Read Chapter 15: The Meeting

The village hall smelled of damp wool and peat smoke. Isla stood at the back, Tam beside her, his hand loose at his side, close enough that she could feel the heat of him without touching. The benches were full—fishermen in salt-stiffened jumpers, women with folded arms, children hushed into stillness by the gravity of the evening. Mrs. Kincaid sat near the front, her silver hair catching the lamplight, her eyes fixed on nothing. She had not looked at Isla once since they entered.

Angus MacNeil stood at the head of the room, a heavy-handed man with a voice built for bad weather. He did not wait for quiet; he made it.

“You all know why we’re here,” he said. “The stranger. The seal-man. Whatever he is, he’s brought the sea’s displeasure down on us, and we’ll not have it.”

Murmurs rippled. A man at the back—Isla recognized him as one of the MacIver cousins—called out, “He’s not one of us. Never was. Send him back where he came from.”

“He came from the sea,” another voice added. “Let the sea have him.”

Tam did not flinch. He stood like something carved from the cliffs, but Isla saw his knuckles whiten at his side.

She stepped forward before she could think better of it. “He’s a man,” she said, her voice louder than she’d intended. The room turned. “You’ve all seen him. You’ve watched him mend nets, haul boats, mind children on the shore. Whatever you think he is, he has lived among you for weeks, and he has harmed no one.”

Angus’s jaw tightened. “You’re a scientist, Dr. MacRae. You study seals. You don’t know our ways.”

“I know what I’ve seen,” Isla said. “And I know what fear does to a village. You’re afraid of a story, so you’re looking for a sacrifice.”

A woman rose from the second bench—Morag MacIver, Callum’s wife, her dark hair braided tight against her scalp, her face unreadable as a winter sea. She walked to the front with the unhurried grace of someone used to being listened to, and when she turned, the room hushed in a way it hadn’t for Angus.

“The doctor speaks of fear,” Morag said softly. “But fear is not the only thing that walks among us. The sea keeps its own accounts. If this man is what the old stories say—if he is selkie—then there is a debt between him and the tide that no village vote can settle.”

Tam’s eyes had not left her since she stood. Isla watched his face and saw something shift in it—not recognition, not quite, but the flicker of a memory trying to surface through deep water.

“What do you propose, Morag?” Callum called from the far side of the room, his tone carefully neutral.

Morag folded her hands. “The Call,” she said. “An old trial. If he claims to be a man who can live on land, let him prove it. One lunar month bound to the shore. He must not touch the sea, must not take to the water, must show us he can walk among us without drawing the tide’s fury. He will be watched night and day. If he fails—if the sea claims him, or he answers it—then he belongs to it, and he must go.”

The hall went quiet. Isla’s pulse hammered in her throat. A month on land. A month of being watched, tested, suspected. And at the end of it—

“And if he succeeds?” Isla asked. Her voice was steadier than she felt.

Morag inclined her head. “Then he stays. As a man. And the village will owe him the courtesy of that name.”

Angus’s face reddened. “That’s no justice. The sea’s already stirred up. You saw the wreck of the Morven. You heard what my boy saw. This creature—”

“Your boy saw a man on the shore,” Morag said, not raising her voice. “A man who did not harm him. The trial is fair, Angus. It gives the sea its due and the village its proof. Unless you’d rather decide this by fear alone.”

The silence stretched. Angus looked around the room, searching for allies, and found fewer than he’d expected. In the end, he grunted and sat down.

Morag turned to Tam. “Do you accept the Call?”

Everyone looked at him. Isla touched his sleeve—gently, a question. He looked down at her hand, then up at the room, at the faces that had half-decided his fate before he ever spoke.

“I accept,” he said. His voice was low, but clear. “One month on land. I will not touch the water.”

A murmur went through the hall. Relief, perhaps, or the easing of a tension they hadn’t known they were holding. Isla felt her own shoulders drop a fraction.

But Morag was not finished. She stepped closer to Tam, close enough to see the green in his eyes, and said, softly—so softly only the three of them could hear—“And if the sea calls you, boy, you had best not answer.”

Tam held her gaze. “I’ve answered it before. I know what it costs.”

Something flickered in Morag’s face, there and gone, like a seal’s head breaking the surface. She turned and walked back to her seat without another word.

The meeting dissolved into small nods and quiet conversations. Isla moved to Tam’s side, her hand finding his. His palm was cold.

“We’ll get through it,” she said. “A month. You can do this.”

He looked at her, and for a moment, his eyes were not the eyes of the man she knew but something older, something that had watched the moon drag the tide for longer than she could imagine.

“It’s not the month I’m afraid of,” he said.

She wanted to ask what he meant, but Mrs. Kincaid was approaching, her face drawn tight with something Isla couldn’t name. She stopped a pace away and looked not at Isla but at Tam.

“You wear my son’s face,” she said. Her voice cracking like old rope. “Whatever you are, whatever the sea made you, you wear his face.”

Tam said nothing. Isla’s throat closed.

Mrs. Kincaid reached into her pocket and held out a small, carved wooden whistle, worn smooth by years of handling. “Ewan had this. He blew it on the shore to call the seals. He left it behind the day he didn’t come home.”

Tam stared at the whistle. Slowly, he reached out and took it. His fingers closed around it, and Isla saw a tremor run through him—a shiver, as though something cold had passed over his bones.

He lifted it to his lips. A single, soft note escaped, thin and reedy. It died into the noise of the hall, but for a moment, Isla could have sworn she heard the sea answer—a distant crash, a sigh of water on stone.

Mrs. Kincaid’s eyes glistened. She turned and walked away without another word.

Tam looked down at the whistle in his palm. When he spoke, his voice was rough.

“I know this whistle,” he said. “I know it, Isla. But I don’t remember who I was when I blew it.”

Isla’s blood went cold. Because if he could remember the whistle but not the boy who held it, then the forgetting spell had not broken fully. And if it hadn’t broken fully, it might still be working.