Chapter Text
Coira
The new Laird’s boots broke the skin of her land with every step. Coira had forgotten how mortal men carried their ghosts.
He moved as though weighted down by an invisible cloak of sodden wool, iron sewn into the lining. It dragged behind him, and he seemed incapable of throwing it off or letting it rest.
She’d trailed him along the barren path toward his crumbling estate, in her incorporeal mist form and the bright bite of the highland’s stiff winter wind, nipping at his mud-caked heels.
The smell of salt and sweet-sour decay poisoned the air. He didn’t seem to see the jaundiced, bare fields that offered little to the cattle starved until their ribs almost broke through their hide.
The only music the land knew now was the muted grousing of creatures already half-gone.
A feeble, toneless dirge resonated through the numb earth where the cows stood. There was no escape from the sound. The grass recoiled from the beast’s hooves as if the blight weaving through their blood poisoned the soil with every press into the earth.
A cold blade of ice pierced her as the knowledge that it had spread further despite her efforts sank in. It twisted in her formless heart, infecting her too, and buried the pain so deep she tasted it like a sickness in the herd’s breath on the wind.
An astringent, grassy reek that the new Laird had at least scowled at. At least the creatures suffering woke something in him.
She’d accompanied the mortal as far as his home’s entrance, moving to cling to the cloudy windows as nothing more than condensation. The man stood tall inside as his Groundskeeper wrung out his long list of grievances with the dying land.
The guardian rowan at the garden’s edge cried out to her, bleeding red sap into the ground as she could only bear witness. A dull, relentless ache filled her as someone inside the house spoke her least favourite moniker.
“…the Grey Lady’s no’ pleased, sir.”
If she were in her true form, she would have smiled. The older man always had a smile for her, even if he couldn’t see her. She liked Old Dougal; as groundskeeper, he followed the Old Ways as best he could.
It wasn’t his fault the place needed a more fervent hand to bless it. She strained to hear better, her heart a rock tossed in a bottomless pool, the fine mist around her intensifying as the new Laird scoffed.
“The ‘Grey Lady’ is a fungal infection, Dougal,” he said.
His voice was flat as the stones by the burn. Even they had more life in them. “What she’s displeased about is the lack of a slater to fix the roof. We’ll have to sell it as is.”
A frozen, tearing scream clawed through her and turned the moisture on the windowpanes to frost. A harsh gust of wind battered into the house as his words settled in her.
Sell? Her soul shrieked, and something vital inside her shrivelled and wept. No, he couldn’t.
He wouldn’t. She focused entirely on the disbeliever, committing him to memory.
He wasn’t the same boy he’d been the day he left. Smiling and waving goodbye to his aging parents, a spring in his step that hadn’t returned with him. They’d passed away while he’d fought in a mortal war.
It had chiselled away the roundness of his face, sharp cheekbones replacing his round, pink cheeks. Her opaque form thinned a little at the loss of that smile now.
His full lips had flattened into a harsh, thin line. He’d shorn his auburn hair shorter than the sheep grazing at the wilted grass. He seemed the same, but not.
Alive and dead and dying all at once. His deep blue eyes were spiritless… yet as piercing as the invisible iron nails holding him together.
The stench of faraway violence, mud, and metal hung around him, as heavy as the bloated clouds threatening a downpour overhead. Dougal’s mouth tightened like a fissure in weathered leather as the Laird dismissed his concerns.
“Have Donald bring the lorry round the ’morra. We’ll start clearing the East Wood. The timber might cover the vet bill for the cattle.”
Her fog turned to water and then to ice, splashing and crystallising on the window as her magic roiled at the command. Dougal stiffened as her mind screamed at her to stop this, to stop him before he destroyed everything she had left.
Her incorporeal hand clawed at the windowpane, slicing into the frost. The tiny screeching sound didn’t disturb the men inside. But a flicker of pain crossed Dougal’s wrinkled, wind-chapped face.
“The East Wood is protected, sir.”
The Laird’s expression darkened, shoulders stiffening, jaw clenched tight as he said through his teeth, “It’s timber, Dougal. It’s not protected from debt.”
The old man nodded and shuffled out, a sigh woven into the scrape of his boots over the stone floor. Coira remained focused on the man inside. He stared at a water stain on the wall, one that almost looked like a woman running away.
He flinched, hands flexing at his sides every time a droplet of water dripped into the china dish set on the flagstones. Plink, plink, plink.
