Read Chapter 2: The Stranger of the Tide

The rain had stopped by the time Isla coaxed the Land Rover down the rutted track into Taransay, but the wind still threw salt spray across the windscreen. The stranger sat beside her, silent, wrapped in her father's old oilskin coat. He had not spoken since they'd left the station, and Isla found herself glancing at him more often than the road.

The village huddled at the head of the loch like a fist clenched against the weather. Whitewashed cottages, a kirk with a sagging roof, MacLeod's General Store with its rusted petrol pump. A few figures moved between houses, heads down. Isla pulled up outside the surgery—a single room attached to the McKinnon house—and killed the engine.

"Stay here," she said. "I'll find the doctor."

The stranger turned his head. His eyes, that pale grey the colour of a winter sea, met hers. "I don't remember how to be a person," he said quietly. "But I know I owe you my life. I would like to at least meet the man who will examine me."

Isla blinked. Three full sentences. The most he'd spoken since waking. His voice had that same quality she couldn't name—not Highland, not Lowland, not English or Irish, though it brushed against all of them like a current against shore.

"Suit yourself," she said.

Dr. Hamish McKinnon was a man of seventy with the hunched shoulders of someone who'd spent a lifetime examining other people's ailments and his own weather. He squinted at the stranger through spectacles thick as bottle glass, then led him into the surgery's single examination room.

Isla waited in the cramped waiting area, on a chair that smelled of disinfectant and boiled tea. The storm had knocked the power out twice in the past week, and the surgery ran on a diesel generator that coughed somewhere in the back. From the examining room came the murmur of Hamish's voice, the occasional single-syllable reply from the stranger.

Twenty minutes later, the door opened. Hamish came out first, pulling off his stethoscope, his face unreadable. The stranger followed, buttoning the borrowed shirt Isla had given him—one of her own, a men's flannel she kept for field work. It was too short in the sleeves.

"Well?" Isla said.

Hamish removed his spectacles and polished them slowly. "I've been a doctor for forty-one years, Isla. I've patched up fishermen after storms, shepherds after falls, tourists after one too many whiskies. I've delivered babies and held hands at the end." He put his spectacles back on. "I've never examined a man in better health. Blood pressure like a boy of eighteen. Heart rate steady as a metronome. Pupils reactive, reflexes sharp. No sign of concussion, no scar tissue, no evidence he's ever been injured a day in his life."

"That's good, isn't it?"

"It's odd." Hamish glanced at the stranger, who stood with his hands folded, looking at the floor. "A man washes up in a storm with no ID, no memory, no injuries, and the physical state of a man who's never done a day of hard work. But look at those hands." He nodded at the stranger's fingers. "No calluses. No scars. No sun damage. It's like he was manufactured yesterday."

Isla felt a chill that had nothing to do with the draught under the door.

"Is there an accent you can place?" she asked. "Something in his speech that gives you a lead?"

Hamish shook his head slowly. "I grew up here. Went to university in Glasgow. Listened to every accent in the British Isles and half the ones beyond. He doesn't have one. Or rather—" He paused, choosing his words. "He has all of them, and none. Like water taking the shape of whatever vessel holds it."

The stranger looked up. "I remember the sea," he said. "The cold of it. The sound of it." His brow furrowed. "And a voice. A woman's voice, singing something I can't quite hear."

Isla's skin prickled. She'd told no one about the lullaby she'd half-heard in the surf that night, the melody that had surfaced in her dreams and vanished by morning.

Hamish cleared his throat. "I'll make some calls to Inverness. Missing persons, hospitals, the coastguard. If no one comes forward in a few days, we'll work out what to do with you."

---

The villagers had other ideas about what to do with him.

Word travelled faster than the wind in Taransay. By the time Isla walked with the stranger up the single street toward the field station—she couldn't very well leave him in the surgery—the doors had begun to open. Old Morag MacLeod stood on her step, arms crossed, watching with eyes that had seen too many winters. Young Callum, who worked the fishing boats, leaned against the storefront and followed the stranger's progress with a look Isla couldn't read.

They passed the kirk, and the stranger stopped. His head tilted, as if listening.

"Isla." The voice came from the churchyard gate. Morag MacLeod had crossed the street and now stood blocking their path, a shawl pulled tight around her shoulders. "You're bringing him through the village as if he's a lost lamb."

"He is lost," Isla said. "He doesn't know his name, Morag. He doesn't know where he comes from."

Morag's eyes moved to the stranger, and something flickered in them. Fear. Or recognition. "Aye. That's exactly what I'm worried about." She lowered her voice. "The sea gives back what it takes, Isla. But it always collects its due. You know what he is."

"I know what legend says. I don't know what he is."

"Then ask him. Ask him what he remembers of the night he came ashore." Morag's voice dropped to a near-whisper. "Ask him if he remembers shedding his skin."

A cold wind moved through the street. Isla felt the stranger shift beside her, felt his stillness become something else—like the moment before a wave breaks.

"I don't have a skin," he said, very quietly. "I have hands. I have feet. I'm cold, and I'm hungry, and I don't know who I am." He looked at Morag with those pale eyes. "If I was something else, would I be so afraid?"

Morag held his gaze for a long moment. Then she made a sign in the air—old, older than the kirk, older than the village—and stepped aside.

"Call him something," she said to Isla as they passed. "A man without a name is a hole the sea can pour through."

Isla walked on, the stranger at her side, the weight of the village's eyes on her back. When they reached the field station door, she stopped and looked at him. He stood in the thin light, seawater still darkening the ends of his hair, looking at the land around him as if it were a foreign country.

"I'm calling you Tam," she said. "After the river. The Tame. Because you washed up like something the water couldn't keep."

He considered this. "Tam." He said it once, twice, tasting it. Then, unexpectedly, he smiled—and the smile changed his whole face, made him look younger, more human. "I like it. It's a good name. It sounds like something to grow into."

Isla opened the door. "Let's get you fed."

But she couldn't shake Morag's words. *Ask him if he remembers shedding his skin.*

Half an hour later, as she watched Tam eat his second bowl of stew with the careful, unfamiliar movements of a man learning his own body, she caught herself staring at his bare forearms. The iridescent sheen had faded. But beneath the harsh electric light, she could have sworn she saw a faint pattern on his skin—like scales, like the marks left by a net—only there, and then gone.

She would need to examine his clothes properly. All of them.

Tomorrow, she decided. But somehow she knew the sea wouldn't wait.