At the Limn

VOLUME ONE: THE ANCHOR

PART ONE: MOONLIGHT

I. Moonlight

The full moon had been climbing all evening, pale and perfect, until it finally settled in the square of the cabin window. It painted the wooden walls in silver, the kind of light that doesn't just shine — it lingers, seeps into the grain, into your skin.

"It's time," I told him. My voice sounded small in the wide quiet of our little cabin. "Will you be all right, Father?"

He smiled in that way he does when he's trying to make me believe something he isn't quite sure of himself. The firelight caught the ginger in his beard, turned it to copper. "You know how it is, Cailean lad. Every moon's different. Some are easy. Some… aren't. But I'll be fine."

I nodded, though my stomach had already begun its slow, familiar twist. His eyes flicked to the old revolver on the mantelpiece — the one with the triskele carved into its side, three spirals chasing each other round the barrel like they were trying to catch their own tails — and back to me. We never talked about it, not really. It was just there, like the moon, like the change. Aunt Muireall said once that it hadn't been fired in ninety years and wasn't ever meant to be; that it was a ward, not a weapon, forged by a Domhnallach who understood the old symbol better than the men who came after him. I didn't understand what she meant by that. I'm not sure Father did either.

"Best get to bed," he said, and I obeyed, padding down the hallway past the framed photographs. Us in the clearing last winter, snow in his fur. Me as a baby chewing on his ear whilst the rest of the pack lounged in the background — Aunt Muireall's boys, the Frasers from over the hill, old Ealasaid Munro before her hip went. I remembered the warmth of those bodies, the way the forest smelt like safety. I still dreamt about it sometimes.

My room was just as I'd left it: dragons in crayon on the walls, a pile of books leaning dangerously on the bedside table, quilt folded back in welcome. He came in a moment later, his nails already black and curved, his ears tapering to points. His smile had shifted with the rest of him — narrower now, edged with teeth — but it was still his.

"You comfortable, my brave boy?" he asked, the growl in his words almost tender.

"Yes. You'll be okay, won't you?"

"Of course," he said, too quickly. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"Does it hurt?"

His jaw flexed. "Yeah. More than I'd like you to know. But I can take it." He grinned wide, as though a bigger smile might make the truth smaller.

I laughed when he tickled me, the sound breaking through the hush. I reached up and touched the bridge of his changing snout, and he gave me a soft huff in return.

"I love you, Father."

He bent and pressed his muzzle to my cheek, the fur warm against my skin. His tail swayed once, twice, before he backed out of the room, clothes in rags on the floor. The door stayed ajar, and through it I heard the steady click of claws on the hallway boards — the sound I'd grown up with, the sound that meant home.

I closed my eyes, wrapped in quilt and moonlight, knowing he'd still be there. Not the same as before, not exactly, but still him. Always him.

That is where the story I used to tell myself ended. A boy, a cabin, a father who went out into the silver dark and came back by morning smelling of frost and pine. It is not where the true story ends, because I did not yet know, that night, that there was a true story at all — that the click of claws on the boards was the newest verse of something that had been sung, in one form or another, since long before either of us had names for it.

This is the rest of it, as best as I can tell it. Some of what follows I lived. Some of it I was told, in kitchens and by firelight and once, very strangely, by the archway itself. I have tried to keep the two kinds honest with each other, and to say plainly, where it matters, which is which.

II. The Sound That Means Home

We lived three miles out from Kirkendrie, in a cabin my great-great-grandfather built with his own hands at the edge of a wood the locals still called, without much irony, the Wolf Wood. Nobody in the village said this to be unkind. It was simply the wood's name, the way a hill is a hill and a burn is a burn, worn smooth by centuries of use until nobody thought to ask what it had once been describing.

I was nine years old the winter of the moonlight scene, and I already understood, in the way children understand things without being told — sideways, through gaps in adult conversation, through the careful blankness that comes over a face when a question gets too close to something — that my family was not like the Camerons down the road, or the minister's family who ran the wee shop by the kirk. I understood that we did not go to church, though Father was scrupulously polite to anyone who did. I understood that the calendar on our kitchen wall marked the full moons in red ink before it marked anything else — before birthdays, before Hogmanay, before the school term dates I was meant to circle myself. I understood that Aunt Muireall, who was not really my aunt but some further and more complicated relation that nobody had ever fully explained to me, came to stay for three days around every full moon and left again after, like a tide going out.

What I did not understand — could not have understood, at nine, tucked up in a room papered in my own bad dragon drawings — was the shape of the thing underneath all of it. That there was a name for what my father was. That the name had a history, and the history had a wound in it, old and only half-healed, running back through centuries of Kirkendrie parish records to a night in 1689 when three people had been brought before the kirk session and tried for a crime the record-keeper hadn't the vocabulary to describe properly, so he'd used the only word he had, which was the wrong word, which is so often what happens when frightened men reach for the nearest word instead of the true one.

I knew the click of claws on the hallway boards. That was the whole of my knowledge, for a long time, and it was enough. A boy doesn't need the history of a sound to know it means safety. He only needs to have heard it enough times, on enough ordinary nights, that its absence would be the thing that woke him.

It was two winters later that I first heard the sound stop.

Not fade — stop. Mid-stride, as though something had reached into the hallway and lifted my father clean out of the moment. I lay rigid under the quilt for a long count of ten before I understood that I was listening to nothing, and that nothing was worse than any sound could have been.

I found him on his knees in the hallway, still half-changed, one clawed hand braced against the wall and the other pressed flat to his own chest as though he could hold something in by main force. His breath came in long ragged pulls. When he looked up at me his eyes were his — I want to be exact about this, because it matters, because it is the whole of what came after — his eyes were entirely his, human and frightened and ashamed to be seen frightened, in a face that was not yet entirely a face.

"Go back to bed, Cailean," he said, and his voice cracked on my name in a way I had never heard before.

I didn't. I sat down on the floor across from him, three feet away, my back against the wall, and I stayed there until his breathing slowed and the claws receded and the moon, indifferent as ever, went on climbing outside the window like nothing at all had happened.

Neither of us spoke of it in the morning. But that was the night I stopped believing the story I'd been telling myself, the one where the change was simply a thing that happened, private and complete, like weather. I began to understand that it could go wrong. I did not yet know how, or why, or what wrong even meant in this particular grammar. I only knew that my father had been frightened, and that he had not wanted me to see it, and that I had seen it anyway, and that something in me had shifted sideways to make room for the knowing.

III. What the Photographs Don't Show

My mother died when I was four. I remember almost nothing of her directly — a smell of heather soap, a voice pitched low and even, the particular way she used to hum without seeming to notice she was doing it — and everything I know of her now comes secondhand, filtered through Father's careful retellings and Aunt Muireall's less careful ones.

Her name was Ealasaid. She was not wolf-kin. She had grown up in Kirkendrie same as generations of her family before her, entirely, unremarkably human, and she had fallen in love with my father at the village dance the summer she turned twenty-two, three months before she ever learned what he was.

"She had every right to run," Aunt Muireall told me once, the two of us shelling peas at her kitchen table while Father was off at the timber yard. "Your mother wasn't daft, and she wasn't reckless either, whatever your father likes to say when he's had a dram. She sat with it a long while before she decided. That's not the same as fear. That's respect."

"What did she decide?"

"That she loved the man more than she feared the wolf." Muireall's hands didn't slow on the pea pods. "And that turned out to matter more than either of them expected, because it's a queer thing about our kind, Cailean — we need an anchor. Something outwith the change that the man in us can hold onto when the wolf wants to take the whole of him. For most of us it's kin, blood of our blood. But sometimes — not often, but sometimes — it's chosen instead of given. Your mother chose to be your father's anchor the day she married him, whether she understood the word for it or not."

I did not understand, then, what an anchor was for, or what happened to a boat that lost one. I only understood, watching my aunt's careful hands, that she was telling me something important in the shape of something ordinary, the way the old stories always seem to arrive dressed as kitchen talk.

My mother died of an illness that had nothing supernatural in it at all — an ordinary cruelty, a growth in her that no amount of moonlight or myth could touch, three years of hospital corridors and then none. I have wondered, since, whether that ordinariness was its own kind of mercy or its own kind of insult: that the thing that took her from us respected none of the family's old rules, cared nothing for full moons or triskeles or the wolf-stones out past Càrn Buidhe, and simply did what illness does, indifferent to what it was interrupting.

What I did not understand, at four, and would not understand until I was eleven and sitting on a hallway floor watching my father hold himself together with his bare clawed hands, was that her death had taken something from him beyond grief. It had taken his anchor.

He had held on, these years since, on will and love and the ordinary discipline of a man who gets up every day and does the next necessary thing. But an anchor held by will alone is not the same as one held without thinking, the way you don't think about breathing, and Father was eleven years into holding his by main force when I found him on the floor that night, and I did not yet know it, but the strain was beginning, very slowly, to show.

The photographs in our hallway did not show any of this. They showed a family in a clearing, snow in his fur, a baby chewing an ear. They showed the warm middle of the story. It is only now, writing this down, that I understand how much a photograph leaves out, and how kind that omission can be, right up until the day it isn't.

from a journal kept much later — on masks

I have been thinking about the word mask lately, and about how unfair it is to the thing it usually describes.

A mask, in the ordinary telling, is a lie you put on. Underneath it is the true face, patient and waiting, and the mask is simply the inconvenience standing between the world and the truth of you. That is not what it felt like, growing up in that cabin. What it felt like was two true faces, worn in sequence rather than in competition, neither one a lie to the other. My father was not wearing a man-suit over a wolf, nor a wolf-suit over a man. He was, each in its turn, entirely himself. The trouble was never the wearing. The trouble was that the world outside our cabin only had room in it for one face at a time, and asked us, without ever quite saying so, to choose which one we'd be showing before we opened the door.

I think a great deal of what people call masking is really just that: not falsehood, but selective honesty, offered to a world that has made it plain it can only receive one truth at a time. It is exhausting. It is also, I've come to think, not quite the crime against the self that it's often made out to be — provided there is somewhere, some room with the door shut and the quilt pulled up, where the whole of you gets to be present at once, and known, and not asked to pick.

We had that room. Not every family does. I think that is the actual difference between hiding and simply being careful, and I did not have the words for the difference until long after I needed them.

PART TWO: THE OLD TONGUE

IV. The Cailleach's Almanac

It was Aunt Muireall who finally told me the history properly, the winter I turned twelve, in the front room of her cottage with the fire built up high and a pot of tea going cold between us because neither of us thought to drink it.

