The Woman from the Waves
THE WOMAN FROM THE WAVES
ROSLYN SINCLAIR
Copyright
Copyright © 2025 by Roslyn Sinclair
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
All names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this story are the author’s invention. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental. When the names of real locations or events are used, they are used fictitiously.
Cover illustration by Syd Mills
Cover design by Fay Lane
Edited by Carrie Byrd and Kelly Cozy
CONTENTS
Pronunciation Guide
Glossary
Prologue
I. The Surface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
II. The Shore
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
III. The Storm
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Also by Roslyn Sinclair
About the Author
Dedication
To Carrie: the light of my life, the love of my days, and the most human angel I know.
PRONUNCIATION GUIDE
Hæra: HIGH-rah
Each-uisge: ech-OOSH-gah
Beathag: BAY-ahk
Ætlaquoy: EYE-tla-kwhy
GLOSSARY
Ætlaquoy
Ætla is Old Norse for “fated,” and “quoy” is Old Norse for a farm livestock enclosure. Due to Orkney’s location and history, its place names are more likely to have Old Norse linguistic roots than Scottish Gaelic ones.
Each-uisge
Many cultures have legends about dangerous water spirits that take on different forms. Most famous from Scottish lore are kelpies, water spirits that can take either horse or human form and live in freshwater rivers or lochs.
In contrast, the lesser-known Each-uisge are ocean dwellers and known to be more vicious. In legend, they usually take on the form of a handsome man or beautiful woman to lure humans to their deaths. Often they appear as ordinary horses, enticing a human to ride them—which never ends well for their prey.
I have taken considerable liberties with the legends of the Each-uisge, developing culture, history, and even biology for them well beyond their traditional folklore. It was my hope to preserve their aura of mystery and danger, as well as the predatory ruthlessness that drives them.
Jorsay
From Old Norse, loosely “Horse Island.” The Isle of Jorsay is my own invention and not a real Orcadian island.
Trow
A mischievous creature from Orkney and Shetland lore, dwelling underground in ancient mounds. They have a human-like appearance but are far smaller, and they usually appear old and wizened, with gray skin. If trows’ mounds are disturbed by humans, they are known to take revenge. They are also known for entering unlocked houses at night and even stealing the occasional baby from its cradle. Keep your bolts fastened!
Witches
In the late eighteenth century, Orkney was home to some of the most infamous witch trials in European history. Before that, for centuries, magic was considered a reasonable explanation for many phenomena of daily life. Some folktales maintain that a witch’s curse is responsible for the Swilkie, a dangerous whirlpool in the Pentland Firth. In fact, another name for the Swilkie is the Sea Witch’s Wheel…
PROLOGUE
THE SEA
This would be a hungry storm. It would eat up the coasts, swallow the sand, and probably chew up a boat or two.
So Hæra had heard from some of her fellow Each-uisge, ones who’d actually ventured beyond the surface of the ocean to places she was forbidden to go. Here, down in the depths, she could only watch the storms begin. Still, the sight never failed to thrill her.
As Hæra observed from a distance, the herd’s Sire led his eleven Stormhorses toward the North Sea’s surface. Calder’s front legs were muscular, his hooves lined with shell edges. At his back half beat his mighty marine tail, which would change to a horse’s hindquarters when he ascended from the water. His fearsome horse’s head pointed skyward. Between his shoulders, ocean currents began to swirl, resolving into a shape.
The shape of wings.
Before Hæra’s eager eyes, Calder’s wings grew into a wider span than his fellows’, marking him as the Sire of the herd. The wings were a magnificent sight. Though they began as water, when he and the other Stormhorses took to the skies, they would harden into muscle, feather, and bone. The feathers, Hæra had heard, were as sharp as hoof-shells. In spite of this, her father had always said the process wasn’t painful.
Not that it would matter. Hæra would take the pain a thousand times over if it resulted in a pair of wings lifting her into the sky, carrying her over the roiling sea until she and the other Stormhorses unleashed thunder, lightning, and wind over all that lay below. Those wings would keep her steady in gale-force winds that whipped the waves to madness. When Hæra finally became a Stormhorse, her wings would be the most powerful of all.
Fierce longing surged through her. Today, she’d do more than watch from below.
Carefully, darting in and out of kelp and rock formations, Hæra followed the Stormhorses as they made their way toward the surface. The Great Mare willing, they wouldn’t look behind them and see a female about to trespass above the waves, seeking the forbidden air. Her father had taken her up once as a secret treat, and in spite of his injunctions otherwise, she’d sought it several times since then.
