of Maidens & Swords

by Melissa Marr

  So, I'm at the pub again. A different one. Tonight is a "peatfire tales" event where locals tell folklore to tourists who sip one free glass of single malt while enjoying the unique scent of burning peat. I came here searching the local or locals who could go on record for the project--or at least some people who might talk to me so I can find some possibilities for Jack.

  I started the night determined not to be charmed by either the folklore or the fire, but when I realized that there weren't any "pretty Scottish lasses" to lure into a video spot, I give in and order myself a quality glass of whisky. I am, after all, a writer. Unpublished perhaps, but I am still a writer. More importantly, I'm an excellent liar. That's the trick to success in life: the ability to lie, to con, to manipulate. Well, that and a wee bit of ruthlessness. My mama taught me that part.

  Tonight, the only ones here are tourists with family or friends. The only single person here, other than me, is a pretty young woman standing at the back of the room. She's as far from the fire as anyone can be without leaving the room, so she's draped in shadows. She has long brown hair, falling to her low back. Her body is neither slight nor heavy, and her height is average. She wears jeans. a plain cotton top, and a long cardigan. Nothing about her appearance is atypical, except a small smile that says she knows secrets or perhaps is holding back laughter. She holds her body like an athlete, and when she moves to the side to let a server pass by, I can't help thinking that she moves as gracefully as the sea. I wonder briefly if she is a dancer or runner. Either way, I cannot pull my gaze away.

  When she smiles, I swear I can feel my body tilt toward her the way the sea follows the moon. Before I mean to do so, I'm across the room, beside her, too near her. She is not the first woman I've flirted with at anonymous bars. She likely won't be the last. She is, for reasons I don't ponder too closely, the first person who has ever been irresistible to me.

  "Hello, Isabel," she says with a strange lilt to her voice.

  I swear I can hear waves. I glance at the storyteller with her musicians, wondering how they created that sound with no electronics. I look to the window, into the darkness where the sea waits.

  "Would you like a drink?" The woman extends a full glass to me. "Or have you had too much already?"

  I realize that she has two drinks. She was expecting me. I don't know how--or how she knows my name.

  When I try to ask, she touches a finger to her lips and says, "The storyteller is still speaking. Be polite."

  Mutely my gaze follows her hand as she points toward the woman at the fireside. The woman at the fire might be speaking Gaelic or gibberish for all I know. Her voice lifts and falls, drifting to a whisper and erupting in a roar. There's music in her words. Scotland seems like a land where music is the pulse that underlies the whole of the landscape. It reminds me of home. Not California, but my real home in the South. The music is different, but in both places, it rises up from the land. Here, the sea's waves move in the people, and the language rolls. The syllables are merely waves that found their way through human lips. It's different than the bayou, where thick air feels like it makes our words and our motions slower. The bayou makes the mundane turn mystical.

  And a few moments or hours later, when the woman at my side meets my gaze and simply walks away, I'm fairly certain that she's wrought of music and sea. I could swear I hear it, feel it, moonlight over waves, waves crashing over my head. It's all fine, though, as long as she's there. It's inexplicable. My glass of whisky is full yet again, so I could be drunk. Either way, I follow her, follow the music that slips from her skin, the waves that roll in the sway of her hips, the steady beat of her footfall. As she glances back at me, I want to tell her that I'd follow her anywhere.

  I try to say just that.

  I turn and leave the few lights of the tiny town behind. She's there, just ahead of me. She glows like she's swallowed the moon, and I am nothing but water that must follow her pull.

  I'm knee deep in the sea when I realize she's gone. She slips away in the darkness, and I am left without her light. I back away until I'm standing at the edge of the sea, cold and alone and still far too drunk.

  I sleep or perhaps pass out. When I wake, I see a lump in the dark beside me. It's not as warm as me, but it's not so cold that I mistake it for a rock. Seal. I feel like I've been offered a rare gift when I snuggle closer for warmth and it doesn't move away. I'm grateful for the body heat as the liquor continues to hit me. Night is only a few hours in Orkney, so my whisky-soaked mind sees no issue with waiting--especially now that I have the seal to snuggle.

