The bell’s warped toll still quivers in the stone as Kian lurches from his pallet, nightmare-water burning in his throat, his habit clinging clammy to his skin with cold sweat. The sound is wrong. Too slow, then too quick. The old iron voice of the tower dragged through water.
No office at this hour. No storm-warning. No death-bell.
He sits hunched a heartbeat, ribs heaving, the taste of salt and grave-mud thick on his tongue. In the dark of the cell the rushlight has guttered low; walls of rough stone breathe damp around him. His fingers grope for the cord at his waist, for the bone charms braided there. They are slick with his own sweat, cold as teeth.
“Not drowning,” he whispers, voice raw. “Not yet.”
The bell shudders again overhead. The sound does not carry true. It comes as if from under the floor, from beneath the hill, from the buried chamber where the old goddess waits with her stone smile. The hairs along his forearms rise.
Something has woken.
He swings his legs down. The packed-earth floor leeches the heat from his feet. His heart beats a monk’s measure, psalm on psalm, yet under it runs another rhythm, the slow pull of tide through a narrow gut of rock.
Kian closes his eyes, just for a breath, seeking the crafted calm the Rule demands. All he finds is the echo of his dream: the church drowned to its lintels, bell-mouthed fishes gliding where brothers once walked, corpse-candles bobbing like stars caught beneath black glass. His own hands pale and bloated, inked prayers washing from the skin like blood.
The bell clangs a third time, then falters midway, scraping into silence as if a hand had seized the rope and another, stronger, dragged back from below.
He flinches. The chill in his bones keens like a plucked string. This is no practice, no boy’s mischief with the tower rope. The pattern is old. Older than Rome, older than Patrick. A freezing-call laid on wandering dead, taught to him in a whisper not from any abbot but from an ancestral shade that smelled of bog-myrtle and wet wool.
The abbey bell should not know that pattern.
He rises. The motion makes the world sway; vigils in the crypt have thinned him to string and parchment. His knees protest as he stoops to snatch up his leather-bound psalter from the floor. The familiar weight steadies him, though the vellum within crawls at the edge of his vision, letters like small black eels stirred by unseen tide.
“Peace,” he mutters, not sure if he commands the text or himself.
The air in the cell has turned sharper, as if a door to winter had opened somewhere close. The faint rustle of wings brushes the back of his neck. No bird this deep in stone. They are never truly gone, the ones he has bound and soothed. Tonight they are restless.
He touches the rough-hewn cross carved into the jamb, then his own brow. Christ’s sign overlaying older marks cut faint into the stone, ogham strokes he alone among the brothers still reads. Threshold, they say. Watch.
Tonight, the word feels less like warning and more like accusation.
He hesitates only once more, listening. Beyond his door, the hush of the cloister lies wrong. No creak of a restless brother. No cough. Only the last, shivering ring of the bell dying through stone like ripples in deep water.
Kian’s throat tightens. He knows what it means when bells ring themselves.
Barefoot, he pushes aside the stiff leather hanging of his cell and steps into the cloister walk. The draft that meets him is knife-cold, cutting through the damp wool of his habit. Flagstones bite up into his soles with the chill of water that has never seen sun. His breath goes out in a pale cloud, blooming and fading in the dim like incense in a shut chapel.
The cloister lies hushed, the long arcade no more than a tunnel of shadow edged with lighter grey. Moonless, yet the mist has crept in under the eaves, pooling low, a thin, crawling vapour along the floor. It curls round his ankles with the clammy touch of drowned weed.
He smells salt stronger here than any wind should carry, and under it. Old wax, cold stone, the iron tang that clings to opened graves. The hairs along his bare arms lift. The Rule says the cloister is a place of ordered peace, of measured footfalls and murmured psalms.
Tonight the silence has weight, as if the very air listens back.
He checks, breath snagging. They are already there. A file of the dead, pale as fog at dawn, gliding past the mouths of the beehive cells toward the church. Not the quick, flickering wraiths that sometimes haunt the garth, not the confused shades of fevered laymen. These move in a slow, grave order, as if answering a litany he cannot hear. Heads bowed. Hands folded or hanging limp, fingers trailing air like weed in slack water. Faces blurred, features washed thin as if seen through river-ice. Some wear the hint of tonsures, some the rough outlines of fishermen’s cloaks, one or two the tatters of finer cloth: but all are bound in the same soaked, clinging white.
They seem soaked to the bone, hair streaming, linen clinging to the angles of knee and wrist, shroud-folds flattened as if wrung by drowning hands, yet where they pass the flags stay pale and dry, no puddle seeping from their hems, no darkening of the trodden way. They glide as if the stone itself were water that only they may touch.
Their faces waver and stretch as if a skin of black water lies between him and them, features smearing, reforming, never wholly fixed. Lips shape words he cannot catch, yet the pattern of them beats at his skull: a mute litany, thick and heavy as the push of a deep tide, as if the whole sea were whispering inside bone.
The chill hooks into his lungs, sharp and foreign. Not the honest bite of sea-mist that he knows, salt and clean and moving, but a dead cold that seems to creep inward rather than strike from without. It smells of damp earth cramped under stones, of iron left long in blood and rain, of crypt-walls that never see the sun. His breath snags; the simple act of drawing air turns strange, as though some unseen hand has slipped fingers between his ribs and holds there, testing the cage of bone.
He sucks in another breath by will alone. It rasps. The air feels thick as water in his throat, clinging, reluctant to pass. He sees his own exhalation smoke pale before his face, a ghost upon the already-misted air, frosting faintly though the night is not so cold and no wind moves to carry it. The cloister flags are wet-dark from evening drizzle, yet now, around him, a rime seems to silver the edges of each stone, fine as breath on winter glass.
The hairs along his arms rise under the wool of his habit. The chill is not on his skin but in his very marrow, a slow seep that knows the paths of his blood. It runs along the old lines cut in him by vigil and rite, those hidden ogham scars only the dead can read, and settles heavy at the base of his skull. His teeth ache with it. The little bone charms on his belt knock softly together, not with the motion of his body but with some faint inward trembling, answering a pull he does not give.
He tastes metal at the back of his tongue. Rust. Grave-dust. A thin, bitter edge like the first sip of ink. The veil is thinning; he feels it as keenly as breath leaving him, as if the world itself were drawing in to speak through his lungs.
One of the shades falters. The fluid swing of the drowned line stutters, as if an unseen current catches at its ankles. It turns.
The rest drift on, unnoticing, faces to the church. This one peels from their tide like a weed-torn plank from a wreck and hangs facing him in the cloister’s dim.
Its head tilts, slow as kelp in a slack swell. Where eyes should lie are white, cloud-pale hollows, milked over and depthless, the thin membranes bulged and filmed as if a skin of ice had formed on water not yet stilled. Strands of dark weed cling where hair should be, slick and glistening, threads of it looped across cheek and brow, trailing down the angle of its jaw to drip nothing on the stone.
It fixes him. Not merely looks, but fixes, as if a hook of sight slides in behind his own eyes. There is a slow, terrible recognition there. Not surprise. Not question. The settled knowing of something long-promised, long-owed, come at last to claim its due.
Its lips shape his name in a voiceless murmur that he feels rather than hears. Not sound, but weight. A slow, dull pressure swelling behind his eyes, pushing at the thin bones, as though some cold thumb pressed from within. The shape of Kian moves through his skull like a stone dropped in black water, sending rings of numbness down his neck, into jaw and tongue. His teeth twinge, as if bitten lightly from the inside by a frost that has learned his measure. The sense of it crawls along the roots of each tooth, slick and invasive, a chill touch more intimate than breath. Kian: hauled up from whatever depth he thought himself hidden in, gaffed and breaking surface.
The pull comes through the braided cords at his waist, not from without but rising, flooding, a reversal of blood. The little bones there clatter like teeth in a dead mouth, knocking out some dim, remembered measure. Pins of ice creep joint by joint along his spine, testing vertebrae, weighing him, as if invisible fingers sought a seam where soul and flesh might split.
For a heartbeat the line between monk and mourners wears thin as scraped vellum; his soles prickle with borrowed cold, heel and toe itching to take their place in that pale, dripping file, to find the rhythm of their tide. The tug crests. A cracked shard of the Pater Noster rasps out between his bitten teeth, words snagging on a tongue gone half-numb, and the prayer’s thin, iron edge shears the pull just enough that he lurches backward, staggering out of their drowned cadence toward the raw ache of his own body and the warped, insistent tolling of the bell.
The bell’s warped peal drags him fully awake as he tears his gaze from the slow, soundless cortege of shades, heart hammering in a rhythm that refuses to match their funeral pace. The note wobbles again, buckling on itself like bent metal, lodged somewhere between tower and earth, neither sky-clear nor properly buried. It rasps along his teeth, worse than the ghost-touch, and with each uneven stroke the line of dead wavers, edges blurring in the mist.
They do not turn. Do not falter. They pass through the cloister’s arch as through a drowned gate, shoulders bowed under some weight the living cannot see. Water beads along their hair and lashes, never falling; their garments hang heavy and yet stir with no wind. One pale child, curls slicked flat as kelp, lifts empty eyes toward the sound and then is gone into the dark mouth of the church.
The bell stutters a third time. Wrong. Ill-timed. No office now. No call to lauds or vigils. Each toll seems struck from raw bone, not bronze. Sleep tears the last of its gauze from his thoughts. This is not some idle haunting loosed to walk the cloister for pity or prayer. Something has been pulled, or broken.
His fingers, still cramped from dream-drowning, scrape at the cords at his waist until they find the familiar burrs and carvings of bone. Counting them steadies the shake in his breath. Not a storm-bell, he notes dimly; not the clean frantic clang that would send brothers running to walls or tower. This is slower, groping. As if an untrained hand hauls the rope. As if the metal itself were reluctant to answer.
The shades file on. Through stone and door both, without hinge or latch disturbed. No splash of their passing; only the soft hiss of mist recoiling from their pale shins. The scent they drag is not incense-smoke or candle tallow, but tide-rot and old grave clay opened under rain. It threads under the brine of the sea, under the cold beeswax in the chapel, and finds him where he stands pressed to the cloister wall.
He swallows hard against the taste of it. Salt and silt and the copper of old blood. His own breath plumes white in front of him though the night is not so bitter as that, and he sees, with a sour twist of fear, that the air does not steam from their mouths at all.
“Go,” he whispers, though he knows they do not heed. The word is more for himself than for them. Go, before the pull finds him again. Before whatever rung that bell decides to ring a different thing loose inside his bones.
The last of the drowned slips under the lintel. The passage between cloister and church gapes black behind them, a wound in the stone. The bell quavers on one final stroke that never quite resolves into silence, hanging thin and jagged in the mist.
Kian drags in a breath that scrapes his throat raw, clutches the cold, reassuring bite of a bone charm in his fist until its carved edges threaten to draw blood, and steps away from the dead and toward the living trouble that has woken them.
He cuts across the slick grass of the garth toward the scriptorium, habit hem darkening with dew, following the bell’s echo as it crawls low and wrong along the cloister stones rather than ringing cleanly through the air. Under his bare soles the ground feels hollow, as if only a thin crust of turf lies between him and some open, listening dark. Each step jars the ache in his spine where the cold has set its teeth. The carved standing stone in the garth looms to his left, cross-cut lines glistening wet; for a heartbeat the ogham beneath the Christian mark seems to twitch like worm-script, answering the bell’s warped note with a pressure behind his eyes.
He does not look twice. The abbot’s voice lies sharp in memory, no lingering by the old marks, no muttered charms, but his fingers still brush the hidden sign of the threshold goddess against his ribs before he can stop them. The bell falters again. The sound drags his gaze upward to the round tower, then onward, to the low, timbered bulk of the scriptorium crouched beneath it.
The scriptorium door hangs askew on one hinge, wood bitten white where iron has torn free, wax-smoke and cold earth spilling out in a low, clinging breath. Kian pauses on the threshold; the chill that seeps round the warped jamb is not the clean salt-cold of night, but the closeness of a grave newly opened. Within, lamp-flames gutter sidewise as if in a great draught, though the night beyond the narrow windows lies thick and windless, mist pressed like damp wool against the leaded glass. Light crawls unevenly over benches and desks, pooling in hollows, leaving ink-stained tools and open codices half-drowned in shadow. Each flame leans toward the floor, not the door, as though something beneath the stones is drawing breath.
At the far wall the heavy charter chest gapes, oak boards sprung and ragged, iron hasps warped aside like softened wax under some heat that never kissed lamp or rush, its sanctified seal split clean through along the abbot’s own pressed cross. No scorch marks. No ash. Only a faint, marrow-deep warmth lingering in the broken grain, as if something had burned inward, not out.
Parchments lie strewn in disordered drifts. Burial rolls and land grants smeared with damp and ghost-grey finger-marks, edges furred where cold mist has gnawed. Crucial names and borders stand torn or scraped to palimpsest-pale ghosts, the flesh of the words flayed away, and in their place letters coil in ink too dark, too fresh, glistening as though not yet willing to dry, as though listening.
He bends until his nose is near the page, breath ghosting over the vellum, and the bell’s wrong-note toll seems still to hum along the cramped strokes. Not a memory of sound, but a thin, steady vibration caught in the black, as if the ink itself were a string plucked and held. Each line quivers at the edge of sight. The flourishes at the ends of letters twitch, curl tighter, ease out again, never quite the same from one heartbeat to the next.
His skull fills with it. A faint chiming under the bone, matching the rise and fall of the written hands. He does not dare touch. The hairs along his forearms lift, the chill in his marrow sharpening to a fine, needled ache. The script has taken something into itself. A peal. A command. A binding. Not of his church.
He lets his gaze slip past the surface gloss of the strokes, the way he does when coaxing a tongue from a stone ogham or listening for a whisper through a shroud. Beneath the Latin forms he feels an older cadence, half-remembered from firelit chants in his grandfather’s mouth. Knot-words. Turnings. Lines not meant for parchment but for carved rock and living wood.
The bell had rung off-pattern. Not for Matins. Not for any office the Rule names. Whoever set hand to these rolls had called its note and twisted it, driven it into the page like a nail through a relic-bone. Now the toll lies coiled in the ink, beating slowly, a black pulse laid over the names of the dead.
A wrong bell. A warped hand. And the promise that whatever vow these letters hold will answer not to abbot nor altar, but to the thing whose echo hums now against his teeth.
The names, once sure as stone in his mind, old friends he had sung at graveside and murmured over fresh-filled pits, will not keep still. They shimmer at the edges when he narrows his eyes, as though seen through water. Letters crawl the breadth of a hair, swell, thin, slide one over another and creep back again, never caught in the same shape twice. In his memory he can trace each name as it should lie, strokes learned from long winter evenings in the scriptorium, but when he matches recollection to ink, the writing shivers aside, refusing the fit. A curl where there was none. A bar drawn longer than any brother’s habit. A cross-stroke thickened, heavy as a grave-mark turned askew. The dead these lines once held are tugged loose in his inner sight, their shades blurred, faces parting from the syllables that named them. It is like watching anchor-stones dragged in a slow, soundless slide across the sea-bed. The script itself fights him, resenting the truth he carries, clinging instead to the new, wrong shape it has been forced to wear.
His sight snags on the thin ink-stroke that parts a poor man’s strip of barley-ground from the hallowed measure set aside for a saint’s rest, and every nerve in his arms roughens as if brushed by nettles. The boundary has crept only the breadth of a whisper, a fox’s-step of theft, yet in that lean, sly angle he feels graves tipped from their sockets, skulls turned a fraction from the east. Blessings that once ran straight as furrow-lines are kinked, slackened, left gaping for other things to seep through. Names that should drink from consecrated soil now lean toward common earth, loosened from the promise that held them, and the old law of place buckles under a stranger’s hand.
It seeps up through flag and foundation, a low, ceaseless fret, and in it he hears snatches of old grave-prayers turned thin and reedy, answers cut short. Not a haunting yet, but the first fret of one. The pact that let bones lie easy has been nicked and frayed; the mutter carries warning, and a question: who dared.
This is no clerk’s cheating of tithes. This hand has reached into soil with ink alone, plucking skull and shank-bone sideways to suit its purpose. Vows are loosened, not broken, and that is worse: the dead left half-held, swaying in unseen currents. Some will drift toward the breach. Some will be dragged. None will forgive.
He leans closer, breath shallow, letting the bell’s after-ring fade from his skull until only the whisper of ink remains. Candles gutter on either side, their light thin and bruised, making the wet strokes glisten like fresh wounds. He blinks grit from his eyes, pushes back the ache in his neck, and surrenders to the old habit that is not wholly Christian: letting his sight slip sideways, away from sense and script into the thin grey seam where words and bones touch.
He does not read the Latin first, nor the Gaelic gloss; he listens to the quiet around each name. Some lie heavy, settled, their letters dark and sure, pressed down by years of prayer and stone and packed earth. Others quiver at the edges, as if a draught moves through them that no shutter can keep out. Those he mouths under his breath, tasting the shapes on his tongue, waiting for the slight wintering of the air that marks the newly unmoored.
It comes, faint as hoarfrost on a nail. Here (where a crofter’s hand once bought a span of holy soil with lambs and labour) cold crawls up his fingertip without touching the page. There, where a woman’s bones were sworn a place near the saints for washing their altar-linen, ink has gone thin and grey, like smoke pressed flat. These are not the soft fades of age and damp. They are fresh cuts, still weeping quiet.
His lips move in scraps of old threshold-charms dressed in Latin endings, the words a narrow bridge between pledge and breach. The letters do not flare or bleed at his murmuring; they lie docile, obedient to a false order. Yet beneath, in the slow, grinding ledger of the ground, something has already shifted, and the chill that answers him is not from the sea.
He lets his hand hang there, not daring to touch. The chill tugs along his bones instead, a slow seabed pull that wants knuckle and marrow, not flesh. It runs from gap to gap where a name has been scraped near-clean with pumice, then painted over in a pious, practised hand that does not quite remember its own weight. Letters look right at a glance. They even smell right but beneath the ink the skin of the calf remembers what was sworn upon it.
He follows that drag the way a fisherman follows a current. Here a tenant’s grave-plot has been shunted three lines down, made to purchase prayers he never vowed. There, a chieftain’s daughter, once nestled in the margin beside saintly relics, has been nudged outward toward the unconsecrated edge. The strokes that bear them are neat. Too neat. They sit upon the page like strangers wearing borrowed clothes.
When he narrows his sight, the altered names pale, thinned to river-ice; through them, faint as bones beneath black water, the true, offended script still gleams.
The abbot’s fingers, knotted with age and cold, clutch at his sleeve for a breath, as if afraid the stone itself might be listening. “You will look quietly,” the old man says, lips scarcely moving. “You will name no spirit, no old power, not to any brother. If there is sin, you will bind it. If there is error, you will mend it. If there is witchcraft…” The word frays at the edges. His eyes flick to Kian’s belt, to the bone charms half-hidden in the cord. “You will see that it does not touch this house. Do you understand, MacCraobh? If Rome smells rot here, it is your name they will carve upon the pyre.”
The unsaid charge bears down heavier than the iron bolt. His gut clenches; bile and cold myrrh rise bitter at the back of his throat. He bows all the same, feeling the weight of unseen eyes in the stone. Every smear of ink on his fingers, every midnight hour among tombs, would feed any distant bishop’s hunger for a witch robed as a monk.
The iron rasp of the bolt still vibrates in his teeth. Tallow, vellum, cold stone, all press close. The bell’s wrong music gnaws the roots of his ears. One thing is plain as ogham cut in bone: if he cannot prise apart the living quill from the dead will that drove it, the house and the grave-marked boy who guards it will go down together.
He holds still in the cramped cell, palm flat to the rough oak, feeling the grain and old knife-grooves bite into his skin. For a long breath he is no more than another piece of wood in the wall, listening, listening. Past the hammer of his own heart he strains for the warped toll’s ghost, for any shiver in the stone that might be the bell’s wrong note still crawling through the tower. Nothing. Only the slow wash of the sea against the cliff, like breath dragged through drowned lungs, and the thin, far-off murmur of brothers at prayer where no office should be. Their chanting sounds uncertain, frayed; snatches of psalm rise and tangle with the surf, then thin to a nervous drone. No footsteps hurry in the corridor. No shouted questions. The house waits, like a patient lying to his confessor.
The silence beneath the sounds is worse. The monastery has silences he knows: the gentle hush before Lauds, the weary stillness after Compline, the grave quiet of the crypt where the dead mutter at the edge of hearing. This is not those. This is a held breath. Walls, beams, flags, all drawn tight as a bowstring, as if even the oldest stones fear to speak the name of what stirred them.
Cold leaches through the door into his hand. The wood sweats faintly, damp with mist or with some older seep rising from the buried mound below. He feels, through the heel of his palm, a faint, slow throb that does not match his pulse. Something in the foundations answering the bell’s profane pattern, then sinking back, sulking in the dark. The hair lifts along his forearm. The veil has been plucked. Whatever set that bell to ill-timing has rung more than iron.
The dream’s choke still rims his lungs, thick and tar-cold. He can smell the brine of it, though his cassock is dry; can feel the phantom drag of black water closing over the church roof, slates vanishing one by one beneath an ink-dark tide. In the mind’s eye, the round tower drowns last, bell-mouth gaping like a drowned man’s, and from that blind hollow no bronze tongue swings. Only corpse-candles bob and sway where bells should hang, fat with foxfire, their pale flames dipping to some soundless, sunken office.
He forces the vision back as if pushing a corpse from his boat. Words rasp up from habit more than faith. “Pater noster, qui es in caelis…” His lips shape the Latin; his heart answers in the older tongue beneath it. His hand drops from the door to his belt, fingers ghosting over the tiny carved bones threaded in the cords. Smooth wolf-rib, old knucklebone, a splinter from a saint’s casket hidden among them. He touches each by feel, naming none, as if counting a rosary of the half-forbidden, needing their hard reality to swear he is yet of flesh, not yet numbered among the wordless company that walked the cloister in dripping silence.
He signs himself, quick and hard, knuckles brushing his brow as if to drive back the dream’s black water. Then he sidles to the narrow window-slit and presses his face to the damp stone. The cloister garth lies swaddled in mist. No pale train moves there now. Only the squat humps of the brothers’ beehive cells, crouched like dark skulls about the grass. The old standing stone looms at their heart, its carved cross a pale scar on moss-slick flank, faintly limned by some light that is not dawn. To his sight the air about it quivers, thin as breath on glass. The small hairs along his nape lift. Shades have passed this way, close as hands, and not long gone.
