She is tired of people looking at her with unsmiling expressions. She supposes she deserves it. She thinks, again (always), of that photo she’d taken of Darcy in the dam. It’s doing the rounds again; a meme this time about exams and homework. It makes her feel nauseous. She thinks of the cool, still space of the gallery where the image should have ended up. Safe. It makes her want to wrap her arms around Darcy. She breathes out, imagines the steady, thrilling feel of her camera button under her finger.

  She tries to focus on the documents in front of her. Another of the executed women, Elspeth, had lived on Seannay, in what was now one of the ruins across from the ghost house. She’d been a widow and, after her execution, the land had reverted to the earl, who ruled the islands at the time. She was accused of calling the whales. She was accused of promising fruitfulness in nature. Luda has found no record of who had lived in the ghost house nor why it had been preserved when the other houses on the island had not.

  Luda peers down at her arms. Her own history, netted in the scars on her skin. The ones that extend down her arms and across the flare of her palms.

  And, scattered like stars, like stories across the walls and eaves of the house, those witch marks. The more Luda learns about these women, the more she is certain that they are connected to the marks. It is a feeling, drawn from the same part of her that recognises the crosshatch of scars on her skin as being her own.

  She wonders whether these women, who had been charged and tried and executed together, had been friends. She hopes they had.

  A pang.

  It is so easy to shape her imaginings of these women into people she would have liked to know. Canny and ferocious and powerful. Unruly. Perhaps people who would have seen and loved that hidden, hungry part of her. The wordless part that lives in a world of light and angles.

  Just women. Just women. Just women.

  Father Lee. That smooth, arrogant face.

  Sometimes, when she’s had perhaps too much wine, she will be certain that she can make out women near the pebbled beach; a single woman standing over her while she sleeps on her thin mattress near the Rayburn.

  Luda has always had a vivid imagination.

  She comes frequently back to the list of charges. Raising a procession of the dead. Fruitfulness in nature. Calling whales from the sound and riding upon them like horses. She thinks of briny fields and broken sea walls. The photos she’s taken.

  She does not, will not, think of the cliffs. She makes notes, drinks coffee.

  Not that she believes in magic, but would such a spell – a spell of fruitfulness – be enough to save the islands? Would that be enough to calm the seas? These ghosts. They are so much safer than staring through the viewfinder of her camera at the hungry, moving sea.

  The more that Min thinks about Father Lee taking something precious from Theo, the more enraged and restless she becomes. She asks Cassandra whether Father Lee will be keeping it at the kirk.

  ‘The kirk, or in a pocket,’ Cassandra says. ‘He’ll be expecting Theo to turn up to worship.’

  And when Min asks Theo if he’s going to see Father Lee, he glances at her and then away. He has a faded bruise on his cheek. ‘I’m not going to the kirk,’ he says. ‘I’ll figure out another way.’

  ‘Maybe Iris will get it for you?’

  ‘No.’ His mouth twists. ‘She definitely won’t.’

  So, on Sunday, Theo goes to the Wailing Cliffs to stamp and yell, and Min rides her rusted, buckling bike towards the kirk. The water is still today and she thinks of her father, lifting things up from the sludgy remains of the dams back home.

  She focuses on peddling. She waits until Father Lee begins his sermon and then she enters via the side door she had noticed on her visit, weeks ago now, with Tristan and her mother.

  The door opens next to a dim corridor that leads to a small amenities room, tucked in behind the custodian’s office that Iris inhabits. Min thinks of how Theo moves across the tidal island, disappearing into shadows. She tries to imagine herself into this secret, shadowy Theo. She slinks into the amenities room with its single high window, narrow table, kitchen. A faded couch with a jacket tossed onto it. Min glances behind her at the hallway leading into the main body of the kirk, and then slips her hand into the jacket pockets.

  Her fingers close on the shard of sea glass. It’s red and worn smooth by the sea. Smiling, she heads back out the side door like shadowy Theo and rides, breathless and thrilled, through the town and along the roads that lead to the northern side of Big Island.