"You're old enough now that not knowing is doing you more harm than knowing will," she said, which was as close as she ever came to an apology for the years of careful silence. "So. Sit still and let me tell it right, the once, and then you can ask what you like."

She told me first of the Cailleach, the old blue-faced hag of winter who strides the Highlands with a hammer to freeze the ground and a plaid the colour of storm cloud, who is older than the saints the kirk brought and older than the kings who came before them, and who is not — Muireall was firm on this point — a figure of evil, whatever the newer stories liked to claim. "She is simply what winter is. Hard, and true, and not interested in your comfort. There's a kind of respect due to a thing like that, that you'll never get from asking it to be gentler."

She told me of Selene, whom the old wolf-kin families call by a Greek name only because a scholar centuries back decided the Gaelic word had gone missing from the record and borrowed one that fit — the moon herself, understood not as a goddess exactly, Muireall was careful to say, but as a presence, cyclical and patient, who does not create what she calls forth in a body but only holds it up long enough to be seen. Waxing. Full. Waning. New. "She doesn't apologise for the dark parts of her cycle, Cailean. She doesn't try to stay full all the time to spare herself the discomfort of going dark. That's the first thing you need to understand about her, if you're going to understand your father at all."

And then, at last, she told me of the wolf-stones.

Out past Càrn Buidhe, in a moorland clearing our family had kept the road to for longer than anyone could say for certain, there stood — stands still — an archway of three joined arches, granite, weathered, older by every reasonable measure than the stone should allow. No mortar holds it together. No tool mark explains how the three curves pass through one another at their crossing points. An old yew grows at the clearing's edge, gnarled and hollow-hearted the way only the oldest yews go, and Muireall said the tree had been there before the stones, and would very likely be there after, and that a wolf-kin funeral, when one was needed, was always held in that yew's shade rather than the kirkyard's.

"Every wolf-kin family in three counties can trace itself back to that clearing," Muireall said. "It's not where the wolf in us came from — the wolf was always in us, same as the moon was always in the sky, waiting. What the stones do is hold the knowing open. You cross under the full moon and you're shown, plain as day, that you're both things at once — man and wolf, neither one erasing the other — for as long as it takes you to understand it properly. Most who aren't kin can't cross at all. The arch doesn't so much as blink at them. It knows its own."

"Does it hurt?" I asked, because that was still, at twelve, the only question I really knew how to ask about any of this.

"No," said Muireall. "That's the thing folk get backwards, thinking of it like a curse laid on. Nobody who's crossed properly has ever called it pain. What they call it, near enough every one of them, in their own words down the centuries, is both. Man and wolf, held together instead of fighting each other for the one body. And at the very end of the crossing — this part I can't explain and I've stopped trying — you're addressed. Told, plain, that you've done it right. Math a rinn thu, the old tongue has it. Well done."

"By who?"

Muireall's hands went still around her cold tea, for the first time all evening. "That," she said, "is the one question the stones have never once answered, in three hundred years of folk asking it. I'd tell you if I knew, lad. I'd tell you first of anyone."

I asked her, at the end, the question that had been building the whole evening, the one I'd been almost afraid to shape into words.

"Will I have to cross it? When I'm old enough?"

Muireall looked at me a long moment, the fire throwing shadow up the side of her face, making her look, for just that second, like something considerably older than my aunt.

"That," she said, "is not mine to answer either. That one belongs to you, and the moon, and — one day, if it comes to it — the stones themselves. All I'll say is this: your father crossed his own crossing at sixteen, same as I did at fourteen, same as near every wolf-kin child does when the time is right for them and not a day before. Nobody makes you go. But most of us, in the end, want to. There's a relief in being seen plainly, Cailean, that's hard to describe to somebody who's never had to hide half of what they are."

I did not know, sitting in that firelit room at twelve years old with cold tea going colder, that I would be back in this exact chair three years later, asking her a very different question, with far less time to spare for the asking.

V. Domhnallach

Father told me his own crossing only once, and only because I pushed him to it, the summer I turned fourteen, the two of us mending a fence line on the far edge of our land with the Wolf Wood at our backs and Càrn Buidhe a blue shape on the horizon.

"I was sixteen," he said, not looking up from the wire he was twisting. "Muireall's father took me — my own father was three years gone by then, taken by a fever that had nothing to do with what we are, same as your mother's illness had nothing to do with it. Funny how the ordinary world doesn't excuse you from its ordinary cruelties just because you've got an extraordinary one of your own to manage."

"Were you scared?"

"Sick with it. I'd grown up on the stories same as you're growing up on them now, and I still didn't believe a word of the comforting parts until I was standing in front of the arch myself, under a moon so full and so close I swear I could feel the pull of her in my teeth." He set the pliers down, finally, and looked out towards the hill. "You cross, and for a moment — less than a moment, really, though it doesn't feel that way from the inside — you're entirely both. Not fighting each other, the man and the wolf. Not one wearing the other like a coat. Both, at once, the whole truth of yourself held up where you can finally look straight at it instead of round the edges of it, which is all any of us ever manage the rest of the time."

"And then?"

"And then you're told you've done it right. And then it's over, and you're standing in a moorland clearing in the middle of the night, sixteen years old, weeping like a bairn, and Muireall's father is there to walk you home and never once mentions the crying, because he did the same thing himself forty years before and knows exactly what it's for."

He picked the pliers back up. I watched him work a long moment before I asked the question I'd really come out to the fence line to ask.

"Was Eòghann Domhnallach — the one from 1689 — was he... us? Really us, I mean. Not just a name."

"Aye. Same line, near as anyone's traced it. Same name passed down man to man near enough every generation since, though I couldn't tell you why — whether it's memory or superstition or just a family running short on imagination when it comes to christening its sons." A ghost of a smile. "You'll notice they didn't hand it to you. Your mother wanted a name that was only yours. I think she was right to want that."

"What happened to him? The old Eòghann?"

Father was quiet long enough that I thought he wasn't going to answer at all.

"Nobody knows for certain," he said at last. "The record just — stops. Some in the family have always believed the three of them were put to death, the way the law of the time would have allowed for a charge like that, whatever word they'd have used for it on the paper. Others believe they ran, and made a new life somewhere the kirk session's reach didn't extend to, and simply never wrote home. Muireall believes — and I've never been able to talk her out of it, nor entirely talk myself out of agreeing with her — that they went into the stones themselves, that last night, and never came back out the same door they went in by. She says the third arch, the blank-faced one, doesn't only look forward. She says it can be persuaded, under the right moon, to look back."

He shook his head, as though shaking off something that had settled on his shoulders while he talked.

"I don't know which is true, Cailean. I'm not sure it matters, three hundred years on, except that it should matter to you what it cost, once, simply to be what we are, out loud, where the wrong people could see it. That's the whole of why we keep the quiet we keep. Not shame. Memory."

He straightened up, wire mended, and looked at me with an expression I didn't have a name for yet, though I would come to recognise it, later, as the particular fondness of a man measuring his son against the version of himself he'd been at that same age, and finding the comparison harder to bear than he'd expected.

"You'll cross your own, when it's time," he said. "I'd rather you knew the weight of the name before you carried it than find out after."

I did not understand, that summer afternoon at the fence line, how soon when it's time would arrive, or how little choosing either of us would end up having in the matter.

VI. What the Session Book Does Not Say

Muireall showed me the record itself the following spring — not the original, which sat somewhere in an Edinburgh archive under glass, but a photograph of it she kept folded inside a Bible she never otherwise opened, which struck me even then as its own kind of small joke.

The hand was cramped, brown-inked, the letters leaning hard to the right as though the writer had been in a hurry to be finished with the page. It said that Alasdair Mhic Aoidh, Mairead Nic Iain, and Eòghann Domhnallach had been discovered in states of manifest bestial transformation at the limn, upon the night of the full moon, and that they had been brought before the session to answer for it. It did not say what answer they gave. It did not say what was done with them after. The record simply stopped, mid-page, as though the clerk had set his pen down one evening meaning to finish the entry in the morning and had, for reasons the parchment does not supply, never returned to it.

There was one line more, though, squeezed sideways into the margin in the same cramped hand, at an angle that suggested it had been added later and in a different mood: The beast spoke true in the Irish tongue, though all English came out crooked and no wise legible.

I read that line perhaps twenty times, that afternoon and for years afterwards, and it took me until I was very much older to understand what it was actually recording. The clerk had watched three people stand in front of him with the whole of their language stripped down to the tongue they had learned first, and he had written the beast spoke true, and had not once noticed that he had just testified, in his own hand and against his own case, that the beast was telling the truth.

"I used to think that was the cruelty of it," Muireall said, when I asked her what she made of the silence. "The not-knowing. But I've come round to thinking the not-knowing might be its own small mercy, in a strange way. There's no verdict written down to carry. No sentence to be angry at on their behalf, specifically, the way you can be angry at a number or a date. Just three names and a door that closes without telling you which way it opened."

She had one more thing to show me, that afternoon — a second photograph, of a letter dated two years after the trial, from one minister to another, its entirety no longer than a single breath: the stone stands. Thee ought not to attend it by night. Neither correspondent, Muireall said, appeared again in the parish records that followed.

"What do you think he meant by that?" I asked.

"I think," said Muireall slowly, "that he'd gone to look, against his own advice to somebody else, and seen something a minister of that particular century had no framework at all for holding. Fear does strange things to a man's handwriting. His is very neat, for a letter that short. I've always thought that was the tell."

I have carried that image longer than almost anything else she told me that spring: a minister, alone at his desk, writing eleven careful words to a friend, and then — nothing. Not even his own name appearing again where a name ought to appear. I think of it now as the oldest shape of the exact silence my own family kept around our kitchen table, three centuries later and one register quieter: not a cruelty exactly, and not quite a kindness either. Just the specific carefulness of people who have learned, the hard way, which doors are safer left only half-explained.

from a journal kept much later — on silver

Every old story about our kind gets the metal wrong, in one particular way that used to make me laugh before it started making me think.

Silver is not a weapon in this family. It is a keepsake. My mother's ring was silver. The bracelet Father still wears, plain and unengraved, was his own father's, and his father's before that, back further than anyone's bothered counting — worn not to ward off the wolf but, if you ask Muireall, to mark the wearer as belonging to something that has survived a very long time by being careful rather than by being armed.