The scriptorium’s violated charter chest rises in his mind’s eye: iron hasps bent like ribs, wax seals bruised, burial rolls spilled like pulled entrails. Certain ink-strokes had lain wrong on the page, not clumsy, not his brothers’ hands, but as if some colder will had steered the quill. Over that memory the abbot’s warning presses, syllables hammering like a curse: sort devil from druid, traitor from tale, and keep your own name clean of every shadowed rite, or burn with them all.
Parchment will not speak under warm light. Ink lies. Bone remembers. He knows this as he knows the taste of grave-damp on his tongue. He snatches up his shuttered lamp, tucks the palm-branch aspergillum beside his bone-charms, and slips into the stair coiling down to the crypt, the bell’s warped cadence tugging him through the cooling stone like a summons, like a noose.
The stair tightens, then tightens again, as if the stone itself is bracing. The curve of it seems steeper than he remembers. His shoulder brushes the clammy wall at each turn. Salt-sweat from the sea has crept this far in, beading on the mortar, stinging the raw place on his thumb where the quill split the skin that afternoon. His lamp is shuttered to a sliver. Light leaks in a thin, honeyed seam that slicks over the steps, catching on damp and grit and the faint green sheen of clinging moss.
He keeps one hand on the inner spine of the stair, counting the familiar hollows worn by generations of sandals and bare monk-feet. Twenty-three. Twenty-four. At twenty-five the bell’s false cadence had sounded, earlier in the evening, when no brother was set to ring it. Now there is only the ghost of that sound, the memory of iron struck in the wrong measure, beating inside his skull. A three-beat where there should be four. A drag and stutter where the old pattern runs clean.
It pulls at him still. Not with sound now, but with a sense of lean, of slope, as though gravity itself has turned slightly toward the crypt. His braided cord-belt tugs against his waist with each step, the carved bone tokens clicking together in a rhythm not quite his own making. He murmurs a snatch of psalm under his breath to hide the old words that want to rise with the pace of the descent. Pater noster… The Latin feels thick on his tongue. The other names, hers, the one whose mound lies under the church, press like cold fingers at the back of his teeth.
He ducks his head where the ceiling dips. The stone above bears faint scratches where taller brothers have scraped their tonsures over the years. Between those newer marks he sees, only when the lamp-gleam skates at the right angle, the older scoring: shallow ogham notches cut into the very bones of the stair-shaft. Not the blessing he knows from the threshold-stone above. A different set. A leaning rhythm, broken in places, as if someone began an older ward here and lost courage halfway down.
The air grows closer. Not just cooler, but thick, the way wool feels when soaked. The familiar hush of the dead gathers around him in layers. He has moved through this kind of quiet since his first frightened night alone in the crypt, a novice with a taper and shaking hands. Then, as now, it felt like walking beneath a piled winter of blankets, the weight of all who lie below pressing down, yet gentle, wanting only not to be disturbed.
Tonight that hush is ill at ease.
Under the soft, padded silence runs a fretful under-sound. Too slight to be called voices, not yet. A fidget of presence. A whisper of weight shifting on stone biers. The barest rasp, like vellum edges drawn again and again against a thumb. He tastes iron on his tongue. His lamp’s small flame gutters sideways where there is no draft, bending as if in answer to a breath that is not air.
The bottom of the stair is near; he feels it in the way the cold sharpens. Each step down leaches warmth up through his soles. The chill does not wrap him, it pierces, needling through wool and skin and into bone. The dead have always been near on this stair. Tonight, they are awake.
With each twist of the stair the world narrows. Stone, and dark, and breath. The air draws in upon itself, tighter, closer, like a chest cinched with wet rope. The usual quiet gathers around him: not the silence of absence, but the thick, padded hush he learned to endure in his novitiate nights. The sense of bodies settled and content, of names laid down like cloaks and left. The crypt has always lain over the older mound like a quilt over wintered earth, its dead a layered warmth of bone and memory that only asks to be left folded.
Tonight that weight is wrong.
The stillness shivers. Beneath the muffled calm runs a fretful stirring, thin as a breath caught and held too long. Not yet words. Not yet the clear reach of a called name. Rather a fraying at the edges of the quiet, a faint, persistent rustle that prickles the skin behind his ears. As if unseen hands worry at shrouds and coffin-lids, as if spectral fingers fret old parchments in the dark, plucking at seams meant never to be opened.
Stone yields at last beneath his soles, the stair’s tight throat spilling him onto the crypt’s low, arched breadth. He eases the shutter wider. Honey-thin light spills in a narrow ring, licking over what lies nearest: a reliquary chest banded in brass, a saint’s name picked out in careful Latin; beside it, no saint at all, only a heap of river-rounded stones raised before Christ was spoken here, ogham cuts glinting like old scars. So it goes, all around. Carven shrines wedged against rough cairns, thin altar-slabs leaning like quarrelsome cousins long forced to share a bed.
He hefts the palm-branch aspergillum, not quite a weapon, not quite a comfort. His fingers clench its haft. A breath. A psalm-fragment, barely voiced, to pin his heartbeat before he steps toward the unseen circle that hems the restless dead.
The wards he has known since novitiate days usually press against his senses like thick, greasy wool, blunting the dead to a tolerable murmur. Tonight his skin feels their failing before his mind can name it. As he paces the ring, his fingertips skid from firm, unseen pressure into sudden hollow: a slack, chill vacancy that yawns in his bones where the old resistance should be, and through that gap the whispering grows sharp.
There, between a gilded bone-shrine and a squat stone whose ogham strokes have slumped under centuries of wet and wind, the air pours through him like water from a burst cask: a raw, needling draft that reeks of open grave and far salt, of sea-cave drip and turned clay. It spears through wool and flesh alike. His breath snags. Every tiny bone-charm on his braided cord gives a brittle, answering tick, as if counted by an unseen hand. The hairs along his arms rise. He knows (not by sight, but by the hollow tug in his marrow, by the way the accustomed press of spirits recoils from this spot) that some patient hand has unpicked the old binding here, leaving the veil thinned, frayed, and bleeding cold.
He lowers himself onto the damp flagstones, knees grinding against cold grit, and presses his palm flat to the nearest ogham-scarred stone; ancient strokes bite against his skin like old teeth, and a numb tingle creeps up his wrist as if the rock is trying to taste the ink and myrrh that stain his fingers.
He lets it. He forces his hand to remain, splayed, the joints locking with the effort not to flinch. Cold seeps into him, not the honest chill of stone but a crawling, deliberate cold that threads along tendon and vein, hunting its way inward. Each carved notch under his palm stirs like a tongue in sleep, testing the scent of him, deciding if he is kin or trespasser.
Words gather at the back of his throat. Latin first, because that is the habit of his days. “Requiem aeternam dona eis…” The syllables come thin and brittle. The stone pays them little heed. The numbness climbs to his elbow. His breath stutters.
So he lets the older sounds slip loose.
Low, under his breath, half-shaped by the click of teeth and the press of tongue against palate, he murmurs the bone-deep cadence his grandmother once used in storm-prayer over their thatch. The air inside the crypt does not warm, but it shifts. The pressure against his skin sharpens from testing to recognition. Ogham cuts that have slept for centuries stir, a faint, grinding flex, answering to the buried pattern of his clan-name woven through the chant.
“Kian mac Cráobh,” he whispers, binding himself to it in the old fashion, then crossing himself in the new, as if one rite might excuse the other. “Mac do sheirbhíseach. Mac do…” The rest of the old invocation curls and dies unsaid, strangled behind his teeth by habit and fear.
The stone does not seem to mind the break. It has never cared for Rome’s rules. It knows only that one of its own blood lays a hand upon it and calls.
A thrum runs up through his palm, a slow, resentful heartbeat not his own. The numbness flowers in his shoulder now, tugging at his breath. Around the edge of that spreading frost, sensation returns in bright, painful pricks, as though a hundred small, unseen fingers are prodding at his flesh from the other side of the veil.
“Easy,” he mutters, to himself or to it, he cannot say. “One voice at a time. One.”
He bends his head until his brow nearly touches his hand, until his breath fogs the stone. The scent rising from it is wet moss and grave-pit, beeswax dripped and hardened, old iron and older bone. He closes his eyes. He tightens his grip on the palm-branch in his other hand until the fronds creak.
“In nomine Patris…” His tongue shapes the cross in the air above the old marks, three quick passes, the rhythm of Mass braided into the murmur of hill-charm. “…agus na Naomh Uile,” slips out with the Latin, unbidden. And all the saints. And all that came before them.
The veil listens.
He feels it then. Not sight. Not sound. A leaning. The world on the far side of his skin tilts, just a fraction, toward his touch. Voices hiss against the stone, too many, too eager, their edges scraping on one another in the dark. A crowd pressing at a door.
He tightens his fingers over the ogham strokes, forcing the press of them into a single line, a single point of contact. “Not all,” he says, the words barely formed, more breath than voice. “Not yet. I ask the bound. I ask the named. I ask the sworn.”
The chill lurches, concentrates, driving like an iron nail into the heel of his hand. His teeth clamp together on a gasp. For a heartbeat he knows nothing but the weight of earth above coffins, the press of packed clay in eye-sockets, the itch of linen on withered skin. Then, from the many, something pulls free.
The air congeals. It does not merely chill; it thickens, gathers grit, as if the dark itself were ground to powder and flung about the crypt. Each breath rasps in his nose, catching on invisible motes. Candle-flame gutters low and long, smearing its light into a thin, jaundiced smear that cannot quite reach the corners.
Something moves in those corners.
Not with the clean line of flesh and bone, but with the slow, collapsing sag of cloth over nothing. Pale, half-made silhouettes bulge out of the coffin-shelves, seeping rather than rising, their outlines wavering like smoke trying to remember the shape of the body that burned. From the seams between flags and the hairline cracks in the walls, more of them drag loose, tattered habits clinging in frayed suggestion: hoods caved in, sleeves hanging empty.
Where faces ought to be there are worn hollows, blurred as rubbed vellum. Jaws work, slack and eager, but tongues have long since gone to dust. The effort of speech twists their not-mouths, yet most sounds die in a dry click, a wheeze, an unfinished moan that rattles against the stone.
At first it is only a low, restless susurration, like wind combing dry reeds, but as Kian’s thumb finds a cracked stave in the ogham groove, the murmur sharpens into phrases, “our names scraped clean”, whistled through toothless jaws, the words dragging grit, as if hauled over stone. Another voice slithers through it, thin and bitter as smoke forced through a chink: “stone that remembers what parchment denies.” The syllables scrape along his bones. Each notch under his thumb throbs, answering. He feels the quarrel of ink and rock made fleshless sound: the dry rasp of quills crossing out, the soft, outraged grind of chisel-bites buried and forgotten. The very stone beneath his hand seems to swell with affront, struggling to speak through dead mouths.
The sound rises and overlaps, every new whisper cutting across the last, shredding meaning to thin rags: “we were here, we were here,” “ink lies, stone keeps,” “names unlearned, names unmade,” and beneath them all a hoarse, almost voiceless insistence so that memory, grievance, and accusation snarl together, indistinguishable.
The cold climbs from his kneecaps into his gut as the chorus swells, echoes battering the low arches and bone-shelves, until his teeth ache with it. He clutches the ogham stone like a drowning man on wreck-wood, jaw locked, stomach turning, mind straining to tease a single true thread of meaning from the storm their tangled grief hurls through him.
He forces his breathing into the measured rhythm of chant, dragging air in against the clamp of cold in his ribs, letting it go in slow, counted threads. In. Christ have mercy. Out. Hold. Again. The cadence steadies his tongue if not his hands. His fingers have gone clumsy and bloodless; they creak as he pries them from the stone.
For a heartbeat he dreads that, loosed, the slab will buck and roll and all that muttering weight beneath it will come spilling through. It only lies there, sullen and thrumming, as if it sulks at the loss of his touch. The pressure against his palm lingers even when his skin leaves it, a phantom weight.
He gropes sideways, blind in the crowded dark of the crypt, knuckles knocking bone, scraping rough mortared wall. Oily tallow has slicked the lamp’s handle; it slithers against his bare fingers before he catches it by the iron hoop. The flame gutters, stretching thin and blue, suddenly tall, as if some mouth he cannot see has just drawn in a long breath beside his ear.
“Easy now,” he mutters, though whether to the fire or to the dead he cannot tell.
He eases the lamp down onto a low ledge, nudging it into a hollow worn by centuries of use. The stone there is smooth and greasy with old smoke, yet cold burns through it into his skin. The ledge shoulders up against a reliquary box of dark oak banded in greened copper, its lid fretted with little crosses and vine-scrolls. Through the warped lattice he can see saint’s finger-bones, ivory-pale and light as hollow reeds, jumbled together as if some hasty hand had swept them in.
They do not lie alone. Among them nestle smooth, sea-rounded pebbles, their damp sheen catching the lamp-glow like fish-bellies in low tide light. Ogham lines score their flanks, sharp and black, the cuts newer than the softened edges of the stones, as if someone had carved them here, in this very chill, with the dust of saints still in the air. The old tree-words prick at his inner ear, half-heard over the clamour of the others, a quieter, deeper script running beneath the ink of the Church.
“Miserere mei, Deus…” he breathes, voice no more than a thread, the Latin syllables clicking into place like beads on a worn cord. Each word lands with the small, deliberate weight of a counting-stone. “Secundum magnam misericordiam tuam…” His tongue shapes the phrases by long habit; the psalm’s rise and fall is a road well-trodden in his mouth.
He lifts his stiff right hand, knuckles pale, and scratches a narrow cross in the chill air over the jumbled heap of relic and stone. Forehead, breastbone, left, right. The sign wavers, as if drawn through water, yet it leaves a faint brightness behind, a thin veil over the restless shapes.
The nearest monk-shades recoil as if from a draft. Their ragged howls fray, threads pulled from coarse cloth. One by one they sag backward, outlines slackening, mouths still open but sound dwindling to a damp, childlike whimper. Faces blur, sink into the shadow of their old niches. Robes smear into the masonry. What had been a teeth-bared press of grey forms thins to a sullen ring of dim figures, peering but held at a distance by the fragile lattice of the prayer.
Without lifting his palm from the cold stone, he lets the psalm’s cadence warp and thin, then slip sideways into older shapes, tree-names and path-words his grandmother once mouthed over rain-slick cairns, beith, luis, fearn, sail, dair, each a notch of wood and wind. He breathes them low, half under the Latin, half through it, so the Church’s verses and the mound’s own speech twist together like twined strands of rope. Christ’s mercy walks beside the hedge-witch’s charm; gospel-water runs in the same furrow as black bog and root. The sounds do not clash so much as grind, rough against one another, sparks striking in his teeth. His tongue feels split, one edge blessing, the other bartering with what lies below.
The space beneath his splayed fingers thickens, not air but a slow, inward drag, as if the mound itself were drawing breath through his skin. A bruised, ancient pulse answers, dull as surf under stone. The ogham-cut pebbles answer it, faintly quickening in the lamplight, their scored lines darkening, slick as fresh ink. The deeper dead do not soften; they lean awake, a prickle of measuring regard that crawls up his arm, sets his teeth to a slow grind, whitens his breath in the already-cold gloom.
Instead of the softening hush he groped for, the braid of prayer and tree-word jerks the scattered murmurs straight, draws them into a single, tightening strand. The many voices thin to one. Thought gathers, weighty and deliberate, like thunderheads crowding behind oiled glass; a cold, auditing regard slides through his marrow and fixes on him, no wider than a knife’s point, set unerringly against his breastbone, pressing. Not yet piercing, but promising.
The air congeals. Sound pulls thin. Frost feathers outward from the brass lip of the reliquary in fine, creeping whorls, as if something inside were breathing cold through the metal. It races along the engraved saints’ names, swallowing them letter by letter, then spills across the stone like spilled milk turned to ice. The chill licks up his sleeve. His skin shrinks from it, but he does not lift his hand.
His lamp answers first. The little oil-flame gutters, pinched sideways by no draft he can feel. Glass clouds white at the edges, a crawling lace that grows and knots, veining inward toward the wick. The flame crouches low, a bead of dull orange, then flares, then knots again, as though strangled and loosed and strangled once more by fingers that never quite close.
Breath steams thick from his mouth and nose. The air tastes of iron and tallow and something older, the raw, damp sting of a grave cut open in winter. His teeth ache with it. The psalm catches in his throat, Latin sticking to his tongue like fat gone cold. The old tree-names rasp through instead, harsher now, the ogham sounds scoring the quiet: beith, luis, fearn. Each syllable drops heavy, hangs, and will not fall away.
Around him the crypt presses closer. Mortar lines darken. Frost veins the carved lids of the stone coffers, tracing the chisel-marks of forgotten names. A dead monk’s painted face on the far wall webs over with tiny shards of ice, until its gilded eyes look out through broken glass.
He feels the wards themselves strain. The buried circle of druid-stone beneath the altar hums, a low, teeth-on-edge note under the Christian chant. The cross-cut ogham carved there flares cold against his bones. What should have been a slow, reverent stirring becomes a jerked, tightening pull, as if some great hand beneath the earth had closed into a fist and seized the loose, wandering shades by their names.
The mutter of the long-dead brothers thins. Not away, but into. Fragments, psalms, death-bed pleas, scraps of old tongue, twist inward, sucked toward a single, gathering knot. Frost thickens in time with it, feathering faster, spiralling from stone to stone, from reliquary to lamp to his own numb fingers, until every breath, every slight shift of his weight feels answered by an unseen drawing-in, a poised, waiting intake before the blow.
That single, stronger ghost presses hard against the weakened veil. It comes not gently, not in the soft, sidelong way of monks roused from long habit of rest, but like a body hurled against a door. For a heartbeat its half-formed face smears across his sight like breath on stone: a pallid blur, then sharper, features dragging themselves out of cold, reluctant dark. The eyes are wrong: hollow as spent coals yet burning within, two pits of cramped, furious will. No grave-peace in them. No surrender.
The mouth works soundlessly in a snarl of thwarted speech. Lips split and knit in the frost, shaping words that cannot yet cross. The effort of it rasps along his nerves, as if each unsaid syllable were being ground out against his ribs. A taste like old pennies and candle-soot rises in his throat. The pressure at his breastbone spikes, pinning him to the stone, and with it comes the brief, stunned certainty that the thing battering at the veil knows him, has been straining toward him for longer than this single shuddering moment.
Not one of the long-dead abbots whose names he has worn thin with vigils, nor any grave, antler-shadowed druid he half-feared from the goddess-mound. This is closer. Fresher. A death that still remembers heat. The sense of it strikes him with the sour reek of new-spilt blood under incense, of tallow that has burned too fast. Its anger has not settled into the slow, bitter patience of the old bound shades; it comes keen and jagged, sharp as a bone just cracked, edges wet. No moss on this one. No forgetting. He tastes the rawness of it like salt in a cut. The veil has not had time to thicken over that hurt. It shines through, red and bright.
The force of that silent charge hits him square in the breast, not mere cold but a blow, as if a smith’s hammer had fallen from the height of the vault. Breath rips out of him. His knees buckle. He reels back into the damp stone of a pillar, shoulder jolted, fingers tearing at his braided belt-cords, lamp-arm flailing, light skittering madly over coffers and frost-filmed saints.
In that lurching moment of contact he feels, as clearly as ink on vellum, that this wrath is bound not only to the ancient threshold-stones beneath the church, but to some newer treachery etched in a monk’s hand, names pared away from charters, oaths thinned and bent in the margin, its fury plaited through fresh script as tightly as through the old carved ogham, letter to letter, stroke to stroke.
He wets his lips against the salt of old fear and dares a deeper question, threading Christ’s holy name and the older, unspoken title of the threshold-goddess together in a single breath. The two do not sit kindly beside one another on his tongue. The Latin bruises the Gaelic; the Gaelic drags at the Latin like weed about an anchor. Still he forces them into a single plaited strand, shaping the breath between them as a binding loop meant to cinch tight around the intruding presence, not to cage it wholly, he is not that bold, but to catch it for the space of one or two heartbeats. Long enough to force it into shape. Long enough to make its wrath take words.
His fingers, numb and ink-stained, spread over the curve of the nearest stone chest. The other hand he lays flat upon the cracked face of the ogham pillar, skin to old groove. He feels the cut strokes like cold teeth under his palm. He lets his thumb rest on the cross his brothers later carved there, a shallow scratch over deeper marks, and uses both as anchor. New sign over old. New prayer wrapped round older vow.
The breath he draws tastes of lime-dust and mould, iron and frankincense. He parts it into syllables taught in choir-stalls and syllables birthed in barrow-dark, lets them coil together and spill low between his teeth. “Per Nomen… agus tríd Do Thairseach…” It is barely louder than the slow drip in the farthest niche. His voice shivers in his own ears all the same.
“By the wound and by the gate,” he whispers, not quite in either tongue. “By the blood You spilt and the blood She keeps. Come into the ring I set. Come and be known. Come bound, not loosed. Come under Name and stone.”
As he speaks he feels the loop of sound closing, not in air but in the thin skin between worlds. The phrases hook into the lingering psalms soaked into the crypt-walls, catch on the older humming silence of the mound beneath. They draw tight like a cord about a struggling beast. The colder air gathers toward him, sucked in by the shape of his plea. Candles lower along the far aisle gutter inward, their small flames drawn as if by breath not his own. The rustle of unseen wings at his back flares and then stills, held tense.
Something gives, somewhere far down and under, a soft sobbing shift as if weight has moved on long-packed bones. The chill that lives in his marrow rises to meet the greater cold pressing at the veil. His teeth ache with it. The loop closes. For an instant he feels it take, feel something vast and furious twitch in the snare of his mingled prayer.
For a heartbeat the crypt holds its breath, a sucked-in stillness that tightens every shadow. Then the ghost’s answering surge hits him like frozen surf breaking full across a winter rock. It does not simply strike; it drives in, a grinding, inward wave. The half-mended tear in the wards flares wide, no small rent now but a raw, bright wound in the unseen skin of the place. Cold pours through as if a sea on the other side has found its breach. It presses through his ribs, not from without only but from within, as though a hand already lodged behind his breastbone has begun to force its fingers out, testing for the cracks.
Pain spears up under his collarbones. His breath is snatched and held. The muttering shades that had circled at the edges of his working erupt into a ragged chorus. Their whispers shred into hoarse, broken cries. They fling themselves against the shapes that bind them (grave-stone, charnel niche, script on brittle tags) thrashing against their accustomed bounds like penned cattle driven mad by lightning over the hills.
Reliquary lids begin to chatter on stone shelves like teeth, soft at first, then hard enough that stone chips flake from their rims. Iron rings groan in their sockets, links rasping as if some unseen hand tests each for weakness. Chains tremble against the damp walls, a faint clinking shiver that runs from niche to niche like fever through a body.
Beneath his braced palm the ancient ogham stone judders, not with a single clean shock but in sick, uneven pulses. Fine fractures creep outward from the carved strokes in pale, jagged lines, branching and re-branching until they web the old grooves. Dust sifts down in a thin grey veil over his knuckles, dry as bone-ash, carrying the sour grit of long-buried vows.
He feels, with a grim, practised terror, that another breath shaped in any holy Name will not soothe but sunder. He cuts the rite like a frayed cord, biting off the last syllable so sharply his tongue floods copper. His palm tears from the stone as from a brand; pins of cold fire stab through his fingers. The air curdles, sharp and sour, as if lightning had scorched old bone-dust. Ozone tang over rank grave-mildew. In that tainted reek the stronger presence rakes at the widening crack, a blind, ice-hot fury, its clawing insistence beating against his ribs as much as against the unseen wound in the warded dark.
With no time for careful liturgy he flings a desperate, improvised charm into the breach, half psalm-verse, half cairn-blessing, words tripping raw from a throat scalded by cold. His fingers scrawl a crooked cross over the hottest fault-lines of frost, then fold into an old druid’s knot before he can stop them. The wards knit just enough to hold, not heal, leaving Kian doubled over and shaking, breath pouring from his mouth in pale plumes that hang in the crypt’s frigid air like the ghosts he has barely, for this shuddering moment only, kept at bay.
He lurches up the first steps like a penitent on his knees, one ink-stained hand groping for the chill curve of the wall. Stone sweats beneath his palm. Each shallow tread is slick with damp, cold as the slab of a fresh-made bier. His vision swims with afterimages: clawing silhouettes flayed out against the dark like smoke made solid; ogham strokes that only a moment before lay quiet and moss-soft now blazing in his mind’s eye raw and bloody-bright, as if the stone itself had opened into a wound.
Every heartbeat seems to jar his skull, a hard dull drum that throws back the dead monks’ mutter in broken echoes. Names stolen from the stone, they had said. Or tried to say, mouths clogged with dust and binding. Names stolen, stolen. The phrase hammers the inside of his head until it frays into rhythm rather than sense. He cannot tell if the rasping in his ears is his own breath, harsh and uneven, or the crypt’s unrest still whispering up after him through the stair-well like smoke through a key-hole.
Half-formed syllables cling to his tongue, scraps of psalm and older charm, but he dares not let them fall into full sound. The wards held by a hair’s breadth only. He feels that hair still pulling, burning, somewhere deep behind his eyes. Old cold needles his bones, lodging in the hollows of his wrists and knees. His fingers twitch against the rough stone, wanting the ogham’s edges again, the false comfort of carved order beneath the skin, and he has to wrench his hand away lest he turn and go back down into the press of shades and frost.
The stair narrows, or his sight does. The thin line of grey light above him shivers, sways, swells and contracts like the beat of a pupil. He climbs toward it as if toward an altar-flame, throat tight, ribs aching, with the taste of bone-dust and iron thick at the back of his mouth and the sure, sick knowledge that what clawed at him below is not content to remain in the dark.
The narrow passage at the stair’s mouth yawns like a throat full of mist, stone sweating, light from the upper cloister thinned to a grey smear. Kian is still half in the crypt, lungs burning with cold incense, ears full of the dead monks’ frayed whisper, when the side-door from the guesthouse slams back on its iron ring, a harsh, living clang that jars through bone and ward alike.
The door rebounds off the wall and Fiachra all but hurtles through, catching himself on the jamb with a palm that leaves a wet print. His shoulders heave under a sodden wool tunic, breath coming in sharp, sea-harsh pulls. Hair lies plastered black to his brow, dripping rain and blown spray; rivulets trail along the hard line of his jaw to darken the neck of his shirt. The smell of him hits first (wet salt, tar, old rope, sweat and peat-smoke) cutting knife-clean through the crypt’s myrrh and tallow and sour grave-chill.
He blinks at the dimness, at Kian hunched on the stair like a ghost half-risen, and for a heartbeat both men simply stare, shipwrecked into one another’s path by storm from above and storm from below.
“From the market-cross on the mainland to the tavern down our own pier they’re spitting your monastery’s name like a curse,” Fiachra pants, island Gaelic rough in his throat. He does not bow, does not cross himself, only jabs a swollen knuckle at the sweating stones between them. “They say forged charters, dressed in your holy script from Cill na Sceathach, are robbing old houses of their fields. Men who held their furrows since my grandfather’s grandfather now shown the door by parchment.” His voice cracks on the word. “And it’s my name they’re swearing by. My mark on the wax, Kian. My seal on bales and bundles I never saw, as if I’ve been rowing their thieving prayers across the tide.”
For a heartbeat Kian can only stare, the world pinched to the raw purple swelling on Fiachra’s jaw, the cracked bead of red at his lip, the tremor in his sea-rough breath. Then the sense of the words catches him sideways: stolen acres, stolen seals, false oaths ferried under his friend’s borrowed name. The litany snarls with the crypt’s mutter, and behind Kian’s eyes the burning echo of that broken rite flares white-hot, hardening into a sick, iron certainty that this is the same wound in two guises. Stone and skin below, ink and flesh above.
Names stolen from the stone. Names stolen on parchment. The twin phrases jar through him like struck iron. In that shudder he feels again the cold, accusing weight that pressed at the torn wards: not some tired cairn-bound relic, but a wronged ghost with its death cut in both earth and ink, reaching up from crypt to scriptorium, pointing, naming, refusing rest.
He almost turns toward the crypt stairs instead, drawn by the memory of that accusing weight, the press of unseen eyes in the dark below. The stone there remembers every footfall, every whispered name; it would welcome him as one of its own. His shoulder angles toward that black, breathing mouth, and for a heartbeat he can almost taste the damp of the burial chamber on his tongue, iron and salt and old lime.
But the bell keeps on with its thin, insistent pattern. Not for vigils. Not for the refectory. The old cadence for scribes and scholars alone, rung rarely, and never lightly. Each strike threads through his chest and tightens around his ribs like a cincture drawn too hard. Duty and habit bite where the rope of his belt rests; the Church’s claim and the older obligations twist together, rough against his skin.
He hears again the roll-call of the dead from the crypt. Names chiseled, half-effaced by time, names he has mended with ink in the register above. Names stolen from the stone, ground down to dust. Names stolen in ink, smoothed from the page as if they had never lain beneath consecrated earth at all. The echo of that quiet theft beats like a second bell inside his skull.
He hesitates, weight balanced between descent and ascent, between bone and parchment. The passage yawns beside him, a throat lined with cold, and something far below stirs at the edge of his sight, a shift of shadow against deeper dark, like a hand lifting to beckon.
He swallows, breath clouding faintly in the already-chill air, and tears his gaze away. With a last, reluctant glance toward the crypt’s dark mouth (as if to promise he will return, as if the dead are keeping tally) he forces his feet along the corridor.
The stones under his soles grow drier, less clammy, the smell of salt and grave-damp thinning into a different dampness: tallow, stale breath, and the lingering tang of scraped pumice. A faint draft runs along the wall from ahead, smelling of old vellum and lamp-smoke, thin as spider-thread but sure as a finger pointing.
The nearer he draws, the sharper the prickle at his temples becomes, the same needling pressure that had dogged him among the coffers and bones. Here, instead of the weight of buried flesh, he feels the weight of words. Of all that has been bound, fixed, and declared true. The bell’s last note fades into the stone; its absence leaves a hollow hum in his ears like distant chanting.
At the scriptorium door he pauses only long enough to school his face into something calm, monk-plain. One hand, stiff with cold and ink-stain, rests on the wood, feeling the faint vibration of activity within: the scratch of quills, the soft shift of sandals, the drip of wax.
He draws in a breath that tastes of parchment and fear, and pushes the door inward.
The room tightens around him as the door yields, the long, low chamber seeming to draw itself in like a lung at the top of a held breath. Candlelight stutters in the iron brackets, not from any draft he can feel, but as if the flames are leaning inward to listen. Their thin light throws the desks into hunched silhouettes, warped shadows pooling beneath the benches like crouched things waiting.
Brothers sit in their accustomed places, backs bowed, cowls drooping, hands moving with the slow care of habit. Yet the silence between them is wrong. Too clean. No muttered prayers under breath, no soft clearing of throats, no quiet exchange over the shape of a letter. Only the dry, precise rasp of quills over skin. Each stroke sounds sharp as a rib cracking, or a finger-joint pulled and twisted, breaking one by one.
He feels the noise in his teeth, a fine splintering. With every line they set down, the air seems to thicken further, words pinning the room tighter to its own walls, as though the ink itself were a net being drawn closed.
The familiar scent of scraped parchment, lamp-smoke, and drying ink, once a thin kind of sanctuary, sits sour on his tongue tonight, overlaid by a faint reek of cold earth that has no business above ground. Not grave-damp from the crypt below, but something fresher, as if a spade had just bitten into consecrated soil and turned it to the air. He moves past the nearest workbench, where gospel lines wait half-illumined in red and gold, and the fine hairs along his forearms rise as if at a sudden wind. There is no wind. Only that slow, crawling chill. The tiny bone charms threaded through his belt cords give a muted, answering tick against one another, a soft clatter like distant hail on stone.
To his left the shelves rear up, cramped with charters and cartularies, calfskin swollen and darkened, their tagged spines a close-grown thicket of promises, threats, bought souls. As he paces beside them, a thin pressure begins to knit behind his eyes, needling his temples in that same crypt-born rhythm. It is like cold brows pressed through vellum to meet his own, a crowd of unseen faces tracking the small drift of his hand along the edges of their written names.
He slows, fingertips hovering above a cracked leather thong, and the pressure sharpens into a kind of drawn breath, hopeful, fearful, insistent. Not mere curiosity. Expectancy. A hush of skulls turned upward under the flagstones. The dead lean through ink and thong and vellum, crowding his skin, waiting to see if he will leave their stolen years buried or trace, in living script, the shape of the wrong that pinned them here.
He shifts the rolls aside and draws a scrap of waste parchment toward him, rough-edged and already scarred with old practice strokes. The lamplight pools small and unsteady on its surface. His own ink-stained finger taps from line to line along the nearest roll, choosing, lifting, separating. Minims first: the plain, bread-and-water bones of script. He copies them in a slow column down the margin. Then the taller letters, the proud ones: ascenders that should rise clean and sure, but here bow inward at the last instant, as if their maker had flinched from the height.
He pauses after each group, listening. The scriptorium’s silence runs close and taut around him, broken only by the faint scrape of another brother’s quill and the far-off sigh of the sea against the rock. Beneath that, under-stone, the mutter of the dead thrums in dull, uncertain waves. His finger moves again. Terminal strokes now, the small proud tails where a hand reveals itself if it will anywhere. He inks each one with careful slowness: a frail upward flick that never quite finishes, a tiny loop that should close but leaves the slightest breath of a gap, an odd reluctant curve where most men’s pens run straight.
Line after line, from different rolls, from grants and obits and burial notes supposedly written decades apart. When he has filled the scrap, he sets the quill down and holds the makeshift pattern out from him, squinting so the words blur and only motion remains. There, in the gathered strokes, a ghost-hand of habit rises from the tangle of script and seals, delicate and unmistakable.
Recognition does not come like a blow. It seeps into him, slow and absolute, like cold water seeping through unwaxed wool, finding every seam. These are not the random stumblings of weary brothers spread across long years. Not the uneven hands of novices grown old and shaky at their desks. It is the same refined, anxious touch repeating itself again and again, teaching itself to stoop, to slur, to mimic. But never quite able to unlearn its own tremor.
One man. One hand. Threaded through lifetimes of ink, hiding in plain sight.
Awareness settles, and the air draws tight around him. The low, layered murmur that has been pressing at his skull ebbs, thins, recedes like tide-water dragging shingle. In its place a listening stillness rises, raw and expectant, as if the skulls beneath the floor have turned as one to hear what choice he will make. Even the faint scratch of distant quills seems to falter and hang.
His own heart misses its measure. The beat that follows lands hard, echoing in his ribs like a muffled bell. The quill in his hand, so light a moment before, grows dense and foreign, heavier than any bone relic he has lifted from a reliquary. He feels the drag of it between his fingers as though the shaft were packed with lead shot, with grave-soil, with the unspent breath of men and women whose names thin and break where that other hand has passed.
Every stroke he has copied gathers in the nib. Every date erased, every boundary shifted, every grave half-unwritten clings to the feathered weight, begging to be set right. Or buried again.
He does not trust first knowing. He tests it, as he was taught to test relic-bones and visions. Another roll, pulled close with care, its seal cracked but still faintly smelling of wax and smoke. Then another from lower in the stack, older vellum gone thin as skin at the throat. He hunts the same small betrayals: a burial entry begun in firm strokes that taper to nothing halfway through a name; a date crowded in where no date should fit; a boundary stone on a cliffside field shifted, on parchment only, the width of a man’s stride.
Each pattern answered, each quiet falsehood found and matched, draws the cold in tighter around his chest. Breath comes shorter. There is no room left for doubt. That elegant, anxious hand is Branmacuillean’s: his neighbour at table, his murmured adviser in matters of ink. The man whose soft-spoken questions and offered scraps of guidance Kian had taken for weary kindness now stands revealed, line by careful line, as the same hand that has been stealing years from the dead and land from the living.
The parchment blur before him clears into aisles and shadows. Sound sharpens: the rasp of nib on skin, the wet click of ink-horn lids, a brother’s muffled cough. Across the dim, Branmacuillean hunches, too still save for the quill clenched white between elegant fingers, the feather quivering against the air as if some unseen pulse ran up it from the grave-cold floor.
Their gazes do not quite meet. Kian’s eyes fix on the fine, strained line of Branmacuillean’s profile, the candle’s tremor carving hollows beneath cheek and brow. In that half-lit face he reads no brother’s weariness, but a hunter’s watch turned inward, always upon parchment, never upon altar or choir. Realisation bites clean. This quiet figure, ink to the wrists, has been working as a hidden adversary to the dead he tends and the living he shelters. Something folds shut in Kian then; the thin remnant of trust he held for the cloister cracks and falls away, leaving only the bare authority of his grave-work and the cold assent of the listening skulls below to brace his next word.
Kian lays his palm flat upon the worm-eaten board between the rolls, feeling the old wood give a little under his weight, as if it, too, had been gnawed hollow by years of quiet falsity. The two charters curl toward one another like dried leaves, but his hand pins them, steadies their edges. With his free forefinger he traces, not the gilded capitals or the pious flourishes, but a single, failing curve: the identical tremor-tilted descender of a letter that sags at the same breath of the line in both.
Ink has dried dark in the grooves of his skin. It smears faintly as he moves, a shadow of script upon script. He follows that faltering stroke as if it were a trail of blood through snow, from the first charter to the second, then back again, letting the pattern settle in his bones. A quirk of habit, that little falter. A man’s weakness of hand, not the will of any saint.
When he speaks, it is soft, scarcely more than a thread in the dim clatter and scrape of the scriptorium, but it slips under the other sounds and lies there. Not the easy mutter of a brother sharing work, nor the shy inquiry of a novice at law, but the measured cadence he uses when he kneels among opened graves and recites the names of the unshriven. “This same hand,” he notes, not lifting his gaze from the treacherous stroke, “has a curious way of faltering at the tail, yet never so much as to trip the eye. See how it repeats, here… and here. In burial rolls. In land-gifts. In places where no two scribes’ errors should marry so closely.”
The words fall like pebbles into a still well. He does not name the hand. He does not need to. The weight in his tone is not accusation shouted to rafters, but the quiet, relentless pressure of witness given before the dead, and he feels the room, and the chill beneath it, incline to listen.
Branmacuillean’s hands spasm above the parchment, elegant fingers jerking as though unsure whether to snatch up a quill or clutch at the cross on his breast. The quill’s feather rasps against the air, then stills. Ink beads at the tip and drops, a single black tear darkening the lower margin of a saint’s life.
For a heartbeat his mask slips. The waxen cast of his skin goes corpse-pale; his lips thin and part without sound, as if some word has been torn from him before it can form. In his eyes (ink-dark, gleaming in the guttering light) Kian sees naked, startled terror, the look of a man who has heard his own name spoken in the wrong litany.
Then the fear shutters. Branmacuillean drags a breath through his nose, draws himself long and narrow as a spear, cloaking tremor in thin, brittle dignity. “You mistake common chancery habit for secret practice,” he says, too smoothly, each syllable polished and pious. “To question my hand in such matters is to question the order of the Church itself. I will not hear baseless suspicion from a brother who traffics in graves.”
The protest shivers out and dies against the stone vaulting, thin as smoke. Kian does not answer it. He lets the clatter of distant pens and the hiss of tallow fill the space Branmacuillean’s outrage cannot hold. He only watches the tight leap of the other man’s throat, the way the words scrape past like fish-bones.
Then, with a grave-tender’s care, he shifts the nearer charter. The parchment crackles. Candle-glow slides along its surface, catches on more than ink. There, in the browned margin beside a pious Latin clause, a faint, scored mark rises under his fingertip. Ogham-leaning strokes, almost worn away. No Christian rubric should bear such scratching.
“Tell me,” Kian murmurs, mild as falling earth, “whose hand dares amend the rolls of the dead.”
Branmacuillean swallows, Adam’s apple jerking like a hooked fish, yet his gaze skates past the ink that damns him. Again it snags on that bare stretch of wall, where the whitewash sags inward like thin flesh over a hollow. To Kian’s sharpened sight the lamplight kinks there, pouring round a man-shaped absence: a darkness dense as packed earth, edges picked out by a grief that is not his own, raw and wordless and fixed upon the trembling scribe.
The unseen thing leans nearer. The hairs along Kian’s forearms lift beneath the rough wool, as though a winter wind had found him in the close, hot room. A grave-cold seeps through tallow-haze and ink-smell, marrow-deep, old as barrow-stone. Another will bears down upon his own, straining like a bound man at fetters, tugging at every sense. The scratch of quills, the mutter of Latin, the dry whisper of parchment all fall away, thinned to nothing, until the whole scriptorium hangs on Branmacuillean’s quick, shallow breaths and the hollow, brimming hush before something breaks.
He leaves the Latin titles, the flourished grants, the neat pieties about bells and candles and fish-rights. They are only skin. He peels them back with silence.
When he speaks again, his words go down to bone.
“Not whose land,” he says, scarcely louder than the rasp of a quill, “but whose grave.”
Branmacuillean flinches at that soft turn, as if Kian had laid a cold hand to his nape. Ink beads on the broken tip of his quill, trembles, falls.
Kian does not look at the spilled drop. He names, instead, the little brother in the south transept whose slab bears the wrong year. The old lay-warden whose name has been shifted three lines down the roll, as if he had died in another winter. The noblewoman in the crypt whose bones, by the abbey’s seal, should lie under carved stone. But whose empty niche gapes like a pulled tooth.
He lets each case fall with the weight of soil.
“You set him down as passing at Lammas,” he says mildly, “yet I remember the frost on the lichyard that week, and the bell tolling in Advent darkness. A man is not twice dead, Branmacuillean. Once in the flesh, once in the ink. To deny either is theft.”
The scribe’s fingers twitch against the parchment. They leave faint, greasy shadows, as if some damp clung to his skin that the others do not bear.
Kian follows the thin thread deeper. “And here. No death-date at all. Only a name, half-scraped, and a space where the prayer should be. No Mass. No candle. No earth turned with a blessing. Tell me, whose bones lie waiting in the dark without the Church to name them?”
His voice is gentle, but each mention of missing chants, of unspoken absolutions, is a stone dropped into still water. Debts. Always debts.
“Such silence is dear,” he goes on, weaving the words like knots in cord. “For every line you alter, some soul is held wanting. For every year you steal or give, some spirit stands at the gate with no record to prove its passing. The Office is not said. The bell is not rung. The grave is not the grave it claims to be.”
He tastes iron at the back of his throat as he says it, as if the air itself had soured on old blood.
“Who pays,” he asks, “for prayers never spoken? Who answers when the dead knock and find the roll shut against them?”
His gaze never leaves Branmacuillean’s face. He watches the colour leach from it, sees the sheen of sweat rise cold along the man’s upper lip. The scribe’s eyes want to dart back to the safe refuge of charters and seals, to land-rights and rents. Kian will not let them.
He holds him there, between ink and grave, and speaks once more, very low.
“Someone has been spending the dead,” he whispers, “like coin.”
At the first mention of a brother buried under a false name, the air buckles; candle-flames gutter sideways as if some vast chest had drawn in a breath and forgotten how to let it go. The mutter of prayers and the soft rasp of quills thin, stretched on that held inhalation until every sound in the room seems a trespass.
Cold comes with it. Not the honest chill of stone, but a brittle, glass-fine rime that races along the oaken boards, kissing ink-stones, knife-blades, the brass hoops of pen-cases. Moisture beads and freezes in an instant, so that ink stiffens on the nibs, goes sluggish in the wells. A thin crack answers somewhere in the rafters as the timber shrinks under an invisible frost.
Kian’s lungs seize on the change. Each breath he drags in scours like sea-wind over iron, raw and stinging; each exhalation blooms pale and ghostly before his face, silvering the candle-glow as though his very soul were smoking from his lips. The chill needles through habit and skin and bone, settling in the hollows of his chest like a weight of unthrown earth.
Branmacuillean’s hand, poised over the parchment, begins to tremble so violently that the pen leaves a jagged blot across a careful line of script, a black wound tearing through saints’ names and dates. He snatches at control, jaw clenched, but his wrist jerks again, sharp as a puppet’s yank, and the nib skates, shrieking, off the vellum’s edge. He half-rises, as if to twist and look behind him, yet some contrary force pins his shoulders forward.
His eyes flare wide toward the corner where his shadow doubles itself upon the limewashed wall: one shape seated, the other a heartbeat behind, lagging and lurching, its outline warping in the wavering light as though something were trying, clumsily, to climb inside his skin.
