Read Chapter 14: The Sea's Claim

The cottage smelled of brine and fever-sweat. Isla had stripped Tam to his chest and was pressing cold compresses to his skin, watching the flush creep up his neck and into his cheeks like a tide coming in. He shivered beneath her hands, muttering words she couldn't catch, his eyelids flickering with the frantic movement of dreams.

She'd dragged him up from the shoreline with the sealskin coat clutched against her own chest, his weight dead and heavy on her shoulder. Every step had been a negotiation with the mud and the wind, and by the time she'd gotten him through the door, her arms had been shaking so badly she'd nearly dropped him on the hearthstone.

Now he lay on the cot by the fire, and the coat sat folded in her sea-chest like an accusation.

"Ewan," she whispered, testing the name against the shape of him. He'd said it himself, there on the beach, just before he threw the coat back at her. *My name is Ewan. I remember now.* Then the strength had gone out of him like water from a cracked vessel, and he'd collapsed into her arms.

The fever had come on fast, burning through him as if the sea itself had marked him for its own and was punishing him for turning away.

Isla dipped the cloth again, wrung it out, and laid it across his forehead. His eyes opened, unfocused at first, then sharpening on her face with an intensity that made her breath catch.

"You stayed," he said, his voice cracked and dry.

"I wasn't going anywhere."

"You should have let me go." He tried to sit up, but she pressed him back down with a hand on his chest. His skin was furnace-hot beneath her palm. "The sea—it doesn't let you walk away twice."

"Is that a threat or a promise?" She reached for the cup of water on the table, brought it to his lips. He drank weakly, water spilling down his chin, and she wiped it away with the edge of the sheet.

"It's the truth." He closed his eyes, and when he spoke again, his voice had a strange, singing quality to it, like something remembered rather than learned. "I was Ewan MacKinnon. I lived on this island as a boy. I had a mother who sang old songs and a father who mended nets and never looked at the sea without fear in his eyes."

Isla's hand stilled on his chest. "Mrs. Kincaid's son."

"Her name was Morag. Not Kincaid." His brow furrowed. "She married Callum MacIver after I—after I left. I remember her voice. She sang the seal hymns at the winter solstice, and everyone said she had the gift."

The room seemed to tilt around Isla. Morag MacIver. The woman who'd sung at the village gatherings, who'd looked at Tam with something like recognition in weeks past. Isla had thought it was just the way Morag looked at everyone—warm, curious, open. Now she understood it differently.

"That was ten years ago," Isla said slowly. "You're telling me you were a boy on this island ten years ago. But you look—"

"I know what I look like." Tam's hand found hers, squeezed weakly. "Selkie time moves differently in the water. When I put on the skin, I become what I was born to be. But the years I spent on land as a boy—they still count. They still shaped me. I was fifteen when I left. And now I'm back, and the sea has kept me young, the way it keeps everything young."

Isla pulled her hand free, stood, and walked to the window. The sea was visible through the glass, grey and restless under a heavy sky. She tried to make the math work in her head. A boy who vanished from the island a decade ago, now a man in his twenties, strong and whole, with no memory of who he'd been.

It was impossible. It defied every law of biology she knew.

But so did a man who pulled a coat of sealskin out of a sea cave and remembered being trapped in a hunter's net a hundred yards offshore.

"When I was fifteen," Tam continued, his voice low, "I met a girl on the beach. She was older than me. She had red hair like copper wire and eyes the color of the deep water. She told me she'd always watched me, that she knew what I was before I knew myself."

Isla turned back to face him. "The woman in your memory. The one who cast the forgetting spell."

"She was the one who stole my skin." Tam's jaw tightened. "I didn't understand at first. I was young, and I thought she loved me. She took me to her cottage and kept me there, and when I asked for my skin back, she refused. She said she'd burned it. She said I was hers now."

"But she didn't burn it."

"No." Tam's eyes were dark with something like betrayal. "She kept it. I didn't know where until tonight. But I remember now—the smell of her cottage, the way she'd watch me sleep, the way she smiled when I tried to leave and couldn't. She was the one who cast the spell. She made me forget who I was so I'd stay with her."

Isla's mind raced. "How did you escape?"

"I don't remember." He shook his head weakly. "That part is still—fog. But I ended up in the sea. And I was there for a long time. Years, maybe. I don't know how long. Time stretches when you're in the water. It folds in on itself."

There was a knock at the door, hard and insistent.

Isla crossed the room and opened it to find Fergus MacNeil standing on the step, his cap in his hands and his face grim. Behind him, she could see a small cluster of villagers at the end of the path, their faces turned toward the cottage like weather vanes in a storm.

"Dr. MacRae." Fergus nodded, his eyes flicking past her to where Tam lay on the cot. "The vote. It's been called for tonight, and after what happened on the beach—" He shook his head. "The whole village saw him walk into the water. They saw what he did."

"He came back," Isla said, her voice sharper than she intended. "He chose to come back."

"Aye, and that's what frightens them." Fergus lowered his voice. "A selkie who walks into the sea and returns? That's not a good sign, Dr. MacRae. In the old stories, when a selkie chooses to stay, it brings a curse down on the ones who kept it from its kin."

Isla wanted to argue, but she remembered her father's confession, the words she'd read in the pendant: *I took the boy's skin and left debt unpaid.* The curse was already here, already woven into the fabric of this island and her family's history.

"The meeting's in the church hall at eight," Fergus said. "Angus is bringing his son's testimony, and Callum MacIver's spoken for the three of them." He hesitated. "You should bring him. Let them see him. Let them see he's not a monster."

"Is he?" Isla asked quietly.

Fergus looked past her, at the man on the cot, and something flickered in his weathered face. "My gran used to say that the selkies were the gentlest of all the sea folk. They only harmed those who harmed them first." He put his cap back on. "I don't know what your father did, Doctor. But I know what you've done since you came here. And I know that man threw his skin away to stay with you."

He turned and walked back down the path, and the cluster of villagers closed around him like water around a stone.

Isla shut the door and stood in the sudden quiet, her back against the wood.

Tam had pushed himself up on his elbows, his face pale and damp with sweat. "What did he say?"

"The village is holding a meeting tonight. About you." She crossed to the cot and sat on the edge, watching him. "They're afraid you're going to bring a curse down on the island."

"Aye." He laughed, a hollow sound. "They're not wrong to be afraid. I walked into the sea with my skin in my hands, and I came back without it. That's the kind of choice that the sea doesn't forgive easily."

"Then why did you do it?" The question came out before she could stop it, raw and desperate. "Why did you throw it back?"

Tam was quiet for a long moment. Then he reached out and took her hand, his fingers warm and dry against hers.

"Because when I stood at the water's edge, with the skin in my hands and the sea calling to me, I looked back and saw you. And I realized that I didn't remember what it felt like to be a selkie. I didn't remember my kin or my home beneath the waves." His thumb traced a slow circle on her palm. "But I remembered the way you look when you're reading your instruments. I remembered the way you fight with the villagers about your research. I remembered the sound of your voice when you shout my name."

Isla's throat tightened.

"I don't know who I am in the water," he said. "But I know who I am when I'm here, with you. And I'm not ready to give that up. Even if the sea takes me for it."

The fire crackled in the hearth. The wind pressed against the windows, and somewhere outside, Isla heard the gulls crying, sharp and lonely against the grey sky.

She didn't know how to save him. She didn't know if he *could* be saved, not from the sea, not from the spell that had held him for a decade, not from the village and its fears and the debt her father had left unpaid.

But she knew she would try.

"Tonight," she said, squeezing his hand. "We'll go to the meeting. And we'll make them see who you really are."

Tam's smile was faint, touched with something that might have been hope or might have been resignation. "And who is that?"

Isla thought of the coat in her chest, the pendant warm against her collarbone, the confession written in her father's hand.

"Someone worth fighting for," she said.