I think the silver-bullet version of the story got popular for the same reason the persecution version did: because it is easier, for people standing outside a thing, to imagine it needs killing than to imagine it simply needs to be left alone. A creature that can be shot is a creature the story already knows what to do with. A creature that only needs the room to be both, quietly, on its own schedule, harming no one — that creature doesn't fit the shape of the stories people reach for when they're frightened. So they reach for silver, and knives, and cages, because those at least come with an ending attached, and the true ending — nothing happens, the moon goes down, everyone has breakfast — apparently isn't dramatic enough to survive retelling.

I wear a silver ring now myself, on my left hand, for no reason I could defend to a folklorist. It isn't a ward. It isn't decoration exactly either. It's closer, I think, to the flag a country flies outside its own embassy — not a claim on the ground beneath it, just a quiet, ordinary insistence that whoever lives here has a name, and the name is not the one the frightened stories gave them.

PART THREE: THE TURNING WORSE

VII. The Kin Gather

Before I tell you how the moons began to go wrong, I want to tell you about the good ones first, because it would be a dishonest sort of story if the only nights I gave you were the frightening ones, and because the good nights are, I've come to believe, the actual reason any of what follows was worth surviving.

Four times a year — the solstices and the cross-quarter nights, though nobody in the family ever called them that outright, preferring the older, plainer Gaelic that Muireall taught me a little at a time — the kin gathered at the wolf-stones clearing whether the moon was full or not, simply to be together in the one place none of us had to choose a face.

There were more of us than I'd understood as a small child watching photographs on a hallway wall. The Frasers came down from over the hill, three generations of them, the youngest not yet old enough to have crossed. Old Ealasaid Munro, no relation to my mother despite the shared name, brought a fiddle that had been in her family longer than the cabin had been in ours and played reels that made even the humans among the gathered kin — for there were humans too, spouses and children and cousins who had married in and stayed, the way my own mother once had — get up and dance around the low fire Muireall kept lit at the clearing's edge, well clear of the arch itself.

I loved these nights with an uncomplicated fierceness I didn't fully appreciate until much later, when the complicated nights arrived to show me the difference. There was a particular joy, specific to our kind and to nobody else I've ever met, in being surrounded by people who did not need the story explained to them. Nobody at the fire flinched at a stray claw showing at a fingertip when someone reached too eagerly for the whisky. Nobody counted the days to the next full moon behind their eyes while pretending to make ordinary conversation. For one evening, four times a year, the whole of what we were got to simply exist in the open air, unremarkable, the way a Cameron's Christianity or a Fraser boy's football team was unremarkable to the people who already shared it.

"This is the part the old trial record never had room for," Muireall told me once, watching the dancing from the log she preferred as a seat, a mug of something hot cupped in both hands. "Three names, a charge, a silence. No mention anywhere of a fiddle, or a fire, or bairns falling asleep against their fathers' sides before the last reel's even finished. The kirk session wrote down the one night it happened to be watching. It never once wrote down all the ordinary nights it wasn't."

I think about that a great deal now — how easily a whole history can be reduced to its worst recorded evening, and how much of the actual truth of a people gets lost simply because nobody thought to write down the nights nothing went wrong. I am trying, in this telling, not to make the same mistake twice.

VIII. The Turning Worse

The winter I was fifteen, the moons began to go wrong.

It happened first in small ways — a growl that lingered a beat too long after the change should have finished retreating, a morning where Father's eyes held something amber in them at breakfast that hadn't fully receded with the rest of him. He said nothing about it. I said nothing about it. We had, by then, an entire unspoken language built out of the things neither of us said, and this became simply the newest entry in it.

It could not stay unspoken forever. In February, on a night the moon was not even full — three days shy of it, by my own count on the kitchen calendar — I woke to the sound of the front door standing open and cold air pouring through the hallway, and Father nowhere in the cabin at all.

I found Aunt Muireall's number by the phone before I found my coat. She was at our door within the half hour, and the two of us went out into the Wolf Wood together with a torch and a fear I did not have words for, calling a name into trees that gave nothing back.

We found him at dawn, three miles off, fully human again, sitting with his back against a fallen Scots pine, shivering so hard his teeth clattered, his bare feet bloodied from the frozen ground. He looked up at us with an expression I will carry the rest of my life — not confusion exactly, but a kind of vertigo, a man checking the ground under a step he no longer entirely trusted.

"I don't remember leaving," he said, and his voice cracked exactly the way it had that night in the hallway, four years before. "Cailean. I don't remember any of it."

Aunt Muireall got him home and warm and did not, for once, have a story ready to soften what had happened. It was two days before she would say, quietly, in the kitchen while Father slept, what she believed was happening.

"It's the anchor, lad. It's been slipping since Ealasaid passed, slower than either of us wanted to admit, and eleven years is a long stretch to hold on to a thing by will alone. What happened three nights back — the moon calling him early, off her own schedule, and him going without even the choosing of it — that's not the wolf misbehaving. That's the man losing his grip on when the wolf gets to speak at all."

"What happens if it keeps slipping?"

Muireall did not answer straightaway, and her silence told me more than any answer could have.

"There's an old word for it," she said finally. "Air a ghabhail leis a' ghealaich. Taken by the moon. It doesn't mean he dies, exactly. It means the wolf stops handing the body back. It's rare — rarer than the stories make out, because most of us keep our anchors close and our crossings honest — but it isn't nothing, and I'll not lie to you and tell you it is, not now, not with what I saw in that wood."

"Can it be stopped?"

"An anchor doesn't have to be the one you're born with," she said, very carefully, watching my face while she said it. "It can be chosen. Given, if it's given freely and understood fully, by somebody the wolf already loves past questioning."

I understood, sitting at that kitchen table at fifteen years old, exactly what she was telling me, and exactly what it would ask of me, and I said yes before she had finished explaining the shape of it, because there had never really been a question in me at all — only the plain, immediate certainty that I would rather carry whatever this cost than watch my father's eyes go entirely amber and stay that way.

"You're young for it," Muireall said, not quite a warning.

"You said it yourself. Fourteen, sixteen — there's no fixed age. Only when it's time." I looked at her steady as I could manage. "It's time."

from a journal kept much later — on anchors

People sometimes ask, when I've told them the shape of this without the specifics, whether it frightened me — choosing so young to be the thing holding someone else together. I've turned the question over a long time and I think the honest answer disappoints people slightly, because it isn't dramatic. It didn't feel like choosing at all. It felt like naming something that had already happened.

I had, without noticing the exact evening it began, already been holding on to my father for years — not as an anchor in the family's specific sense, not yet, but in the ordinary sense any child holds on to a parent who is frightened and trying not to show it. Sitting on that hallway floor at eleven. Not asking, at fourteen, the questions that would have made the fence-line conversation harder than it needed to be. Learning, without being taught exactly, which silences to keep and which ones to break. By the time Muireall asked me the real question, in that kitchen, I wasn't deciding to become something new. I was agreeing to let a word be put on something I'd already spent years quietly being.

I think that's true of most of the large choices people make about the people they love. They arrive dressed as a single decisive moment, a kitchen table, a kneeling beneath an arch, but the actual choosing happened gradually, in a hundred small unremarked evenings beforehand, and the dramatic moment is really just the paperwork.

PART FOUR: AN CUSP

IX. The Road to the Wolf-Stones

We went out on the first clear night before the full moon, the three of us — Father, Muireall, and I — walking the old road past Càrn Buidhe that our family had kept beaten flat for longer than the county's own maps had bothered to record it. Father did not want me to come at all, at first; it took Muireall the better part of an argument in the cabin kitchen to bring him round to it, an argument I was made to leave the room for and could still hear every word of through the thin wall.

"He's fifteen, Muireall. Fifteen."

"He's Domhnallach blood and he's chosen, Eòghann, freely, with his eyes open, same as Ealasaid chose you. You'll not get to refuse this one on his behalf any more than her father got to refuse hers."

"It isn't the same thing—"

"It is precisely the same thing, and you know it, and you're arguing with me because you're frightened, not because you're right."

He didn't have an answer for that. I heard the silence stretch a long while before he came and found me in the hallway, crouched against the wall in almost the exact spot I'd sat four years before, watching him hold himself together with his own two hands.

"You don't have to do this," he said.

"I know."

"I mean it, Cailean. There's no shame in—"

"I know, Father." I stood up to meet his eyes properly. "I'm not doing it because I have to. I'm doing it because I want to. There's a difference, and I need you to hear it."

He looked at me a long moment, and something in his face gave way — not defeat, I understood later, but recognition, the particular ache of watching your child become, in real time, someone braver than the fear you'd been trying to protect them with.

The clearing, when we reached it, was smaller than I had built it up to be in my head over three years of stories. Moorland grass worn thin by a footpath older than any of us. The old yew stood dark at its western edge, hollow enough at the base that Muireall said a grown man could once have stood inside it, though none of us tried. The archway itself, three arches of pale granite fused at their crossing points with no mortar and no visible seam, standing perhaps two metres at its highest curve, catching the rising moon along one clean edge so that the whole structure seemed, for a moment, to be lit from somewhere inside the stone rather than by anything so ordinary as the sky.

Up close, I could see the carvings Muireall had described: on the inner face of the first arch, a triskele, three spirals turning clockwise, the stone smoothed deliberately around it by hands three centuries gone or older. On the second, a moon in three phases laid in a single line, waxing, full, waning, the full circle drawn very slightly larger than its neighbours, as though the carver had wanted you to understand, without needing to say it, which phase mattered most. On the third arch — the one facing away from the rising moon, towards the dark bulk of Càrn Buidhe and whatever lay beyond it — no mark at all. Only stone, smoothed as carefully as the other two, holding its blankness the way a held breath holds silence.

"That's the one Muireall thinks looks backward," I said, more to steady my own voice than because anyone had asked.

"Aye," said Father, quietly. "We don't go near that one. Not tonight. Not ever, if I've any say in it."

Muireall was already kneeling at the clearing's edge, laying out what she'd brought — nothing dramatic, no candles or chanted words, just a small fire built low and careful against the cold, and a flask of something that smelled of heather that she pressed into Father's hands rather than mine. "For the waiting," she said. "You'll need it more than he will tonight."

The moon climbed. Nobody spoke much. Somewhere past the second hour of waiting, Muireall began, so quietly I almost missed the start of it, to hum, and then to sing, three lines at a time, the way I'd heard her sing at the solstice gatherings but never quite like this — not celebration, something closer to petition:

She glows still. She holds our hand. She frees us.

We watch here. We walk soft. We bring peace.

It was not a hymn I had a name for, and when I asked her afterwards where it came from she only said that some songs are older than the families who sing them, and that this was one of them, and that she'd learned it from her own mother the same way I was hearing it now, without ceremony, folded into an ordinary cold evening the way all the truest things in our family seemed to arrive.