The quill snaps between his fingers with a dry, brittle crack, a thorn of wood biting his palm as ink leaps like black blood across the unfinished column, spattering saints’ names. Branmacuillean’s breath shears off; his throat works soundlessly as five dark welts flower along the pale skin, rising from sullen red to livid purple, as though clamped by a hand no eye can see. His heels drum once against the rush-strewn boards, a dull, panicked thud, while his nails rake useless furrows through the empty, freezing air.
The scriptorium’s ordered murmur shatters. Benches shriek over stone as brothers lurch back, habits snagging on trestles. A younger monk’s ink-blackened fingers twitch a crooked cross in the air, lips stumbling over a psalm. Another, jolting upright, knocks his taper sideways; molten wax spatters and hisses along the grain, inching toward a loose sheaf of dry vellum that flutters in the sudden, unholy draught, corners already beginning to curl.
Instinct cuts through Kian’s shock like a knife through wet wool. He does not think; he bows his head as though merely deepening into the work before him and lets his lips part on a thin, urgent murmur. The first words are Church-taught, Latin versicles shaped by long hours in the choir, sharp as chiselled stone. Beneath them, almost under his breath, the rougher cadence of the old tongue threads in, consonants catching in his throat like thorns.
“Domine… claudis… naomh-gheal… stay the wandering… bind the unshriven…”
One ink-stained hand lifts, palm outward, fingers splayed in the semblance of a blessing over quill and page. To the brothers, it might seem only a priestly reflex, a warding gesture over panic and spilled ink. The other hand slips low, under the lip of the table, disappearing into shadow. There, hidden from any watching eye, his fingertips find the shallow grooves no rule-bound brother should have cut.
Ogham. Old marks, older than the monastery, older than the cross scraped into the standing stone in the garth. A secret lattice of strokes and notches pressed into seasoned oak, worn smooth by his own furtive touch in long vigils. He follows them now as if reading blind: upstroke for calling, cross-cut for binding, short clustered lines for the names that do not belong in any Christian litany.
Finger to notch, breath to word. Each groove pulls a different syllable from him, the chant plaiting itself without conscious choosing. He feels the pattern catch, hissing through the grain like sap drawn backward. The table’s edge is cold under his skin, rimed with a thin, invisible frost. He presses harder, thumb on the deepest cut, a hinge-mark, a threshold-sign, and turns his voice there, setting the rhythm of Latin and Gaelic together like hammer and anvil, to catch and bind what rides the trembling scribe.
The air about Branmacuillean tightens, slow and vicious, as if a net were drawing in from all four corners of the room. Not a breath of wind moves, yet the parchment nearest him stirs and bows inward, as though some great weight presses upon it. Frost feathers along the brass rim of the nearest inkwell, creeping in white veins over dried spatters, the metal pinging with a faint, breathless crackle. Candle-flames draw thin and blue, guttering not outward but inward, stooping toward the stooped scribe as though paying him an obscene reverence.
Kian feels it answer him. The old death-cold lifts along his fingers like water up a wick, seeping into tendon and bone, eating at what little warmth remains. It runs up his forearms in narrow bands of ache and numbness, burrowing into the thin meat of his shoulders. His ribs tighten. Each breath rasps colder than the last until he can see it, a thin veil of smoke-thread curling from his lips.
His voice falters on a Latin syllable. The older name, the anchor-word taught in dreams by ancestors and grave-whispers, rises to his tongue and catches there like a fishbone. His lungs claw against his narrow chest; white motes dance at the edge of his sight, crowding the ink-blurred world. The ogham-cuts under his fingers throb with answering chill, but his grip slips on the grooves as his strength ebbs, and he feels the rite strain, stutter, threaten to tear.
For a heartbeat the binding holds. The air congeals, taut as wet hide stretched on a frame. The shadow clinging to Branmacuillean’s hunched back thickens, black upon black, its ragged edges dragged sideways, smearing toward the invisible ogham-web Kian is sketching in the chill above the table. It bunches, strains, a torn cloak snagged on thorns.
Then the pattern slips.
Something in Kian’s numbed grip falters, a single syllable sours on his tongue, and the woven words part. The ghost’s fury, fouled by half-checked constraint, whips back through the only vessel it owns. Branmacuillean jolts as if struck by a mallet, spine bowing, heels drumming. A strangled, borrowed cry tears from his bruising throat as his body is hurled sideways, shoulder and ribs hammering the heavy desk.
The blow heaves the worktable sideways; quills leap like startled birds, pounce-sand scatters in a pale spray, and the brimming inkwell lurches, its dark mouth yawning toward the open spreads of painstakingly illuminated gospels and brittle annals splayed across the warped boards. Ink swells, black and viscous, in a slow, impending arc over decades of labor and prayer, over saints’ lives and land-bound lineages that exist nowhere else on earth, nowhere but here under his keeping.
Kian’s schooling grips him as hard as any vow. Scripture is the house of their prayer, the isle’s memory pressed into calfskin and color; to let it drown in black ruin would be its own blasphemy. The prayer splinters on his tongue. He tears his hand from the cut lines and lunges, habit rasping the bench, fingers closing round the inkwell a heartbeat before it spills. Glass-hard cold bites his palm; a few thick drops leap, spatter his sleeve, bloom like small night-blooms on the wool instead of the vellum. As his grasp tightens, the ogham under his freed fingers goes suddenly mute. In that snapped instant the tenuous lattice of word and mark shivers, gaps, then shears away; he feels the binding slacken, spill loose like a cut net from the raging presence he had nearly fixed.
Cold knifes through the room as if some unseen door has been flung wide to winter. The breath snatched from Kian’s chest returns in a rush so raw it burns; the air whitens faintly before his lips, every exhale a pale ghost of its own. The half-wrought lattice of sound and sign above the table (his mingled psalm and ogham-prayer) shivers like hoarfrost in thaw, its unseen threads parting strand by strand beneath the ghost’s wrenching escape.
He feels the thing tear loose from the net he had almost cast round it. Not a body, not quite a mind, but a knot of hunger and grief, a weight without flesh that drags at the bones of the world. It shears away from the open space over the desk and slams backward, hard as a fist, into the angle where wall meets ceiling. Plaster dust ticks down in a fine sifting. The shadow there swells, blooming out from the corner in a bruise of black-on-black that does not answer to candlelight.
It ripples. Not the soft, lawful tremor of smoke, but the writhing of spilled ink in a basin of water, feathered tendrils darting and recoiling, seeking edges. Within that murk his half-sight snatches at details, a suggestion of a jaw clenched in endless accusation, fingers curled and reaching, the rag of a tonsure flickering like seaweed in a current, then loses them as the thing knots itself tight against the stone.
Freed of its strangling grip, Branmacuillean folds where he stands. His legs buckle with no more ceremony than a cut rope; he drops to his knees on the reed-strewn floor, palms slapping down a heartbeat too late to save his chin from cracking against the table’s edge. A raw, tearing sound hauls out of him. Less a cough than a man’s first breath after drowning. He clutches at his own throat, nails whitening with the force of it, and drags the air in ragged, wet gulps through a passage that seems unwilling to widen.
Color already breeds there, ugly and swift. The flesh about his larynx purples as if some invisible garrote is biting tighter with every heartbeat. The marks are not smears or vague discolorations, but clear ovals and bars, the shapes of fingers that have forgotten how to let go. Five on one side, five on the other, set deep and dark as ink into vellum. No living hand rests there. Kian sees only Branmacuillean’s own trembling fingers skitter over the rising bruises, seeking purchase on nothing at all.
The sounds of the scriptorium thin around them, as if the room itself is listening. Somewhere beyond the shutter small rain begins to hiss, fine as sand on stone. The wax in the nearest candle gutters with a sharp, frantic spitting, the flame leaning away from the corner where the ghost has pressed itself, as though heat itself would rather not look upon that clinging stain.
Kian’s own breath comes quicker, each plume of cold before his mouth a counting of his failure. The taste of iron threads under his tongue, bitter and hot, seeping from where the last syllable of the broken charm had turned and cut him inside, like a hook pulled backward through flesh.
For a heartbeat there is only the rasp of Branmacuillean’s coughs and the frantic flutter of candles bowing toward the corner where the ghost has hidden itself, wicks spitting wax as if in protest. The sound claws at the rafters. Then voices crack the hush (first a thin, frightened “Sancte Michael, defende nos) ” from one of the younger brothers, then another child-voice trying to remember the Latin of an exorcism and stumbling into half-psalms. A third, older throat shouts hoarsely for holy water, for the abbot, for bells. Feet scrape, benches grind back; no one comes near the corner where the cold is thickest.
Parchment edges still twitch on the desks, shuddering and settling, as though some invisible wind is riffling through the monastery’s memory and cannot quite bear to leave. Ink pools gleam like black eyes. Kian straightens, slow as if surfacing from depth. He feels every accusing gaze like a stone laid on his breastbone, one upon another, a cairn built in silence. The echo of his broken charm stings in his ears, high and thin. Copper floods his mouth where the prayer turned back and bit him, and he swallows it down like guilt.
Branmacuillean hangs there a moment, swaying on his knees, milking the silence as if it were coin. He lets his head loll, lets his breath rasp thin and whistling, lets the brothers see the bruise-marks darkening like spilled ink beneath his fingers. Only when he feels their horror fix on him does he drag up a voice. “This… this is what comes,” he croaks, each word squeezed through torn flesh and practised fear, “when heathen mutterings… defile Christ’s house.” The phrase breaks on a coughing fit that shows the whites of his eyes to good effect. Those ink-dark eyes gleam with wet, curated terror as he lifts a shaking hand toward Kian, careful, very careful, not to glance at the corner where the ghost crouches, its silent fury beating in the air like a second heart.
The abbot’s sandals slap stone before he is fully seen, habit flaring with his haste. He halts in the doorway, eyes raking once over the strewn rolls, the skewed bench, Branmacuillean’s livid throat, Kian fixed in the midst with fingers still locked round the rescued inkwell. Under that narrowed, weighing stare, Kian gropes for words that will not name ogham or grave-song, forcing his tongue instead around stilted phrases. He can feel authority slipping from him in slow, cold trickles, as if some unseen hand were wringing trust from the very air. The brothers draw, almost without thinking, closer to abbot and gasping scribe, their bodies closing ranks, leaving Kian stranded in a widening ring of crossed fingers, sidelong looks, and muttered psalms that fall like a hedge against him.
He bends under the abbot’s rebuke, murmurs obedience, mouth tasting of iron and ash, yet his eyes stray to the wall-shadow where the cold clings thickest. In the crooked edge of sight the ghost sharpens: a hollow-cheeked scribe-shape, ink dripping from its fingers like fresh script. Its arm juts past him, rigid as a rod, indicting not monk but stone, the low arch and stair that nose downward toward crypt and sea-damp foundation. The unseen hand trembles, insisting. The line of that pointing burrows under Kian’s skin, a barbed thought. Later, when bells fall silent and the mist presses like breath against shutter and slit, that buried command will prise him from his pallet and send his bare feet down into the reek of salt and old bones.
The stair tightens, stone pressing in. The lamp’s flame gutters low, a small orange tongue licked thin by drafts from below. Water ticks somewhere in the dark, slow and patient, like a counting of beads. The sound sets its own rhythm against the rasp of their breathing.
Halfway down, the air changes. Less of the dry crypt; more of the sea’s wet throat. Salt rides the chill, sharp and metallic. It threads through Kian’s lungs, stinging like old penance. Beneath it lies another scent, harder to name. Sour iron, spent incense, the cloy of herbs long rotted. The mingled smells of both altars.
Fiachra clears his throat once, softly. “How far?” The question comes in a croaked whisper, island Gaelic sanded down by caution.
“Far enough,” Kian answers, though he does not know. His voice comes out flat, the words hanging in the stone like smoke. The ancestral murmur along his skull presses forward, a soft, urgent tapping. Down. Down. Child of the mound, go down.
He tightens his grip on the belt of bone charms at his waist. The little pieces of carved antler and knuckle click against each other like teeth. Cold seeps from them into his fingers. Not his saint’s relics that chill him now, but the older things bound among them, kin-bone and ogham-scratched slivers hidden under pious names.
The stair spills them at last into a narrow landing slick with condensation. Here the crosses thin, and the cut spirals grow thicker, flowing like frozen waves over the stone. Certain curves catch the lamplight with a damp gleam, as if the rock remembers being river or sea.
Other marks intrude. Fresher. Neater. Lines of Latin cramped along the edge of a spiral, ink once rubbed into the grooves now only a faint darkening. Kian squints and makes out the hand, the tight, scholar’s strokes, the slight rightward lean.
Branmacuillean. No doubt.
He reads the nearest words, lips moving. “Non licet… It is not permitted…” Then, more cramped, forced between older swirls: “Do not break. Do not loosen the watching ones.” A warning, scratched by the same man who has been prising at records and wards alike.
Kian’s mouth dries. His ancestors hiss amusement in the back of his head. Late fear, scribe, he thinks, but does not speak it. The ghost at their backs gives a faint, answering scrape, like quill on parchment.
Fiachra shifts his weight. The landing is too small for his shoulders, his presence too solid for this in-between space. “This the way to your cave, then?” he mutters.
“Not mine,” Kian says. “Hers.” He does not specify which “her”. The Church’s Lady, or the older, nameless keeper of the mound. In this throat of stone, the line between them has never been clean.
He pushes on.
The passage beyond the landing narrows to a low, dripping tunnel. Rock sweats around them. The lamp smears wavering gold over slick walls veined with quartz that glints like trapped bone.
As they move, Kian feels the wards grow patchy. Here, a cross carved deep and clean, humming with steady Christian prayer. There, merely a faint scoring, half-erased, its grace thinned to a thread. Between them lurk spaces where only ogham remains, upright strokes and slanting cuts that answer his blood more than his baptism.
He slows at one such gap. The notches form a short, dense cluster near knee-height. Old habit makes him bow his head as he reads them with his fingertips.
“Gate. Debt. Speak true.” The shapes spark behind his eyes, overlaying Latin phrases like ghost-text. A bargain-script, set so low the monks would not notice unless they crawled.
“Don’t linger,” Fiachra urges under his breath. “Place feels… wrong.” The sailor’s gaze keeps flicking back the way they came, as though he expects the tight stair to vomit something after them.
“It is wrong,” Kian agrees. “But it has been wrong a long while.” The island quivers under his soles, a dog shaking in its sleep.
Ahead, the stone darkens, sound changing from close drip to a wider hush. The air grows colder still, the salt-thick damp of tide-caves rising to meet them.
“The sea,” Fiachra breathes. “We’re near.”
“And other things nearer,” Kian murmurs.
He lifts the lamp higher and steps into the waiting dark.
Beyond, the cramped stair kinks sharper, burrowing in a tight helix that seems intent on swallowing them whole. Each step grinds a tired groan from the stone, as if the rock resents their weight. The air cools to knife-edge. Kian’s breath feathers white, thin ghosts that rise and vanish, each exhale briefly limning Fiachra’s anxious profile as the sailor ducks his head to clear the sweating ceiling.
Marks thicken along the walls. Ogham notches, old and sure-cut, run beneath a scurf of shallow crosses. Once carved deep, then defaced with hurried chisels, the blows uneven, almost panicked. Kian’s fingertips skim the gouged lines in passing, skin burning with their cold. The strokes rank themselves in his mind with Latin fragments like marginal glosses.
“Threshold… binding… watchful dead,” he breathes, the words barely sound at all. The phrases taste of peat-smoke and altar wine mixed together, wrong and right at once.
With each term spoken, something in the stone gives a minute, answering quiver. Hair-fine cracks darken for a heartbeat. The stair’s curve seems to lean toward him, as though the buried script recognizes blood-kin and strains to listen.
At the stair’s foot, where cut blocks sink back into the island’s raw bone, Kian drops to one knee. No door shows itself. Only a seam of rock, tight as pressed lips, veined pale with salt and smoke-stain from centuries of guttering candles above. Cold bleeds up through his shins. He lays his ink-blackened thumb into a shallow spiral at knee-height, its groove worn satin-smooth by hands far older than any shorn crown. Old speech crawls from his tongue, ragged syllables his grandmother’s shade hissed through dream-windows, twisted together with a clipped scrap of psalm. The air narrows. Even the dripping stops. Then the seam shudders and parts with a grudging, grinding sigh, breathing out rust, sea-brine, and the ghost of burned resin.
The tunnel beyond narrows to a rock-hewn gullet, forcing them sideways, shoulders rasping along stone filmed with sweating minerals. The lamp stutters and thins, flaring brief, corpse-blue whenever it brushes unseen draughts that finger comb-like through Kian’s hair and habit. Nervous brothers’ crosses crowd over drowned spirals and knotwork that seem to shift like trapped tide-lines; for a sick instant he feels the walls flex, testing them as a throat tests a mouthful, weighing whether to swallow or spit them back toward the light.
Behind them, where no waking brother treads this night, the unseen companions crowd closer. The familiar rustle of incorporeal wings brushes Kian’s ears, colder than the stone at his spine, and beneath it creeps the faint, teeth-aching rasp of metal nib on grit. The sound skitters over his bones, a dry, relentless scratching that turns marrow to ink. It is a reminder carved in nerves: he is not stealing alone toward forbidden knowledge, but hauling a chain of the dead, kin and enemy both, into a gullet where the wards feel thinned to palimpsest, one sharp stroke from tearing through and letting all that waits below come flooding up.
The passage constricts until they must move one behind the other, shoulders brushing rock, then breaks without warning into open blackness. Stone falls away beneath Kian’s outstretched hand. He jerks back, breath catching. The rush-light spits and steadies, its weak flame painting a cramped hollow where the island’s innards meet the sea.
The air is different here. Less dust, more teeth. Salt breathes up from below, threaded with weed-rot and the metallic tang of old iron. Tidewater laps at the undercut rock. Slow strokes, patient, like a blind thing testing the limits of its prison. Each lick leaves a finer sheen on the ledge, a treacherous gloss that makes Kian’s soles whisper when he shifts his weight.
He holds the light out. The walls around the hollow glisten. Algae feathers them in sodden greens and blacks. Lines of limpweed hang down like uncombed hair. Here and there barnacles clump in pale constellations, their calcified mouths cracked open as if in dumb prayer. The lamp’s glow strikes them and scatters, cold and broken, across wet stone. Beneath, the pool itself lies almost still, its skin shifting only with the slow in-and-out of the tide-breath. It looks less like water than like a slab of smoked glass, oiled and waiting.
Fiachra sucks air in through his teeth. “Mother of mercies,” he murmurs, voice flattened by the hollow. He edges past Kian, pressing himself to the rock, boots grinding for purchase on the narrow path that skirts the pool’s lip. The gloom eats him quickly; only the scuff of leather and the occasional clink of his belt-buckle mark his passage.
“Hold it higher,” he calls back, low but urgent. The cave makes the words strange, stretching them, then folding them in on themselves.
Kian inches forward, lifting the rush-light. Shadows pile under the ledge, thick as sodden wool. The dead that trail him crowd nearer to its fringe, invisible weight tugging at his bones, but none of them dare the black mirror of the pool. Their absence there troubles him more than their press at his back.
Fiachra halts, bracing one hand against the wall. His free fist raps the rock at shoulder height. The sound that comes is wrong. Not the muffled thud of solid stone, but a dull, hollow knock, like bone on the side of a wooden chest. He strikes again, lower this time. The same report. “Here,” he hisses. “Bring it, Kian.”
Kian shuffles along the ledge until the lamp’s glow spills over the spot. The stone ahead doesn’t quite match the rest. Its seams show fine lines of paler grit, not yet darkened by years of spray. Dust clings in the cracks where it has no right to be in a place that the sea licks clean twice daily. Someone has moved these not long past and jammed them back in with hurried hands.
He lays his ink-stained fingers to the chill surface. Damp beads against his skin, but beneath it he feels the faintest give, an echo not of living earth but of something hollow behind. The hair along his forearms lifts. Old sigils, half-scrubbed by salt, ghost the edges of the stones. Spirals and strokes he knows too well, crossed through in places by clumsy scratches of the newer faith.
“This is no fisher’s hiding-hole,” he whispers, more to the shades than to Fiachra. The cave seems to lean closer, listening.
Together they work the seams with bare hands and knife-blunt fingertips, feeling for the places where haste left purchase. Stone grates on stone, a grinding that rasps up Kian’s arm-bones. Each slab comes away slow, reluctant, edges slick with slime that numbs the grip and sends little shocks of cave-cold into the joints. Fiachra’s breath saws in the dark close by, turning to steam that clings and curls against the newly opened gap.
The last rock drops with a thud that sounds too small for the wrongness it uncovers. A black mouth gapes in the cave wall, not the raw, clean dark of sea-hollowed stone but a stale, contained shadow. Air sighs out, heavy and close, smelling not of salt but of mold-soft leather, rancid tallow, mouse-nest, and the dry, papery ghost of old vellum. It is the smell of a room that thinks itself forgotten.
Within, pressed in tight as contraband in a raider’s keel, squat iron-bound chests filmed with sweat, their bands bloomed green where damp has eaten the metal. Between them are crammed oilcloth bundles, their skin beaded with droplets. Faded sigils cling to the wrappings: church crosses scrawled over older knife-cut strokes, the ghost of ogham still visible beneath like a wound that never quite closed. Fiachra’s mouth twists; what leaves him is half curse, half prayer, a sailor’s blasphemy hurriedly broken to fit a saint’s name. His hand jerks to his breast in the sign of the cross, then strays instinctively toward his belt where no knife hangs, fingers clenching on emptiness.
Kian crouches, knees biting into the cold rock, and works at the nearest bundle. The oilcloth peels back with a wet, reluctant sigh, sticking to itself like old scab. Within, sheaves of parchment flare in the rush-light, pale and thin, crackling like shed snakeskin under his thumb. Wax seals, some clean-struck and true, others just-barely-wrong in device and weight, have bled into the damp. Their reds and purples run in bruised halos, blurring saints’ faces and royal crests around charters that, with a few crooked lines and altered names, shift land, tithe, burial rights. Relic labels lie beside them, inked in near-perfect mimicry of elder hands, granting sanctity to bone chips and wood splinters Kian knows as kitchen refuse. A hoard of quiet knives, every page honed to cut through kin, parish, lineage.
At the very bottom of one chest, cradled in oilcloth and lambswool like a warped reliquary, lies a narrow codex of darkened vellum. Its edges are ink-burnt where older sigils were scorched away, but the inner leaves crawl with ogham in the margins and tight Latin glosses bent in a hand Kian knows too well: Branmacuillean’s precise, tremoring script, each letter like a held breath. As Kian lays chilled fingers to the strokes, the ink seems to throb with remembered will, a faint heat pulsing against his skin, and the shadows behind his shoulders thicken, every watching shade leaning closer, crowding the edge of sight, rustling like feathers in a crypt.