The last Stormhorse disappeared above the water. Hæra waited as long as she could bear it, pumped her tail, and propelled herself to the surface. Her head broke through the water just in time to see the final three Stormhorses transforming their marine tails into hind legs and hooves. Their mighty wings, fully formed, beat the air; around and above them, clouds began to swirl, menacing and dark.
Calder reached the clouds first and disappeared into them with one final flap of his wings. The moment he did, lightning flickered from within the cloud.
Hæra held back an eager groan. What must it be like up there? Her father, Alban, had said clouds were damp and cold. Did they also feel soft against your hide? And what was it like to feel the wind, to balance yourself on air currents?
What did freedom feel like?
Within moments, the Stormhorses disappeared completely into the clouds, heading toward the islands to the south. More lightning flashed and leapt from cloud to cloud: the Stormhorses speaking to one another without words in the language and fellowship only they knew.
Hæra could learn that language. She knew she could.
In the meantime, she’d seen what she’d come to see, and she’d better return before she was caught at the surface. The consequences for that would be…significant.
She sank below the surface and swam back the way she’d come. Silver fish scattered before her, tempting and plump, but she wasn’t hungry. As she went deeper, standing rocks rose to meet her; anemones and barnacles dotted their familiar surfaces. At the bottom, a stingray slowly swam just above the seabed, its flaps stirring up the sand.
Home again. Back to the dark waters where nothing exciting happened other than orca hunts or the occasional pursuit of a selkie foolish enough to venture out alone.
“Where were you?”
Hæra whirled, and bubbles swooshed around her. Her brother lurked by a great stone behind her, his red eyes gleaming. Her front hooves instinctively pawed forward as if to strike him.
Seeing this, Asgall only laughed.
Had he seen her surface? If he had, he wouldn’t hesitate to report it. Nothing would please him more than his own sister’s disgrace.
“I saw a promising school of fish,” she said. “But it wasn’t worth telling the herd about.”
“Especially now that the Stormhorses are gone,” Asgall agreed. “They’d want to partake of a feast, wouldn’t they?”
When it came to Asgall, going on the defensive was a bad idea. Over the turns, Hæra had learned to attack instead. “You know all about what Stormhorses want and don’t want,” she said. “That’s funny, isn’t it, since you’re not one?”
Ah, yes. There were his teeth: sharp and pearl pale, bared at her.
“You’re one to talk.” Asgall’s tail propelled him forward. His skin and scales were so dark that, even with Hæra’s sharp vision, it was difficult to see him. Her own skin and scales, a very pale blue, made her a more visible target.
“My dream was within reach,” Asgall growled. “It still might be. Yours? No.” He tossed his head contemptuously, as if Hæra’s ambitions deserved to be shaken away. “There’s never been a female Stormhorse and never will be.”
Hæra ignored that. He hadn’t observed her trespass, although he clearly suspected it. If he knew for sure, he’d rub her nose in it before tattling. She said, “What do you mean, your dream ‘still might be’ within reach? You failed your trial, so-called hope of our family, and you’ll never be a Stormhorse. There are no second chances. Be glad our father wasn’t alive to see it.”
Any defeat for her vicious brother was a victory for Hæra. Their mother, Beathag, had taken no such pleasure in it, and her disappointment had torn at Hæra. Literally. She’d worn the scars from her mother’s hooves for many tides.
“And who’s our hope now? You, Hiiiira?”
Hæra had no idea why it should be so irritating when her brother elongated her name. Probably because nearly everything he did was as irritating as an oyster’s sandy insides. “I don’t see why I shouldn’t be. Am I not as swift as you? As cunning?” She swished her tail threateningly. “Am I not the braver hunter? The Sire’s rewarded me often enou—”
Asgall snapped out with his teeth, but Hæra was prepared for that. She darted out of the way and swiped at him with her tail, catching him at his ribs. He grunted. As a foal, she’d assumed these battles were only play; the first time he’d broken her skin, she’d learned better. Now she took it seriously. Her brother would earn none of her blood.
He retreated with a snarl. “You’re not as good as you think. Not nearly as good. And what makes you so proud of yourself is what shames our mother the most.”
The words struck home. Asgall was right: Beathag had never forgiven Hæra for being better at hunting, fighting, everything Asgall was supposed to excel in. Sometimes it seemed she loathed Hæra for it even more than Asgall did. Her two offspring were her two greatest disappointments, but at least Asgall wasn’t a showy one.
Now that Hæra was grown, it was easy to avoid her mother, and she did so at every opportunity. It was also better to ignore Asgall now that he no longer wished to attack her, and generally the right thing to do after he grew tiresome.