His entire body jerked at the sound as if it were gunfire. Dougal had spoken of her—the Grey Lady—and this new man had dismissed her as nothing but rot.
A thing to be chopped up, sold, and shipped out. Inside her, the leash on her darker power nearly severed.
The ancient, wild part of her that had once lured vain shepherds to their deaths in peat bogs or foggy lochs stirred. Darkness wound her ribs, climbing up her throat. A song rose in her mind, the melody never forgotten.
Her misty form shook in the air, moisture glistening in the day’s gloomy light. It would be so easy.
It would solve her problems for a little while. He would hear only a lullaby on the wind, a glimpse of verdant beauty by the loch.
He’d feel an incessant, warm pull toward her—to be with her without the veil of propriety holding him back. And when she had him, she’d let the black water take his confusion and disdain and leave her land in peace.
The impulse scorched through her mist, turning it to steam as the gloaming set in. Painting the estate in shades of mauve, dusky orange, and a tinge of crimson.
Salt infused the very atmosphere, sending a spike of glacial warning through her. The impulse to end this new threat before it could worsen the war she’d fought single-handedly for centuries grew teeth and fangs and gnawed at her.
The Laird walked away out of view, each step landing like stones on her intangible flesh. She shoved the power down, down, down.
Later, she’d assess him. Her night watch was about to begin.
She peeled away from the window, spearing toward the Alder trees guarding the perimeter. The land grieved, crying out to her and adding another tear to her tattered soul.
Animals stood in listless huddles. A cow coughed a wet, rattling sound that ached in Coira’s own lungs. Her fog swelled, trying to blot it out.
The need to help them was a scorching hand in her chest, strangling her from the inside. The flock of sheep fared no better.
Their dull, marble eyes had sunk into sockets far too deep that tracked her misty movements, a passive, hopeless hunger glazing their gazes. The pastures already haunted despite the creatures and their hearts still beating.
She wished she could close her eyes and pretend it wasn’t happening. Let herself pretend it would heal on its own, or let herself go down with it.
The thought was a patch of nettles taking root in her mind that she immediately ripped out. If she attempted it, she would be just as bad as the Laird.
She witnessed it, as painful and soul-destroying as it was. As she moved through the air, a spectral sphere of pale green light flickered over the hills and aimed for the river.
The ball of Corpse-Light glowed brighter and brighter as it neared the battle-line she’d held for centuries. The taste of salt as it thickened in the chilly breeze brought the Nuckelavee’s ghastly image to the surface of her memory.
The creature was a single, fused horror of glistening tendon, muscle, and marrow-rotted bone. The rider’s legs vanished into the steed’s flayed back as though melted there by sea-water.
It was a catastrophe of raw, spoiled meat. Its breath was the slow death that blighted her springs, leeched life from the field beasts, and edged closer each night. She took her true form as she reached the pebbled banks of the rushing river coursing through the land.
The sensation of warm spring water sluiced over her as it took hold; living moss braided her cotton-pale hair, and her ears formed their usual delicate points.
Her hooves crunched over dead leaves, long gown hem hissing over the stones, every step graceful and steady as she approached a large boulder. Time and many battles had split it down the middle.
A fracture that had once splintered her own bones as her heartbeat kicked up a tempest behind her ribs. Her green dress swirled with the mist as she placed her hands in their worn grooves in the stone.
The cold rock warmed as it welcomed her touch, and a shimmer of frail golden light surrounded it as she closed her eyes and exhaled slowly. Clearing her mind of Laird’s and selling precious things and destroying forests older than even her.
Her mouth curled into a snarl, nerves sparking alight as the Nuckelavee pushed against her fraying wards. It tested every inch of them to find the weak spot. The hair on her nape stood on ends as the roar of the river faded, and she pushed aside her worries.
She’d stop the war-torn man after she dealt with tonight’s skirmish. Her frown felt permanent, teeth burying into her bottom lip. Her energy, her bond with the land, the magic it gifted her seeped from her hands into the boulder.
This was her war.
The stone thrummed as if it were alive, summoning the clouds to unleash their deluge of freshwater. Holding the beast back. Her muscles strained, joints tightened, and jaw rippled as it drained from her.
She’d consider what to do with the Laird when dawn kissed the earth once more. She’d make him pay his tithe. He would listen, or he would break.
No matter which way it went, she’d fulfill her duty, as always. She’d accept nothing less. There were things older than men coming home to roost; a mortal mattered little in the end.
He’d die before she failed.