“Liv, I implore you to put aside what you think you know and listen to those of us who have suffered,” Mirrin shouted then, throwing her hands up. The room fell silent, and Mirrin fixed me with an emotional stare, her eyes wide and glassy with tears. She lifted a hand and pressed it to her chest. “I lived on an island called Mulltraive,” she said, her voice trembling. “I had four brothers and three sisters. My parents ran a farm. My mother found a child wandering along the riverbank, a wee boy. My mother took him in and set about finding his parents. I remember my brother Ian forcing us all to play with the child. Said he’d want to make sure the wee boy didn’t feel too scared while his parents were found. Not long after, I went to visit my aunt Shauneen in Fort William. By the time I returned to the island, my family was dead.” She hung her head, overcome with emotion. “All my brothers. All my sisters. Both my parents. And not a month later, we had floods. Hundreds of livestock killed, twenty crofts underwater. Crops destroyed. It took a government intervention to keep the community from starving. But no one ever claimed that boy. And he was never seen again.”
I was reeling from what she told me. From the connections they were all drawing between terrible, gruesome events and innocent children. “I’m sorry for you, and for your family,” I said carefully. “And I’m sorry about your brother,” I said, turning to Isla. “But . . . the risk you run in telling such stories is that you persuade people to do terrible things.”
“There is a way to distinguish between perfectly innocent children and the wildlings who mimic them,” Ruqayya said. She moved forward, onto her hands and knees, staring down at the scroll. “There,” she said, pointing at an image of numbers. “A red mark, a burn, with scratches in it. If you look closely enough you’ll see they’re numbers. Always numbers.”
I looked where she pointed. There was a large set of numbers drawn in a row.
“My mother wouldn’t hurt a fly,” Isla said. “But the mark she found on the wildling was undeniable. It had four numbers, just like the curse said. The wildling cried for her, and her heart was broken, but she went through with it. She dragged that thing to the burning trees up by the Brae and did what was needed. She never spoke of it until many years later, and only then it was to warn me. She took no pleasure in what she did. But she’d had to bury my grandfather because she’d hesitated. And the day after, the storms stopped.”
My stomach dropped as I realized what she’d said. Isla was telling me that her mother murdered her little brother. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Isla believed what she did was right.
Carefully, I set down my glass and stood up, measuring my words carefully. “Ladies, I appreciate you telling me all this. But really, there is no need. If I see the boy again, I’ll call the police.”
They all looked up at me from their circle as I stood to leave. I didn’t want to offend them. I didn’t want to lose their friendship. But I could take none of it seriously, and I needed to process what Isla had revealed to me.
As I went to walk out, I felt someone grab my hand. It was Isla.
“You should consider leaving the island,” she said, her eyes stern and her grip hard. “There might still be time.”
I pulled my hand away and forced a smile on my face. “Oh, I bet we’ll be fine,” I said, and walked quickly out of the door.
III
I don’t think I’ve ever felt as alone as I did that night.
Once the girls had gone to bed, I sat in the armchair of the living room in the bothy, looking out the window at the moon streaking the back of the sea with a white stripe of light. I had spent some nights here feeling increasingly at home, soothed by the waves and the vast spread of the horizon. But now I felt sick to my stomach. The thought of Isla’s mother murdering her little brother played over and over in my head. A helpless little boy, his life taken in the most brutal way because of some ridiculous superstition. No justice for him. And the superstition persisted, even now, in 1998. It made me so angry.