He was wrong, anyway. Hæra didn’t give a damn about being the hope of her family. The depths knew her mother and brother wouldn’t appreciate it.
Hæra would be her own hope. With her father’s death, she had lost her only protector, and now she protected herself. And why not? Wasn’t she gifted? Couldn’t she swim as fast as any male, catch as many fish, maneuver as nimbly around the reefs of the North Sea? Hadn’t she been the one to deliver a fatal attack during an orca hunt, feeding the herd on blubber and muscle for days? The Sire had allowed her to eat one of the orca’s eyes: a great honor.
It wasn’t enough.
Asgall swam away with a disgusted snort. Hæra barely noticed him. Her ambitions were more interesting than his petulance. Nearly anything was.
How ironic that through his failure, Asgall had achieved what Hæra could only gain with unprecedented success. By herd law, only Stormhorses could sire offspring. Because Asgall hadn’t passed his test, he was forbidden to mate or reproduce.
Hæra wasn’t nearly so lucky. Once she reached her hundredth turn around the sun—nearly 150,000 tides—she’d reach the maximum age before she had to become a brood mare. Then her life would become an endless cycle of mating with the first Stormhorse to claim her in heat, being pregnant, and giving birth…unless she was killed in the mating frenzy, of course.
Out of respect for her father who should have been Sire, and Hæra’s skill as a hunter and warrior, Calder had granted her request to delay that horror well past the time she’d become fertile. She had eight turns left to go.
It seemed like a lot, but they’d swim by in a flash. Hæra had grown and was approaching her full strength. She needed to act soon.
She would be a Stormhorse, swift and powerful. She would be respected; even Asgall would show deference. She’d see the ocean, her home, from the distance of the clouds.
She just had to eat the right person first.
PART I
THE SURFACE
CHAPTER ONE
“It’s no Stonehenge.”
Sister Madeleine frowned at the girl who’d made the remark. The students of Sacred Heart should not cavalierly dismiss the wonders of the ancient world, even if some were less wonderful than others. They were lucky to be on this trip and not at home, staring at their phones all day.
At Madeleine’s frown, Emma ducked her shoulders. “I don’t mean to be rude, Sister. It’s just less impressive, you’ve got to admit.”
Madeleine tugged her coat around herself as the wind kicked up. Scotland’s Orkney Islands had few trees or high hills, and the ocean was never far. It was a surefire recipe for wind that stung your face and cut through your layers, even in June. “Define ‘impressive,’” she said. “This stone circle isn’t as big or well preserved as some others—”
“Or as circular,” Emma muttered.
“But it’s the oldest in Europe, and the settlement ruins are even older. Isn’t that impressive enough?”
It was true that Jorsay wasn’t the grandest of the Orkney Islands. At fourteen square miles, you could walk the length of it in an hour at a brisk pace—the kind of pace Madeleine preferred. There were fewer than 250 permanent residents. The population rose in summer, but other islands in Orkney had greater claims to fame: bigger cliffs, older churches, longer shores, and visitor centers.
If the island was known for anything, it was its shape, which was remarkably like a horse’s head. In fact, the name “Jorsay” came from the Old Norse word for steed: jór. Centuries later, it now roughly translated to “Horse Island,” so named by the Norsemen who’d swept into the islands in the eighth century, conquering the populace. They had, for a time, brought horses with them. The few souvenirs for sale in the island shops tended to be horse themed.
Currently, Madeleine stood in the easternmost part of the island, where Orkney’s most ancient artifacts sat. Wind flattened the green grass and clover beneath her shoes. Just beyond a hillock rose the cliffs: rough faces of ruddy sandstone and marl that stood firm against the pounding surf. Nature’s dramatic variety was always a wonder and a gift.
To the north, there lay a path that led down to a strip of pale sand. Madeleine cast her gaze down to that little beach, closed her eyes, and smiled at the wind in her face. It might be chilly and gray, but it was God’s day nevertheless. She was lucky to be standing here in a place so different from her home, taking it all in.
It was too bad the students didn’t feel the same way, but they were still young. Hopefully, the time would come when they’d know to embrace each moment. Part of Madeleine’s job was to teach them that, but only experience would drive it home.
When she turned, the Sacred Heart girls stood in a cluster, looking askance at the grass dotted with standing stones. Supposedly there had been ten stones originally erected during the Bronze Age. Now only four remained, worn down by time.
