The Selkie (15 page)

Hexy turned another page and saw merrows. On another one she finally found the selkies.

“Ruairidh?” she whispered, staring at the achingly familiar face. Its gaze, unlike the merrow’s, was not sterile and blank. Fringed with those eyelashes, it should have seemed effeminate. But though unearthly in beauty, it was nothing other than masculine.

The whole design was one of wondrous loveliness even though someone had scraped the gold
gilding away from the art. She peered at the minute text but could not read it. The writing wasn’t the expected Latin but appeared to be some stylized form of Gaelic. She turned another page, searching for some readable text, and found something penned in the narrow margin in what looked like a careless gloss done in inferior ink.

I pray for Thy blessedness, O Father, O Word, O Holy Spirit, that whosoever shall take this book into his hand may remember the fallen who unwilling inhabit the deep waters, and that they be liberated and called home on the Day of Judgment.

I have read of the monk’s experiments with peas and believe that these examples of persistent traits may explain the NicnanRon. It is my belief that if she mates with a normal man, her children will appear normal but still carry the hidden curse of their mothers. This is a terrible enough burden, as I can attest. But if she is seduced by a water demon, then she will surely conceive and give birth to another demon, or else another full-blooded NicnanRon.

The shame of my family is so great that I cannot bear it. I place this book into the
sea and will suffer it to rest there, incomplete, until I return to a state of grace.

By my own hand, Ferdomnach Meic Maor

“
Meic Maor
. MacMoyre,” she muttered, beginning to understand Gaelic spelling and pronunciation. “But what does this mean? It is all just more riddles! I need something plain.”

She turned the old vellum pages quickly. As she had feared, the rest of the book was blank. It had never been finished by the poor MacMoyre, and it explained nothing.

However, on further examination of the book she discovered in the back of the folio a sort of pocket, and there was a piece of parchment tucked between the last page and the cover. Inside the brittle vellum there was a lock of hair. It was short and sleek and glossy brown, and it looked all too familiar.

She clenched the hair between her fingers, her heart suddenly thrumming as the lock seemed to curl about her fingers with a life of its own. Shaking, Hexy read the blurred words scribbled on the paper. It had been penned by an unsteady hand.

’Tis all I have, this hank of hair, and all he’ll allow me to keep as token of our love. And it is not enough to sustain me in my
loneliness and disgrace. They do not know him, so what care they for his own tender heart’s wounds, his beauty, his purity, his fidelity to his people? They only see that his fidelity, in the end, belongs to the sea, and it is there that he has taken our son so that he might live on as he was meant to. They see this as pitiless abandonment of me, the woman whose innocence he destroyed by leaving her with a bastard son. But what else could he do? Ardagh, our beloved son, would die if he remained here. Much as I dreamed that we would be spared and my son could live a life as Kenneth Campbell, it was not to be. It was the sea, or death. How could I let my son die?

But now I am likewise stricken, grievously wounded by my loneliness. This is true, and soon I shall pass out of this life where all hope of love has been forever deferred. But I tell you all that this is not Donagh’s fault, or his decision. I inflicted my own wounds when I went to the sea to ask for a lover, and I am without remorse for what we have done, or for the life we created.

I am not MacNicol, so I cannot ever live with my love and my son, and they in turn, without evil enchantment, can never return
to me. So I choose not to live. I have foolishly confessed some of my thoughts to Reverend Fraser, and he says if I choose not to live, then I am surely damned. Well, so be it. They’ll have to call the sin eater after I’m gone. If he eats enough of the funeral meats, mayhap that will help save my soul.

My love! Perhaps they are wrong. You must have a soul! And perhaps God is not pitiless and we may someday see each other in heaven.

Morag Boyne Campbell

Horrified, Hexy wiped tears from her cheeks. Her hands shook as she refolded the page about the lock of hair and replaced it in the book. She closed the cover on the bit of old tragedy and then rested a hand over her abdomen.

Her emotions were tangled, but one thing she was certain of—this tragedy wouldn’t happen to her! Disaster happened when people were weak. It was about the failure of certain personalities in times of crisis. Circumstances that doomed one couple would not necessarily damn another, if they had enough fortitude to face adversity and master it.

Look at Ahab! He had eventually found Moby Dick, and he had to search an entire ocean to do it. All Hexy herself had to do was go and look at a couple of islands where some sea monsters lived. She even knew where one of those islands was. Ruairidh had warned her away from it, but that was before. He surely had not known that they would be separated this long.

