a real one.

There is something off about it though. Its eyes are dark, almost too dark.

And I don’t know what I mean by that, because most horse eyes are dark by nature. But these are dark the way the loch is dark—the dark of something that has no bottom—and they are looking at me with rapt attention.

Horses are prey animals, and they’re almost always watching you, especially if you’re a stranger encroaching on their land. But I don’t get that feeling of wariness from this horse. Not from its gaze, the way it’s so sharply focused on me with those too dark, too deep, too large eyes. It reminds me more of an elk or a bull; something that’s prepared to defend itself if needed. It wants to do the chasing, not the other way around.

I take a slow step away to the far side of the road.

The horse does not move. It does not flick its ears. It stands so still that I’m starting to wonder if it’s some sort of illusion, not really there at all.

I lift my hand.

“Hello,” I say, feeling ridiculous. “I’m not here to harm you.”

Are you here to harm me?

The horse watches me wave but it doesn’t move. The only thing it does is blink.

I lower my hand, and I keep walking, and I don’t dare look back until I have gone another twenty feet. When I do look back, the clearing has filled with fog and there is no horse in it, but I can’t tell if the horse has moved into the trees, or if the fog has come down, or if I invented something that wasn’t there.

I keep going until the trees thin out some more and the world opens, and suddenly the castle is in front of me.

Oh my god.

The fog is acting like a set designer as the castle rises out of the wet grey, its curtain wall the same color as the rock it sits on, the line between geology and architecture almost gone. The seaward sides drop away to the bay, the water down there hidden by the fog so the castle looks like it ends in cloud. The ditch on the landward side is grown thick with bracken and gorse, a green moat instead of a stone one, the collapsed timbers of what was once a drawbridge sticking out at angles through the growth.

It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, a perfect mix of grandeur and decay that makes my heart beat aflutter.

I don’t know what I expected, really. A ruin, I guess. Something dignified and sad, as seen in a Heritage Scotland photograph. Not this, though. Not this slow, grand thing half-eaten by its own coast, half-still-standing. Wild roses have climbed all the way up the curtain wall on the landward side, their last late blooms bright against the grey. Foxgloves grow in the joints of the stone. Yellow lichens flame on every south-facing surface. Honeysuckle has rooted in a high arrow-slit and is hanging in a long curtain of green and cream down the wall that smells heavenly from here.

I have to make myself remember why I came.

I came to confirm that someone lives here.

That part is going to be easy. Even from where I’m standing at the broken edge of the moat, even with most of the castle obscured by fog, I can see the difference between the parts that have surrendered and the parts that haven’t. The east range to my left is half-fallen, roofless, gone to grass. The west range past it is a single low broken line of stone. But the north range, the largest, three stories, set against the open bay behind it, has windows that are glazed. The slates on the western half of its roof are sound. Someone has kept this castle alive in one wing, and let the rest go, and the going has been slow enough to look like part of the design.

I pick my way down into the ditch. The bracken has grown enough that I can almost step from one tussock to the next without losing my footing, and the collapsed drawbridge makes a kind of half-ramp at the bottom. I scramble up the other side, gracelessly, with one wet hand braced on a stone. My boots find purchase on the worn-down threshold of what was once the castle gate.

I step through.

The gateway opens into the courtyard, and the courtyard is what undoes me.

It’s open to the sky—or what would be sky if there wasn’t a cotton puff of fog. The grand entrance hall, or whatever this was, is gone, no roof or floor and what’s left is a rectangle of cracked flagstones with grass and nettles coming up between them. Ivy thicker than my wrist climbs every surface that will hold it. A small elder tree has rooted in one of the upper window arches and is growing horizontally out of the wall, ten feet above the ground. Somewhere a robin is singing, while the fog comes down through the open roof in slow drifts. The whole courtyard smells like wet stone and something green, almost honeyed.

I stand in the middle of it with my bag of cuttings and my sketchbook and feel like I’m lost to time. I forget for a long second that I’m here for a reason.

Alasdair lives here. It doesn’t look like anyone could live here in this Grimm fairy tale, but he does.

And I am here to see him in it, even if I don’t knock.