Jack hesitated. He didn’t want to scare her more than necessary, but he remembered Adaira’s words from the day before. One girl had gone missing on her walk home from school. The other, while tending the sheep in the pasture. He thought back on the stories Mirin had once told him. Legends where spirits—often benevolent ones—thrived in the yard and were even welcomed inside, such as when a fire was lit in the hearth. But he had never heard of one approaching a house and forcibly entering. Not that it was impossible, as the spirits often accepted the gifts left for them on porches and thresholds, but it seemed that even the most dangerous of beings preferred to be in the wild, where their powers were strongest.
“I’m not sure, Frae,” Jack said.
“Mum says the spirits in our yard are good. As long as I am home or stay on the roads or at school, the folk can’t trick me. They watch over me, especially when I wear my plaid.”
Jack’s eyes drifted to Frae’s shawl, which she had knotted crookedly over her collarbones. He noted its shimmer of enchantment. The shawl was green from summer bracken and nettles, with a vein of madder red and lichen gold. Colors of the earth spirits, harvested and crushed and soaked to make dyes. He wondered what secret was woven into that pattern, and for once he was glad of Mirin’s skill.
He smiled at his little sister, hoping to ease her worry. “Mum’s right. Now show me where the best flowers grow.”
Torin was walking the nook of the marsh, searching for the missing girls, when he spotted Jack standing beside a crown of rocks, waiting to speak with him. Torin took his time. His clothes were wrinkled stiff from the rain, and his eyes bleary from a long night, but he continued to comb through the wet grass. His boots squelched, startling meadow pipits in their morning foray as his guards fanned out behind him. Eventually he reached Jack and the shadows of the rocks. Torin noticed a flower was tucked into Jack’s dark hair, but he said nothing of it.
He had finally met Frae then.
“No sign of either lass?” Jack said.
Torin shook his head. “Not a trace.”
“I think you should search the western hills, up by my mum’s croft.”
“Why is that?” Torin knew he sounded skeptical, but all he could think of was how the spirits had been thwarting him. The wind had blown away any markings in the grass. The storm had broken, impeding him at every turn, and even now the rain sat in puddles, destroying any evidence of where the lasses might have wandered off to.
He feared the worst—that he would not be able to find either girl. The conversation he had had with Eliza’s mother last week still rattled in his skull, like broken bones.
Why would the folk take my daughter? Can I strike a bargain with them to get her back?
Torin had been speechless, uncertain what to say to the desperate woman. But it had turned his thoughts toward more dangerous, risky contemplations.
Jack was quiet, waiting for Torin’s attention. The wind carved a path between them, but there were no whispers within it that morning.
“I heard something strange last night,” Jack began, and Torin’s focus sharpened. He listened as Jack told him about the shutters rattling, the shadow that had fled into the hills.
“You saw them?” Torin demanded. “What did they look like? Which manner of spirit was it? Earth? Water?”
“I saw a shadow moving,” Jack corrected. He paused, hesitant. “I couldn’t determine how it was built. But it has me wondering … are the spirits becoming bolder? Have they been approaching houses with the intention to enter, uninvited?”
“It’s rare, but I’ve heard stories of them doing so in the past,” Torin replied. “And if it truly was a spirit knocking on your window last night … it’s a sign they’re growing cold and cruel. To steal a lass directly from her home.”
Jack frowned. “Could it mean that there is trouble brewing in the spirit’s realm?”
“Perhaps,” Torin said. “But there’s no true way of knowing, now, is there? If they refuse to manifest and speak directly to us, we can only wonder.” He sighed, motioning for his guards to gather. “If you think something might be hiding in the west hills, we’ll search there.”
Torin began to chart his course by the rising sun, heading toward Mirin’s croft, but Jack stopped him.
“You don’t think it was a Breccan scout, do you, Torin?”
Torin paused, let his guards pass by him before he responded. “If it was a Breccan, I would know. No one crosses the clan line without my knowledge.” And he flexed his left hand, the one that bore the scar.