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The call comes between orgasms. Tosh leans back against the headboard, hands up and breathing hard. She doesn’t want this, not now, not while Ruth is rubbing her thumbs along Tosh’s inner thighs, waiting for her to say yes, she’s fully refracted, and they can get on with the night. A good night, Tosh thinks; a good one, sweet, with the firelight crackling golden through glasses of red wine. They kissed against the white wall below the beams, and came here between Tosh’s sheets, naked and with the luxury of time.
And now, the phone. Jarring and juddering across the wood, the screen lit up like a beacon.
“Turn it off,” Ruth says, lifting her head from between Tosh’s legs. She was just dipping it, ready to go again. Tosh hisses as the cold air comes in, in the absence of Ruth’s mouth.
“I have to,” she says. “We have to.”
They’re getting better at off-duty means not on duty, round here; less of Police Scotland being instantly available for the citizenry’s slightest suspicious sneeze. Which means that whoever’s calling, past ten on New Year’s Eve, needs something that no one else can provide.
“All right,” Ruth says, rocking back on her heels. Tosh listens to whoever it is on the phone and Ruth wants to hit a wall.
“All right,” she says. “Let’s go.”
*
Half an hour later they’re trudging over icy cobbles, the lights of Bressay on their right across the strait. It’s so cold, bitterly cold, more than Shetland should be in its north Atlantic drift. In the inland darkness the snow is pillowed, heaped on the inclines, and here in the town it’s frosted on the eaves. Tosh still feels overheated, partly from stepping out into the winter’s night out of the fire-warmed house, and from putting her knickers on in a hurry. She’s still sticky between her thighs as she strides to keep up. Along the seafront, Bressay is visible to their right behind the boats rocking; past the pier is Sandy in his winter boots, the particulate snow in his hair. He doesn’t know it, but he’s why Ruth stayed.
Of course it was Tosh she stayed for. Of course it’s Tosh. Tosh scurrying up to the ferry terminal before they called the night passengers, the Northlink witches saying the words over the ropes . “Ruth,” she said. The babe in her arms, its little fists curling and uncurling. “Please.”
Northlink waits for no man but it waited a moment that night. The row of heavy witches with their knots of strength. