The Lighthouse Witches(83)

“Only we have to tie you to a tree while you count to a hundred,” Isla added.

It was time. The people from the committee were visible and coming closer. I thought they might hurt me if I didn’t do it. I thought of Luna, back at the bothy, all alone. What if they hurt her, too?

I could see that the wildling was getting distressed, her face crumpling. She looked so small, so vulnerable. I pressed a hand to my mouth, and instantly Isla was by my side, reassuring me.

“I know how hard this is,” she said. “Remember, everything you see before you is not what it seems.”

I nodded, but when the wildling turned, I had to crouch down to check the burn on the back of her leg to reassure myself that she wasn’t Luna.

And there it was. Four numbers, in a vertical row.

The sight of the numbers sent a fresh chill ripping through me. It was still there. The mark of a wildling.

“Stand against the tree,” I said, straightening. But the wildling looked at me with such fear on her face that I felt my resolve weaken again. It felt unnatural to treat a child this way, my own child, and yet I clung to what Isla had said. She was a wildling. She had to be.

Tentatively, the wildling stood against the tree, her face full of terror. I tried not to look in her eyes as I moved the rope around her, fastening her there.

Isla placed a bundle in my hands. The long, sharp knife from her home, wrapped in a blanket.

The wildling’s eyes fell on the blade and she started to cry. “I love you, Mummy!” she said. “Please don’t hurt me.”

“Do it now, Liv!” Mirrin shouted from somewhere in the trees. “Now!”

I raised the knife and willed myself to do what needed to be done. My daughters’ faces flashed in my mind. Saffy. Clover. Luna. I was wrong when I’d wished I’d never had them. Despite everything, no matter how terrible our lives had been, it was all worth it.

I would die for them.

And I would kill for them.

“Please, Mummy!”

I looked down into the wildling’s face, into the terror that was drawn across it. In that instant, something inside me sparked to life, screaming that this was my daughter. My instincts were suddenly loud, stronger than Isla’s whispers behind me and the wind in the trees and the fears that screamed in my head.

I brought down the knife to cut the ropes, but Luna had somehow wiggled her arm free and raised it, catching the nick of the blade before I could stop it in time. Blood flew through the air, landing on my face. I moved the blade to the ropes, cutting her free.

I shouted at her to run. Luna darted through the trees, quickly moving out of sight. I glanced around. Isla stared at me, her mouth open. She reached forward to grab me, but I lunged away. Behind her, I saw villagers starting to head after Luna.

I broke into a run in the opposite direction, drawing them away from her.


V

I could not kill Amy. I knew that, as much as I knew I was looking at the mark of a wildling on my wife’s skin. I could never kill her, not for anything.

I told her to relay to me what had happened when she’d gone through Witches Hide. She said that she arrived on the shore and found herself addressing the daughter of Christopher Darroch, Marion, who told her that the year was 1707. The proof, she said, lay in the church graveyard, where a fresh tombstone was marked with the year—1707, just as the mark on her skin stated.

Amy was mesmerized, she said, and terrified, for although she looked for me, she could not find me.

She climbed back into the cave and went through once more, hoping to arrive back in 1667. She went dozens of times, the cave spitting her out at whim to the years before her own birth, before her mother’s birth, and far into the future. She said she passed through the cave and it sent her where it wished her to go, branding the year on her skin each time like a burn.

Slowly, she lifted her right sleeve. Just as trees are ringed inside their bark with each passing year, so, too, did the flesh of her arm report hundreds of fiery red numbers, etched painfully into her skin. All marking the years to which she had traveled.

“Time’s stigmata,” she said, fingering a particularly livid wound.

She told me she spent two months in 1921, hiding in an abandoned croft on the south of Lòn Haven and living off crops and stolen milk from a nearby farm. She knew she had to work out the spell to enable her to return to her original time. And once she did, she went through.

“So . . . do you know everything that is to come?” I said, feeling sick at the thought of it. What would that kind of knowledge do to a person?

“The boy they killed,” she said. “Angus’ son. He wasn’t a wildling. He had traveled through the cave from the future.” She turned her face to the fire, her jaw set. “I’m going to tell the Privy Council that the mark isn’t what they think. That it’s not the mark of the fae.”

I told her, as gently as I could, that they’d never, ever believe her. They would believe she was bewitched, or in league with the Devil. They would kill her for possessing the mark.

It had to remain a secret.

“Why don’t we go through the cave together?” I told her. “You’ve worked out the spell that sends you back to the time you came from, have you not?”

She nodded. “There is a problem with that idea,” she said. There was a possibility of encountering yourself in the past, or in the future. In such a case, there would be two of you. Two Amys, or two Patricks.