He mouths the Latin and ogham in a rasping whisper, piecing meaning from gaps and scraped-away strokes. A working to slacken grave-cords. To draw “threshold dead” from mound and crypt, bind them to a single will, and wring from them the hoarded gold and fey-marked secrets hidden in the isle’s root-rock. Each line settles on his ribs like lead plate. The sour hum in the crypt-chapel. The small, sly erasures in burial rolls. Wards that failed not from age but from hands set against them. Branmacuillean’s quill has gnawed at the very knots that keep sea of dead and Otherworld from breaking over cloister and village. At Kian’s temple the murdered scribe’s shade spasms, cold fire lancing through his skull. In that shared, flayed instant he sees the snare: bring this cache blinking into chapter-house light and the charge of sorcery, falsum, and traffic with spirits will spread like mold. It will not stop at one crooked scribe. It will eat through abbot, rule, and Kian himself, leaving Cill na Sceathach bare-throated under a sky full of watching dead.
Kian’s breath ghosts white in the cave’s throat, rising and shredding in the lantern’s frail glow. Rock sweats around them. Sea-smell, iron-cold, presses close. Between their crouched bodies the oilcloth bundles gleam like bloated seals in the half-light.
“They go to the abbot,” Fiachra hisses, jabbing a scarred finger at the nearest chest. “All of it. Tonight. Before that black-feathered bastard scents the loss and shifts it elsewhere.”
His whisper slaps off stone, sharper than he meant. He flinches, glances toward the low tunnel mouth as if expecting boots, bells, the abbot’s staff. Only the cave answers, a slow drip, the drag and suck of the narrow tide-pool at their feet.
Kian tightens his grip on the narrow codex until the vellum creaks. The ink-warmed pulse beneath his fingers beats once, twice, like some buried heart. “You would hand this to men who think a smudge on a psalter is witchcraft?” he murmurs, voice raw. “Who ring the tower-bell wrong when the dead press close? They will break the wards out of fear alone.”
“Better broken by fools than gnawed in secret by a thief,” Fiachra snaps back, blue eyes hard as winter sea. “If we sit on this, and Branmacuillean scents you nosing in his midden, he’ll have half the mainland swearing you taught him the rites. A peasant’s word against a monk’s? I’ll be hanging from some harbor beam while you chant for my soul.”
The murdered scribe’s ghost flickers between them, a smear of pallid fire trembling in the damp air. It jitters from Kian’s shoulder to hover over the opened chest, face contorted in soundless accusation. Where it passes, the hair on Kian’s forearms lifts, his skin pebbling with chill. He tastes iron at the back of his throat.
“They’ll see this hand,” Fiachra presses, stabbing toward the cramped Latin glosses. “Bran’s. And the seals, the forgeries. What more proof do monks need? You said yourself: once a thing’s written and sealed, the world bows to it. Give the abbot enough ink and he’ll pin Bran to the wall.”
“And pin me with him,” Kian answers, the words barely air. “These rites are not ink alone. They are knots in the veil. Some are mine. Some older. If frightened hands tug all at once, the whole cloth tears.”
Fiachra throws a look toward the black pool, its small waves licking at the stone lip. “And if we do nothing, he keeps tugging in the dark. How many more graves go wrong? How many more lights on the headland, Kian? My brothers fish under that sky.” He leans closer, voice turned low and fierce. “You dragged my father’s soul from the sea’s teeth once. I’ll not watch the isle drown in other men’s ghosts because monks are afeard of their own shadows.”
The ghost flares, lantern-bright for an instant, its outline half-formed: a man’s tonsured skull, ink-burn round his fingers, throat torn black. It thrusts a hand toward Kian’s face, then wheels as if seized by unseen current, stretching toward the codex, toward the scrawled rites that bound and betrayed it. A thin, icy ache jabs behind Kian’s eyes. His vision doubles: cave-rock and dripping vault laid over a second, wavering image of cloister stones awash in black water and corpse-candles.
He forces his gaze back to the page. Ogham strokes march like tally-marks of the damned; the Latin glosses cling around them like barnacles. “If I can strengthen the old wards first,” he says, breath ragged, “cloak the bindings, mend what he’s frayed. Then we choose the time, the place, the witnesses. Not in a panic, not with the bell clanged wild and spirits roused.”
Fiachra’s jaw works. “You’ve no time. Every hour you mutter charms down here, Bran scratches another name from some burial-roll above.” He shoves a hand through his salt-stiff hair, knuckles whitening. “Monks and their secrets. You’ll get us both killed with your quiet.”
The words hang sharp between them, breath and torch-smoke snagging on their edges. Even the ghost seems to pause, its trembling light drawn thin, pulled taut as if listening for some deeper answering strain in the dark.
Mid-whisper, Fiachra swearing softly that monks will get them both killed with their secrets, the cave itself seems to flinch. The drip and lap of water stutter, then fall silent, cut off as if some unseen hand has closed tight upon the throat of the tide. The tiny waves around the stone ledge where they crouch press flat in an instant, smoothing into a perfect obsidian plane that drinks the torchlight, then throws it back sharper, wrong. Their own faces stare up at them: drawn, hollow-eyed, the lantern’s gold stretched thin over cheekbone and shadow. Even the murdered scribe’s indistinct shimmer is caught and held below, no longer a blur at the edge of vision but a warped double, pale fire pinned beneath black glass.
A weight slides over Kian’s ears, thick and cold as if the whole sea has risen to rest upon his skull. Sound dulls. Fiachra’s next curse comes out only as a fish-mouthed shape. The lantern-flame gutters sideways, then steadies, its hiss swallowed. Kian’s own heartbeat thuds loud in the muffled air, slow and heavy, like a bell tolling under water.
Light thickens beneath the glass-dark skin, no longer mere reflection but a bruise of pallor swelling up from unfathomed depth. It gathers slow as breath in a drowning chest. First a blur, milk-pale and wavering; then a narrowing shaft, a column that curls upon itself like smoke in reversed wind, spinning limbs out of brightness, hair from the drag of shadow. Kian feels the veil tug at him: not the thin rip of graveyard visitations, but something colder, elder, like stone turning in its sleep. The ogham carved along the cave wall pricks his sight, each stroke brightening as though newly scored by unseen hand. Lines he half-read in Branmacuillean’s codex stir in his memory, old names for sea-bound warders, for chains that bind both tide and ghost.
The column twists again. A woman’s visage firms beneath the surface, held inches from his own but immeasurably far. Young and ancient at once, high-boned and hollow, eyes pale as ground sea-glass with no white, no pupil, only washed-out green that sees too much. Her hair streams wide around her, not with the quick slap of real water but in great, slow banners, weaving weeds and foam-strands that never quite break, never quite meet. Around her throat and shoulders, her arms and narrow ribs, green-black coils of weed bite and bind, braided painfully neat through iron rings the size of votive crowns. On each rust-scabbed hoop lie cramped Latin prayers, Ave and Pater and tangled exorcisms, cross-cut and scored through by harsh ogham strokes that deny and answer them in the same breath. Where sea-script and church-script cross, the metal glows a sickly, submarine gold, as if heated from some furnace far below.
When she speaks, no ripple breaks the pool. Sound comes up through stone and marrow, a braided murmur of island Gaelig and church Latin yoked to the slow beat of tide and psalm. She names herself warder and wright of the sea-gate, bargained into bondage when Cill na Sceathach was raised: chained in the deeps, and also to the founding stone and the net of relic-prayers and ogham-knots that hold the “threshold dead” in their barrow-rest. Each title, gate, chain, witness, scalds the air; the ghost at Kian’s shoulder jerks back, its light shrivelling, as though the bare naming brands it.
Her pale gaze fixes on Kian, and the mirrored water about her shivers with faint echoes of graves and leaning stones, of bone-pits and bell-ropes. In cold, lucid speech she flays Branmacuillean’s meddling open: miscopied ogham, crooked invocations, sigils scraped thin where mound, crypt, and sea once held fast together. Gaps yawn now, she says, where the dead no longer tarry in the half-light but slip through hungry, unshriven, unhalted. If his scratching continues, the old threshold will tear outright and the dead will spill over land and wave alike, drawn to the island’s wounded heart where the bindings knot: the very place Kian has sworn, in altar-vow and ancestral rite alike, to guard or perish.
The cave hears every word. The rock seems to lean in. Even the drip from the roof stops between beats of Kian’s heart.
Her clauses fall one upon another like beads on a rosary, counted, weighed, without haste. No thunder, no wild promise. Only cold recital. She tells him how the shades can be called as fish are called, with line and sinker and a name. How she can pull them down, the muttering dead of barrow and crypt, the white-wandering drowned, all the unbound ones that seep now through the torn places. Down into her depth. Down past remembering. “Nulla memoria,” she murmurs in Latin, and the word scrapes along his spine.
The chains about her throat and ribs stir as if with breath. Weed-gripped iron rings touch and part in that slow water, making a thin, almost human chiming. With each sound, the cave’s own ogham flares and wanes, strokes of old names answering like distant bells. Where weed brushes rusted prayer-metal, the crossed scripts pulse: Latin cramped and tight, asking mercy; ogham sharp, imperative, commanding price.
She speaks of the ghost then. Not “spiritus sanctus,” not blessed. “Umbra reus,” she says. Guilty shadow. A small tightening at the corner of her wide mouth might be disdain. She tells him how that clinging thing would buck and shiver once as she took it, as a net jerks when a trapped eel twists, then go slack. No more whispered accusations at midnight. No more blue bruises blossoming on Branmacuillean’s skin from invisible hands. The ghost’s tongue, its testimony, sunk beneath tides no church bell can reach.
From there she steps, without pause, into fate and parchment. She names judges and abbots as if she has sat beside them at their long tables. Minds are only wax, she says, and wax may be warmed and smoothed. A turn of her binding here, a loosening there, and what was once bright and sharp in their memory of grants and charters will cloud, blur, slip. Branmacuillean’s forged lines will stand naked, unsupported by the threads of chance and omen she has been forced to honour. In such a fog, no document of his can truly bite.
She does not speak of law as monks do, from rolled scrolls and canon. She speaks of it as tide: what washes in, what is taken back. “Fatum,” she says softly, then the older word under it, older even than his grandfather’s tongue. A word for woven course, for net and noose alike. She can tug that weaving, she tells him, so that the isle’s story kinks away from the scribe’s schemes. Those who might have listened to Branmacuillean’s false witness will find their attention turned, their trust frayed. A storm on the day his parchments ought to sail. A sickness in a magistrate’s house. A lost courier on a mountain pass. Not miracle. Not curse. Only small slid stones in a riverbed, changing the course of all that follows.
Every offer precise. Each price unspoken, but measuring him all the same.
Her tone never rises. It flows level as the pool that holds her. No entreaty. No feigned pity. She does not beg him to agree; she lists outcomes, as if setting down terms of a charter in the scriptorium. This for that. Chain for chain. Soul-burden for silence. The words fall into the still air with the weight of an oath and the chill of something older than oaths, and when at last she falls quiet, the hush she leaves behind feels not empty but sealed, as though the cave itself waits for his assent like wax for a signet ring.
Kian’s fingers twitch toward the damp chests on the ledge, toward cracked lids beaded with cave-sweat and salt. Parchment glimmers dully inside, pale as fish-belly. His hand hovers over the half-translated druidic text, Branmacuillean’s crabbed Latin notes crawling like mildew between ogham strokes. Beside it lie wax tablets and dangling strings of counterfeit seals, each impressed with saints’ faces and bishop’s rings that never blessed this shore. Tools enough to damn a man. Or spare him.
He feels the hook in her words sink and set. A clean cut through the tangle of his days. The chance to end the nightly whispering in the dormitory, to strip Branmacuillean of his spectral accuser and his paper blades in one stroke. For a suspended heartbeat he lets the image rise and stand: brothers breathing easy in their cells, no cold hands tugging at their dreams; the abbot’s gaze never falling on false charters that twist land and blame; Fiachra’s name never inked into some mainland tally of guilt. The possibility burns through his hollowed chest like a blessing uttered in a forbidden tongue, bright and searing and perilously sweet.
In that same breath another sight rises, sharp as ice in his lungs. Not from his eyes, but from the sinking place just behind them. Through the glass of the pool he sees what her loosing would do. The lattice that binds this rock together (the ogham cut low in the foundation, the sainted splinters of bone walled in mortar, the sung psalms caught in shroud-thread) does not fall away. It corkscrews. Warps. Draws in upon her like a crown hammered crooked.
The mound’s old lady of the threshold thins, drawn back as a tide drawn wrong, her doorway skewed sideways. In that sudden hollow this sea-woman swells to fill the lack: storms tilting their shoulders toward the isle, bells and beads and whispered Paternosters leaning, unmeant, in her direction. Supplications sink like offerings into a well that has learned the taste of them and will demand more. The dead grow orderly in their unrest, no longer wandering, but ranked: drowned and barrow-born alike turned into her press-ganged host, their silence no gift of peace but the quiet of troops waiting on a single, alien command.
It is not metaphor. It settles in him as fact, as if a hand had written it along his bones. These are load-bearing chains. Each rusted ring threads mound to altar, altar to sea, saint’s relic to buried ogham, making one fraught, shivering span. To pick at even one is to loosen all. The first night might pass with hymns still sung and walls still standing; the brothers might sleep, thinking the danger gone. But the years after would warp. Tides would answer not to season or moon but to her mutter. Storms would rise when she turned her face. Crops would bow too low or fail outright where her damp shadow lay. The restless dead would not be healed, only regimented under a single, hungry ordinance. Branmacuillean’s tear in the veil would not be mended; it would be widened, edged and finished like a doorway, and over that threshold her name alone would be written.
The knowledge curdles in his gut. To work what she asks, he must stand naked in that forbidden crossing between altar and mound, give the old goddess her secret names, notch living ogham into consecrated stone, summon depths no prior has language for. No safe assent exists. Only a clean, catastrophic bargain: tonight’s hauntings swallowed, the isle thereafter bent forever to her tide.
Fiachra’s hand clamps around Kian’s arm, fingers digging through soaked wool hard enough to find bone. He jerks him back a half-step, away from the pool’s black pupil. “We should be gone already,” he rasps, voice pitched low as if afraid the stone itself might be listening. “Take what proof we can carry, smash the rest, and leave that chained thing to her depths.” The usual lilt is shorn from his speech. The man who jokes with oarsmen and makes light of winter squalls sounds now like an old boatman on his deathbed, dry-mouthed with warnings too long unsaid.
His breath comes salt-sharp and fast against Kian’s cheek. The cave’s low ceiling throws his words back at them in warped fragments until it seems that a dozen Fiachras crowd the narrow rock, all urging flight. The echoes snag on the damp walls, slip around stalactites furred with salt, and run ahead into the dark like scouts that will not return. Beneath their talk, another sound keeps to its own slow measure: the faint creak and grind of iron prayer-rings, somewhere under the water, as if a drowned censer were swung on the sea-floor.
Kian feels the tremor in Fiachra’s grip, the dampness of fear-sweat mixed with cave-drip. This is not the man who dove laughing for a fouled net in winter, nor the one who rowed through a storm to fetch a priest for Kian’s dying novice-brother. This is a sailor facing the oldest peril he knows: a voice from beneath the keel that offers terms. His eyes flick to the chests stacked in the rock-niche (oilcloth bundles of charters, seals, relic-labels, the half-scribed ogham text) all suddenly heavy with the weight of futures they might set in ink.
The pool lies between them and any clean escape. Its surface has gone glass-still again, holding not their faces but a slow, pallid shimmer like moonlight under ice. Somewhere in that depth, iron answers iron with a tired complaint, the sound threading up through Kian’s bare shins and into his marrow. Fiachra’s fingers squeeze harder, as though sheer human grip might yet pull him back from whatever listening waits just beyond the black.
The ancestral murmur tightens around Kian like a second skin. Old Gaelic names breathed at his ear, patronym and place-name and title of forgotten gods; fragments of half-remembered litanies rising up through the rock from the bones beneath Cill na Sceathach. They crowd close, these dead who once kept watch over mound and shore. Some chide. Some warn. Some only weep. Each whispered phrase threads through the fey woman’s bilingual plea, Latin cadence plaited with island speech, until her lone voice swells into a many-throated chorus that feels in him both like temptation and command.
Cold gnaws at his calves where the black water clutches him. It is not only sea-chill. It is the pull of graves. He tastes old salt and grave-mould on his tongue, feels along his shins the faint, jerking tremor of chains far below as if the dead themselves writhed in answer. In that shudder he senses the whole host of Cill na Sceathach, abbots, druids, nameless fishermen, straining at their bindings, tugged first by Branmacuillean’s clumsy unwork, now by the chained lady’s hunger, each drag thinning the veil to a rag.
He sees, as if on a tilted page lit by corpse-candle, the cost of refusal that offers no answer in its place: Branmacuillean creeping back through this same throat of rock, oil-lamp hooded, ink-stained fingers lingering over the damp chests. Time enough then to perfect the half-read rites, to worry at the ogham strokes until their meaning yields, to cut and re-stitch burial lines so that the very record of the dead lies in his narrow grasp. Walking away would let forged charters and counterfeit relic-names harden into gospel, seals and signatures ossifying into law, a desperate scribe still prying at the “threshold dead” with stolen spells. The vision settles on Kian like a hair shirt soaked in ice and brine, turning simple flight into a quieter, more cowardly surrender that would damn others in his stead.
He draws a breath that tastes of salt, mold, myrrh, steadies himself against Fiachra’s bruising grip, and answers not with assent but with a wrought refusal: shaped like a vow, edged like a curse. His voice narrows to a knife. He slips into the forbidden braid he has never dared in any chapel: Latin psalm-phrases knotted with hearth-dark invocations his grandmother mouthed over lintels, cradles, graves. In that mingled tongue he denies her price, yet binds himself instead: to seek the founding stone’s buried heart, to crawl where the crypt’s bones kiss the sea, to re-weave every frayed ward even if he must name the threshold goddess over the altar, profane and pure at once, staking his own brief warmth between the monastery and the black hunger below.
The water’s skin arches to meet his words, rising in a shivering dome; light crawls along it like frost. Below, the chains about her limbs flare, sea-green fire veined with the dull, clotted red of rust-bitten iron crosses. Her features knot in startled fury, then smooth, the mouth curving to a thin, knowing smile. Dark amusement hardens its edge as she inclines her head the bare breadth of a hair. She takes his counter-vow as binding, but coolly laces her own rider through it: if he falters, if he strays or fails or simply breaks beneath the work, she will draw her due not only from his thinned soul but from every monk, pilgrim, sailor, beggar who dreams beneath Cill na Sceathach’s bells. The cave floor answers at once, groaning like a hull under too much sea, a fine crack feathering through the rock beside his bare toes. In that shuddering tilt he feels the old balance slide, the weight of gods and ghosts levering itself onto the narrow, fragile bar of his single oath.
Kian sways as the cave’s groan dies away, one hand braced on slick stone; behind his eyes the fey woman’s conditional assent burns like salt, but it is the ghost that moves first. The air to his left tightens, cold and close, and though its shape does not fully form, a clawing pressure drags his attention toward the chest of forged charters. The tallow-smell thins, replaced by the sharp reek of old blood and iron gall. His breath clouds though no wind stirs.
Invisible fingers seize upon the opened parchments. They do not rustle or lift, yet their words flare in a script of pain along his nerves. Lines of ink Kian cannot see with his eyes etch themselves into his marrow. Names of landholders twisted from one lineage into another, minor chieftains raised and others quietly erased. Dates of burials shifted by a single, damning year so that a grave moves across a border on paper while the bones below lie still. Seals duplicated and reassigned like stolen faces, abbots’ marks copied stroke for stroke, a dead bishop’s crooked loop mimicked with obscene care.
Each alteration arrives as a bodily sensation. A changed numeral burns like a brand beneath his ribs. A falsified witness-name knots in his throat as if gagging him. A forged relic-label settles behind his eyes with the dull ache of an oncoming fever. He feels the tug of each lie on the land above: farms mis-tithed, widows dispossessed, a harbor-man’s due catch vowed away by a charter he never saw.
Fiachra’s grip digs into his arm, an anchor in the swell, but the fisherman’s muttered question reaches him only as a far-off splash. Kian’s whole attention is pinned under the ghost’s cold hand. Each whispered detail lodges in his memory with the painful clarity of a wound, an unerasable testimony pressed directly into his soul, as if the dead man were carving his indictment not on vellum but on Kian’s own living flesh.
The ghost’s attention tightens like a noose, and Kian’s sight buckles. The cave, the wet stone, Fiachra’s grip: all thin to a rind. He stands instead in a low, smoky room far inland, limewash flaking from cramped walls, the air thick with ink, tallow, and unwashed wool.
He is seated at a slant-board that is not his, hand moving in a script that is not his own. The fingers he looks down through are long, familiar, and not his either: Branmacuillean’s. Opposite, another scribe bends over a charter, lips pursed, reading each clause with weary care. Candlelight glances off the small silvered scar by the man’s jaw, catches the slight shake in his wrist as he dips the quill.
Branmacuillean’s voice, patient, coaxing, edged with the soft authority of habit, urges assent to a seemingly minor correction. A land-name shortened. A witness struck and replaced. “For clarity,” he murmurs. “For truth.”
The fellow scribe hesitates. Then, trusting, he nods, bends, signs.
Kian feels the shift in Branmacuillean’s body. The calm decision. The hand that had only guided the quill now glides under the robe-fold, closing around a small, narrow-bladed knife warmed by his skin. No shout. No warning.
Steel parts wool and flesh in the same economical motion. The victim’s breath jerks into Kian’s own lungs as if he is the one pierced. Hot spray spatters the pale, scraped boards, freckles the charter’s lower margin with tiny, blooming dots of red that spread into the wet ink, turning testament into stain. Ink-stained hands fly to the wound, slipping uselessly.
Shock comes first, how could you?, then a flare of raw outrage, of betrayal, so fierce it is almost holy. Betrayal of friendship, of craft, of the written word itself twisted into murder’s tool. Terror follows, a sharp, narrowing tunnel as the world tilts and the charter blurs, the seal dangling half-pressed from its cord.