Though inner doubts still plagued her about other possible reasons for Ruairidh’s absence, her nightmares of the monster Sevin collecting selkie souls were even stronger.

Hexy straightened and pushed back from the desk. She tried not to notice that her hands were less than stable, and she quickly looked away from her reflection in the glass-fronted bookcase. She wouldn’t admit it, but she was a little afraid of the undermining effect of the appearance of the woman in the glass. She was too pale, too thin, too hollow around the eyes. What she didn’t need to see at this moment was her own fragility.

This was about spiritual and mental courage, not muscles, she lectured herself. She was MacNicol and MacFie—and very angry. No one, not humans or monsters, would keep her from Ruairidh—and no one would take her babies away either! She’d see them dead first.

And thanks to this poor, doomed Campbell
woman, she had her starting place at last. It was time to go to the old hooded man who lived somewhere beyond the village, the one who had been pointed out to her some time ago as the sin eater. The thought of confronting this legendary creature, who was supposedly the vessel for all the sins of the people he had been called upon to save from hell was frightening. But if there was anyone still alive who would know more about the history of this poor Morag Campbell and her selkie lover, it would be he.

Ruairidh looked out over the assembly, waiting for the last echoes of noisy greeting to die out in the hall. It had taken longer than anticipated to call all the People home, but they were there now. All their dark, thoughtful eyes in their furred faces were upon him—some concerned, some wary, some eager for news. Some were resentful of being taken from their human lovers.

It was time to speak of the danger that faced them, to put into words what he feared was happening.

Ruairidh cleared his throat and moved to the edge of the stone ledge and leaned out over
the assembly. He began speaking in the slow, liquid vowels that made up selkie speech.

“Welcome, children of Lochlann; draw near and hear me, for I have news of the world.” His words were formal and put an end to the few remaining smiles in the room. “A dark cloud has moved over the sun and cast a shadow on the sea. Though we have had peace for over four hundred seasons, war is again coming to Avocamor. And this time it is not of the land dwellers’ making.”

There was a shocked murmuring that rippled through the room. Some of them had heard of the stolen bones, but they had incorrectly assumed that it was mad John who had taken them.

Ruairidh spoke over the dazed voices.

“We have long known that the finman, Sevin, had given himself over to darker alchemies, but there is proof now that he is stealing souls and ancient bones to create more power for his dark arts.”

“What care we if he steals land dweller souls?” one angry voice asked. All heads turned Eleth’s way. “We should never have aided the humans. Look what the pact has done to us! I care not if he steals their dead. Let him turn his sorcery loose upon them. It is only what they deserve for their eternal war-mongering.”

“Do you care if he steals
our
dead? Do you
care if he steals
our
souls to gain power?” Ruairidh asked. “For that is what he has done. It was our ancestors’ bones that were taken from the
last grotto
. It is our pups who have been attacked.”

There was a long moment of shocked silence, and then the hall erupted into speech.

Ruairidh turned from the babble and spoke softly to Cathair.

“They shall argue for moons about what this means. Eleth and his ilk will never believe that there is a serious threat against us unless they are personally attacked by the finman.”

“Perhaps this is so, but ye must stay here and convince the rest of them. If we delay now and let the finman and his followers grow any more powerful, we may be unable to stop him later.”

Ruairidh nodded, acknowledging the truth, but he looked unhappy. He had a growing uneasiness about how Hexy was faring in his absence. It was typical for a selkie’s lover to be placid once she was with child. Many times they were even unaware of the passage of time—an excellent thing when the pregnancy with a male selkie could go on for so many more months than a human gestation. But Hexy had not been typical in any of her reactions, and he placed only dubious faith in the notion that her pregnancy would keep her pacified and accepting of his nonattendance.

And the other side effect of pregnancy was that it could, in rare instances, drive some abandoned females to acts of desperation. The watchers he had posted on the shore had seen nothing in the days past, but he had had to call them home for this meeting. No one was there to look out for Hexy now.

Frustrated, he turned back to the assembly and raised his voice in impassioned argument.

The ancient, rheumatic creature that had been born Padraig Gordon was now known almost exclusively by his professional title of sin eater. Sin eating was a gruesome custom that had fallen out of favor in many parts of Scotland, but the man’s occupation was not so forgotten and disused that he and his tainted soul were welcomed into village society. Unlike the selkies, sin eaters were known to the church and their status was firm.

