Her appearance at the stable door made the noise suddenly stop. The two young stable lads working with the horses stopped, their mouths open in shock as they saw her.
“Where is my skin?” she asked the closest one. “Have you seen my skin?”
He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again and swallowed convulsively, unable to utter a word.
She dismissed him as a half-wit and looked across at the other boy. “Where is my skin?”
The other stable boy, a young lad with a shock of red hair and freckles, managed to stammer out, “W-what are you l-looking for?”
“I am looking for my skin. The master has taken it from me and I want it back again.”
The red-haired youth paled. “You are the…” His words tailed off and he took a step backwards.
“I am the selkie,” she said, correctly divining what he was about to ask her. “Have you seen my skin? Do you know where my skin is hidden?”
He shook his head, his face white. “It’s powerful bad luck to hide a selkie’s skin. I wouldn’t hide it for nothing.”
“I will reward you well if you give it back to me,” she promised him. “I can show you were ships full of Spanish gold are wrecked in the ocean depths. I can show you beds of oysters full of pearls.”
The two of them looked blankly at her at the mention of gold and pearls, and she racked her brains to imagine what might appeal to a young stable lad. “I can…I can chase the fish into your nets when you are at sea and protect you from the wind and the weather.”
“Now that would be a powerful good spell,” the red-haired stable boy said. “My da would like for his nets to be full of fish every time he went out on his boat and to know that he was safe from the winds and the waves.” He looked at her cannily, his brow furrowed with concentration. “I don’t know where your skin is hidden but if I find it, will you cast that spell for me?”
She nodded. “I will. I swear on my skin that I will.”
The other stable boy, the one she had dismissed as a half-wit, suddenly spoke up. “I know where it is.”
The red-haired boy’s mouth dropped open and he gaped at him.
Maya felt a spring of hope in her breast as she whirled around to face him. She took several steps forward into the musty gloom of the stables so she could see his face. “Where is it?” She held out pleading hands to him. “Tell me where it is.”
His face was dark and his hair as black as that of the horse he had been grooming. He did not shrink from her as the red-haired boy had. “What will you give me if I tell you?” he asked boldly.
“Gold? Pearls? Nets full of fishes?” she offered, her power of invention having left her in her excitement.
He shook his head at each offer. “I don’t want none of those. If I had gold or pearls, I’d be taken up as a thief and hanged, like as not. And nets full of fishes are no use to me, filthy slimy creatures that they are. I’d rather starve than be a fisherman. I’d sooner meet my Maker on dry land than in the depths of the sea.”
“What do you want, then?” Renewed hope was making her eager. “I will give you anything I have in exchange for my skin.”
A crafty look came into his face. “It would be a fine thing I’m sure, to be kissed by a selkie.”
The red-haired boy drew his breath in with a hiss. “You shouldna have asked her for that, Willie.”
“It’s little enough in exchange for telling her where her skin is hidden,” Willie replied, his voice defiant.
Maya agreed. She would give him fifty kisses if he would tell her where her skin was. She drew near to him, so near that she was nearly touching him. “You swear you will tell me where my skin is if I kiss you?”
The boy nodded, a sheen of perspiration covering his brow. “I swear.”
He smelled of sweat and of horse, this boy from the stable. She wrinkled her nose as she drew close to him and touched her lips to his suntanned cheek.
The boy jumped at her touch and leaped backwards with an exclamation of disgust. Once out of reach, he wiped at his dark cheek with the back of his hand with a grimace of distaste.
“You didna like the kiss of a selkie, Willie?” the red-haired boy asked, with a flicker of amusement in his green eyes.
“It was like being kissed by a wet fish,” the dark lad answered sulkily.
“That means she disna fancy ye,” the red-haired boy said, cackling at his friend’s discomfiture. “Tis a spell the whole selkie folk weave for their protection.”
Maya interrupted the burgeoning quarrel. “Where is my skin?”
The dark stable boy glowered at her. “I should have asked for gold and taken my chances with being hanged,” he muttered.
She shrugged. “Twas not my fault if you did not like the bargain you struck. It was made in good faith. Tell me, where is my skin.”
“You’d better tell her, Willie,” the other stable boy chimed in. “Heaven knows what other enchantments she might bring down on you if you don’t.”
“It’s in Edinburgh,” Willie muttered.
“Edinburgh?” she echoed, her heart giving way to despair once again. Edinburgh was many leagues away—a long way even for a selkie to swim, let alone for her to walk. “How do you know it’s in Edinburgh?”
“I saw the master give a package to Tomms and tell him to ride to Edinburgh straight away.” His voice was truculent, as if he resented having to give so much away for so little return. “I was curious to see what was in it, so I crept over and peeped inside it when Tomms was saddling his horse.”
“Looking for sommat to steal, more than likely,” the red-haired boy interjected.
Willie made a rude gesture. “It was a fur all wrapped up, a dark brown fur and when I touched it, it felt different, like it was alive.”
“My skin,” she breathed. It could be nothing else. “But where in Edinburgh would he have hidden it? Where has he taken it?”
His bargain now completed, the dark-haired lad took up his shovel and started to clean the muck out of the horse’s stall. “That’s all I can tell you. I don’t know any more.”
“The master’s got a house in Edinburgh,” the red-haired boy volunteered. “In Dunedin Place, where the toffs live. Tomms has gone there for sure.”
She backed out of the stables, eager to be on her way and to start her impossible quest. “Thank you,” she whispered to the stable lads. To the red-haired one she added, “You will have that spell for your fish for the help you have given me.”
The dark-haired boy threw her a black look and continued to shovel.
The red-haired boy doffed his cap at her, his face split in a wide grin. “Thank you, for sure. My da will be right pleased. I wish you luck in finding your skin, selkie.”