There was another verse to it. I know because she stopped, that night, at the place where a third line should have gone, and let the silence sit there in the shape of the missing words, and went back to the beginning instead. I had heard the missing line only once before, hummed rather than sung, under her breath one Samhain with her hand flat on the bark of the yew — ash and burn, the yew sc'urn and flow — and when I asked what it meant she said that nobody living knew, that it wasn't Gaelic and never had been, and that it belonged to the tree rather than to us. Then she said, in the flat voice she used for the small number of things she was genuinely unwilling to discuss, that we would not be singing that part tonight, thank you, not with the arch standing right there listening.

I remember, more than anything else about that hour of waiting, how ordinary it felt beneath the strangeness — how the three of us sat at the edge of a three-hundred-year-old mystery the way we might have sat at the edge of any ordinary fire, Father's hand finding my shoulder once, briefly, and staying there.

"Whatever happens in there," he said, low enough it was almost lost under the wind coming off the moor, "you come back to me. That's the only thing I'm asking. Not that it doesn't change you — I know it will, I know it should — only that you come back."

"I will," I said, and meant it with the whole plain certainty of someone who has not yet learned how large a promise that actually is.

X. An Cusp

I crossed the first arch alone, because Muireall said that was the only way it had ever been done, in three hundred years of the family's keeping — that the arch does not answer a shared step, only a single one, made freely.

I want to tell this part honestly, which means admitting that I do not fully have the words for it, and that everyone who has ever tried to describe it before me has run into the same wall, and that I understand now, in a way I couldn't at fourteen listening to Muireall's careful telling, why the wall is there.

It happened at once. Not gradually — one step I was looking at the underside of the arch, the triskele close enough above my head to touch, and the next I was standing in the same clearing, in the same body, and was also, entirely and without any sense of loss, something else. I could hear the wind moving through heather half a mile off. I could smell Father's fear and Muireall's steadiness at the clearing's edge as clearly as I could see them. My hands, when I looked down at them, were mine — fifteen-year-old hands, a healing scrape on one knuckle from mending the same fence line Father and I had worked two summers before — and were also, at the very same moment, not only that. I do not know a better way to say it than the way every account before mine has said it: I was both. Man and wolf, neither one erasing the other, held together instead of fighting for the single body, for exactly as long as it took me to understand, all the way down, that this was true.

It did not hurt. Muireall had told me it wouldn't, and I had not quite believed her, the way you never quite believe the comforting part of a story until you're standing inside it. What I felt instead was something closer to what she'd called relief — the specific, enormous relief of being looked at plainly, all the way through, by something that already knew everything there was to see and had decided, regardless, that the seeing was not a problem to be solved.

I thought of my mother, though I could not have said why, except that Muireall's word for what she'd given Father — anchor — arrived in my chest at that exact moment with its full weight for the first time, and I understood, standing in that clearing both wolf and boy, that I had just become the same thing for him, and that the doing of it did not diminish me in the slightest. It only meant there were now two things holding the rope instead of one, and a rope held by two hands is stronger than a rope held by a hand alone, however willing that hand had been.

And then, right at the very end, before the moment released me back into my ordinary fifteen-year-old self standing in cold moorland grass — I was addressed.

I will not pretend I can tell you who spoke, because I do not know, and every account before mine says the same thing, and I have come to believe that not-knowing is simply part of what the arch is. It was not a voice from any particular direction. It was not, quite, words, though the meaning arrived in me with all the precision of words, the way you can understand a tone from another room before you catch the sentence itself. It was brief. It was warm, in the specific way that warmth means approval rather than mere kindness.

Math a rinn thu.

Well done.

I came back into myself standing exactly where I had been standing, no time at all having passed by the ordinary clock, though something in me insisted it had been much longer. Father was already moving towards me across the clearing before I'd fully found my footing, and I understood, from the look on his face, that whatever had shown on the outside while I stood beneath the arch, it had been enough to frighten him and reassure him in equal measure.

"Cailean." He caught my shoulders in both hands, checking my face the way you check a child's face after a fall, for the moment before the crying starts or doesn't. "Are you — is it—"

"I'm here," I said, and found that my voice was steady, steadier than I expected it to be. "I came back. Like I promised."

He pulled me into him then, hard enough that I felt the tremor running through his whole frame, and I understood, arms around my father in a moorland clearing under a full and patient moon, that I was holding him up as much as he was holding me, and that this was, from now on, simply going to be true, in the particular and permanent way that some truths become true the moment you're finally strong enough to carry them.

XI. The Third Arch

There is one thing I have not yet told, because it belongs to me alone, and because I have never fully decided what it means.

In the space between the address and my father's arms closing round me — a space that could not have lasted longer than a breath, by the ordinary clock, though it did not feel like a breath from the inside — I turned, without meaning to, towards the third arch. The blank one. The one facing Càrn Buidhe and whatever the dark beyond it held.

It was not glowing, the way the first arch had seemed to glow with the moon caught along its edge. It was simply darker than the night around it, a patch of black with a more deliberate shape than shadow usually bothers with, and for one unmeasured instant I understood — not as a fear, not quite as an invitation either, but as a plain fact laid before me the way the first arch had laid its own plain fact — that I could step through it if I chose to, and that something on the other side of it was, in its own patient way, aware that I was standing here considering it.

I did not step through. I want to be entirely honest about why not, because it would be easy, telling this part, to make it sound like courage or wisdom, and I don't think it was quite either. I did not step through because my father was three feet away with his arms already opening, and because Muireall's voice was already calling my name across the clearing, and because the whole of what I had just crossed the first arch to become — an anchor, a second hand on the rope — required, before anything else, that I come back the way I had promised to. Whatever the third arch was offering, it was not offering it to a boy who had somewhere else, more urgently, to be.

I told Muireall about it only once, weeks later, and she went very quiet the way she did whenever the conversation touched a part of the family's history she had turned over many times without reaching the bottom of it.

"Your father's ancestor," she said at last. "The old Eòghann. I've always believed, and I'll go on believing until something plainer comes to correct me, that whatever happened to those three in 1689 happened through that arch and not around it. If you felt it looking back at you, Cailean, I don't think that was nothing. I think it means the door's still open on their side of it, however many years the crossing takes to close."

"Should I go back? Try it properly?"

"No," she said, with more force than she'd used all evening. "Not out of curiosity, and not tonight, and not for a long time yet, if ever. Some questions are worth carrying unanswered longer than they're worth answering carelessly. That one's yours to decide, when you're older, and it will keep. It has kept three hundred years already. It can wait for you to be ready to ask it properly, with your whole self behind the asking, rather than because a door happened to be looking at you on the one night you were already frightened and brave at the same time."

I did not go back for two years. I want that sentence to sit on its own for a moment, because of the shape of it, and because of what a person who has read this far will already have understood about a boy who counts the years he managed rather than saying simply that he did as he was told.

She was right about all of it. Every word she said to me that evening was true, and was kind, and was given to me with a clear head at exactly the right time, and I have never been able to fault a single part of it.

I only wish she had known to say the other thing as well — that a question you have agreed to carry does not sit quietly in the pocket you put it in, and that the danger was never going to arrive dressed as curiosity. It was going to arrive dressed as a reason.

from a journal kept much later — on doors that stay open

I used to think every story needed all its doors closed by the last page, or it hadn't finished doing its job. I don't believe that anymore.

Some questions, I've come to think, are meant to be carried rather than answered — not because the answer would be unbearable, necessarily, but because the carrying is itself doing something, keeping a kind of faith with the people who asked the same question before you and ran out of time to finish asking it. I think of the old Eòghann sometimes, on ordinary evenings that have nothing to do with him — whether the door on his side of that arch is a grave or a kind of survival stretched thin enough across three centuries that the word for it hasn't been invented yet. I don't need the answer today. I'm not sure I need it this year, or this decade. I only need to know the door is there, unclosed, holding the shape of a question my family has been kind enough, and patient enough, to leave for me rather than force shut on my behalf.

There is a particular kind of love, I think, in a family that hands you an open door instead of a locked one, and trusts you to decide for yourself when — or whether — you're ready to walk through it.

PART FIVE: THE ANCHOR HOLDS

XII. The Change Did Not Stop Being Difficult

I want to be honest about that, because the easy version of this story would have the crossing fix everything at a stroke, and that isn't what happened, and I don't think the wolf-stones have ever promised anyone it would.

What changed was smaller than a cure and larger than I had expected, both at once. The next full moon, and every one after it, I sat with him through the whole of the turning — not in the room, he was past needing that, but close enough that the thing Muireall had named could do its work the way an anchor does, which is mostly by being there. Felt rather than seen. Holding the line taut without either of us having to think about the holding.

He came back to himself each dawn a little steadier than the last. The amber that had begun to linger in his eyes at breakfast receded over the following months, back to the ordinary brown I remembered from before that February night in the wood, and stayed there. He did not wander again. He did not wake on frozen ground three miles from his own door with no account of how he had got there. Twice that spring I woke in the small hours with the clear sense of having been leant on in my sleep by something with no hands, and both times I found him in the kitchen in the morning perfectly well and slightly embarrassed, and neither of us ever managed a sentence about it that didn't collapse halfway through into tea-making.

That is the whole of what an anchor turned out to be, in practice. Not a ritual. Not a weight I felt myself carrying about the place. Just the ordinary fact of being reliably where I said I would be, extended into a register I had no other language for.

Muireall told me, the following spring, shelling peas at her kitchen table the way we always seemed to be doing when the important things got said, that this was not unheard of — a shared anchor, blood-given and blood-received, tending to hold firmer than either alone. "Your mother did what she could with what she had, and it was enough for eleven good years, which is no small thing. But you're his, Cailean, in the way only blood can be, and there's a steadiness in that which even a chosen anchor, however loving, can't quite match. I've seen it before, in the old records, though not often. It's a rare kindness when it happens."

XIII. Who Spoke

I asked her, that same afternoon, the question I had been carrying since the clearing.

"Who was it? Who spoke."

She didn't answer straightaway, same as she never quite answered straightaway, and I had learned by then that this particular pause was not evasion but honesty — the shape a person's face takes when they are genuinely turning a question over rather than deciding how much of the truth to release.

