We lived quietly. We planted and reaped and watched bitterly as wildlings were found and killed, knowing them to be the children of the very people who killed them. What could we say that would stop them?
I made a stone to commemorate our mothers and Amy’s sister, and the nine others who had been killed. Father Ross spotted me at work and invited me to place the stone within the kirk.
“I’d rather not,” I told him. “There’ll be an outcry.”
“An outcry?” he said. “They’ve paid for their sins, and it is up to God to judge them now. Their memory is no stain, but a warning.”
I could not agree with him about the warning part, but I consented. Slowly, the presence of the stone stirred up more than I could have imagined—some of the older members of the community stopped after the church service on the Sabbath to lay wildflowers by the stone. Sometimes I would hear them mutter remembrances about Finwell, or my mother.
I cannot say whether the stone acted as a warning or not. But while witches continued to be burned all around us, there was never another witch trial on Lòn Haven, though the legacy of wildlings persisted.
One day I hoped that, too, would cease.
SAPPHIRE, 2021
“Lunch money?”
“Got it,” Saffy tells her foster mother. She throws her a tight smile before heading out the front door and walking briskly to school.
It’s been six months since she came out of Witches Hide. Six months since she was found on the bay, bleeding, and in shock. Six months since she sat in the police station and had been told that the year was 2020. She didn’t believe them. They’d asked for her next of kin. She gave them her mother’s name and date of birth. They couldn’t find her. She gave them her uncle’s name and address. He’d died ten years ago. She couldn’t take it in. What was going on? If it wasn’t for the wound in her shoulder—a two-inch stab wound that missed her subscapular artery by millimeters—she’d have thought she was being pranked. Payback for how horrible she’d been to her mum and sisters. But the strangeness of her surroundings didn’t lessen, the odd way people dressed and the cars and the mobile phones. Like a form of magic. And when a social worker came, it started to sink in. She was in 2020.
And she was entirely alone.
She’s been staying with a foster family, the McKennas, in St. Andrews. They have a beautiful home, a four-bedroomed chapel conversion with ocean views that they’d hoped to fill with their own children but never could. Michael works as a lawyer and Jenn’s a full-time fosterer. They’re quite taken with Saffy, and she with them. She has an iPhone 8 and a laptop and an Instagram account. She has friends at the local school. She’s on antidepressants and sees a counselor. No one has been able to trace her family. No one and nothing has been able to fill the gaping hole in her heart.
So today, she’s running away. She’s left a note for Michael and Jenn with a bouquet of wildflowers she picked yesterday tied with some gardening yarn. She doesn’t want to hurt them, they’re lovely people, so she’s taken time to think carefully about what to say. She hopes they’re not upset.
She’s going back to Lòn Haven to find out for herself what happened. She’s already worked it out. When she went through Witches Hide, she moved forward in time. The stuff she’d read in the grimoire was all true. The witches from Lòn Haven put some kind of spell on the cave in revenge for the way they’d been treated, and rightly so. But now she’s in 2021. She’s spent time learning how to use the internet. Four weeks ago she found a Facebook page with her face on it. Find Saffy Stay!
There was a name on the “admin” section of page. Luna Stay. Luna had set it up. Luna was a grown woman, now. Saffy marveled at the thought of this—of course she was. It was 2020—Luna was thirty-two! And she was looking for her.
Saffy was astonished. At the click of a button, she had found her sister! She could go home, at long last. But Luna hadn’t responded to any of Saffy’s messages. Maybe she’d done it wrong.