Though he was not welcome in town, everyone knew where his isolated cottage was located, and Hexy had no trouble discovering from the now very curious carpenters at Fintry where to find the outcast man. She regretted the necessity of calling attention to herself by asking so many questions, but with the servants gone there was no one else she could seek out for information. Certainly she would not go back to Mr. Campbell, who—though kind to
her so far—already knew far too much about the selkies, and had every reason to fear and dislike them, since a relative of his had been driven to suicide over one.

Hexy stepped out into the day, relieved to be away from Fintry and the noise of construction. The workmen there seemed to believe that it was their duty to raise as much din as possible while they worked, perhaps as proof that they were struggling diligently for their wages.

Hexy did not understand them. Had she been working at converting the cesses, it would have been with her face muffled and drawing as few breaths as possible. That certainly let out stringing together long, creative curses that managed to combine both scatological and sexual references. So uncharacteristic was this swearing to the usually courteous Scotsmen that she had to wonder if it was not some corruption brought home from the war.

She sighed, rubbing her head. Every day she felt more alienated from the world. At least she would not be there at elevenses to hear the workmen slurp down their tea in repulsive, noisy gulps.

As she hurried down the long drive, she took time to appreciate that the weather was fair for her quest. Though not previously a superstitious person, she had recently begun to believe in omens, and was glad to find the signs fortuitous.
It also meant that she need not bring the rain cape whose oiled hide smelled foul to her.

Armed with the gift of a plug of tobacco taken from Mr. MacKenzie’s smoking room—an offering that one of the older workmen warned her to bring—and also the proper greeting in Gaelic, Hexy started out for the sin eater’s cottage.

The sin eater’s home was located several hundred yards past the end of the village in a stand of ancient yew, which ringed the small farmstead and all but obscured the cottage at its center. The ancient trees were so adept at blotting out the light that a person could easily mistake the gloom beneath them for the fall of twilight. She had to wonder if the choice was not a deliberate one.

Hexy had a bad moment when she first tried to approach the cottage and was overcome by a wave of gut sickness so strong that it brought tears to her eyes. But she found that after a moment, if she breathed shallowly and did not look up, her body calmed and she was able to approach the pitted stone building, and the man who sat quietly smoking out in the only patch of fractured sunlight the woods afforded.

Hexy was nervous, both at her task and at facing a man that so many feared because of his knowledge of the wickedness of mankind.
But she found, instead of a wrathful, towering Old Testament prophet, with a piercing gaze and a staff of lightning clutched in a steel fist, that old Padraig was actually very small, and that his eyes were bandaged in cataracts, his hands too knotted by arthritis to wield staffs. Strange subdermal lumps also misshaped his beardless face and made him both a frightening and pathetic creature to behold.

His voice was fine, though, smooth and soft and as soothing as a lullabye. Nor did he seem at all surprised by Hexy paying him a visit.

“Forgive me for not wearing a veil, but I am taking my ease today and so left off the uniform of office while I enjoy the rare sun,” he said gently in the voice of an educated man, marred only by the smallest country burr. “I hope that the sight of me does not distress you. It has been some years since I saw my own image clearly—which is a blessing in a way, as I was none tae fond of it anyway.”

“I am sorry to disturb you on your afternoon of ease,” Hexy began.

“Nonsense.
Ciamar a tha sibh?
Take a chair, mistress, and speak tae me of what is troubling you.” The old man waved a brown hand at the empty stool that sat beside his own.

“Thank you.” Hexy seated herself carefully, praying the stool was not made of yew. Relieved that the wood did not burn her or make her
itch, she asked politely in return:
“Ciamar a tha sibh fhein?”

“I am as well as it is possible for a man like me tae be,” Padraig replied with a hint of a smile as he put the stem of his pipe between his lips and puffed gently. He was obviously accustomed to speaking around the stem, for he was able to add clearly, “But tell me, what brings you here? Is it the selkie?”

Hexy started so hard that she nearly unseated herself. “What?” she whispered.

“There is little else that would bring one sae young and healthy tae me. And it is drawing toward the season of the hunt. With sae many men dead in the war, they’ll be abroad by Beltane, if not before. Ah, well, it means more work for me.”