Maya scarcely heard him. She had already set her mind and her feet towards Edinburgh.
* * * * *
Iain woke to the sound of rain pattering against the windows. He reached out for Maya beside him, but the bed was cold and empty. Only then did he remember her stubborn refusal to come to sleep with him the previous night. She had insisted on sitting all night in her chair in the window, looking out at the blackness towards the sea.
He could have insisted on carrying her to bed, but when he offered to pick her up, she turned on him with such a snarl that he thought it best to let her and her foul temper alone until she had cooled down.
With any luck her temper had improved somewhat this morning. There was no joy in living with an ill-tempered harpy who bit and scratched at him if she did not get her own way. The wildness had to be tamed out of her one way or another.
Maya was not in her room when he went looking for her. A small smile crossed his face. He had half expected her to still be sitting in the window looking out at the sea and holding on to her sulks as only a woman could. It was pleasing to find that she wasn’t the sort to hold a grudge overlong.
She wasn’t at the breakfast table in the parlor and the maid, when questioned, had not seen her all morning. Nor was she in the sitting room or the dining room, or any other room in the manor.
By the time he had gone all over the manor looking for her and found nothing, he was beginning to worry. Where had his prize hidden herself?
He was just throwing on his greatcoat in order to hasten down to the seashore where he had found her and search for her there among the rocks when Mrs. Abercrombie bustled up to him. “Are you looking for the selkie?”
He thrust his arms into his sleeves. “Have you seen her?”
Mrs. Abercrombie made a clucking noise with her tongue. “She was down at first light this morning, poor thing, as naked as the day she was born and looking for her skin.”
He buttoned up the front of his greatcoat with fingers that had started to shake. Maya’s disappearance was making him more than a little uneasy. “And what did you say to her?”
“I told her the truth,” Mrs. Abercrombie said belligerently. “I said that I didn’t know where it was but I’d be sure to look for it and give it back to her if I found it.”
He glared at her. It was just as well for both of them he’d hidden the skin well out of the old woman’s reach. He would not forgive anyone, not even his old housekeeper, for interfering in this matter. “What did she say to that?”
“The poor thing was sick at heart,” the old woman said in an accusing tone. “She cried for a bit as if she had no more joy left in her and then she wandered away—”
This was no time for the foolishness of an old woman. “Where is she now?” he interrupted.
“I have been busy about my own duties this morning,” she replied, her voice defensive. “I have not seen her since.”
He was holding on to his temper with some effort. Extracting information from her was like wringing blood out of a stone. “Where did she go when she left you?”
The old woman shrugged her shoulders, as if disavowing any knowledge. “She was looking for her skin. I did not question where she went.”
He took one threatening step closer to her. “Come now, Mrs. Abercrombie, you must have seen the direction she took. I insist that you tell me where she went.”
The housekeeper stuck out her bottom lip and glared at him. “She went outside.”
Outside? In this foul weather? He had suspected as much, but he did not like to have his fears confirmed so baldly. “You did not think to stop her?”
“Why should I stop her? Selkies should be free to go where they please. I would not be her jailer.”
The old woman was foolish as well as impudent. “She will freeze in this weather with naught to cover her. Did you not think of that?”
Mrs. Abercrombie looked mutinous. “She would not freeze if she had her skin to keep her warm.”
Had she been a man, he would have struck her for her insolence. Since she was only a woman, and an old woman at that, he restrained his temper with no little effort. “If she comes to any harm,” he spat out. “I will hold you accountable. You will pay for any harm that befalls her, be it so much as a scratch.”
Mrs. Abercrombie was not a whit perturbed at his threat. “You’d be better off to lay the blame closer to home, young master Iain. Where it rightly belongs.”
He was scarce out of the door when a stable boy came running towards him. “She’s gone to Edinburgh, master. The selkie’s gone to Edinburgh on her own two feet and with naught to cover her nakedness.”
The boy’s words stopped him in his tracks. “Edinburgh?” he asked, his voice cold, fixing the lad with a steely glare. “Have you been blabbing out of turn?”
The boy’s dark face turned white under its tan at the accusation. “‘Twas not my fault,” he whimpered. “She bewitched me into telling her all I knew about her skin. I didn’t tell her nothink. Just that Tomms had taken it off to Edinburgh. And then she went away and I came running here to find you. I thought you’d want to know,” he added self-righteously, subtly holding out his hand for the expected reward.
“Which way did she go?”
The lad pointed. “That way. Over the fields.”
He reached in his pocket and flicked the lad a couple of farthings, little though the blabbermouth deserved them. “Saddle up Seafoam and hurry.”
He strode around the back to the stables and pulled on his riding boots while the boys saddled up his fastest mare. At the last moment, he grabbed an extra horse blanket and tied it to the saddle. Maya would be half frozen by now.
Then with a clatter of hooves and a jingle of spurs he leaped the fence and headed off into the fields after the selkie.
Thankfully, she had not had the time to get far. After scarce ten minutes riding he spied her in the distance, her figure clear in the morning sun.
He spurred the mare and rode up to her. “Maya,” he cried as he swung his leg over and landed on his feet beside her. “Maya, what are you doing?”
Ignoring him, she continued walking, her feet stumbling on the slippery grass, wet with the morning dew. She was not, he noted, surprised to see him.
He fell into step beside her, his booted feet next to her bare ones. “Where are you going?”
“To Edinburgh,” she said as matter-of-factly as if it were not half the length of the country away. “To fetch my skin back.”
He looked at her labored walking. Her feet were clearly sore and beginning to blister already and each step she took on them must be painful beyond belief, especially to a selkie more used to smooth water than rough ground. He had to admire her bravery even though he deplored her naiveté. Even were the weather less inclement, there were still thieves and brigands aplenty on the roads who would make fine sport of a naked woman.