  "Thank you," I whisper, carefully patting the slick skin of its back.

  When the sun breaks over the sky, I see that I am not, in fact, cuddling the chilly body of a pinniped. I can only surmise that I was drunker than I thought because there next to me is another dead man. This time it's Mitchell, the camera-man, clad in a puffy coat that I had mistaken for seal's skin. He's on his side, and his massive girth makes him seem vaguely seal-shaped in this position.

  He's been stabbed. Blood has pooled around the edges of his body, collected in the crevices where the sea has steadily carved its mark. I check myself, seeking clarity. Am I a killer? Well, yes, of course I am a killer. I’ve been a killer for years, but am I responsible for this body?

  I have no recollection of buying the knife that's caked with sand and crusted blood.

  The tide is coming in, and soon the dry spot where I've been cuddled up to a dead man will be in the waves.

  "Did I kill you?" I ask, the words no more than wasted air in the sea breeze. "I should remember if I did."

  I didn't like him. Our last conversation was ugly. He called me a "glorified prostitute" and said that my only qualifications for the job are that I'm "fuckable and desperate." He wasn't wrong, but I still tried to slap him. He stopped me, shoved me at the wall, and ground his hips against me. His last words to me were "So high and mighty, aren't you? If I offered you enough money, you'd change your tune."

  I'm careful not to push him over as I move away. Mitchell is a large man, and he'd be impossible to roll without help. I unzip his jacket, pull out his passport and bills. He has more cash than I would expect. I pocket it, toss the rest, and continue to try to depersonalize his body in case it's found. After enough practice, the process is easy.

  Mitchell is the fifth dead man I've frisked.

  I worry, briefly, about his disappearance. Muggings happen in Scotland, but Orkney has the lowest crime rate in the nation. Briefly, I hope that means they also don't have any sort of police force able to investigate disappearances. There are so many islands, so many cliffs, that a search seems improbable. And, more importantly, the landscape seems to invite dreamers who just want to get lost. Since I've arrived, I've been battling the urge to wander and maybe find whatever I've lost inside me.

  I pat Mitchell again. "I hope this isn't what I lost, Mitch. The urge to kill."

  I rip his shirt so I have a way to hold the knife, and then I use the blunt end to knock out his teeth. It's easier than it ought to be. I turn it around, slice off the flesh of his fingertips. Routine. Simple. It's not perfect, but the sea should help hide what the blade doesn't.

  Afterward I wipe the knife and handle clean and hurl the knife as far as I can.

  I'm not a killer; I'm simply practical.

  Once, when I was a kid, I'd killed a man. Okay, admittedly, I killed three of them over a couple months, but it wasn't like I did it for pleasure. As far as I know, I haven't done it since. I'm not certain about Jason or Mitchell, but I don't go seeking men to kill. I'm not a sociopath. I killed a few men early in life, but I was just a girl with plans. I was acquitted when no bodies were found. The charges went away, and I changed my name. Met a guy. Daniel. Paid for papers. Then I had a clean slate, a new life.

  I did not kill Daniel, although he did turn up dead a year later. Part of me didn't so much mind because he knew the old me and new me. I suspect I might've killed him if I'd been thinking clearly, b
ut I wasn't. Fate handled it.

  I think.

  Is the "real me" what I've found here? Did I kill two more men and forget? Had I killed Daniel after I got my papers from him?

  I remember killing the ones whose lives I ended when I was nineteen. I remember the sounds of the bayou when I slipped my tiny boat with dead cargo into the water and went in search of the pigs. They eat more than the gators, despite what television shows say. Eaten by gators is just sexier or something. The pigs are practical, though.

  Here on Orkney, I have no pigs. The sea, however, is willing to help.

  The tide is coming in, and soon the dry spot where I've been cuddled up to a dead man will be in the waves.

  The tidewater starts puddling around my feet, covering Mitchell inch by inch.

  In the surf, I see a seal. They seem to be everywhere here. It's easy to understand why Jack chose this series of islands. The seals bask on rocks that jut out of the water or amidst the rocks on some of the coastal stretches. They haul out on land, but never quite let us approach.

