Read Chapter 12: Seal Skin Found

The spring tide pulled back farther than Isla had ever seen it, leaving the beach at Clach Ghorm naked and steaming in the cold afternoon light. Rocks that usually wore a collar of white foam stood dry and barnacle-crusted, and the air smelled of exposed weed and old salt. She had brought Tam here on impulse, following a thread in Morag’s stories about a sea cave that only opened twice a year, when the tide surrendered its deepest thresholds.

“It’s called Uamh nan Ròn,” Isla said, her voice carrying across the wet sand. “The Cave of the Seals. The old ones said the selkies stored their skins here between the full moons, when they walked among men.”

Tam stood at the cave mouth, head tilted. His hair was dark with sea spray, and the bruise on his jaw from the storm had faded to a sickly yellow. He had not spoken much since the village vote was called. The men would gather in the hall at dusk, and Isla could feel the hour pressing on her like a barometer dropping.

“I have been here before,” he said. Not a question. A statement of fact delivered with the same quiet bewilderment he used for all his fragments of memory.

The cave opened like a throat. Water dripped from the roof in slow, musical notes, and the walls glittered with veins of quartz that caught the last of the daylight. Isla clicked on her torch and swept the beam across the chamber. Seal bones littered the floor—ribs curved like driftwood, a skull worn smooth by the sea’s patience. Offerings, maybe. Or the remains of meals taken in safety.

Tam walked past her, drawn deeper. He moved with a certainty that made Isla’s skin prickle.

“Tam,” she said. “We should stay where we can see the entrance.”

He didn’t answer. His footsteps echoed off the rock, and then stopped.

The niche was cut into the back wall, hidden behind a curtain of dried kelp that crackled like old paper. Inside, folded with impossible care, lay a coat. It was made of sealskin—dark, almost black, with a sheen that caught the torchlight and threw it back in ripples of green and grey. It had no buttons, no seams that Isla could see. It looked less sewn than grown, as if it had been shed whole.

Tam reached for it.

“Wait,” Isla said.

But his fingers had already touched the fur.

The effect was immediate. Tam’s body went rigid, his eyes staring at nothing. His breath came in short, sharp bursts, and a low sound escaped his throat—not a word, but something older. A seal’s cry, raw and grieving.

Isla crossed the cave in three strides and grabbed his arm. His skin was cold, colder than the air. “Tam. Tam, look at me.”

He didn’t. His gaze was fixed on the coat, and his mouth worked like a man trying to swallow a scream.

“I was in the net,” he said, his voice distant, a boy’s voice. “The net was heavy and I couldn’t break it. The water was dark and there was blood—my blood—and the ropes smelled of tar and iron.”

Isla’s throat closed. She held his arm tighter.

“The woman came down to the shore,” Tam went on, each word dragged from deep water. “She had a knife. She cut the net and pulled me free. I was so tired. I didn’t want to shift back, but she was crying and I wanted her to stop. So I did. I stood on two legs and I was cold and small and I’d lost something—something I needed to go home.”

He blinked. For the first time, his eyes focused on the coat in front of him.

“She took it,” he said. “The woman took my skin and wrapped it in oilcloth and buried it under the floor of the bothy. And then she spoke a spell over me, a spell of forgetting, so I would never remember the sea or the sky beneath it or the way the tide pulled at my blood.”

The cave was silent. The drips had stopped, or Isla’s ears had forgotten them.

“The spell is breaking,” Tam whispered. “The longer I stay out of the water, the more it fades. And now—now I know.” He looked at Isla, and his eyes were the grey of the open ocean in a storm. “This coat is mine. Without it, I can never return to the sea.”

Isla’s torch shook in her hand. The light danced across the sealskin, and she saw it then—the workmanship, the way the pelt seemed to shift and breathe, as if it were only waiting for its owner to slip back inside.

“Ewan,” she said, the name escaping before she could stop it. “Mrs. Kincaid’s son.”

Tam’s brow furrowed. The name raised no echo in his eyes. “I don’t know that name.”

“The woman with the knife,” Isla pressed. “She had a son. He drowned, or vanished, and she burned his skin when he was fifteen. But the son—Ewan—he had a pendant. A sea-glass pendant. She gave it to me.” Isla’s hand went to her chest, where the pendant hung beneath her jumper. It felt warm against her skin, warmer than it should.

Tam shook his head slowly. “I remember the knife. I remember the net. I don’t remember a son.”

But something flickered in his expression at the word pendant. A crack in the forgetting.

Isla stepped closer, pulling the pendant out from under her jumper. The sea glass caught the torchlight and glowed green, the colour of her father’s confession, of Mrs. Kincaid’s grief, of the woman in Angus MacNeil’s story who had green eyes like sea glass and looked like Isla herself.

“This was in the water when you washed ashore,” she said. “It belongs to Ewan. But it was warm when you touched it, the first time we brought you inside. It knew you, Tam. It knew you before you knew yourself.”

Tam’s hand came up to the pendant, hovering a finger’s breadth from the glass. His face twisted with the effort of trying to reach something just out of grasp.

“I was a man,” he said slowly. “I was a man for a long time. I had a mother. I had chores and a bed and a name. And then one day I went down to the water and the tide took me back. The sea called and I answered, but it wasn’t my sea—not anymore. My skin was burned. I had no way to be what I was. So I drifted. I forgot. I forgot everything except the longing.”

His hand closed around the pendant. Isla felt the heat jump from the glass to her skin, a pulse like a heartbeat.

“I have been caught twice,” Tam said. “Once in the net. Once by the forgetting. But this—this coat—it means I can choose.”

Isla’s mind raced. The village vote was hours away. Angus had a witness. Callum’s son was afraid. The knife with the sealskin handle was evidence. But if the coat was real—if Tam really was the selkie man of the legends—then none of it mattered. The islanders would not just exile him. They would tear him apart.

“We have to hide it,” she said. “If the village finds this, they’ll use it to condemn you. Angus will say it proves you’re a creature. They won’t wait for the vote—they’ll take matters into their own hands.”

Tam looked at her, and his expression shifted into something she had not seen before. Not confusion. Not fear. A grim and terrible clarity.

“They can’t use it,” he said. “Because I’m going to take it.”

He reached for the coat.

Isla grabbed his wrist. “No.”

“Isla.” His voice was gentle, but it carried an undertow. “If I take the skin and go back to the sea, the vote becomes nothing. The village loses its monster. Your father’s debt is paid. And I go home.”

“You said you didn’t remember the sea as home,” Isla said, her voice cracking. “You said the seal-folk are a story. You said you weren’t sure you were one of them.”

Tam looked at the coat. Then at her. The torchlight caught the water in his eyes.

“I wasn’t sure,” he said. “But I am sure now.”

Behind them, at the mouth of the cave, a shadow moved against the pale sky. Isla spun, hand dropping to the knife at her belt.

But the entrance was empty. Only the sound of the tide turning, the first greedy lick of water returning over the sand.

“We need to go,” she said. “Now.”

Tam didn’t move. He stood with his hand still outstretched toward the sealskin, and the expression on his face was the expression of a man who has found something he lost so long ago he’d stopped believing it existed.

“Tell me one thing,” he said. “You believe I’m human, Isla. You believe the science proves it. If I put this coat on and I walk into the sea and I don’t come back, what does that make you?”

The question hung in the air like the last note of a drowned song.

Isla had no answer.