The room spins into a smear of details that fix themselves like iron hooks in Kian’s mind even as the victim slumps: the crooked window above the lane with its missing horn pane; the rain-drip through the warped sill; the low murmur of two lay-clerks gambling with knucklebones behind the door; the brass-bound chest in the corner with the abbey’s sigil scorched half away; the precise form of the charter: its heading, its dating clause naming a certain feast day in a certain year, the three witnesses list with one honest name cut.
He knows the murdered man’s name now. Feels it lodge under his tongue like a shard of bone. Sees Branmacuillean’s eyes, wide and wild for only a heartbeat, then narrowing as he wipes the blade on the dead man’s sleeve with practised care.
The vision jolts, pins, then withdraws, dragged backward through blood-mist into damp stone and sea-reek. Kian’s knees almost give. But the ghost at his side no longer thrashes in blind rage. Its chill steadies, weighty and intent, like a hand laid upon a Gospel when an oath is sworn. It has poured the whole, prosecuting story into him (place, time, faces, the document itself) and rests now with a grim, exhausted relief, certain that at last someone living holds its murder entire and will bear it upward to judgment.
Fiachra sees Kian’s face bleach to chapel-limestone, eyes gone blank as if turned inward on some hell-lit choir. He swears under his breath, clamps both hands to Kian’s shoulders and shakes once, hard, until bone and sinew answer him instead of ghosts. “Enough,” he snaps in hurried island Gaelic, voice low for fear of what else may be listening. “Leave it, a stór. Breathe.”
The water lies black and flat as uninked vellum. Fiachra will not look at it long. Instead he hauls Kian down beside the chests, and they work by feel and the thin smear of the lantern’s last light. Branmacuillean’s half-translated druid text. A nest of clashing charters. Counterfeit relic labels. Slips of cramped marginalia naming dates and graves. Fiachra tears a strip from his own undershirt with his teeth, binds the chosen stack tight. The rest they shove back into the damp shadows, cloaked in old oilcloth and sea-musk, trusting the cave’s secrecy more than any lock.
When at last Fiachra spits on his fingers and pinches the lantern’s wick, darkness falls like a cowl. Kian can taste the fey’s promise in it, metallic as blood. Bent double, shoulders scraping, they grope toward the low, rough bite in the rock that leads back to the crypt, guided by memory and the faint, cold pull of the dead above.
The crawl back bites harsher than Kian remembers, every jag of stone sharpened by the fey’s warning and the new weight of the ghost’s testimony grating in his bones. The tunnel breath grows ever colder as they climb, breaths frosting in the cramped dark, fingers numbed on slime-slick rock, until at last they spill into the crypt’s shadowed chamber.
What had been mere chill is now bitter. Candle stubs cling to sconces like dead moths, puddles of cooled wax mapping hours they did not feel. Iron brackets sweat beads of moisture that glimmer like tears. Beneath their feet the old mound hums, low and sullen. Kian feels the bound threshold dead press against their wards, restless, listening, as if the island itself has noted the moment his oath bent.
They ease the slab aside and climb from crypt-gloom into the cloister. The hush hits like a held breath. No bell, no chant. Only mist hissing on stone, the sea a muffled growl beyond the walls. Yet beneath the quiet, the place thrums.
Brothers knot in doorways, habits greyed with damp, trading scraps of omen in low, nervous Gaelic. “The standing stone wept salt.” “The refectory crucifix turned.” “Lights over the herb-garden, like corpse-candles.” Novices hurry past with unsorted manuscripts clutched to thin chests, eyes too wide, ink-smears bright on their boy-soft hands. No one quite meets Kian’s gaze; those who do flinch, as if sensing the cold that walks with him.
Along the cloister walk the abbot turns and turns, sandals whispering, a crumpled parchment ground in his fist. His lips move in a muttered psalm that never quite reaches the name of Christ. Jaw set, eyes bloodshot, he looks like a man already shaping condemnations, weighing whose soul to cast out to appease an unseen wrath.
By the church door Branmacuillean stands rigid as a sprung snare. His patched robe hangs too loose, shadowed hollows under his cheekbones, but his hands grip a thick roll of charters like a weapon. Ink-dark gaze fixed on the threshold, he watches every movement in the garth, calculating, haunted. The ghost that filled Kian’s bones gathers now behind his shoulder like a sharpened frost, pressing forward, eager for speech. From the cliff’s unseen edge the chained presence in the deep tugs faintly at him, a cold, patient pull through stone and tide.
Silence. Accusation. Confession. Any word he chooses will tear veils: over Branmacuillean’s forged dead, over Kian’s own mingled rites. Proof sweats against his ribs beneath the habit; Fiachra’s steady bulk at his side lends him a borrowed, mortal courage. Between grave and sea, Gospel and ogham, two powers wait upon his tongue. Kian steps toward the dark mouth of the church, knowing dawn’s chapter will not be a quiet office but a judgment that may break Cill na Sceathach upon its old foundations. Or bind it anew under a covenant more perilous than any raider’s sword.
Kian feels each phrase settle on his shoulders like fresh weight. Corruption. Pagan remnants. Secret counsels. Words shaped for devils, yet they find his own thin frame.
The abbot’s voice is raw with lack of sleep and something like zeal. It scrapes along the stone vault, catches in the timber roof, falls back on the gathered brothers. They draw inward as if from a lash. Cloth rustles. A cough is swallowed. No one moves their feet.
Kian stands at the rear, the damp from the crypt still in his hems, Fiachra a solid, uneasy bulk at his side. The sailor smells of salt and cold air, foreign in this place of wax and vellum. The hidden bundle beneath Fiachra’s cloak presses against Kian’s awareness as though it, too, listens for its own doom.
When the abbot’s gaze finds them, it lingers a heartbeat too long. Not open accusation. Not yet. Merely a weighing. The old man’s eyes are bloodshot, rimmed red by candle-wake and fear; they slide from Kian’s ink-stained hands to Fiachra’s broad shoulders, then back to the parchment as if relieved to return to something written and safe.
“Some among us,” the abbot says, “have trafficked with worldly men for unclean gain.” His eyes do not quite look at Fiachra. “Some have meddled with the memoria of the dead, presuming to alter that which is set down before God.”
Kian’s fingers tighten on the sleeve of his habit. He feels the ghost-stir in the nave before he sees it: a faint prickle at the nape of his neck, the familiar dragging chill along his spine. The shades in the crypt do not like this talk of sealing and fire. Their attention crawls upward through stone, restless as worms in turned earth.
A young brother two rows ahead shifts his sandals on the flagstones. Another, Brother Aodhán with the uneven tonsure, mouths a prayer without sound, his lips pale. The rosary beads in Brother Cormac’s fist creak, wood strained almost to splitting. No one dares cross themselves too broadly, as if the gesture itself might draw a suspect gaze.
Fiachra leans the smallest fraction closer, his whisper barely a breath. “They mean to throw blame down the well and see who drowns first.”
“Silence,” Kian breathes back, but it is more plea than rebuke. His own heart stammers. Each proclamation from the abbot feels like a hand groping along dark shelves in the archive, ready to close on the one forbidden scroll.
Talk of pagan remnants. He tastes peat-smoke and myrrh on his own tongue, remembers the old ogham cut beneath the altar stone, the threshold name he has traced with hidden fingers. Fester, the abbot says. As if the older dead were rot alone, not root.
Secret counsels. He thinks of midnight whisperings in the herb-garden, of Fiachra’s rough voice trading rumors for blessings, of the soft, urgent speech of ancestral shades when the wind turns from the sea.
Around them, fear moves like a low wind over grass. Heads bend. Shoulders hunch. Every brother seems to shrink into his own habit, hoping the storm will pass over and strike some other roof. Yet the air is too still, too tight, as if the storm has already chosen its place.
The abbot lifts the parchment high enough for all to see, as if its seal alone could scour the isle clean. Wax glints dull red in the candlelight. When he breaks it, the sound is small but final.
He begins to read.
The phrases are smooth, lawyered Latin, all teeth hidden in silk. A mandate from the mainland bishopric. Concern for orthodoxy. Horror at “ambigua et suspecta volumina” gathered in outlying houses. Authority granted for purgation by fire. Each period falls like a stone in water.
“Glossas marginales… additiones non auctoritatis… ritus non secundum morem Romanum.”
Each term lands with surgical precision. Marginal glosses. Unauthorized additions. Rites not after the Roman custom. Kian hears, beneath the Latin, the scrape of a knife at the edge of a page, shaving away a cramped red ogham note. He sees the quiet shelves of the scriptorium flaring, curls of charred vellum lifting like black moths. All the little places where he has stitched old sense into gospel lines glow in his mind as if already embers.
His tongue tastes of ash and iron. The words are aimed at no man by name, yet they find him unerringly, like arrows following a hidden mark.
With every syllable the ghost draws tighter, coiling up his back like a cold rope. Its weight presses along his spine, not quite touch, not quite air, breath beading chill at the nape of his neck until the small hairs there stand rigid. The old ache in his bones knives into clean, bright ice as his mind leaps ahead to what the words will do. Crypt doors barred. Stones mortared shut. Ogham lines buried in lime and pious forgetfulness. The mutter of the older dead smothered under chrism and terror.
At his side, Fiachra’s jaw clenches and grinds. The sailor’s big hands twitch toward the hidden bundle, then fist against his thighs. A man made for oars and rope holds himself motionless, straining against the church’s demand that he stand and watch.
The abbot’s decree ends with a command for truth: any brother who has “tampered with the witness of the page, trafficked with unlawful spirits, or aided worldly crimes” must step forward now. Silence holds. No foot shuffles, no cough breaks the thickening air. The sea’s dull pound seeps through stone. To Kian’s sharpened senses, the faint, muffled rustle of restless shades gathers beyond the crypt door, like sleeves dragged along burial niches, like breath behind plaster. The pressure of unseen attention bears down so heavily that several monks bow their heads as though under a lash; one old brother sways, rosary slipping, as if someone invisible had set a hand upon his neck.
That is the moment Branmacuillean chooses. He peels himself from the choir’s shadow with the slow care of a man approaching an altar, not a noose, head modestly bowed, charters cradled like saints’ bones against his chest. When he asks leave to speak, his voice quavers just enough to read as zeal-stricken humility. Only Kian, watching through the ghost’s thin frost, sees the brief flare of naked will in the averted eyes, the minute squaring of shoulders once the abbot’s hand gives grudging consent: a man already half-damned stepping up the gallows ladder who means, at the last rung, to wrench the rope from his own neck and cast it over another’s.
Branmacuillean bows low before the abbot, spine bending in a show of meekness that does not reach the tight set of his jaw. When he straightens, he does so with care, as if bearing a relic. The first roll of parchment lies cradled against his breast like a fragile thigh-bone of a saint. He steps to the lectern. The brothers part for him without touching, cloth whispering, eyes avoiding his as if his very nearness might stain.
He lays the charter down. The wax seal (red, impressed with the abbey’s crude cross and ring of thorns) catches the pale, colourless dawn that leaks through the high, narrow windows. For a heartbeat his fingers tremble, that familiar fine quiver that makes his letters blur at the edge. Then he breaks the seal, unrolls the sheet, and the shaking stills as utterly as if some invisible hand had closed over his own. Lines of cramped, dark ink stare up: his work, his refuge, his weapon.
Kian, watching through the thin frost of the ghost, feels the air draw in around the man. See how the scribe settles his shoulders. How his breath evens. The notary enters him like a spirit.
Branmacuillean inclines his head again toward the abbot, then lets his voice loose. “In the matter,” he begins, “of certain goods conveyed by sea to this blessed house and thence to the mainland, for the safeguarding of the abbey’s good name and the purity of its revenue…”
Clause follows clause, each knotted to the next with “whereas” and “therefore.” He names ports and coves, dates of sail and lists of cargo: wool-fleeces and smoked fish, tallow and barrels of salt, iron tools “of uncertain origin.” The phrases are dry as old vellum, but under each lies a thin, dark current.
“…it being found that several shipments did pass without full tithe rendered, and that such cargoes were turned aside from godly markets toward buyers long held suspect by our mother the Church…”
He never once says smuggler. He never once says thief. Instead he speaks of “irregularities,” of “confusion in accounts,” of “worldly men tempting the brothers to negligence.” Each fault is wrapped in concern for the abbey’s reputation, as though he grieves to bring these stains to light.
Yet while his tongue weaves piety, his eyes are not on the abbot.
They flick, quick and hard, to the back of the nave.
“To wit,” he reads, “by the hand and mark of one Fiachra mac Fionnagáin, boatman of the western cove, there being attested hereon a series of nocturnal landings, unentered in the common ledger, their proceeds unrendered to the tithe-chest…”
Fiachra’s name lands in the church like a stone dropped into still water. The sound of it ripples along the rows. Some brothers glance back; others stiffen and stare resolutely at the floor, as if unwilling to be witnesses.
Kian feels the sailor flinch beside him, hears the sharp intake of breath through his teeth. The big hands twitch toward the hidden bundle under his tunic, then knot themselves against that impulse, fingers digging into rough wool. Fiachra’s gaze burns toward the lectern, but the church holds him the way a net holds a struggling fish.
Branmacuillean does not look long. Just a raven-quick dart of attention, enough to mark where his arrow has struck. Then his gaze drops piously to the ink again.
“…and though this poor scribe is loth to speak ill of any soul given to the sea’s hard service,” he continues, “yet conscience, and duty to the rule, compel that such dealings be laid bare, lest the name of Cill na Sceathach be darkened among the faithful…”
The words come smooth now, oiled by long practice. He cites a witness “whose humility forbids him to stand forth,” a brother “of proven obedience” who saw Fiachra’s skiff nose the shingle by starlight. He refers to a second charter, “since regrettably misplaced”, that once tallied the loss to the abbey’s coffers. No names, there. No proof to grasp. Only echoes.
Around them, the gathered monks tighten like a belt. One clears his throat, then thinks better of speaking. Another makes the sign of the cross twice, quick, furtive, as if to ward off contagion.
By the crypt door, unseen hands drag along stone. The ghost at Kian’s back presses closer, its chill pooling between his ribs as ink and accusation braid together at the lectern.
The first charter curls in upon itself again. Branmacuillean sets it aside with a little sigh, as if the weight of such worldly stain pains him. His ink-black fingers choose another roll from the bundle. This one is narrow, its vellum paler, the seal a modest blob of brown wax impressed with the simple cross used for internal records.
“A lesser matter,” he says, throat catching on the word in false humility. “Merely a correction in the rolls of our departed.”
He breaks the seal. The parchment whispers open.
No land-grants here. No cargoes. Just neat columns of names and dates, little crosses and Latin phrases for “laid to rest,” “interred with due rite.” At first glance, it is as clean and dull as bone bleached on a strand. Kian recognizes the format; he has copied such lists until his fingers cramped. For a breath, his mind cannot find the snare.
Then Branmacuillean reads.
“Be it noted,” the scribe intones, “that in the year of Our Lord…” He names a recent winter. “Certain entries were amended by the hand of Brother Cían mac Craobh, at the request”, a small pause, almost a caress, “of unnamed senior brethren, to clarify confusions touching the ceremonies performed.”
Clarify. Confusions. Innocent words, laid like twigs over a pit.
He proceeds with care, each syllable a pin. “Where original marginalia spoke in imprecise and unseemly fashion of vigils and ‘old prayers’ at the barrow-mouth, they are here rendered in more fitting terms. ‘Uncustomary observances’ corrected to ‘commendation of souls’; ‘signs on the threshold-stone’ deleted as being ‘not consonant with Holy Church.’”
He never says druid. Never says idol, or charm. His tongue walks the line and lets the brothers’ minds leap the ditch.
The chapter-house air tightens. A rustle passes through the stalls like a wind through dry reeds. Men who have knelt beside Kian at night now measure the space between their sandals and his. One old monk who has seen him emerge pale from the crypt wipes his palms on his habit, as though something cold had brushed them. Someone hisses a prayer under his breath. Another mutters, “Threshold-stone,” as if tasting a forbidden word and finding it bitter.
Branmacuillean lowers his lashes, all reluctance and pain. “I speak of no sorcery,” he adds quickly, as if defending Kian. “Only of the danger that our poor, simple folk may cling to remnants of darkness, and that well-meaning brothers, out of misplaced mercy, may lend their hands to fashioning language that shelters confusion rather than light.”
He lets his gaze stray, just once, to where Kian stands. Not long enough to be challenge. Just long enough that a dozen watching eyes can follow the line and find their mark.
Fiachra’s jaw knots, sea-blue eyes flaring with the raw hurt of a man named and condemned in a tongue not his own, before men whose hands have never frozen on an oar in sleet. His shoulders bunch; for a heartbeat he seems about to bull through the crowded nave, to seize the lectern, to bellow his innocence in salt-harsh Gaelic that would clang against the Latin like iron on stone. He surges one step toward the choir rail.
Kian’s hand finds his forearm. The grip is slight, but cold as water from a grave well. Fiachra flinches, more from the grave-chill than the strength.
Kian’s fingers tighten. A faint tremor runs through his own frame. He gives the smallest shake of his head.
Not this way.
Only then does Kian draw out his own bundle of parchments, bound with a salt-stiffened cord soot-marked at the knot. When he loosens it, a faint scent of brine, peat-smoke, and blown-out wick breathes up; some inked lines waver, as if written over older, unseen script that tugs at the corner of the eye. He spreads his sheets beside Branmacuillean’s with small, methodical movements and, in a level voice, begins to trace discrepancies: dates that defy the storm-seasons every boatman knows, landholders’ names that slip askew from earlier grants, crude sigils where the abbot’s seal-ring should have bitten clean, a single bent preposition that would slide a boundary-ditch three furrows east. Each correction is precise, patient, like a lesson to novices. Yet every quiet word chips at the scribe’s edifice, stone by stone.
Voices fray. The nave seems to narrow, pillars bowing inward, the brothers’ murmurs tangling with tavern gossip and cliff-path whispers. The stones listen; the altar shivers. Folio meets folio, gloss claws at clause, ink answering ink. Fiachra’s skin prickles. Corpse-lights on graves, a drowned woman’s eyes beneath the swell. Under Kian’s bare soles, the mound heaves, old wards straining like wet rope. Smuggling, forgery, restless dead, fey covenant: every hidden strand snarls tight, the church itself drawn like a fishing-net just before it splits.
Called to account, Kian does not bow or avert his eyes. He steps out from the choir stalls into the center of the nave, habit hanging loose on his frame, the carved bone charms at his belt clicking softly. Though the dawn outside is mild, a visible mist of breath blooms around his lips and those nearest him shiver as if a winter wind has slipped under their wool. The hush that falls is edged with unease: this is no longer merely a dispute over ink and vellum.
He feels it in his marrow: the dead drawing nearer, crowding the blind spaces between the pillars. Their attention is a weight along his spine. Every candle-flame in the nave leans, very slightly, toward him.
He lifts his head and meets the abbot’s gaze. The old man’s lips are a tight, bloodless line; his hand is spread over the Gospels as if to hold them down, as if the gold-leafed Christ might otherwise rise and walk away from such a hearing. Around him the brothers stand packed and rigid, wool hoods pushed back, faces pale in the wash of angled dawn. Some will not look at Kian at all. Others cannot seem to look away.
Bone clicks at his hip again, an ancestral murmur. He feels, at the knot of his belt, the faintest answering tug from ogham-scratched charms hidden beneath his sleeve. Under his bare soles, the flagstones are slick with an old cold that seeps up from the buried mound. The Latin psalms carved round the arches seem to waver, letters straying sideways, as if the older language buried under them is trying to breathe.
Branmacuillean watches from the lectern, ink-dark eyes bright and fevered, his stack of damning charters resting beneath one tremor-prone hand. The forged seals catch the light. To most of the brothers, they gleam with the solid comfort of authority. To Kian, they glimmer like lures dragged across black water.
Somewhere behind him, Fiachra shifts his weight, shackled by a ring of wary monks. Kian does not turn. He cannot afford, now, to be simply the quiet brother who walks the cloister at odd hours. The air about him tightens; a draught coils through the nave as though some invisible door has been unlatched.
He draws breath. The world narrows to ink, stone, bone, and the listening dark beneath the church.
His voice at first keeps to the cloistered measure of chapter-house disputation. Clause upon clause in careful Latin, deferent yet edged, he names folios, gatherings, quaternions, the very pricking-holes in the vellum. He calls out the burial roll of the twenty-third year after the great storm-famine, then the charter copied “in the same hand” ten winters before that scribe was ever professed. He notes ink that should have browned with age yet gleams fresh, strokes that quake where the abbot’s seal-ring, in truth, would have bitten clean. A brother reaches for one roll as if to shield it; Kian merely cites the line and column where the forgery lies.
Then the cadence tilts.
Latin thins. Old Gaelic swells through it like a deeper current, words round and sea-heavy, older than the islanders’ market-talk. He lets it roll, unbroken, naming night landings on weed-slick rock, sacks lifted over tide-line, boats that bore no blessing-lamp. He binds each hidden cove to a mismatched grant, each whispered bargain to a seal that bears the abbot’s mark yet not his touch, the truth of hunger and coin overleaping the ink’s deceit.
Murmurs rise. Some scandal-pricked by the heathen tongue, some gone pale at the precision of his knowledge, as if he has walked their sleep and read their dreams. Kian’s gaze lifts past the abbot’s knuckles and the gilt-bound Gospels to the high altar and the squat, half-hidden stone beneath. In that same tidal Gaelic he names an older bond laid down when the cliff was bare and no bell-rope swung: a vow that the living would keep the dead in quiet earth, that no monk’s charter nor chieftain’s greed would haggle with the border of worlds. His grey-green eyes dull, depth drawing inward toward the black below the flags. For an instant the cloister’s re-carved standing stone feels near, intent, its buried marks listening.
Voices flare (“sorcerer,” “liar,” “blasphemer”) striking like thrown stones, some brothers crying that parchment cannot err, others hissing for him to bite back his words. Kian neither bows nor breaks. He lets silence gather like breath before a plunge, then, in that same sea-heavy Gaelic braided with Latin, lays bare Branmacuillean’s ghost: full name from a mainland roll, year, town, the reeking alley behind a side-altar where blood soaked cobbles and never washed clean. He speaks of a knife, squat and hook-curved for gutting, and of neat, pious depositions arranged afterward, sworn by men who never saw the corpse yet signed away the dead man’s truth in a tide of parish ink.