  I should've known that it wasn't a seal offering me warmth in the early hours. Maybe they'll offer him some warmth as his body finds its final home in the cold waters of the North Atlantic.

  Several hours later I'm at a table in the Lynnfield Hotel dining room where Jack has stationed us today. It's mid-morning, past the breakfast crowd and not yet time for lunch, so we are alone in the room. Like many of the restaurants I've visited on the islands, there is a strange out-of-time feeling to the room. The mix of antiques and no-longer-modern but not-yet-antique touches doesn't clash, but there is a strange sense that the year could be years past or years future.

  Time moves differently on these islands, though, so this seems right. The extreme imbalance of the light and darkness, the peculiar lack of trees, and the constant press of sea and wind have started to re-shape me. I want to ask the others about it, but no one in the crew speaks to me unless it's for business. The nature of my position is that I belong to Jack, as if I am an extension of his eyes and ears.

  "I've come for the job," she says. "For your film."

  The woman from the peatfire readings stands in front of me.

  I'm first tier, technically doing the interviews unless he wants to follow-up. Meanwhile, he sits at a table to my left with a pot of tea and a stack of pages he's alternately scowling at or scrawling on.

  "Name?"

  "Margaret. You may call me Margaret." She pronounces these words as she's bestowing a gift upon me, and I don't feel able to ask for her surname. She has the same small smile that she had at the pub.

  Jack looks up at the sound of her voice. I see him notice her voice and her figure. She's not wrapped in the layers that our crew still favors. Instead, she wears a simple black cotton t-shirt, jeans, and low hiking boots. Her only concession to the weather is a red scarf.

  "We met," I manage to say.

  "Yes. More than once."

  I'm sure she's wrong. I'd have remembered her if we'd met repeatedly. "No, at the pub. I've only been here a few days and . . ."

  She looks past me then. Smiling.

  "And who have we here?" Jack asks.

  His voice is slick and charming, and I know already that he'll offer her a job. Margaret will be the face and voice speaking of the sea. It seems fitting. She makes me think of the ocean, or maybe I'm simply smitten. The way she moves feels too fluid for land.

  ". . . with Isabel."

  I look up, realizing that I've been lost in my thoughts. "What?"

  "Of course," Jack says, speaking right over me. "These days one can never be too sure. Some men would treat a woman wrong, take advantage. You're smart to be cautious of strangers, but"--he drops an arm around my shoulders companionably--"Isabel will vouch for me."

  "He is a talented filmmaker," I reply dutifully.

  "And a gentleman." He squeezes me slightly as he says it.

  I nod. I can't say he is--or isn't. Silence seems more like truth. Somehow lying to her seems wrong.

  We settle at the table where Jack was working, and the server takes this as a cue to check in on us. In short order, another pot of tea is en route to us.

  Margaret's hands wrap around the tea cup as if she's afraid it might suddenly fall or shatter at her touch. She drinks carefully, and I worry that I've truly slipped into some other world for a moment. Perhaps this is what a psychotic break is like. I keep finding dead men, and I'm attributing odd traits to a perfectly lovely Scottish woman.

  "Since you're hear for the seals, have you heard of selchies? Or of the Finfolk?" she asks.

  Jack tenses. "This is a scientific film."

  "Ah." Margaret pushes her teacup away. "I thought you were asking after local commentary."

  "On tourism, maybe the impact of the fisheries. Not fairy tales. Do you know about the seal watching tours or the fisheries? Or--"

  At this Margaret's smile slips a little. "The fisheries get angry at the seals for hunting fish, as if they should know that those fish are reserved for humans. Trap the fish in tiny spaces--" Her lips press as she cuts herself off. Inhales. Exhales. The smile returns. "I have no need to speak of them. There is nothing to be said that will change man's greed."

  "Well, then, tourism? Or some sort of encounter with the seals?"

  "An encounter with the seals," she echoes. Her hands curl around her teacup again. This time her fingers are too far forward, as if she intends to lift it with only her palms.

  Without thinking I pull the cup forward by its base, resettling it in her hands.

  She startles at the gesture, staring at me again as if I am some curious thing.

