I look down just as I realise I’m doing it, the pendant smooth and cold against the pad of my thumb.

‘You found it here, you know,’ Charlie says.

‘Here?’

He nods. ‘On this beach. You ran off, and your mum just about lost her mind. And then we found you down by the east bluffs, holding that piece of quartz like it was a nugget of gold.’

I think of a pink box and white bow. A chain so long, its silver links caught the light as I pulled and pulled it out. It feels as alarming as it does comforting – to realise that I’ve always had a part of this place with me. Careful, that coward in my heart and head says.

‘Guess we all need talismans,’ Charlie says after a moment, and his voice has lost its steadiness.

And maybe his pause, that unsteadiness, is why I find myself asking the question to which I’m no longer sure I want to know the answer. ‘Did Mum … did she ever tell you that she knew Robert? Or about what happened to him?’

Charlie gives me a sharp look that I can’t read. ‘No. What makes you ask that?’

‘I don’t know. I guess I’m still trying to make some sense of it all.’ I look down at the dead crows. And then I catch my breath when I realise what he just said. ‘You didn’t even know what they were until what, Charlie?’

This time, he’s quiet for maybe half a minute. Then he takes in a long hard breath and straightens his spine. ‘I only ever knew one person who made vándr-varði. Who even knew what they were.’ When he finally looks at me, I can’t read what’s in his eyes. ‘And that was Robert Reid.’

CHAPTER 19

Robert

As a boy, I ran away when the first storm came – the first after that last. I ran inland, away from the waves at the headland’s edge, their screaming thunder and fast shadows. I ran across the peat moor, my feet sinking and sticking, my breath cold and sharp inside my throat. The storm swiftly overtook me: clouds racing black over the way ahead, sheets of rain hiding the road to Uig and Ìslibhig. And I felt fishermen in the wet roaring wake behind me, breathing salty breath against my skin.

And then there was Loch-na-each, its surface wide and choppy; an inlet – an ingress – for the angry sea, blocking my escape. Its grassy banks so soft and sodden that I couldn’t stop sliding down and down. I screamed when dark water closed over my feet and calves, and grabbed for the grass, coming away with handfuls of only mud. The fishermen laughed inside low rolls of thunder and the rattle of rain against the sea loch. They swam up from its tidal depths, cold fingers pinching at my ankles, trying to pull me out into the deeper water, trying to pull me down. Because they were gods now. Rán, the sea goddess of death, had collected them in her net, and now they lived under the sea like the Sjóvættir. Their names were etched into stone and memory, more vital dead than alive, and righteous with vengeance. And I was the boy who’d traced their shapes against glass and marched towards the light on Àird Èinis with rage in my heart and rocks in my pockets.