  The Wailing Cliffs are on the edge of a wild, frothing, churning sea. The hiss and thud of waves against rock. She finds Theo glowering, cross-legged, a little way back from the cliff edge. He’s damp and breathing heavily from running or raging. He offers her a flask of whisky when she sits down next to him.

  She hands him the sea glass without speaking. His gloved hand closes over it and he looks searchingly into her face. ‘How?’ he asks.

  ‘I stole it out of his jacket while he was giving his Sunday sermon,’ she says, stretching her legs out in front of her. She takes a mouthful of whisky.

  He smiles then, a slow, beautiful smile. He holds the sea glass up to the sun and then tucks it into his pocket. ‘Thanks, Min.’ He reaches for her hand. And Min thinks of Harper and Sōta and Nico, but the thought of them doesn’t make her ache quite as much as it had when she first came here. She rests her head on Theo’s shoulder, and soon they stand and throw stones into the churning sea until their arms are sore.

  Chapter Ten

  MAY (THEIR FIRST YEAR)

  After Sunday’s service, a woman had waited patiently near the confessional to speak to Father Lee. She could hear clanging, bangs, coming from somewhere behind Iris Muir’s office. Where the hell is it? It was right here! More banging. More clanging. She glanced at her watch.

  Finally, Father Lee emerged, red-cheeked, hair tousled. ‘Oh, Isabella,’ he said, his voice calm and warm, even as his chest heaved with exertion. He grabbed her hand with both of his (sweaty). ‘What can I do for you?’

  Cassandra is at the pub. She does not come as often as she’d like – it’s a difficult journey for her in this papery body of hers. But she had not been entirely lying when she told Father Lee that it was her version of a sacrament.

  While she truly craves the wildness of the shoreline, the sea takes something from her if she strays too close. The wind and the sun and the earth. The price it exacts is exhaustion – the vacuous kind, where she disappears inside herself for days, breath so slow that often doctors are called.

  Despite the fact it is a slow and painful process getting Cassandra into a car and then out again and then into the plushest booth in the pub, she can normally convince Lorraine to take her. Lorraine has six lads, now grown, and on any given day one or two of them can be found at the Blue Fin, picking at a plate of hot chips or playing darts. They are the sorts of lads who are happy to give her a hug and a peck on the cheek in front of people and it always makes Lorraine glow with pleasure.

  It doesn’t hurt that the pints are cheap on a Monday, either.

  Lorraine had dropped Cassandra off an hour or so ago and Ewan would be picking her up when he finished at the docks. She has a blanket over her legs. She drinks whisky.

  Violet Reynolds sits across the room, nursing a soda water. Like Cassandra, she seems to find the pub comforting. She comes for the company, the sense of space being taken up by warm air (not empty) and the general bustle of normal people living normal lives. She does not drink. Cassandra wonders if it is because of Father Lee’s aversion to women consuming alcohol, or whether it is because Violet Reynolds is aware that if she starts, she will not stop.

  After a while, Violet moves across the room and sits down next to Cassandra and takes her hand. They sit like that. Cassandra lets the waves of numbing sorrow move from Violet’s body to her own. She senses Violet’s breathing come a little easier, the slightest squeeze of Violet’s fingers. Cassandra nods to Louise, who brings over another glass of whisky. A plate of hot chips that Cassandra hopes Violet will pick at. Another glass of sparkling water that Louise never charges Violet for.

  Violet closes her eyes, imagining Cassandra’s small, narrow hand into the small, narrow hand of another. Cassandra sits very still, watching one of Lorraine’s middle lads lean over the bar and say something to Louise that makes Louise throw back her head and laugh. Men from the docks, vaguely familiar but nameless in that peculiar island way, empty the rubbish from their pockets onto their plates for Louise to clean away.

  Cassandra frees her hand and has a sip of whisky.

  Later, Iris comes and sits down next to her. ‘Ewan got held up,’ she says, frowning.

  Louise brings over a tea for Iris and Iris thanks her curtly. Iris will drink it (as she always does) because she hates anything to be wasted. And Cassandra will have the pleasure of watching Iris seated in the pub with a tea in her hand, simmering with indignation.

