It was the place where they had once swum for countless hours as children. Jack wondered if Adaira was choosing it because the rock held strong memories for them both. He vividly recalled bobbing on the waves as a lad and racing her to the shore, eager to beat her.
“Of course,” he said. “I haven’t forgotten my way around the isle.”
She only smiled.
Jack was carefully folding Lorna’s music into his harp case when Adaira said, “I suppose you are eager to see Mirin?”
He bit back a sarcastic retort. “Aye. Since you’re done with me, I’ll be heading that way to visit her.”
“She’ll be overjoyed to see you,” Adaira stated.
Jack said nothing, but his heart felt like stone. When he had first arrived at the mainland school, his mother had written him once a month. He had gone to a broom closet and wept every time her words had arrived. Reading of the isle roused his longing to return home, and he often skipped his music classes, hoping his professors would send him back. They hadn’t, of course, because they were determined to see him flourish there. The wild isle-born lad who would have had no proper last name if not for the generosity of his laird.
As the years passed, Jack had finally given himself up to the music, falling deeper and deeper into that world, and Mirin’s letters had become more and more infrequent, until they only arrived annually, when the leaves turned gold and the frost fell and he had aged another year.
“I have no doubt,” Jack said, and this time the sarcasm bled into his voice.
Adaira must have noticed, but she didn’t make a remark. “Thank you for your help, Jack,” she said. “Would you also be able to meet with me again tomorrow at noontide?”
“I don’t see why not.”
Adaira tilted her head, gazing at him. “You are quite overjoyed to be home, aren’t you, my old menace?”
“This place was never my home,” he said.
She made no reply to that comment, but her eyes softened. “Then I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He watched her leave. He stood in the music chamber for a few minutes more, to soak in the solitude.
The light was beginning to fade. He felt how late the hour was, and he knew he couldn’t delay the inevitable.
It was time for him to see Mirin.
Jack once reveled in the swiftness of hill travel. As a boy, he had been quick to learn which summits flattened and which ones multiplied, which rivers changed course and which lochs vanished, which trees moved and which ones held steady. He knew how to find his way back to the road should the folk succeed in tricking him.
But it might have been foolish of him to think that would still be the case a decade later.
The isle looked nothing like he remembered. He pressed west as he walked the fells, Torin’s boots wearing blisters on his heels, and suddenly the land around him was wild and endless. He might have once loved this place and its many faces, but he was a stranger to it now.
One kilometer stretched into two. The hills turned steep and merciless. He slipped on a slope of shale and cut his knees. He walked for what felt like hours, searching for a road, until afternoon gave way to evening, and the shadows around him turned cold and blue.
He had no idea where he was as the stars began to burn.
The southern wind blew, carrying a tangle of whispers. Jack was too distracted to pay attention, his heart beating in his throat as a storm broke overhead. He pressed on through mud puddles and streams.
It would be easy for a young lass to get lost here, he thought.
He reminded himself how much he had grown to hate this place and its unpredictability, and he eventually came to a halt, drenched and angry.
“Take me!” He dared the spirits who were toying with him. The wind, the earth, the water, and the fire. He challenged the glens and the mountains and the bottomless trickling pools, every corner of the isle that sprawled before him, gleaming with rain. The fire in the stars, the whisper of the wind.
If they had ushered the girls away for their own amusement, why did they hesitate with him? He waited, but nothing happened.
The gale chased the clouds, and the sky teemed with constellations again, as if the storm had never been.
Jack trudged onward. Gradually, he began to recognize his surroundings, and he found the western road once more.
He was almost to Mirin’s.
His mother lived on the edge of the community, where the threat of a raid was constant, even in summer. Despite the risk the Breccans posed, Mirin had insisted on remaining there. She had grown up an orphan until a widow took her as an apprentice, to teach her the craft of weaving. This house and land were hers now, her only inheritance, the widow having long since perished.