Unlike the famous Ring of Brodgar on Mainland, Orkney’s largest island, this stone circle lacked a name. It held Madeleine’s interest anyway. Maybe it was the crumbling prehistoric settlement nearby, the dwellings of people who would have reverenced this spot just as Madeleine worshipped in Sacred Heart’s chapel, attached to the convent where she lived and prayed.
Orkney was just one stop on Sacred Heart’s summer tour. The international tour was eagerly anticipated every year by students, and this time they’d gone to Scotland. The Northern Isles were unlike the cities and highland landscapes they’d already seen. The main attraction had been the Italian Chapel, built by Catholic prisoners of war during World War II, but the neolithic history was hard to beat.
“It’s cold,” said Ava, another student.
Madeleine looked at the few other tourists and archaeological students examining the ruins. None of these other people seemed to be prioritizing the weather over priceless history. She swallowed down the uncharitable thought and unwound her gray scarf from her neck, which immediately developed goose bumps in the chilly air. “Take this.”
“Oh, Sister, I didn’t mean—”
“I know.” Madeleine looped the scarf around Ava’s neck, and when Ava gave her a grateful look, Madeleine smiled back at her. “I’ll want it returned, mind you.”
“Yes, Sister Madeleine. Thank you.”
“Make sure to layer up tomorrow. Girls, go out there and take your notes. You’ll probably find it’s less windy if you go toward the settlement walls or the stones themselves.”
“I’m not touching them,” a third student, Hannah, protested. “What if they’re, you know…something?”
“What if they take you back in time, like Outlander?” Emma scoffed. Then she gave Madeleine a guilty glance. “Not that I’ve seen Outlander.”
“I certainly hope not,” a cool voice said, and they all turned as one to see the approach of Sister Agnes, assistant principal of Sacred Heart and the trip’s other chaperone. At fifty-four, she was nearly twenty years older than Madeleine and far less forgiving. “No Sacred Heart girl should know anything about that sinful trash.”
Sister Madeleine had read the book version of Outlander in college, before she’d had her calling. Best to keep her mouth shut about that.
“These stones are merely artifacts,” Agnes continued. “Appreciate them as part of human history before the coming of Christ. There’s nothing to fear from them.”
“Yes, Sister Agnes,” Hannah replied, not looking totally convinced.
Maybe something else would convince her. Madeleine said dryly, “Remember how much your parents paid to send you here.”
That did it. The girls scattered, some heading for the stones and others for the settlement in the packs of three or four that teenaged girls seemed to fall into instinctively. Only Emma and Ava headed off as a pair. Sister Agnes watched them leave, a frown line climbing nearly the whole length of her forehead from her eyebrows to the edge of her veil.
Their veils were coming in handy today, keeping their hair safe from the wind. Madeleine’s order, the Daughters of Grace, had long since discarded the old-fashioned nuns’ habits you’d find in The Sound of Music. Her modern habit was still undeniably modest, with a long-sleeved white blouse, a black sweater vest, a skirt that went past her knees, dark hose, and comfortable black sneakers. A black veil covered her short dark hair and fell to her shoulders, and her rosary rested at her waist. Over all of it, Madeleine wore a black puffer jacket that did a decent job of shielding her from the Orcadian weather, even without her scarf.
No high school student would call it fashionable, but at least she was warm.
“We should keep an eye on them,” Agnes said, still watching Emma and Ava. “They spend a lot of time together. A…special friendship.”
“They’ve always been good friends.” Hopefully she didn’t sound like she was challenging her senior sister.
“Yes, but this sort of behavior is more noticeable in a smaller group. I suppose it didn’t occur to me until now that they could be—well, we all miss things sometimes. Even me.” Agnes squinted. “Is Ava wearing your scarf?”
Madeleine knew where this was going. “She was cold, Sister.”
“Then she should have brought a sweater. They need to learn responsibility.”
Ah yes, just as Christ had said of his faithful followers: For I was cold, and you told me I should have brought a sweater. It might be judgmental to think poorly of Agnes, but she missed the mark on some basic things. It was fine to give a shivering child a warm piece of clothing.
And there was nothing wrong with intense female friendships in your youth. That was when you talked at all hours, shared everything, and spent every possible moment together. It was natural. And then, as God willed it, you grew up and turned that emotional energy toward a man in holy matrimony.
Or to Christ and his saints, as Madeleine had done. The Sisterhood had called to her instead, letting her know where her divinely ordained duty lay. It wasn’t with a husband and children.
Which was also completely natural.
“Am I talking to myself?”
Madeleine snapped back to attention. Sister Agnes had raised her eyebrows and was employing her usual trick of looking down her nose, even though she was several inches shorter than Madeleine.
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