Cold rolls out from the altar like a tide let loose from understone. Summer dawn gutters into cellar-winter; each breath smokes, each whispered Ave breaks on the air. Frost flowers along the nearest pillar, brief ogham-scratches that sear Kian’s sight before they melt. Ink-smoke spools from the chancel’s dim, reeking of iron gall, old vellum, mouse-droppings and mould. It knots, limb by limb, into a gaunt scribe-shape, robe and fingers blotched as if dipped in a well. Where its eyes should be, letters creep and clot, black on black, turning and erasing themselves without rest. Brothers stagger back, hands half-lifted in blessing or warding, Latin fragments dying in their mouths as they grasp what stands among them: not rumour, not heretic gloss, but a dead man summoned by Kian’s word into the very nave.
The first sound is not a word at all but a rending, a torn-veil noise that rakes along stone and bone alike. It starts deep, a monk’s chant pitched too low, then fractures upward into a keening that belongs on a winter headland, not in God’s house. It knifes through nave and cloister together, so that even in the distant cells men flinch awake with no knowing why.
Then it finds shape.
“Branmacuilleanus,” it intones, each syllable hewn in court-Latin, cadenced as a notary’s clause. “Branmacuilleanus filius nulla fidei, falsarius, periurus.” The titles roll like doom from an episcopal court, but the voice slips on the last word, shears sideways into the harsh curve of island Gaelic. “Branmacuillean mac uaille bradach,” it spits, name and lineage bound together like a curse, “black-handed, oath-broken.” It shudders, then begins to count.
A town by its old Roman name. A feast-day of some forgotten martyr. The year of a famine-winter when the river froze and the poor died in hovels while landlords fattened on hidden grain. A counting-room behind a sacristy door, close-smelling of tallow and damp wool. “Frater Mael Íosa,” it hisses, the dead man naming himself, “struck down at terce, his skull broke like a pot on the flag, his blood caught on the lip of the table.” The words are flat, clerkly, as if read from a roll; that plainness makes them bitter.
“Sand on the stone,” the ghost goes on, “three basins of it, to drink the red. Scraped and gathered. Cast out behind the bakehouse as if he were spilt ale.” It lifts its ruined hands. Where skin should be, letters crawl: curls of ink in minuscule, tall biting capitals, cramped marginalia in a dozen hands. Each character flares as it is spoken, then runs like wet ink down the translucent flesh.
Kian sways under the weight of it. The nave tilts; the pillars seem to lean like mast and spar in a storm. The familiar pull takes him. Down and through, as if the floor has thinned beneath his bare soles and only his shivering body keeps the dead from folding the living world like a page. He feels the ghost’s memory rush his marrow: the shock of bone meeting edge, the dull astonishment as breath will not come, the heavy cloth of a brother’s sleeve blotting out the last lamp-flame. The ache of years spent scratching at the inside of parchment, trapped in the misshapen letters that bore his name falsely.
His own pulse staggers to the ghost’s broken rhythm. Each time the spectre spits a date, his heart trips and catches; each place-name is a drag of cold through his lungs. He lets it pass through him because he must. He is anchor, and he is door. If he closes, the thing howling in the nave will loose itself wherever it can.
Ink-black tears begin to course down the hollowed channels of the apparition’s cheeks, thick as fresh gall from a scraped oak-apple. They leave no shine, only matt darkness that drinks the candlelight, streaking its face in downward strokes like careless pen-lines. When they reach the jaw they do not fall; they veer, defying gravity, and stream back along the phantom’s throat and collar as if pulled toward Branmacuillean’s place before the choir.
Some brothers clap hands to their ears as if flesh can shut out what rides the bones. Others clutch their rosaries so tight that knuckles blanch, beads biting into skin, the rattled Pater Nosters tumbling over one another, tripping on fear. A novice near Kian mouths the Creed, but the words slide from sense, scattering like loose leaves in a gust.
The ghost pays no heed. It drones now like an indictment read aloud, each clause another stone added to a cairn. “Margines mutati,” it murmurs, and the Latin is almost tender. “The margins altered. Witness-names erased. Lines of land-right smoothed like scraped vellum, then written again to favour the living thief.” It lists folio numbers, chapter headings, the colour of the thread in the binding. It recalls a smear of grease in the lower corner of one parchment where a hungry clerk once ate over his work.
With each detail, the air thickens, ink-smoke coiling tighter about the chancel, creeping down the nave in slow, staining skeins. It rolls through Kian’s ribs like a second breath. He tastes iron, dust, the sour mould of rat-chewed bindings. The ghost’s sorrow is a thin, ceaseless keen threaded through its wrath, and it saws at his nerves without mercy.
As the accusations spill the candles along the choir stalls buckle. Flame after flame snaps sideways as though a wind blew only from Branmacuillean’s place, though the air lies dead-still. Each wick rises, thins, then flares to a needle-bright sting, a host of tiny, burning styli all stabbing toward him in a silent, fiery indictment. Wax gutters in pale runnels, dripping not down but inward, crawling along the wood toward his stall like melted seals seeking their master.
Branmacuillean, who had stood with measured calm moments before, reels back. His lips shape denials, church-Latin and island Gaelic tripping over one another, yet what comes out are raw, strangled whispers fit for a penitent’s cell. Sweat beads along his hairline despite the cellar-cold. His hands clench and unclench on the edge of the stall, fingers jerking like hooked fish.
On the flagstones at his feet, his shadow begins to convulse. Limbs jerk a heartbeat too late, head lolling on a neck that his body holds rigid, as if some ink-dark thing inside that outline thrashes to get free and take his place in the light.
The ghost’s litany gathers itself, then strikes. In a voice like a clerk at sentence-giving it names the last offence, the worst: not murder in hot blood, but murder by quill. “Ego,” it rasps, “sub manu Branmacuilleani,” and recites the wording of a deposition, every clause exact, every lie preserved. It tells how that same neat, ink-stained hand, now levelled in pious accusation, once shaped false witness against a blameless brother on the mainland, bartering him into the gallows’ shadow and a pit without a name.
The abbot’s arm locks. The condemning charter, lifted high like a sword of doctrine, trembles. His fingers slacken. Parchment slips from his grasp and flutters down, corner catching the candle-glow, then wheeling aside to land face-down on the flags like a bird struck mid-flight. Wax-spots spatter it as it falls, blurring fresh, righteous ink with old, cooled tears of tallow.
All colour drains from the old man’s cheeks. His lips move soundlessly, chewing the edges of prayer, but no blessing comes. He stares not only at Branmacuillean, pinned beneath the forest of pointing flames, but at the thing that speaks: and at what its speech proves. Every stroke. Every flourish. Every careful erasure. The dead remember each as if written in bone.
Around him, the rule unravels. Novices crumple where they stand, some sobbing into their sleeves, others gagging as if the air itself has turned foul. A few clutch at the abbot’s robe, seeking anchor and finding only his tremor. Older monks bare their teeth around their prayers, spitting Latin like curses. Their eyes, finding no purchase on the ghost and not daring rest on Branmacuillean, fasten on Kian instead.
“Magus,” one hisses, rosary biting his palm. Another flings a shaking hand in the sign of the cross, not at the spectre but at the gaunt young monk swaying in its wake. Words like sorcerer, necromancer, druid’s whelp slip between the Pater Nosters, low and vicious. As if he had beckoned this blasphemy from understone for spite, as if the howling ink-shape were no wronged soul but his familiar.
Kian feels their fear strike him in waves, hot against the inner cold that has been gnawing his bones for weeks. He does not look away from Mael Íosa’s ghost. He cannot. Yet at the edge of his vision he sees the abbot’s hand flutter once toward him, then fall, fingers curling uselessly, caught between the urge to command and the terror of touching what has crossed the veil.
They jostle in blind flight, habits whipping, sandals skidding on damp flag. One brother’s heel catches the chest; it tumbles, bursts, scatters little discs of bone and lead, each scratched with cramped crosses and ogham-strokes. They spin, roll, break their circle. Kian feels the pattern shear. The air tightens; stone shudders underfoot. Not sound, but weight. A low, inward drag, as if the whole church draws breath through a crack in its own foundations. Mortar grits from the joints. Then, like ice parting on a river, the unseen seam splits. Darkness, not shadow but absence, writes itself across the stair-mouth and peels wider, spilling a cold so pure it burns his teeth and chokes every candle’s flame toward it.
They come wrong-footed and many-voiced, jostling one through another like smoke in a gale. Monk-shapes in green-flecked wool, lips gnawing old litanies. Cairn-bound dead with ochred bands at wrist and brow, their bindings crawling with faded ogham. Drowned men whose beards drip brine and pale crabs. They press close, their needs striking him like hail. Justice. Names. Vengeance. Rest.
Kian bites down till his teeth ache, holding his tongue against the flock of voices trying to roost there. Names, grievances, fragments of psalm and pagan dirge all jostle for his breath. If he opens to them, he will drown. He fixes instead on the raw taste of incense and cold iron in his mouth, on the rasp of his own breath, and wrenches himself sideways through a thicket of reaching dead.
Their fingers pass through wool and flesh as through mist, yet each touch tugs at him as if hooks had found the meat of his soul. Old men who died without shrift. Children laid in peat-bogs. Warriors with skulls stove in under foreign banners. They cling, not with strength but with need, and that is worse. His limbs jerk and falter as a dozen unseen weights drag him backward toward the stair-mouth’s yawning dark.
He tears free with a ragged sound that might once have been a prayer. His shoulder slams into a pillar; stone grates against bone. “Fiachra. Now!” The word scrapes out of him like flint on steel, bare and sparking.
Across the nave’s turmoil, he finds the sailor. Fiachra is a moving knot of muscle and stubbornness in the panic, broad back hunched as he bullies his way through a press of cassock and ghost-shape alike. He shoves one novice bodily out of the path of a wild-swinging censer that trails smoke and ember like a comet-tail, then swats at a pale, questing arm that slides through his own. Frost blooms along his sleeve where the touch grazes him; he flinches, swears under his breath, but does not slow.
For a heartbeat, the storm thins between them. Kian sees the man’s face clearly: sea-wind burned, eyes too wide in the dancing candlelight. Fear there, yes, honest and sharp, but braced against it, like a man leaning into a gale, is something steadier. The memory of a night on the shore with no moon, when Kian’s whispered rites brought a drowned man’s voice back long enough to say farewell. A debt. A friendship neither quite understands yet both hold as binding.
Kian’s own fear answers, but it is not for himself. If he fails, the dead will have this place. If he succeeds, he may yet give the dead a kinder gate. His gaze catches Fiachra’s and holds. In that fleeting lock of eyes all is said: Go. With me. No turning back.
Fiachra nods once, jaw set, as if taking a captain’s order when the reef is already under the keel. Then the breath between them breaks; the nave heaves again. Shades pour from the crypt-mouth in fresh torrents, and living men lurch and stumble before them, some falling to their knees, some scrabbling blindly for doors that will not open.
They move anyway. Together, but from opposite ends of the chaos, angling toward the same slim salvation: the shadowed side aisle leading toward the cloister door and the tower stair. The dead rise up before them like a grey-green sea against black rock, but Kian has chosen, and the choice drives his feet.
They drive into that wave.
Cold takes Kian first, up the sinews of his bare feet, through bone and nail, until every step is a wade through gravesoil. He thrusts out his ink-stained hands. Fingers knot and uncurl, shaping signs half-cross, half-forgotten ogham, his joints popping with the strain. Words spill from his mouth in a braided stream: a hoarse Kyrie eleison torn open mid-syllable by an older cadence that names wind and stone and bone, the hill’s old name, the goddess’s secret title that no monk has written.
The nearest shades shudder. Their outlines smear and run; eyes and mouths blur as if seen through pouring rain. Some claw at their own chests, as if searching for rosaries that never were. They thin, edges shivering, and a narrow gap opens. A wound in the grey wide enough for two living men.
They plunge through. Fiachra, teeth bared, shoulders down, uses his solid weight where faith falters. He heaves a bench aside with a sea-man’s grunt, wood screeching. A stumbling novice caroms off his chest; Fiachra hooks the lad’s collar and flings him toward the shelter of the choir-stalls without breaking stride.
The dead close again. A sea-sodden corpse hauls itself up on the polished stones before them, beard trailing weed, eye-sockets full of black crawling things. Its fingers, blue and puffed, clamp around Fiachra’s ankle with the grip of tide and rope. Fiachra staggers, knee buckling.
Kian feels the pull as if that hand were on his own heart. “Air ainm na gaoithe, air ainm na croise,” he rasps, snapping a cracked-Gaelic charm over the clutching wrist. His breath steams white around the words; ogham-shapes ghost in the air between his fingers.
The thing slackens. Its wrist bones grind like wet shells; then its arm unthreads into silt and eel-slick hair. It slides back into the floor as if the flagstones were the skin of a dark pool, gone with a slow, reluctant suck, leaving only a smear of brine and the stink of old kelp.
The great doors loom ahead, a dark promise of escape. Then they slam as if struck by a giant’s palm, the crash splitting the abbot’s shouted psalm clean in two. Iron shrieks; the latch-bar drops of its own accord, jolting into its sockets like a nailed lid on a coffin. No hand touches it. The sound is final.
Wind howls through the church with nowhere to come from, a mad circling gale that scours the trapped brothers, driving incense-smoke flat and yanking candle-flames sideways till they gutter blue. Kian tastes oak and old blood on his tongue. The grain of the doors thrums under the storm like a living thing. Refusal. From the mound below, from the straining wards above. No flight. Only choosing where to stand.
He jerks off-course toward the cloister arch instead, fingers closing on Fiachra’s sleeve, dragging him along. Above, the clerestory glass spiders with cracks; shards of colored light fall across their path in jagged bars, sharp as broken glass, painting their fleeing feet in martyr-red and drowning-sea green as they run.
The cloister garth is no refuge. As they burst beneath the open sky, mist claws at them in heavy, salt-sour curtains, and the ancient standing stone at the garth’s heart hums so fiercely that Kian’s teeth ache. The carved cross upon it blurs; older lines swell beneath, stark as fresh-cut wounds. Shadows crowd its base, too dense for mere absence of light, faces momentarily surfacing in the stone’s skin like fish beneath ice: some he knows, some too old for memory. A susurrus of prayer and keening rises from nowhere and everywhere at once. Each step toward the round tower door feels like wading into a tide running the wrong way, the pull of the Otherworld tugging them backward toward the church, toward the gaping crypt-mouth and its hungry dead. Fiachra swears under his breath in island Gaelic, muscles bunching as he leans into the invisible current, shoulders lowered as if against a breaking wave; Kian can barely feel his own feet, numbness climbing from soles to shins as rime begins to crust the edge of his robe and the cords at his waist crackle with thin ice.
The stair tightens, stone corkscrewing around them like a throat. With each turn the cold deepens, breath smoking thin and grey, twisting into half-formed letters Kian almost knows, old names, forbidden pleas, before they shred and fade. His heart thuds slow and swaddled, beat wrapped in grave-linen. He drags his palm along the sweating inner wall, skin splitting on rough lime, until numb fingertips snag on buried grooves beneath the Christian plaster. Ogham. The tower remembers. The whispers that haunted his sleep find tongue, no longer mutter but command, their cadence locking with the boom of unseen surf and the distant, strangled echo of the abbot’s halted chant. Each step is a penance. By the time they lurch into the belfry, wind knifing through the open arches and sea-mist stinging their eyes raw, Kian’s limbs hang from him like sodden wool, every joint packed with ice. The bell-rope sways without wind, fibers creaking, a live, sullen serpent of hemp. It bucks when he seizes it, trying to tear free, but he winds his numb fingers tighter, cords biting his skin. Fiachra plants his salt-crusted boots, shoulder to Kian’s, jaw locked against the thin, hungry laughter spiralling up from the waves below and the deeper, older mirth coiling in the stone. Together they lean their weight into that defiant, thrumming mass, muscles screaming as they drag it toward the first stroke of a rhythm only Kian truly hears.
The first strike tears through the dawn-mist like a wound in the sky.
Sound does not merely ring; it rends. The bell’s cry shears the air raw, a jagged note that seems to split cloud from sea, roof from vault, flesh from spirit. Kian feels it punch up through his arms, through the rope-seared palms, straight into his chest. His ribs rattle like thin staves in a barrel ready to burst. His teeth knock together. The world blurs. White flowers at the edges of his sight, burning cold, eating colour, until for a heartbeat there is nothing but the naked, blinding edge of that sound.
It cuts downward.
The answering shudder runs through every stone of Cill na Sceathach, a convulsion that starts in the bell-tower’s crown and dives whiplash-fast to the buried roots of the mound. Mortar groans. Beehive cells quiver on their foundations. The cloister flagstones jump under bare feet. In the church, the tremor hits like a command.
Everything stops.
Raised hands and twisted faces lock in place, the living and the dead alike held in a single, breathless tableau. A brother mid-genuflection freezes with knee half-bent and fingers crooked in the sign of the cross, palm hovering an inch from his own chest. Another stands with his cowl flung back, eyes rolled to the rafters, throat tendons standing out like cords as an unsung alleluia dies behind his teeth. A novice caught in the act of fleeing hangs suspended, heel lifted, habit skirt flared in a wind that no longer moves.
The dead are no less trapped. A nun’s translucent hand, reaching from the curve of a pillar, hangs inches from the abbot’s sleeve, each finger knotted with rosary-bead shadows. A row of grey-faced soldiers along the north wall halt mid-step, rusted mail clinking once, then falling mute, swords of mist arrested just shy of living bellies. On the crypt-stair, a man with half a skull and a monk’s tonsure crouches like a spider halfway through his climb; rotten jaw frozen in a rictus that might be hunger, might be prayer.
All of them nailed in place by that single tone.
Branmacuillean stands at the heart of it, a scarecrow pinned on an invisible spike. He is halfway through a shouted denunciation, arm flung out, the accusing finger rigid, aimed straight at the empty space where Kian stood before he ran. His mouth is a torn O of effort, lips peeled back from yellowing teeth, spittle strung like glass between them, caught mid-fall. His eyes bulge, white all round, pupils blown huge, the skin at his temples drawn so tight it seems ready to split.
Within that mask, something else heaves.
The ink-smeared ghost that dogs him surges up from behind his eyes, its own face surfacing through his like a drowned twin through thin ice. For an instant the two countenances ripple across one another. Ink-blot cheek over flesh, spectral script crawling along the line of his jaw, a second, transparent mouth dragging itself into place over his, shaping a different word. Oil on water. Wrong on wrong. Black smears bloom across his frozen skin where no ink lies, letters that never settle into words before the sound nails them still.
Then both freeze.
Ghost-face and living face, fused yet not, are pinned together by the bell’s cry. One of Branmacuillean’s hands, halfway to his own throat as if to tear something out, hovers there, fingers crooked. The shadow cast on the flagstones below him delays by a fraction, then jerks to stillness too, caught mid-twitch, head turned in a direction his body does not face. Candles along the nave gutter sideways, flames stretched flat as lances by a wind that has already passed; they hold in that impossible angle, thin and knife-bright, as if speared by invisible nails.
Silence falls after the strike, but it is not peace. It is the held breath before judgment, every soul in Cill na Sceathach, living, dead, and damned between, caught in the same white, ringing pause that throbs like a wound in the marrow of the isle.
The second swing drags through Kian like a net through deep water. The bell’s answer drops lower, a raw, iron-thick note that does not so much sound as burrow. It bores down the tower throat, through nave and crypt, a piledriver of vibration that hammers straight into the buried core of Cill na Sceathach. The founding stone takes it like a blow. For a heartbeat it seems to swell, unseen, then the old ogham carved in its sunken flesh flares. In the church, that hidden script surfaces. Hair-fine strokes shimmer across the floor, around pillars, even over the brothers’ frozen sandals: a crawling net of letters that knit and unknit faster than sight, refusing any Christian order. Beneath the altar, timber and stone graves convulse. Coffin-lids jump without moving. Cairn-stones grind against one another, sparks of cold bursting in the seams. Shades halfway through their breaking rise are caught again. Hands thrusting from stone halt with fingers only half-called from mist, bones inside them still remembered, jaws sagging wide about hungers they cannot voice.
Far below, in the sea-caves, the rock itself vibrates. Pools of black water pucker and ring, their surfaces shivering into tight, concentric circles as if struck from within. The hum that wakes there is not quite sound, not quite tide; it is an answering resonance, thick as blood in the ear, as if the ocean has heard its true name and begun, slow and reluctant, to lift its face toward the bell.
The third peal tears itself from Kian’s throat as much as from the bronze. Latin spills from cracked lips, but under it runs the older pulse, the wordless rise and fall the dead druids taught his dreaming bones. The two threads snarl together, a rope of sound dragged taut over the isle. It answers in the cloister garth.
There, the ancient stone stands at the garth’s heart, hoar-frost clinging to its flanks. The struck note spears it. Shadow and light shear apart along the carved cross, black cruciform sliding one way, white the other. Between them, the buried ogham flares, raw and pale as exposed bone. A presence loosens within the stone, not moving, yet vast, like a door thinking of opening. The threshold goddess breathes.
Far below, the same note knifes through the sea. In the drowned dark beneath the cliffs, where no monk’s bell should ever be heard, something answers. Chains rasp over rock, barnacled links of no earthly forge grinding tight, then tighter, around a shape that glimmers more suggestion than flesh. The sea-lady’s limbs flex against her binding, long and sleek, neither wholly woman nor wholly wave. Her hair streams out in the black water, a cloud of kelp-lit strands, shivering with trapped light. The pierced silence wrenches a voiceless cry from her; it surges upward as pressure and ache rather than sound, a column of yearning that meets the bell’s toll halfway.
For a heartbeat the isle hangs upon that braided call: church and cloister, stone and seabed all strung on the same, straining chord.
For a stretched, crystalline instant, every boundary dissolves. Church, crypt, mound, and drowning deeps lie atop one another like translucent leaves in a single codex. Pillars blur into cairns; altar into capstone; wave-crest into vaulted arch. The ghosts crowding Cill na Sceathach, murdered scribe and forgotten monks, drowned fishermen and fey-touched dead, are yanked into stillness, their forms thinning to hair-fine etchings of ink and frost-fire. Kian feels their countless gazes converge through the bell’s vibrating core, spearing him where he sways in the belfry throat. The goddess’s regard is a cold hand at the nape of his neck; the sea-lady’s yearning floods his ribs like black tide. He understands, with a clarity that cuts like a flensing knife, that he has become the hinge: open or shut, bind or unbind, sacrifice or reprieve.
Fiachra sags against the rope, chest heaving, eyes white in his salt-burned face. Kian’s hands slip from the beam; cold surges in, hungry, up through bare soles and bone. The silence presses questions against his teeth. In the church below, a single brother sobs a broken Pater. The sound skids, falters, then bends toward him, awaiting answer.