"I don't know, lad. Nobody's ever known, in three hundred years of asking, and I've stopped believing that not-knowing is a failure on our part rather than simply the truth of the thing. Some in the family think it's the Cailleach, watching over what's hers, since it's her stone and her season the arch answers to. Some think it's Selene herself. Some — and I incline this way myself, on my better days — think it doesn't matter whose voice it is, only that it has never once, in three centuries, told a single person crossing honestly that they had done wrong. That the stones have had every opportunity, across every generation since 1689 and long before it, to be cruel to the people who come to them, and have simply never once taken it."

"And Eòghann Domhnallach? The old one?"

"I still don't know what became of him," Muireall said. "I don't think I ever will, this side of my own crossing being done for good. But I'll tell you what I've come to believe, for what it's worth from an old woman who's spent sixty years living beside a mystery without managing to solve a scrap of it: I don't think the stones let him go easily, whatever happened that night at the limn. I think, whatever the parish record couldn't bring itself to write down, the truth of him is closer to us than three hundred years usually allows a truth to be. I think that's why the name keeps coming back, generation on generation, Domhnallach to Domhnallach. Not superstition. Not a family short on imagination." Her eyes found mine, steady. "Memory, choosing to keep itself alive."

I have thought since about how carefully she built that answer, and about what she was doing while she built it. She was giving me the mystery in a shape I could carry — furnished, warmed, with the dangerous edges turned to the wall. She was not lying to me. She had simply spent sixty years learning which true things can be said to a boy of fifteen who has just discovered he is strong, and which ones want another few years on them first.

I don't hold it against her. I have come to think it is one of the more difficult forms of love there is, and one of the least thanked.

XIV. Two Good Years

What followed were the best two years of my life, and I did not know it at the time, which I understand is standard.

Father was well. Not cured — there is no cured, the moon does not offer it — but well, in the specific, unremarkable way that a man is well when he sleeps through most nights and eats his breakfast and complains about the price of timber. He took on an apprentice at the yard, a Fraser boy of nineteen who was hopeless with a saw and very good with people, and spent a whole summer grumbling about him in a tone I eventually recognised as fondness wearing a coat.

I turned sixteen and then seventeen. I sat exams. I had a friend called Ross MacBride who knew nothing whatsoever about any of this and remains, to this day, one of the two or three people I have most enjoyed being bored with. I discovered that I could pass an entire month without thinking about the wolf-stones once, which at twelve I would have found unimaginable, and which I now understand is what health looks like from the inside: not the absence of the thing, but the thing declining, for long stretches, to be the most interesting fact about your day.

At the solstice gathering that first winter, Muireall brought me something.

It was a small wooden box, dark with age, the triskele cut into the lid by someone who had plainly been better at woodwork than at spirals. Inside, on a bed of felt gone bald with handling, was a silver ring — plain, unadorned, worn smooth and slightly oval by however many decades of somebody's hand.

"Your mother's," she said. "She left it with me before the last of the hospital, and told me to hold it until you'd want it rather than just take it. She was very clear about the difference. I've been waiting to be sure which one this was."

I put it on. It was a size too large that year and exactly right the next, which is the sort of detail I have learned not to make anything of.

"It isn't a ward," Muireall said, watching me turn it in the firelight. "You'll hear folk tell you different. It isn't protection and it isn't a badge of office and if you lose it in a burn it won't mean anything except that you've lost a ring. It's a keepsake, Cailean. That's all it's ever been. Your family has survived three hundred years by being careful rather than by being armed, and the ring is what we wear instead of the armour we never got to have."

That was also the winter old Ealasaid Munro died, at ninety-one, of a bad hip that finally became a bad chest, and I attended my first wolf-kin funeral. It was held in the shade of the yew at the western edge of the clearing, as every one of ours has been for as long as anyone has kept count. Her body was laid in the hollow of the roots. A triskele was cut fresh into the bark above her. Nobody spoke a word, from first to last — the whole of it conducted in a silence so complete I could hear the granite ticking as it gave up the day's heat — and afterwards her grandson played the fiddle that had been in their family longer than our cabin had been in ours, badly, and weeping, and it was the best playing I have ever heard in my life.

Muireall hummed at the graveside. Not the hymn. The other thing, the one that isn't Gaelic. Ash and burn, the yew sc'urn and flow. I saw two of the Fraser women look up sharply when she started, and look away again, and say nothing.

I asked her about it on the walk back. She said the yew keeps what it is given, and that this is either a comfort or a warning depending entirely on the day you're having, and that she had no intention of deciding which for me. Then she changed the subject to the price of coal with a firmness I had learned not to test.

And through all of it, through the whole of those two good years — the exams and the timber yard and the fiddle under the yew and Ross MacBride's opinions about football — the third arch stood out there in the dark past Càrn Buidhe, blank-faced, patient, entirely unbothered by any of it.

I would like to be able to say I forgot about it. I have written down, honestly, that there were whole months when the stones did not cross my mind, and that is true, and it is also true that the third arch was never once among the things I successfully forgot. It sat at the back of every good day like a coat hung by the door of a room you are enjoying being in. I did not look at it. I always knew exactly where it was.

Muireall had told me it would keep. She was right about that. What neither of us had thought to say aloud was that keeping is not the same as waiting patiently, and that a thing can be perfectly content to keep for three hundred years and still be, in some fashion nobody has a good word for, counting.

XV. The Letter from Glasgow

The thing that sent me back out to the stones was not the stones. I want to put that down plainly at the start, because everything that happened afterwards got explained to me, at length and by professionals, as a young man being drawn towards a fixation, and I have never been able to make that account fit the actual order of events.

What sent me back out to the stones was a letter from the University of Glasgow, offering me a place to read history, starting the following October.

I did not tell anyone for four days. I carried it around in the inside pocket of my coat and took it out in places where nobody could see me taking it out, and read it, and put it back, and each time I did I could feel the shape of the problem getting slightly larger and slightly less solvable.

The problem was not money, and it was not nerve, and it was not — I checked this in myself very carefully, more than once — that I did not want to go. The problem was three miles of Wolf Wood and a hundred and forty-odd miles of A82, and the fact that an anchor is not a thing you can operate from Glasgow.

I did the arithmetic in every direction I could think of. Weekends. Full moons only — twelve nights a year, thirteen in a bad one, a five-hour journey each way and a term's worth of missed Fridays. Deferring a year, then another year. Asking Muireall, who was sixty-eight and had a hip that was starting to make the same noises Ealasaid Munro's had made. Not going.

Every road came out at the same place. Father had held on for eleven years by will alone after my mother died, and it had very nearly taken him, and the reason he was well now — the whole reason, the only reason — was that I was there. He had said, in the kitchen, on the night before my first crossing, arguing with Muireall through a thin wall while I sat in the hallway and listened: he's fifteen, Muireall. Fifteen. He had been frightened of exactly this and had let himself be talked out of the fear, and had been right, and I had been fifteen, and now I was seventeen and holding a letter that I could not answer without answering a much larger question underneath it.

I did not want to ask Father, because I knew precisely what he would say. He would say go. He would say it instantly and mean it entirely and I would have no way on this earth of telling whether it was true.

So I went out to the clearing instead, on an ordinary evening in May, with the moon four days off full and the light going long and gold across the moor, to ask the only other party to the arrangement.

I want to be clear that I did not, that evening, intend to cross anything. I went out there the way you go and stand in a doorway to think — because it was the place where the terms of my life had been set, and it seemed reasonable to go and look at them.

VOLUME TWO: THE THRESHOLD

PART SIX: THE BLANK ARCH

XVI. The Stone Was Warm

The clearing was empty. Father was at the yard. Muireall was at her cottage doing something to a great quantity of nettles.

The first arch stood as it had always stood, familiar now to the point of being unremarkable, the triskele on its inner face catching the last of the sun. The second held its three phases, waxing and full and waning, the full circle drawn very slightly larger than its neighbours. And the third stood where it stands, facing away from all of it, out towards the dark bulk of Càrn Buidhe, blank as a closed mouth.

I sat on the grass for a long time and said, out loud, feeling ridiculous, most of what I have just written down. That I had a letter. That I could not see a way. That I did not know how to ask my father the question without the asking of it being the answer.

Nothing happened, which is what generally happens when you talk to a rock, and I remember being obscurely relieved.

Then I got up to go home, and on the way past I put my hand flat on the third arch. I have been asked about this more times than about any other single thing I have ever done, by people with clipboards and people without them, and the honest answer has never satisfied anyone: I did it the way you touch a gatepost on your way out of a field. There was no decision in it at all.

The stone was warm.

Not sun-warm. It had been in shadow since four o'clock, and the other two arches, when I went back and checked — and I did go back and check, immediately, with the specific frantic thoroughness of somebody assembling an argument against himself — were cold as the evening. The third arch was warm the way a hand is warm. It was warm the way the flank of an animal is warm through its coat, and under my palm, faintly, at a rhythm far too slow to be a pulse and far too regular to be anything else, it moved.

I took my hand away. I looked at my hand. I looked at the arch.

And a thing arrived in me that I have never been able to describe to a doctor's satisfaction, because the vocabulary they had available for it was thought insertion and the vocabulary I had available for it was Muireall's, which is that the stones know their own. It was not a voice. It was not words. It was the flat, unhurried transmission of a fact, in the same register as the first arch's both and the first arch's math a rinn thu — and the fact was this:

The one you are asking about is still here.

I went home. I ate my tea. I asked Father about a delivery that had gone wrong at the yard and listened to the answer and laughed in the right places. I went to bed.

Four nights later, on the full moon, I sat with him through the turning the way I had sat through every turning for two years, and when he was gone into the wood and the cabin was quiet, I put on my coat and my boots and walked out past Càrn Buidhe on my own.

I left no note. I have thought about that more than about almost anything else in this account. It would have cost me forty seconds and it would have changed the whole of what came after, and the reason I did not do it is not mysterious and does not require a diagnosis to explain: I did not leave a note because I knew that if I wrote one down I would see it in my own handwriting and not go.

XVII. The Limn

The clearing under a full moon is not a dark place. The granite takes the light and holds it, and the moorland grass goes the colour of pewter, and you can see well enough to read by if the sky is clear, which it was.

The third arch was not lit. It stood in all that silver like a shape cut out of the night and laid over it — not shadowed, absent, a piece of the world with the world taken out of it.

I stood in front of it for a long time. Long enough that my feet went numb. Long enough to compose and discard four separate sensible plans involving going home and telling Muireall in the morning.