  One of those with Lorraine’s middle lad says something about Louise spreading her legs – something crude. An attempt at humour. Lorraine’s lad swats at him, but he’s laughing. Lads are gentle with each other in this way – laughing at the unfunny things their friends say.

  ‘I don’t know what you see in this place,’ Iris says in a low voice, but she does know.

  Cassandra does not need to touch Iris for the impressions to flare between them. Iris is thinking of the kirk. Of her mother, August. She is thinking of Haaken’s Hole. Of how, when nobody else is in the kirk, she will stand by the yawning mouth of it and trace her fingers over the worn stone, feeling an ache of something as old as the kirk itself.

  Iris gives her a venomous look. The impressions fade to a studied nothingness. She has another gulp of her tea.

  ‘I hear that Carter fellow caught the morning ferry,’ Cassandra says.

  Lorraine’s middle lad has gone to the toilet. His friend is bending low over the worn-out pool table.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Well, that’s good news, isn’t it?’

  ‘If he’s leaving, it’s because he’s got what he came for.’ Iris sags a little. It’s as close as she ever gets to slumping in her seat.

  ‘Or because he’s given up.’ But Cassandra knows this is not true. Iris knows it, too.

  Theo’s pale skin mottled in a bruise. His cheek grazed. The stubborn jut of his chin, his silence. Iris doesn’t bother shutting this one away. Her aching worry.

  ‘You can’t keep him locked up,’ Cassandra says. ‘He’s nearly grown. We learn best from our own mistakes.’

  ‘I’m well aware of that, thank you.’

  Old, old wounds. The missing shard of sea glass that Father Lee has been both sullen and defiant about. It was right here, in my pocket!

  ‘I suspect it’s been returned to its rightful owner,’ Cassandra says, sipping her whisky.

  Iris’s eyes narrow, but she doesn’t look as displeased as Cassandra would have expected. ‘Marcus is livid.’

  ‘Good.’

  They stare at each other.

  ‘How does Violet seem to you?’ Cassandra asks eventually.

  ‘Shattered. Bryce has had to disable their internet. She’s been compulsively looking at the photos that relative of yours took.’

  ‘Aye, I’ve already said that those were misjudged.’

  ‘Misjudged? They were barbaric.’

  Cassandra shrugs. ‘Ewan says it’s got the attention of federal funding bodies.’

  ‘I’m on the council, Cassandra. I’m aware.’

  ‘Apparently, one big construction company has already offered to fund the upkeep of the dry stone wall up north.’

  ‘Well, that’s alright then, isn’t it?’ Iris sets her empty teacup down. ‘As long as the funding bodies are taking notice.’

  ‘No.’ Cassandra considers her whisky. ‘No, I don’t think it is.’

  Iris’s thoughts turn to Seannay as they occasionally do. She scratches at her long throat.

  ‘I hear Tristan’s still mooning around the ghost house,’ Cassandra says.

  ‘The council doesn’t support the research.’ A snort. ‘Not that it stops him.’

  Cassandra turns her whisky tumbler slowly on the worn wooden table. ‘It won’t be there forever, you know.’

  ‘I’m aware of that.’

  ‘Are you? You think you’ll be able to just walk across one day and hunt everything out for yourself? That’s not how it works. The islands are being destroyed.’

  Iris says nothing.

  ‘One particularly ferocious storm and the ghost house could be as tumbledown as all the other places on Seannay.’ Cassandra says. ‘Just something to think on.’

  Iris sniffs.

  Lorraine’s middle lad emerges from the toilets. Cassandra sits up straighter in her seat.

  ‘You,’ she says.

  The lad bobs his curly head, rounds his shoulders and comes over to the booth. ‘How are you, yourself?’

  ‘Not so bad,’ Cassandra says. She senses Iris watching her with narrowed eyes. ‘I was hoping you’d do me a favour.’

  He relaxes a little. Big, strong lad like him probably thinks she needs help out to Iris’s car. ‘Aye,’ he says.

  ‘There’s an image stuck up in the men’s toilets,’ Cassandra says, her voice very pleasant. ‘Of an upset young lad lying on cracked earth.’

  Lorraine’s lad says nothing, but he nods once.