  Trying not to shake and spill the hot liquid on her, I carefully pour Margaret's tea before I say, "I thought 'Selchie' was the Orcadian word for pinnipeds, seals."

  I am rewarded with a smile. I'd do a lot more than pour tea for such a look. Margaret may not be carrying the moon inside her skin as I thought when I was too far into my whisky, but she is remarkably alluring.

  Jack makes a small face, but he doesn't pursue the topic. I have no doubt that Margaret would feature in stills for the film, a human touch for the scientific project. It sells. Footage of seals isn't enough. Tourists in Southern California can walk up to the colony at La Jolla and take selfies with them. Until we'd come here, I'd questioned the logic of the project. Who hasn't seen a pinniped up close?

  "Tell us," Jack relents.

  "Here, on the islands," Margaret says, "there are selchies, seal-folk, and there are Finfolk. The Finfolk, like many fey things, steal away mortals. They are cruel and hurtful."

  "Humans or Finfolk?" Jack interjects.

  "Yes." Margaret's gaze drifts to the windows, and I can see in her the same longing I feel when I stand at the edge of the sea.

  "The selchies," she adds, "are not cruel. By nature, they are seals. Harmless. Playful. They come ashore, and they shed their pelts so they might meet the humans they see from afar."

  She turns to meet Jack's gaze and then mine. "They see you watching them. They see you with your cameras and your curiosities, and so they come to you."

  Despite all of the reading I've done on pinnipeds the last month, this is new to me. The words pluck at something I've heard since we arrived in Scotland: a warning in a song in a pub one night, one of those folksy lamenting tunes that go beautifully with another glass of Scotland's finest drink.

  "You cannot understand the seals if you don't know of the Finfolk and the selchies," Margaret warns.

  "I'm sold." Jack leans back in his seat and claps his hands together. "We'll want you standing at the water when you talk. Intersplice your story with footage of the pinnipeds. This can work."

  He's scribbling notes now.

  "Isa, get her information." He's up and moving. "I'll call Ned. We'll want"--he glances at her, and she's no longer a woman but a subject behind a lens even though his hands lack the camera in this moment--"hair loose. There's always a breeze, so that natural thing."

/>   He glances at me briefly. "Talk to Carrie."

  "Cheri," I interject.

  He waves my correction away. "The costume girl. Talk to her about wardrobe. She can't wear that."

  And then he leaves, lost to any measure of civility now that his mind is on the project. This, too, is part of my job. I handle the hurt feelings. I explain his "creative genius.” I turn to Margaret prepared to do my due diligence, but she's staring out the window again.

  "He's doesn't mean to insult you."

  Margaret stares at me in confusion. "There was insult?"

  I exhale in relief. "Not intentionally. He's very focused."

  She nods.

  "Can I get information?" I ask. "Your mobile number?"

  Margaret stands. "I am not one for being indoors. Walk with me, Isabel."

  And once again she moves with such speed and grace that I wonder if she runs in her free time. I am stone sober today, but I still struggle to keep pace. It does not occur to me to ask her to slow or to refuse to follow her.

  We walk quickly, me trailing her slightly, until she stops as suddenly as she had begun. At the water. At the precise spot where I found Jason a few days ago. Warily, I look around for evidence that he was here, a washed-up credit card or shoe. There is nothing.

  "Nature sets things right," she tells me.

  I nod mutely.

  "Shall I tell you of the selchie and of the Finman?" she asks softly.

  "Sure." I don't see any reason not to listen, and there are several good reasons to indulge her.

  "You don't believe then?"

  I laugh. "In fairy tale creatures? No. I'm from the middle of nowhere, but that doesn't make me a fool."

  Margaret glances at me without turning, so she looking at me from the corner of her eye. "So, do you think me a fool, Isabel? An island 'lassie' as your man would call me." Her own musical voice grows harsh, as if she's using the clunky accent Jason affected. "A wee island fool willing to be used to sell your film?"

  "No." I swallow with difficulty. "He's not my man, either. He's my employer."

  "Fine. You still do not believe the things I tell you, though?" Margaret sounds angry now, as if I've insulted her.