Hexy stared at the nearly blind eyes and shivered. He might not be sighted, but it seemed that he had the sight. Still, he was the first person she had met who actually knew about the selkies and was apparently willing to talk about them. She needed to find her voice and ask sensible questions.

“You are nervous, mistress? Do you seek someone tae take away your carnal sins? Is that why you have come? If so, I should warn ye that sin eating works best with corpses. Of course, I should be glad tae make an appointment for some future date,” the old man said softly, smiling
at his small jest, as a pale gray wreath of smoke encircled his head.

“No! I don’t need a sin eater!” Hexy was surprised at how emphatic she sounded when her words finally burst free. The tone was nearly rude, but it only made the old man’s smile widen.

“I didn’t think sae. The lassies never do repent. It’s just as well. I do believe that I shall predecease you, anyway. A body can only hold sae much woe before it collapses.” He shook his head. “If it isnae the selkies, what then troubles you, mistress?”

Feeling a catch at the back of her throat, Hexy reminded herself to keep her breathing slow and shallow.

She was also not entirely without gifts, and reached out with what she was beginning to think of as her inner eyes to probe at Padraig’s intentions. She could read very little about the man, for he seemed able to cloak himself, but what little she sensed was entirely benign.

Afraid of frightening him away with a spill of wild words, she began hesitantly: “I have been reading an old book—a diary of sorts—and I ran across a letter from a woman who died. She killed herself, actually. Did you by any chance know a Morag Campbell?”

Padraig thought for a moment and then said carefully, “I know of her. She died before my
time of calling, but the sin eater before me was summoned tae her deathbed, and having his memories inside me now, I know of her, too. And all the lassies before her as well. Of course, I cannot speak of their sins or hers. In that, mistress, I am rather like a priest.”

Hexy shivered, considering how it was that the sin eater might have acquired his knowledge. She wanted to reject the notion that a sin eater could actually have absorbed the experiences of his predecessor by consuming the baked meats laid out on the corpse’s body, but she couldn’t dismiss the notion as easily and as entirely as she might have a month earlier.

“I don’t want to know anything personal about Morag Campbell. I need some help locating someone else. I need to know—” Hexy swallowed, and then said bluntly, “I need to find a creature, a finman called Sevin who lives in a place called Wrathdrum. I thought that perhaps Morag had known someone who was familiar with this place.”

It was the sin eater’s turn to be unbalanced. His smoldering pipe fell to the ground, scattering red embers as it landed awkwardly on the packed earth.

“Och! Why dae you seek the sorcerous monster Sevin?” he asked harshly, bending to retrieve his pipe. The burning embers touched his withered flesh as he groped for the bowl,
but he didn’t seem to feel them. “No good can come of it, mistress, I warn thee.”

She agreed with the old man, but her options were all but gone. She was certain now that it was not family matters that detained Ruairidh. And this man seemed the only person who knew anything concrete about the other, invisible society that lived on the outskirts of the land. She didn’t want to risk endangering Ruairidh or herself by admitting to what would be seen by many as a blasphemous union, but she didn’t feel that she had much choice. She reminded herself that the sin eater had said he was like a priest, and that he had probably seen so much wickedness that he would not be shocked by anything she said. Besides that, he
felt
safe.

But even with these rationalizations, it took Hexy a moment to answer. Admitting out loud, to a witness, what she believed was happening made it all real. After this there was no turning back, no possible denial of what she believed. She could not someday tell herself that she had had a brain fever that made her imagine wild things, for there would be another person who knew that she was not in the clutches of illness when she said them.

Ruairidh had teased her that she was probably bad at sums and plussages, and it was true. So she calculated everything again, slowly and
carefully. But no matter how she totaled up the facts, she still came up short of needed knowledge. Frankness, at least to a degree, was called for on both sides if she was to learn what she needed to know.

Throwing away more caution, Hexy answered plainly.

“I believe that this monster of Wrathdrum has stolen the soul of someone this friend of mine knows, and I fear that my friend—this person I love—has gone to retrieve it.” She stopped then, refusing to voice any more of her fears of what might have happened to Ruairidh. “Do you know where I could find the finman? Do you know where this place called Wrathdrum is?”

“I don’t know Wrathdrum. It isn’t the concern of men, sae I do not search for knowledge of it. There’s wickedness enough in our world.” The reply was instant and emphatic.

“Please. Help me. I sense that I have very little time.” Involuntarily, her hand settled on her stomach. “You must know something that can help me. I
have
to find my friend.”