  ‘Someone has scrawled the words bad fuck over it.’

  The lad reddens. Why do the young always think they have the only claim over foul language? She has been using foul language for longer than he’s been alive.

  ‘Fetch it for me, would you?’

  The lad bobs his head again, disappears, and returns with the printout of Darcy in the dried-out dam. Cassandra smiles, thanks him. Then she rips it into tiny, tiny pieces and sets them on the saucer beneath Iris’s teacup.

  ‘If you see anything else like this in the toilets, or around the town, take it down, won’t you?’ Her voice is more threatening than she means it to be. The lad takes a step back, nods.

  Iris lets her breath out. ‘You shouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Do what?’

  Iris shakes her head and stands. ‘Finish your drink. It’s time to go home.’

  Theo begins meeting the Managans further from the school; further from the alleyway that runs past the hostel. Sometimes, he thinks he dreamt attacking those lads.

  His knuckles are still stiff.

  Sometimes he does not fall into step beside the siblings until they’ve reached the other side of town. Sometimes he’s not there at all, and this rattles both Managans, although neither of them admits it to the other.

  Today Min walks alongside Kole, who has been strangely quiet with her since she demanded that he tell her Darcy’s name. They are not meeting his friends today. Instead they are walking to the small inland loch that had once been part of the bay. There are swans there, he’d said. And he’d shrugged with unfamiliar awkwardness.

  It’s a bright afternoon, the days slowly beginning to lengthen towards summer. There are no swans at the loch, just swan shit, a few pale gulls and a pattern of rubbish on the shoreline. So much rubbish.

  Kole’s ears go red. They stare at the shit-tinged water.

  ‘I don’t just want to hang out with you to annoy my parents.’

  Min gazes out at the loch. The water of it seems to be made up of a different substance from the breathing, watchful sea. She thinks of Cassandra’s stories, about the one that made it sound as though Cassandra had swum here when it was still soupy with salt and seaweed and starfish. She wants to swim where Cassandra has swum. She wants to share Cassandra’s stories with more than just her imagination.

  ‘Min?’

  ‘What?’ She glances up from the water, startled to find that Kole has shifted closer to her. Things suddenly make sense. The swans; the absence of his friends. Jesus.

  He runs a hand through his hair, angling his jaw in a way that he must practise in the mirror. He sighs, reaches for her face and tips her chin up. ‘You’re hot, you know.’ He says this softly and reverentially, as though he has paid her an unimaginably profound compliment.

  Perhaps back home, before everything, Min may have glowed and leant in. She may have given him what he wanted. She has kissed boys back home; it had been light and giggly and they had all been her age. Standing in front of her, Kole suddenly seems very much older than she is. He seems very much like a man.

  She considers the word hot. She thinks, Aren’t I strong? And fierce? And don’t I notice people and care? The words she would prefer to hot tumble over each other until her head is buzzing and her cheeks flush with the urgency of them all.

  She moves her chin sharply from his hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, and she is. When she confronted him over Darcy, she had not wanted this. She had wanted to be seen. Why couldn’t he see her without thinking that he had to call her hot? Why couldn’t he see her and make space for her, without the possibility of sex or something like it? Wasn’t she worth that?

  His expression shifts. ‘Is this because of Theo? Because it wasn’t me. I was just there. Us local lads wouldn’t touch him. Not ever.’

  Min frowns. ‘What?’

  His expression shifts again. Surprise, then feigned casualness. ‘Nothing. It was nothing.’

  ‘What about Theo? What wasn’t you?’

  ‘Nothing! It was nothing. Just some of the hostel lads mucking around with him, that’s all. He slipped. He’s fine.’ That self-righteous, defiant jaw. The way each sentence lands hard against the next like pearls on a string. Clink. Clink. Clink.

  ‘I didn’t know about that,’ Min says. ‘Bloody hell, Kole.’

  They stand like that for another moment, and then Min straightens. She gives Kole a look and begins to walk away. She thinks he might follow. That, having gone as far as to call her hot, he might fight for her now. But he doesn’t and she is relieved.

  On the other side of the loch, where the road begins to arc towards the sound, Theo falls silently into step beside her.