I want to be exact about what I was thinking, because the record matters and because nobody, in the weeks that followed, ever asked me. I was not thinking about Bannockburn or the past or destiny or any of the large words that got put into my mouth afterwards. I was thinking: three hundred years ago a man with my father's name stood in front of a kirk session and could not make himself understood, and nobody has ever found out what happened to him, and my aunt says the not-knowing is a mercy, and my father says it should matter to me what it cost, and I am about to leave for Glasgow or not leave for Glasgow and I do not know how to weigh a life I cannot see the price of.

I stepped through.

The cold came first, and it was not weather. It went past skin and past bone and arrived somewhere behind my sternum, and for a moment — I am fairly sure it was a moment — there was no ground under me and no direction anywhere and no light of any kind, and I was not falling and not floating, only between, which is a word I had been using casually my entire life and had never once meant.

Then there was a smell of wet peat and human waste and iron, and I was standing at the edge of a hole in the ground.

It was perhaps ten feet deep and roughly square and it had been dug, not fallen in — I could see the spade marks in the peat wall by moonlight. Across the top, someone had laid a grid of iron bars, and over the bars a hurdle of woven hazel, and over the hazel a weighting of turfs, so that there was no more than a hand's breadth of open sky at the corner where I was standing. The whole arrangement had been made by people who had thought carefully about it. That is the detail I have never once been able to put down without stopping: somebody sat and planned that. Somebody said, the moon is the trouble, so we will build them a place the moon cannot reach.

The moor around it was empty. There were no torches, no crowd, no minister. Whoever had made it had gone home to their beds, and I have come to understand that this is the true face of the thing, and that every painting of a mob with brands in its hands is a kind of flattery, because a mob at least stays to watch.

There was somebody in the pit.

I got down on my front in the wet and put my face to the gap at the corner and I could see, in the little light that got past, a man sitting with his back to the peat wall and his wrists resting on his knees. There was a chain on him. It was not iron. It had that particular soft grey that silver goes when nobody has cleaned it in a while, and it had been wound about his forearms rather than locked, as though whoever put it there had believed something about silver that was not true, and had been thorough about it anyway.

He was not changed. He was not a wolf and he was not half a wolf. He was a man of about thirty in the ruins of a shirt, and he was thin in a way that told you how long the pit had been there, and when he lifted his head I was looking at my father's face with thirty years and three centuries taken off it.

I said his name.

He looked up at the gap for a long moment without any surprise in him at all, which I did not understand until much later. Then he spoke, and it was Gaelic, and it was fast, and it was not the careful schoolroom Gaelic Muireall had taught me a little at a time across a kitchen table.

I got perhaps one word in four. I have gone over it ten thousand times since and I can give you, with confidence, this much: he asked was I the one at the stones. He said bràthair or bràithrean — brother, or brothers. He said something about Mairead that had the word for cold in it. And then, slowly, when he understood how little I was following — I watched him work it out, I watched him decide to spend some of what he had left on making himself understood by an idiot child at the top of a hole — he said it again in pieces, with pauses, the way you speak to a foreigner.

Am bheil sinn ann fhathast?

Are we still here. Are we still there. The tense is not the same in the two languages and I have never known which one he meant, and I do not think it matters, because they were the same question.

And I found I could not answer him.

Not would not. Could not. My English was there in my head and would not come out of my mouth, and my Gaelic was six words of a child's vocabulary, and the whole of what I had to give this man — that there were Domhnallachs in the world three hundred years after him, that the stones still stood, that a boy with his name in his father's mouth was lying in the wet at the top of his pit — was locked in a language he could not hear and would not have believed.

What I managed, in the end, was this. I got the silver ring off my finger and I put my arm down through the gap as far as my shoulder would let me and I let it drop.

I heard it hit the peat. I heard him move. There was a long silence, and then a sound I have no intention of describing, and then he said something with my mother's ring in his hand that had the word fhathast in it — still, yet, even now — and then he said, quite clearly, in a voice that had gone from a starving man's to something else entirely:

Math a rinn thu.

And then he pushed something up through the gap against my hand, and I closed my fingers on it, and the world went out.

XVIII. What I Brought Back

Muireall found me at seven in the morning, face down in the clearing about four feet from the third arch, soaked through, hypothermic, with a knife in my right hand.

Father found us both twenty minutes later, having come back to an empty cabin at dawn and gone straight out the road past Càrn Buidhe without stopping to put shoes on, which is a detail I did not learn for over a year and which I still cannot think about with any composure.

The knife is nine inches overall. The blade is old and has been sharpened so many times that it has gone concave along one edge. The hilt is bone, or antler, worn smooth, and there is a triskele cut into the pommel-cap by a hand that was not much better at spirals than whoever did my mother's box.

Muireall had never seen it before. She said so at once, in the clearing, on her knees in the wet grass with her coat already round me — she took it out of my hand, and turned it over twice, and said, I don't know this. This has never been in our family. She has never once, in all the years since, altered that statement in any particular, and she is not a woman who has ever needed to be consistent about anything in order to be believed.

The ring was not on my finger. It has never been found.

That is the whole of the evidence. I have laid it out as flatly as I can manage, in the order it exists, without any of the connective tissue I spent the following winter trying to force into the gaps.

Here is what I know: an old knife nobody can account for, and a lost ring, and a boy of seventeen with sixty-two words of Gaelic who spent nine hours in a moorland clearing in May and came out of it able to say things he could not say going in.

Here is what I do not know, and have made my peace with not knowing, and would ask you not to settle on my behalf: everything else.

from a journal kept much later — on going alone

The thing I did wrong was not the crossing. I have been extremely clear with myself about this over a long period, and I have had a good deal of professional assistance in being unclear about it, and I have come out the far side still holding the same view.

The thing I did wrong was going alone, at night, without telling a soul, four days after receiving a letter I had not shown to anybody. Whatever is or is not true about the arch, that is a description of a person in trouble, and it would have been a description of a person in trouble if the errand had been an entirely ordinary one.

I have noticed that people want very badly for these two questions to be the same question. Either the arch is real, in which case I was fine and everyone else was wrong; or the arch is not real, in which case I was ill and the whole of it can be filed. Nobody at all wanted the third possibility, which is the one I have lived in since I was seventeen: that a true thing can happen to somebody who is also, at that moment, coming apart, and that the coming apart does not retrospectively unmake the true thing, and the true thing does not excuse anyone from noticing the coming apart.

I did not leave a note. That is not evidence about the stones. It is evidence about me.

PART SEVEN: THE WHITE ROOM

XIX. Nineteen Days

I was ill for nineteen days before anybody used a word for it, and I have kept the count because the count is the only part of that period I am entirely sure of.

It began with the language.

The morning after the clearing I woke in my own bed with a hot water bottle at my feet and Muireall in the chair by the window, and I said good morning to her in Gaelic. I did not decide to. I heard it come out of me and understood, in the same instant, that the English had not been available — that I had reached for it in the ordinary way you reach for a light switch in your own house, and found the wall.

It came back within the hour. Muireall made no fuss about it whatsoever, which I have since decided was the single most useful thing anybody did for me that entire month. She said her own mother had gone Gaelic for two days after a bad fall on the ice in 1951, that the first tongue is the one nailed down hardest, and did I want an egg.

But it kept happening. Not constantly — in patches, mostly when I was tired or frightened or being asked a direct question, which is a fair description of most of the following three weeks. Sometimes it was total and I could produce nothing at all, and would stand in the kitchen with my mouth open like a man looking for a word in a foreign country, except that the country was my own head. Sometimes it was worse than total: I would speak perfectly fluent English in which the words were the wrong words, and be able to hear that they were the wrong words, and be entirely unable to get at the right ones.

The beast spoke true in the Irish tongue, though all English came out crooked and no wise legible.

I found that line in my head somewhere around day four and could not get it out again. I still cannot decide — this is a genuine open question in my life, not a rhetorical flourish — whether recognising myself in a marginal note written by a frightened clerk in 1689 was an insight or a symptom. The obvious objection is that I had read the line at fifteen and it was simply available to me. The obvious answer to the objection is that it was available to me because it was accurate. I have never found a way to get past that loop, and I have stopped trying to.

Then the sleep went. Then the dreams, which were not about the wolf at all. They were about the hurdle of hazel and the weight of turfs, and about lying on my front in wet peat with my arm down a hole, and in the dreams I could always speak — beautifully, fluently, at length — and it never once made any difference to anything.

By the second week I had stopped going into Kirkendrie. This is the part of the account that has always been hardest to write down honestly, because it is the part where I can most clearly see the shape of something that was not true. I became certain that people knew. Not suspected — knew, specifically and in detail, the whole of it, going back three centuries. The woman in the shop knew. Ross MacBride's mother knew and had known for years and had been kind to me out of pity. There was a particular afternoon when I stood at the end of our road for the better part of an hour, unable to walk into the village, because I had worked out that if they all knew then the only reason nothing had happened to us yet was that they were waiting for something, and I could not for the life of me determine what.

I told nobody any of this. I was seventeen, I had just been offered a place at university, my father had been well for two years because of me, and I had concluded — on evidence I found overwhelming at the time and which now reads to me as a fairly ordinary piece of adolescent grandiosity dressed in three hundred years of family costume — that the correct response was to manage it myself.

The break, when it came, was not dramatic and did not involve the wolf.

It was a Tuesday. Father was in the next room with the radio on. I was sitting at the kitchen table looking at the wall, and I had been looking at the wall for a considerable time, and I had begun to be able to see the third arch in it — not as a picture and not as a shape in the plaster, but in the flat, unhurried way the arch had told me the one you are asking about is still here, except that now it was in the house and had been in the house for some days and I was the only one who had noticed.

I got up. The chair went over. And I went at the wall with my hands — not at my father, not at anything living, at the wall — and by the time he got to me I had my nails in the plaster to the quick and I was making a sound that I have been told about by three separate people and have no memory of producing at all.

He got his arms round me from behind and put his mouth by my ear and said my name, over and over, in the tone he used at the fence line, in the tone he used in a moorland clearing when I was fifteen: Cailean. Cailean. I've got you. I've got you, son.

And I came back into the room. And I saw the state of the wall, and the state of my hands, and the state of my father's face.

And I understood — this is the exact moment, I can put my finger on it — that I could no longer tell the difference between the things that had happened to me and the things that had not.

XX. What They Were Both Afraid Of

Muireall arrived within the hour. Father had phoned her before he phoned anyone else, and what he said to her, in a voice she described to me years later as the worst thing she has ever heard down a telephone, was: it's happening to him.

I want to be careful and fair here, because for a long time I was neither.

