woman.
Nessie nodded. “In the middle of the isle is St. Adrian’s priory built three hundred years ago by Benedictine monks. They lived in harmony with your mother’s people who came to the isle centuries prior. The two were able to preserve the old ways while at the same time respecting the new until the Reformation started, causing the church leaders to sell the isle to your father.”
“Then what we seek is located at the priory?” Cameron asked, taking Nessie by the hand and guiding her up the steep slope from the beach.
“I do not know for certain. Your mother might have assumed you would know where to look when the time was right.”
“How will I know if I have never been here before?” Mariam asked as she followed behind the two, watching Nessie’s steps grow lighter and less awkward as they made their way fully onto the fertile soil above.
“Trust your instincts, Mariam. I’m sure that is what your mother would advise if she were here with you,” Nessie replied as they started off toward ruin in the distance.
“Why are the ancestors’ ashes so important?” Mariam asked quietly. The very air around her seemed to still as though holding its breath, waiting for the answer.
“The ashes contain all the magic of those who came before.”
“No one has ever sought to gain that power in all the centuries that have passed?”
“The legend passed down from generation to generation claimed that only the daughter of a ninth daughter can manifest that power into herself on the nineteenth year of her birth.” Nessie’s gaze met and held Mariam’s. “Your mother was a ninth daughter, so you Mariam, are the one.”
Mariam’s stomach tightened and her steps faltered. The message in her shell had said in seven days’ time she would ‘come into her own.’ At midnight, she would enter her nineteenth year. Memories that were not her own stirred inside her mind, tantalizing her, tormenting her with snippets of crumbled rock, of a dark recess, of green and gold light. So close, and yet too far away to grab them and make any sort of sense of what she saw. Had these impressions come to her in her dreams? Was that why they seemed so familiar?
“What does the cauldron have to do with any of this?” Mariam asked.
“The cauldron, and its otherworldly metal, gave the ancestors the power over life and death when they brewed a potion inside it.”
Mariam frowned. “If that is so, then why did the ancestors not save themselves?”
“Because, although a person may be brought back to life, they would be mute. It is the sacrifice that must be paid. Instead of a kindness, over time, the ancestors came to realize the cruelty of such a gift and hid the cauldron away.”
“It sounds as though these things might be better off hidden from the world.”
“From the world, aye. But not from you. Your mother was insistent that you needed to find these things to become who you were meant to be.”
Still not quite understanding how all the pieces fit together, Mariam decided to trust what her mother had wanted her to do. She closed her eyes, trying to grab hold of a thread of memory when something solid came to her—a thousand flat, rectangular rocks stacked high. They looked like the burial cairns she had seen dotting the Scottish landscape from ages past. She sighed, opened her eyes, and looked at Nessie once more. “I think I saw a cairn. What does that mean?”
“It means you have identified where we must go. There is a cairn just north of the ruins. Can you see it there in the distance?”
Cameron frowned. “If we are to reach it before sundown, we will need to go a little faster. Are you capable of that?”
“I will keep up,” Nessie replied before Cameron set a faster pace across the grassy plains.
The moon slipped out from behind a stream of clouds and painted the landscape before them in shades of silver and blue. Shadows crouched behind boulders they passed and wind whispered through the grass. Hazy light filtered down from the heavens, guiding the way forward. Tranquil beauty temporarily touched the small world around her that was so at odds with the devastation and suffering they had left behind, or the ash cloud that was heading their way.
Half an hour later, they reached their destination and gathered at the base of a cairn. It was only a pile of rocks, and yet Mariam stared at them spellbound,