The bell’s final shivers bleed away into a ragged chorus of coughs, sobs, and stumbling prayers, as if sound itself has forgotten how to move through the charged air. Throats rasp. Beads click in shaking fingers. A brother retches dryly against a pillar, another mutters the Pater over and over, words slurring like a charm gone wrong.
Kian feels the silence beneath the noise. A hollow, tidal draw. The echo of the bell still rings in his bones, in the small of his back, in the ache behind his eyes. The air hangs heavy with tallow smoke and salt, with the iron taste of fear. Every breath scrapes cold along his lungs, as if he has drawn in sea-mist instead of air.
The shades that had crowded the aisles now cling to the walls and corners like smoke pressed flat by an unseen hand. Ash-grey. Thinned. Faces half-remembered. They flicker at the edge of sight. Old abbots, drowned men in torn cloaks, a woman with weed in her hair. Their mouths work soundless curses, but the bell has fixed them in a sulk of watchful stillness.
He does not look at them first.
His gaze drags, heavy as lead, to the place where Branmacuillean had stood when the ghost rose full and terrible and the stone itself seemed to open beneath him. The memory of the man’s last cry, half plea, half denial, still pricks Kian’s ears, though no one else seems willing to recall it aloud.
He swallows, the motion dry, and steps forward, bare feet numbed by the cold that seeps up from the flagged floor.
In the center of the nave, where Branmacuillean had stood, a dark slickness seeps between the flagstones (seawater beading and trickling in impossible rivulets) leaving no trace of him but salt on the stones and a faint, briny chill.
In the center of the nave, where Branmacuillean had stood, a dark slickness seeps between the flagstones, not like honest rain or spilled water, but as if the stone itself were sweating the sea. Seawater beads and gathers in the worn hollows, trembling as though something beneath still breathes. Thin rivulets creep out along the mortar lines, feeling their way like pale eels, then falter and still, leaving only a glimmer on the uneven rock.
There is no torn cloth. No scattered quill. No mark of struggle. Only salt whitening as it dries, crusting the stones in a faint ring where the man’s feet had been. The smell of it rises sharp and clean over tallow and incense, the breath of open water in a place that has never known tides.
Kian’s toes numb where they touch the damp. A cold climbs his bones, slow and sure, as if the sea has reached up and taken hold of him too, marking him in silence where all can see nothing at all.
Around the pillars and along the shadowed walls, the once-surging dead have thinned to ash-grey smears of presence, crouched low and watchful, their earlier fury condensed into a sullen, waiting hush. They pool where stone meets shadow, pressed flat as if some great hand still bears upon them. Faces half-formed bulge and blur within the murk: eye sockets like pits of peat-water, mouths working soundless words that never quite tear free of the bell’s after-ring. A drowned man’s beard trails weed that does not stir. A child’s small hands claw at an invisible veil, then slacken. Their nearness prickles the hairs on Kian’s arms, a crawling chill over his skin, a weight behind his eyes; not striking now, but listening.
Men reel as though struck, some sprawling, some dropping hard to their knees, clutching benches, pillars, one another. Fingers jab clumsy crosses over brow and breast. Beads slip from numb grasps, pattering like sleet on stone. Eyes flinch toward the walls, skittering off the ash-grey shapes that cling there, then wrench away again, as if looking longer might invite them nearer.
Overhead, candle-flames gutter and sway toward the damp ring on the stones before righting themselves, thin smoke drawn as if by a breath that is no longer there. A slow, stumbling murmur of psalms rises, thanksgiving braided with warding, men’s voices raw and uneven. As they find the words, Kian feels the press of unseen eyes ease, just enough for ordinary fear to speak aloud.
Kian’s breath smokes faintly in the chill that lingers after the impossible flood, a thin ghost of warmth clawing at air that feels like the mouth of a cave. His lungs ache as if he has swallowed sea-water and grave-damp both. Yet when he drags his gaze over the dazed brothers, faces blanched, habits soaked at the hem, sand and grit clinging where water should never have reached, his tongue moves of its own bitter discipline.
He names them. One by one. Each name a small ward against the silence that pressed here moments before. “Mael Ísu… Colmán… Aodhán…” His voice rasps, but it holds. With every syllable, some tightness in his chest eases. None missing. None stretched long and grey in the tide that came from no sea.
Beside him, the abbot sways, fingers clutching his wooden cross so hard the knuckles blanch. For a heartbeat, the old man’s eyes look past Kian, toward the dark lip of the crypt stair. Then he wrenches them back and forces his own cracked voice to follow Kian’s.
He repeats the tally. Stumbles once, corrects himself, starts again. The litany becomes a second bell, low and stubborn, ringing flesh against the unseen. Names answered by hoarse “present, Father” and shivering nods. A brother breaks into weeping; another laughs too loudly, then clamps his hand over his mouth as if he has blasphemed.
When the last name is spoken and the last shaken reply given, a ragged sigh moves through the church like a single, shuddering exhalation. Wet wool rustles. Teeth click as jaws unclench. A few men cross themselves again and again, more rote than devout, as if motion alone might keep their souls from being washed back down into the stones.
The sound of the sea beyond the walls seems farther away now, but Kian hears another, closer wash. A slow withdrawing drip along flagstones, as though the church itself is remembering how to be dry. He swallows the salt on his tongue and stands very still, counting his own heart among the living.
Fiachra stands out like driftwood cast up in a cloister. No tonsure, no habit, only salt-stiff wool and a fisherman’s boots leaking on the holy floor. His chest heaves once, twice. Then he leans his shoulder against the nearest pillar, slow and deliberate, as if to prove the stone is still there, still of this world and not some grey timber from the fey-tide.
His palm stays flat to the rock a heartbeat longer than needed. Kian sees the slight tremor in the fingers, the whitened knuckles, before Fiachra makes himself straighten. The sailor’s gaze sweeps the nave, counting men as he might count crew after a storm. When his eyes find Kian’s, they harden with a wild, relieved light.
He jerks his chin toward the ring of standing, shivering monks. A wordless question. All?
Kian inclines his head, once.
Fiachra blows out a breath, almost a laugh, then swallows it. His attention drags, unwilling, to the gape of the crypt stair. There the flagstones still gleam damp and dark. The air that rises is thick and bitter with brine, like a low tide turned sour. He sniffs once, face tightening, as if to say: the sea is still in here, brother, and it is not done.
Under the looming, rain-darkened crucifix, the abbot drags in a breath that rattles like a loose shutter. He lifts one trembling hand, bidding the brothers draw close, gathering them in as a shepherd might after wolves. His other hand never quite leaves Kian’s sleeve, fingers hooked in the wet wool as though anchoring himself to the gaunt monk who has just spoken with both saints and something older that lives in stone and sea. In a hoarse, cracked Latin that falters on certain syllables, he declares, once, then again more loudly, that no man is to descend into the crypt, ring the bell in the old pattern, or so much as shift a bone or relic without Kian’s word and presence upon him as witness.
Around them, men sag to their knees on the damp flags: some in ragged thanks, others because their strength has run like water from a broken cask. Mutters of psalm and Pater slip into low, frightened talk: of judgment, of salt where no tide runs, of a shadow that shrieked as if torn. More than one pair of eyes keeps straying to the crypt-arch, watching as though it might swell and draw breath.
While a pair of younger monks hurry off at the abbot’s word to fetch senior scribes and the more trusted of the lay-brothers, Fiachra crosses himself in the clumsy village fashion, thumb smearing a damp cross on his own brow. He steps in nearer to Kian. “They’ll want a tale fit for Rome and the mainland,” he mutters, voice pitched low for Kian’s ear alone. His glance flicks to the dripping crucifix, then down to the dark, sweating stones beneath it, as if measuring which power weighs heaviest here. “They’ll set it down neat, right, with seals and flourishes. But whatever they write, we’ll ken the true judge that took him. And what’s still listening yet under our feet, waiting the next mis-step.”
Word flies ahead of the returning runners. By the time their sandaled feet slap over the wet flags, the scriptorium already hums, a hive stirred with smoke. Men bend close over their desks yet write nothing, quills held idle and dripping. Scripture and homily lie open, faces down, as though the parchment itself might listen.
Branmacuillean, they murmur, has been “claimed by judgment.”
Not dead in any decent, bell-rung way. Not stretched waxen in the infirmary for candles to gutter by. Taken. Swallowed. Drawn down like a stone beneath a black wave by something that made the church’s very flagstones weep salt water and shine like a low-tide reef.
No two tellings agree, yet each is worse than the last. In one, a hand of water rose from the crypt and closed on his throat. In another, his own shadow surged up and dragged him screaming into the floor. Some say the dead scribe who haunted him showed its full, sea-rotten face before the altar, and Branmacuillean fell through it as through a door. All agree the bell had been ringing in the old, forbidden pattern, and that the sound froze their marrow.
“Judged,” the older brothers say, lips thin, making the word sound safely Roman, as if a distant synod had spoken. “Claimed,” the younger whisper, and glance toward the west wall where the spray sometimes ghosts through the stone on storm days.
A lay-scribe, eyes wide, mutters that the stones themselves have begun to hold court. Another swears he heard, in the thunder of the tower bell, an answering note from beneath the isle, deep and slow as a whale’s calling. They cross themselves over their ink-blackened chests, some slipping in a thumbed trace of the old triskele beneath the newer sign of the cross.
By dusk, no man in the scriptorium will walk barefoot on the flags. Too many swear they still feel a chill tide breathing there, as if the sea that took Branmacuillean waits, patient, just a finger’s breadth below the stone.
Under Kian’s hollow-eyed supervision, the brothers spread Branmacuillean’s ledgers and charters across the long boards in the warming-room and scriptorium, pushing aside gospel and homily to make space for the tainted work. The air smells of damp wool and scraped vellum. No one meets Kian’s gaze for long; they look instead to his ink-stained hands, to the faint white crust of salt at the cuffs of his habit.
He sets them to it in a low, clipped voice. Column by column, hand by hand, they trace altered strokes and suspect erasures. Margins are held up to the light of guttering tallow, the thin skin showing ghosts of words shaved away and written over. A monk with keen eyes murmurs dates that do not tally with known deaths. Another finds a seal impressed twice, the first faint and truer beneath the second.
Line by meticulous line, false grants are exposed. A junior clerk, jaw tight, copies each correction into a clean roll, noting witnesses, times, the measure of stolen acreages inked back to their rightful kin, all to bear the abbot’s hard-won seal.
Fiachra is brought before the assembled monks and a knot of wary villagers in the cloister garth, rain-flecked light falling cold on stone and wool. The abbot stands beneath the re-cut standing stone, its carved cross glimmering faintly, voice thin but formal as he names each forgery and clears the sailor’s name. The complaints and contracts bearing Fiachra’s hand are pronounced void, “false as any heathen charm.” A murmur swells, then stills.
Fiachra bows stiffly, sea-rough shoulders tight, cheeks burning as the weight shifts in the faces around him. Suspicion unclenches, finger by finger. Men who would not meet his eye last week nod once, reluctant. Grudging respect edges in; so does fearful curiosity, as if he has stood too close to some hidden court and come back marked.
As the crowd thins and sandals scrape away into the mist, tongues loosen in low, sidelong murmurs. Some mutter that the drowned and dispossessed have begun to sit in secret judgment beneath the church, weighing lies in the dark like coins on a scale. Others swear a strange bell-ring froze even their breath, and that afterward every shadow along the cloister wall seemed to be listening, leaning inward, hungry for each spoken word.
By the time lamps are lit, a new saying has taken root from shore tavern to scriptorium bench. That at Cill na Sceathach the stones themselves remember every oath and erasure, every whispered bargain in the dark. Men lower their voices on jest and curse alike. The abbot forbids such talk, yet his gaze drifts often to the flags beneath his feet, as if expecting another invisible court to convene without his leave and weigh even his silence.
They meet not in chapter but in the cramped archive cell, where damp creeps through the mortar and a single tallow flame gutters over stacked chests. The air is close with vellum-musk and the sour tang of old mold. Stone presses in. The round tower’s bell is a distant, muffled pulse, as if sounding from under water.
The abbot does not sit. His shadow leans long across the flagged floor, hands clenched in his sleeves until, with a soft, fraying sigh, he reaches into the fold of his habit. Parchment rasps. He brings out a narrow strip already bearing the pressed wax of the abbey seal, the lamb and cross dulled by finger-grease. His hand shakes as he holds it toward Kian.
No preamble. Only a mouse-thin whisper of Latin, breath catching on the words as if they cut his throat on the way out. Custos. Guardian. Not of relics upon the altar, but of “quibusdam scriptis communi aedificationi minus idoneis”: certain writings, unfit for the simple.
The quill-strokes are tight and crabbed, meant to be clear to any bishop’s eye and yet to say nothing that cannot be denied. No catalogue. No titles. Only a charge and the warning that what is so entrusted is “to be concealed for the safety of souls, until Holy Church shall judge the fitting time, or the Lord end the age.”
Kian reads it twice, tracing each inked curve with his gaze as if it were a binding sigil. His name there, in the abbot’s own hand, seems heavier than any chain. The wax glistens in the low light, red as clotted blood. He feels, as he closes his fingers around the scrap, the chill of the crypt stones rise to meet the dry heat of the tallow flame, and knows this is as near to a vow as either of them will dare to speak aloud.
One by one he works at the rusted hasps. The little keys rasp and snag, then give with a grudging click. A worm-eaten coffer yawns, breathing out a cold that does not come from the stone alone. Out of it he lifts wrapped bundles, cloth darkened by old grease and the faint bloom of mold. Beneath the linen lie vellum codices heavy with iron clasps, their bosses stamped with crosses that do not quite sit easy over the twisting knots beneath. There are thin folios of brittle bark, edges crumbling at his touch, scored with ogham strokes that seem to bite deeper than the surface. A leather roll follows, stiff with age, that smells of brine and old ash, like drowned firewood.
Kian’s fingers hover, not yet turning the pages, but his eye catches enough: illuminated capitals that curl into shapes older than gospel vines, beasts and coils that suggest antlers, tides, doorways. In the margins, saints’ names blur into half-scraped invocations, vowels thinned to ghosts, addressed not to martyrs but to nameless thresholds that open where stone, sea, and bone meet.
The abbot’s mouth twists, as if the words themselves taste sour. “These,” he murmurs at last, gaze fixed on the coffer’s black mouth, “are the fruit of over-bold hands and over-fearful hearts. Errors of zeal. Errors of dread. If legates set foot here, they must find nothing but clean saints’ lives and lawful grants for land and tithe.” His voice roughens on the last word. He does not bid Kian swear. Instead he catches the younger monk’s ink-stained fingers in both his own and presses them hard against the signed scrap. The wax bites. The parchment crackles. It is a poor man’s sacrament, oath and absolution muddled together, and in the press of skin Kian feels the abbot’s hidden tremor.
The books sit in his arms like quarried stones laid to choke a barrow’s mouth, each clasp a small iron nail in his own flesh. The marrow-cold in him stirs, bone answering to the low, wrong music in their leaves. He inclines his head, not to the abbot but to the unseen Witness, and murmurs that he will hide them where men’s feet rarely foul the dust yet the old circles still knot tight. Between crypt and cliff, in the narrow throat where salt-breath seeps through rock and psalms already braid with half-erased ogham, line over line, prayer over spell, in a darkness that remembers both.
The abbot does not bless him, nor bid him go. He merely pinches out the flame. Smoke twists, then is gone, and the little chamber sinks to a black that smells of ink and cold stone. In it Kian hears, or dreams he hears, a slow, self-born flutter of leaves and, far underfoot, a drawn breath in the deep.
The bells find their hours again, voices rising and falling over the mist, but a hush lingers between the notes; brothers cross themselves more often when the tower tolls the old freezing pattern, remembering the night the water came where no water should be.
They do not speak of it in chapter. It creeps instead into pauses at table, into the way shoulders tighten when the clapper stutters through that forbidden sequence, once meant only for raiders and for storm. Now every stroke seems to thicken the air, as if invisible ice formed in the nave and cloister, pinning shadows to flagstone. Novices glance up from their psalters, lips moving faster, as though they might outrun a memory by out-singing it.
Kian measures the change in the silences. The great bell’s echo walks the stone before the sound itself fades, and in that trailing space he hears the rustle of those who almost did not go back. Shades half-turned toward the sea and half-tethered still to bone and oath. The brothers feel it too, though they do not name it. They pray louder; their candles gutter lower.
At night, when the bell stays mute, the tower looms like a sealed throat above them, yet its presence lies heavy on every dream. Men wake with the taste of brine and iron at the back of the tongue, not knowing why. Water-basins in the cloister walk are never more than half-filled now; no one says who first began to empty them before Compline, but the sight of too much water in a holy place sets hands to trembling.
When storms roll in from the west, cloak-hems drag damp along the floor where no leak marks the roof. The older brothers mutter that the stone is drawing breath. The younger ones count the beats between each toll and wonder, in the raw quiet after, whether the bell has frozen more than wandering spirits.
Down at the shingle cove, word runs thinner than ale and twice as quick. Men hunch over coils of rope and patched nets, watching the dark smear of the headland where the graves crouch above the surf. They swear the corpse-lights there have faded. No more blue foxfire bobbing over the mounds on moonless nights, no wandering gleam to mark where a drowned man’s soul might stray. It ought to be a mercy. Instead it feels like a held breath.
They cast anyway. Hunger drives harder than fear. Yet when the nets sink past the familiar run of herring and cod, past weed and rock and old anchors, there comes at times a slow, thoughtful weight on the lines. Not the sharp jerk of fish, not the dragging clutch of snagged stone. A measured pull, as if something far below were closing its fingers, testing hemp and callus and the will of the hands above.
The bravest curse and haul. The older men cut the rope clean, muttering that what the sea has taken into herself she means to keep, and now has help in the keeping.
Within the cloister, Kian’s sandaled steps trace a nightly circuit, the same tight loop of stone and shadow until the flagstones seem to know his tread. He walks when the last psalm has died and the oil in the lamps runs low, lantern raised to the arches and alcoves where shadows once crowded like breathless listeners. Its light crawls over damp mortar, over the old re-cut standing stone that hums faintly in his bones. His fingers move ceaselessly over bone beads carved with faint ogham notches and Latin saints’ names, prayer threaded through older charm. Each whispered Ave is laid down like mortar between two walls of faith, every muttered fragment of an herb-wife’s ward set quietly behind the name of God, against the unquiet.
Brothers begin to seek him out in murmured twos and threes: one asks if his dead sister truly rests, another if the drowned raider in the crypt still dreams of iron and blood; Kian answers carefully, voice low and even, shaping reassurances like blessings while listening past them, ears pricked for any stir in the veil, any whisper of bargains unfinished, promises yet unclaimed, names not fully laid to earth.
Faces turn away when he passes, more from unease than disrespect. Children of lay-servants cross themselves twice. Once, a novice swears he heard Kian answer in a tongue like running water and wind in burial-grass, and that the silence after shivered. Word spreads in whispers: Brother Kian minds the doors no lock can bar.
The stone is slick with mist beneath his ink-stained palm, cold sweating through skin and sinew, its carved cross and half-effaced ogham grooves humming together like two voices forced into a single chant; the thrum that answers up through his bones is older than bells and yet shaped now by psalms. The wet grit of lichen presses into his fingertips. Tiny beads of water gather along the iron nail driven once into the carved arm of the cross, fatten, fall, and vanish into the dark-veined rock.
He shuts his eyes. Lets the sound of it swell.
Not sound, not quite. A pressure. A slow, patient note that has lain under every toll of the tower-bell since the first stone was set here, now rising as if the air itself leans nearer to listen. Latin syllables flare in his memory, Pater noster, qui es in caelis, each word a bright, narrow thing; beneath them coil older names that never knew ink, only blade-cuts in green wood and the whisper of wet earth closing over bone.
The cross-marked face of the pillar flares in his mind’s sight, haloed by all the prayers breathed against it for a hundred winters. Turned just so in his thoughts, the deeper cuts show themselves, half-buried ogham strokes running like scars along the edge. They answer the Christian carving not in defiance but in a rough, braided counterpoint. Two songs. One throat.
For a heartbeat his pulse stutters to match that buried rhythm. The air thickens. Cloister-mist curls lower about his ankles, drawn inward, as if the garth itself inhales. Kian feels the ground under him tilt, slight as the sway of a coracle in a long swell. The stone’s hum pushes up into his wrist, threads the cold already sunk in his marrow, and where the two chills meet, something opens. A narrow place, neither wholly church nor mound, waiting to hear what tongue he will choose.
It comes up through him first as taste. Salt thick as blood, metal-sharp, as if he had bitten his own tongue. Brine and rusted iron collect at the back of his throat, souring the psalm that wants to rise there. His jaw locks against it. His eyes stay shut.
Far below the cliff’s black lip, where stone ribs arch over the secret cave, something bound in water turns in its sleep. He feels the drag of old chains through drowned sand, the slow flex of a will taught to coil rather than strike. Her hunger moves like a long swell under storm-chop, patient, heavy, ancient.
It answers the pulse under his hand. Not as rival, but as echo, as if the buried goddess and the sea-bound lady were two ends of the same held breath. The ache that climbs his bones is not his. It belongs to both. To depth and threshold together. Grass at his feet slicks darker, blades bowing though no wind passes, each thin green tongue trembling as if about to speak.
For a dizzy heartbeat the world lists sideways, as if the isle itself has slipped its moorings: church and mound, cloister and shore shear past one another like miscopied lines, half a world out of true. Flagstones run slick as tide-rock under his feet. The herb-beds drag long as drowned fields. The grey slit of sea lifts, peers in through the cloister arches. In the skewed tilt of it the standing stone narrows, thins, is no longer pillar but a knife-edge of absence, a slit in the world’s bark. Kian finds himself fixed exactly in its hinge, breath pinned, bones creaking, two vast, wordless attentions bending toward that hairline crack as if he were the weakness they might press wider.
When breath returns, it comes thin and crooked, hitching in his chest. The words that slip from him are the same. Each syllable beads in the cold like breath on iron, hanging between stone and sky, neither blessing nor curse, only a half-spoken vow.
They do not wholly loose him. Their touch remains in marrow and tongue, a faint bruise under the skin of his soul. Salt and soil thicken on his palate till it is hard to swallow. This is no supplication, but a spoken bond. He has set his weight upon a crack in the world, and it will split.