Understand what my father believed. He believed, on the family's own account, that there is a condition called air a ghabhail leis a' ghealaich — taken by the moon — in which the wolf stops handing the body back. He had watched it start in himself. He knew the early signs from the inside: the moon calling out of turn, the going without the choosing of it, the hours you cannot account for. And here was his son, four days after a full moon, found at dawn in the clearing with no memory of the night, losing his language, not sleeping, seeing things in the walls.

Now understand what a doctor would believe, presented with the identical facts.

That is the thing nobody ever says about that fortnight, and it is the only part of it I now find genuinely frightening. Both explanations available to my family fitted every single observation. They predicted the same course, they described the same boy, and they agreed about what would happen if nothing was done. They differed only in what they said the trouble was.

And of the two, exactly one came with anything you could actually do on a Tuesday.

Muireall was against it. She said, in our kitchen, with me in the next room and the door not properly shut — I have inherited my whole family's habit of overhearing the important conversations through inadequate walls — that they would take one look at a boy talking about stone archways and write down the word they had ready, and that once it was written down it would be very difficult to get unwritten.

Father said: "And if we do nothing, and I'm right about what it is, what do we do then? Sit with him? Sing to him?" And then, after a long silence: "I can't lose him as well. Muireall, I can't. I'd rather he hated me."

He was not choosing the doctors over the stones. He has never in his life believed the stones were not real. He was choosing the only door in the room that had a handle on it, and he was doing it in full knowledge of what it would cost him with me, and he was right to, and I did not manage to tell him so for a very long time.

from the records of the Highland Health Board — initial assessment, redacted

Seventeen-year-old male, no previous psychiatric contact, brought by father and great-aunt. Presenting complaints: disturbed sleep (patient estimates 3–4 hours nightly over ~2 weeks), episodic expressive dysphasia with reversion to Gaelic, persecutory ideation regarding the local community, and an episode of self-injurious agitation on the day of admission (superficial trauma to both hands, no suicidal intent elicited).

Patient gives a detailed and internally consistent account of having passed through a stone archway on family land and having witnessed an ancestor imprisoned in a pit in the late seventeenth century. He produces a small antique knife which he states was given to him during this episode. He is not persuadable on this point but is not distressed by challenge; when the account is questioned he becomes weary rather than agitated. Notable: patient volunteers, unprompted, that he is aware the account "cannot be assessed by you or by me", and asks whether he can be treated without either of us having to settle it. This degree of preserved insight is atypical.

Family history: father describes a longstanding hereditary condition affecting male relatives, characterised by monthly episodes and prior "loss of hold" following bereavement. Great-aunt declines to expand. Both are consistent in their account and neither presents as unwell. Corroborated: patient was found outdoors at dawn following an unaccounted-for night, hypothermic.

Impression: first-episode psychosis, probable, with prominent stress precipitants (recent university offer; long-standing caregiving role in respect of father). Differential includes dissociative presentation. Organic causes to be excluded.

Plan: informal admission with consent, olanzapine, bloods and EEG, review in 72 hours.

I have put that document in this account beside the other one, and I would ask you to look at the two of them together, because I did not notice what they had in common until I was about twenty-four and it stopped me in the street.

Two records. Two institutions, three centuries apart, both of them careful, both of them staffed by people who were not cruel and were doing their honest best with the vocabulary available. Both describing a Domhnallach who could not make himself understood in English. Both of them accurate, in the narrow sense, about everything they chose to write down.

And both of them stopping — the clerk mid-page, the assessment at review in 72 hours — exactly where the thing that actually mattered began.

I am not angry at either of them. That is what I want on the page. The kirk session had no word for what stood in front of it and reached for the nearest one, and so did the Highland Health Board, and the difference between them is roughly three hundred years and a very great deal of kindness, and I would choose the second one every time. It is only that I have read both records now, and I know what is in the gap in each of them, and it is the same thing in both.

XXI. The Ward

Nineteen days at home. Twenty-one days in the hospital in Inverness. I have never gone back to look at the building.

It was not a bad place. I need to say that clearly, because the version of this story I told for the first few years afterwards was not fair and made better anecdotes. The staff were tired and decent. The food was poor in an ordinary institutional way. There was a day room with a television nobody watched, and a courtyard with four benches, and a man of about sixty called Douglas who taught me a card game whose rules I am now certain he was inventing as we went.

The medication worked, in the sense that it did what it was for. The sleep came back first, in enormous unrefreshing slabs. The certainty that Kirkendrie knew about me thinned out over about ten days into something I could look at from the outside and recognise as absurd, which was a relief so profound I cried in the courtyard about it. The dysphasia stopped. It has never once come back.

What it did not touch — and I reported this honestly every time I was asked, because I had made a decision early on that I would not lie to them, on the grounds that I would then have no way of checking anything — was the clearing. The pit. The gap at the corner under the turfs. The sound of a ring hitting peat.

Those did not fade, or soften, or acquire the slightly embarrassing quality that the Kirkendrie business acquired. They sat exactly where they had been sitting, in the part of the mind where you keep the things that happened, indistinguishable in texture from my mother's voice or the smell of the timber yard.

I do not offer that as an argument. I have had it explained to me, more than once and perfectly reasonably, that a fixed delusion is precisely a belief that does not respond in the way the others do, and that the stability I was describing was the diagnostic criterion rather than a rebuttal of it. I understood the explanation. I still understand it. It remains the only complete account of the facts that I have ever been offered, and I have never been able to believe it, and I have long since stopped pretending that my inability is evidence of anything except my own position inside the problem.

XXII. Dr MacLeod

Dr MacLeod was about fifty, with reading glasses on a cord and the flattest Inverness accent I have ever heard, and she was the first person in my life to ask me a question about the stones without already knowing the answer she wanted.

We did badly for the first week. I gave her the whole account and watched her write, and I could see the sentence assembling itself on her pad while I was still talking, and eventually I stopped bothering to talk. She, in turn, said the thing they are trained to say — that must have been very frightening for you — and I said, more sharply than I have ever spoken to a stranger before or since, that it had not been frightening, that it had been cold, and that if she was going to reflect my feelings back at me she might at least get them the right way round.

She took her glasses off. She put the pad face down on her knee.

And she said: "All right. What would you like me to do instead?"

That was the turn. I have thought about it for years. She did not concede a single inch — she never once told me the arch was real, and I would have stopped trusting her on the spot if she had — but she put the pad down, and she asked, and she meant it.

What I said, once I had got hold of myself, was that I wanted her to treat the fortnight without settling the night.

And after a long pause, she said that she thought she could probably do that, and that it was not what she had been taught, and that she would like to be honest with me that she believed the night and the fortnight were the same event. But she said that she could not prove it, and that she had noticed I was not asking her to believe me, which was unusual, and which made her more inclined to work with me rather than less.

We got on well after that. She is the reason I finished my exams. She is the reason I went to Glasgow, in the end, a year late — she was the one who said, in the flat Inverness voice, that a seventeen-year-old carrying a father was a load-bearing wall and that load-bearing walls do not get to have opinions about the weather, and that whatever else was or was not true, that had been going to bring the house down on its own schedule with or without any archways.

Near the end, she asked me what I thought had happened. Not what I believed — what I thought, which is a different question and she knew it was.

I said I thought a boy had gone out on a moor at night because he could not see a way to have his own life without costing his father his, and that something had met him out there, and that I had been trying ever since to work out how much of it had come from outside.

She said that was the most useful sentence I had produced in three weeks. Then she said that in her clinical opinion I was going to be fine, and that in her personal opinion, which I was to disregard entirely, she had grown up in Strathpeffer and her grandmother had had rules about which stones you walked past on the way home from the dance, and that she had never in her life managed to get all the way clear of them either.

XXIII. The Moon I Missed

There was a full moon on my eleventh day in the hospital.

I had known it was coming since before I was admitted. I had done what I could — I asked, on the ward round, four days beforehand, whether I might have a night's leave to go home. I did not explain why, because there was no version of the explanation that would not have added a fortnight to my stay. I said I wanted to see my father. That was true.

They said no, kindly, and offered me an extra visit instead, and wrote something down.

I sat up the whole of that night in a room with a window that opened four inches, watching a moon I could see about a third of, on a ward where the lights never go entirely out, one hundred and forty miles from a man whose grip on his own body had depended, for two years, on the fact that I was reliably where I said I would be.

That was the worst night of my life. Not the pit. Not the wall. That one.

Father came the following afternoon, and he was fine. He was tired and had a healing gash across the back of one hand from a fall, and he was fine, and he sat on the end of my bed and told me the yard had lost the MacFarlane contract and that Muireall had taken a strip off him about his cholesterol.

I asked him. Of course I asked him.

He said: "It was a hard one. It's a hard one whether you're here or not, some months." And then, when I did not let it go: "Cailean. I got through it because I knew I had to be in a car at ten o'clock the next morning to come and see you. That's all it was. That's the whole of the trick."

Muireall told me the rest about a year later, at her kitchen table, with peas, because in my family the important things arrive with a colander. He had not been fine. He had gone into the wood at dusk with her walking behind him at a distance he had asked her to keep, and had come out of it at four in the morning ninety minutes' walk from where he went in, on his knees, entirely himself, having got there without any account of how. She had walked him home. He had showered and shaved and changed the dressing on his hand and driven to Inverness.

I have made my peace with most of that fortnight. I have not entirely made my peace with the fact that on the worst night of my father's adult life, his anchor was sitting on a ward a hundred and forty miles away, doing the only thing that had ever been asked of it — being reliably where he could find it in the morning — and that this apparently, against everything the family had ever taught me, turned out to be enough.

Muireall's view, delivered with the colander, was that I had spent two years thinking an anchor was a thing you did, when it is in fact a thing you are, and that the distinction had cost me a stone in weight and my father a night in the wood, and would I like to hear about her hip.

PART EIGHT: MATH A RINN THU

XXIV. The Human Shape

They let me home on the twenty-first day. Father drove. Neither of us managed much on the road, and what there was of it was about the car.

Three nights later I said the worst thing I have ever said to him.

The fire had burned low and we were the only two awake in the house. He was in the chair with a mug of tea gone cold in both hands, and the last of the embers had got into his beard and turned the ginger to copper the way the firelight always did, the way it had when I was nine years old and asking him whether it hurt.

The humans are broken. I don't get to be like you. I don't want to be like you. I want hair like yours; fingers like yours, lungs that ache.

It came out of me in that order and made about that much sense, and I heard it land, and I did not take it back.

He did not answer straightaway. He put the mug down. He has a way of listening that I have never seen in another person and have never managed to learn: he takes what you have said and holds it, visibly, for as long as it needs, as though you had put a stone into his hands and he was not going to set it down until he was sure of the weight of it.

"You want to be ordinary," he said eventually.

"I want to be boring." My voice went on me halfway through. "I want to be tired because I've been working. I want to cough and have it be a cough. I want to wake up in the morning and not have to check."

"Check what?"

"Which parts of yesterday happened."

He was quiet a while longer. Then he said, "You think I don't touch my own face some mornings? Just to be sure it's still mine?"

I looked at him properly for the first time in about a month. The grey coming through at his temple. The hands round the mug, steady, and the small tremor in them that only showed when he reached for something. Fifty-one years old, an inch shorter than he had been when I was small, a man who got up every day and did the next necessary thing.

"Your mother didn't stay for the wolf," he said. "I want you to hear that properly, because I think you've got it the wrong way round in your head and I think you've had it that way round for a while. She stayed for the man who could sit by a fire and tell her a stupid joke. Who could hold her hand in the hospital. Who could cry with her when the bad days came. The wolf was the price of it. It was never the point of it."

"I don't know how to be just a man," I said. "Not after all of it."

"Nobody does." He shrugged, and it was not a dismissal. "We just get better at pretending we've worked it out. Your mother never worked it out either. She was the bravest person I have ever known and she was making it up as she went along, every single day, and she'd have told you so herself."

The wind got up outside and rattled the window in its frame. Somewhere off in the Wolf Wood a real wolf called — not one of ours, just a wild thing, saying whatever it is they say — and I felt the old prickle go up my arms, and did not flinch.

Muireall came in then, boots wet, hair curling at the edges from the mist, having let herself in as she has let herself in for the whole of my life. She took one look at the two of us and did not say a word about any of it. She put the kettle on. She handed me a cup so hot it hurt to hold.

"Drink that," she said, "before you drown in your own head."

It was bitter and earthy and it was one of hers from the garden, and it did the thing her tea always does, which is to put you back in the room.

"The humans are broken," she said, sitting down between us with a grunt for her hip. "So are we. Different breaks, that's all. You'll not find a family in this glen that isn't carrying something, and most of them haven't the excuse of a moon." She nudged my shoulder, hard enough to shift me. "You want his hands? You've got his stubbornness. You've got his face when he's thinking too hard, God help you, and you've got his mother's habit of going quiet for three days when you're upset instead of just saying so, and if you want a list of the rest of it I can go on until Tuesday."

Father made a sound into his tea that was nearly a laugh, and his eyes were wet.

"Aye," he said. "And the temper."

Something in my chest gave, about a quarter of an inch. Not enough to fix anything. Enough to breathe.

I looked at my hands. They were steady and human and mine, and I had bitten the nails down past where I usually bite them, and there was a scab across two knuckles from the wall.

"I don't want to be frightened of myself," I said.

"No," said Muireall. "That'd be a poor way to spend a life." She drank her tea. "So don't. But don't you dare stop being yourself in order to manage it. I've watched people do that. It works, and it costs more than the fear did."

XXV. The First Moon After

It came nine days later.

They were both with me in the clearing — not the arch clearing, our own, the one in the photographs on the hallway wall, with the snow in his fur and the baby chewing his ear. Muireall had a fire going at the edge out of pure habit. Nobody said anything about why we had all come out together, because there was nothing to say that was not obvious.

I had been on the medication for five weeks by then, and nobody in the family, including me, had the first idea what it was going to do. There is no chapter of the old lore about that. Muireall had gone through every account she had, some of them going back two hundred years, and had found nothing at all, and had said so, which I appreciated more than I could tell her.

What happened was this: I changed, and it was the same as it had always been.

Not easier. Not harder. Not blunted, not delayed, not chemically improved in any particular. It hurt the way it had always hurt, in the shoulders and the long bones, and it took about the same time it usually took, and at the far end of it I was a wolf standing in wet grass in the middle of my own life with my father beside me.

I have thought since that this ought to have settled something. Two irreconcilable accounts of my own head, and here was an experiment: if the pills touched it, one story won, and if they did not, the other did. It did not settle anything, of course. Dr MacLeod, when I told her, said mildly that antipsychotics do not do much for the weather either, and left it there, and I have always liked her for leaving it there.

We ran. That is not an interesting sentence and I do not have a better one. We ran the boundary of our own land in the ordinary way, and came back at about three, and lay down by the fire Muireall had kept in, and in the morning I woke up in the grass under a coat with all my language present and correct and my father snoring about four feet away with his beard full of bracken.

He looked, that morning, more like himself than he had looked in six weeks.

I understood then — actually understood, in the body rather than as a proposition — the thing Muireall had been trying to get into my head with the colander. Being an anchor had never been a service I performed on his behalf on the nights it was needed. It was not a duty and it did not require me to be within three miles or three hundred. It was simply the fact of my existing, and being his, and being reachable in the morning.

Which meant that Glasgow was not, and had never been, the question I had gone out to the stones to ask.

XXVI. Moonlight, Again

I am writing this at the desk in my old room in the cabin, which used to hold a pile of books leaning dangerously towards the edge, and which now mostly holds the pile of books' descendants.

I am twenty-five. I went to Glasgow a year late in the end, read history for four years, and now do a job I could describe to you in one sentence that would make you stop asking questions about it. I come home most months. I am home now, for the week, because it is August and because Muireall — who is seventy-six and has had the hip done and is insufferable about how well it went — has decided that this year's Lughnasadh gathering will have a proper fire and not, as she put it, that shite the Frasers built last year.

The dragons on the walls were painted over when I was thirteen and decided I was too old for them. Three years after that they came back. I did not find out for months, and only then by accident, and when I asked him about it he went the particular colour he goes and said the room had felt too empty and he hadn't been able to say why until he'd already got the brush out.

They are still there. They are terrible. He is a better joiner than he is a draughtsman and it shows.

He is well. I want to put that down plainly at the end, because a great deal of this account has been about the fear underneath the ordinary — the click of claws that might, one night, not resolve back into a father at breakfast — and I think the fear has earned the right to sit next to the fact that it did not, in the end, win. He is fifty-nine. He has a bad knee and a Fraser boy running most of the yard for him now and a standing Thursday arrangement with two other men his age that he refuses to describe as a friendship. Some moons are hard. Some are easy. That is all it has ever been.

The knife is in the drawer of this desk. It has been there for eight years. I have never had it looked at by anybody who would know, and I am not going to, and if you have got this far you will already understand why: because the two possible answers are a nineteenth-century farm knife of no interest whatsoever and a knife of no determinable date, and neither of those would tell me anything I do not already know, and both of them would take the question away from me.

The ring has never turned up. Muireall gave me another the winter I came out of the hospital — plain, unengraved, not my mother's and never presented as my mother's. "It isn't a replacement," she said. "It's just what we wear." I have it on my left hand as I write.

I have not gone back through the third arch.

I go out there, though. Two or three times a year, on the quiet nights between moons, I walk the old road past Càrn Buidhe and sit at the clearing's edge under the yew and look at the three of them standing patient in the dark — the triskele, the three moons, and the blank one that faces away from all of it towards the hill. I have put my hand on the third arch exactly once since I was seventeen, on my twenty-first birthday, in daylight, with Muireall standing about ten feet behind me making no comment whatsoever.

It was cold. It was just cold. Granite in April, in the shade, at nine o'clock in the morning.

I sat down in the grass afterwards and found that I was neither relieved nor disappointed, which surprised me, and that I had known before I touched it what it would be, and that this had not stopped me needing to check.

There is a man named Eòghann Domhnallach who was alive three hundred years ago and whose record stops mid-page, and I do not know what became of him. I have a knife I cannot account for and a memory I cannot verify and a diagnosis I have never been able to disprove or entirely accept, and I have arranged my life on the understanding that I am going to die without settling any of it.

'S e fìrinn liminalachd. The truth is liminality. Not the wolf instead of the man, and not the man in spite of the wolf, and — I have had to add this part myself, it is not in the old saying, and I think it may be the only thing I have to contribute to three hundred years of family lore — not the true story instead of the illness either, nor the illness instead of the true story. Both, held together, exactly as long as it takes to understand that both was always the shape of the thing.

I closed my eyes that first night, nine years old, wrapped in quilt and moonlight, knowing he would still be there. Not the same as before, not exactly, but still him. Always him.

I know now that the same was true of me, long before I ever stood beneath the arch to be told so, and long after the arch and everything that came of it. It was simply waiting for a moon patient enough, and a boy stubborn enough, to go and be shown.

from a journal kept much later — what the threshold told me

Written by moonlight, for anyone who finds it useful.

I don't know how to end this without sounding as though I have resolved something that isn't, strictly, resolvable. The third arch still stands, unexplained. The name in the session book still stops mid-page. The assessment still stops at review in 72 hours. My father is well tonight, and I have no way of promising he will still be well a year from now, because that isn't the kind of promise the moon has ever made to anyone in this family, however faithfully we have kept her calendar.

What I can say, with a certainty I could not have managed at nine, or at fifteen standing frightened in front of a stone archway, or at seventeen in a hospital room with a window that opened four inches, is this: the parts of us that get called monstrous by people who have never had to live inside the experience of being two things at once are, far more often than the frightened stories allow, simply the parts that were never given a room with the door shut. Given that room — a cabin, a fire, a family willing to sit through the difficult nights without flinching, a woman with a colander who will tell you the truth about yourself and then ask about her hip — the monstrous thing turns out, again and again, to have been asking for nothing stranger than to be seen whole.

I don't think that is only true of wolves. I don't think it is only true of the ones with a diagnosis, either. I think it is true of nearly everyone I have ever loved, in one register or another, and I think it is the actual reason I have written all this down rather than leaving it, like the clerk did, to stop mid-page.

There was a man in a pit under a hurdle of hazel and a weight of turfs, and whatever else is or is not true about that night, this much I am prepared to stand over: somebody built him that pit on purpose, having thought about it carefully, because they could not bear for him to be two things at once. Everything I have written here is an argument with those people. I have not met them. Their descendants sold me a paper in Kirkendrie last Tuesday and were perfectly pleasant about it.

She glows still. She holds our hand. She frees us.

Ash and burn, the yew sc'urn and flow — and I still do not know what that means, and Muireall still will not say it above a hum, and I have decided that I am content to hand it on exactly as unexplained as it was handed to me. That is the whole inheritance, in the end. Not answers. An open door, a bad drawing of a dragon, and somebody's word that you did it right.

Math a rinn thu.

I intend to be one more voice the song outlives.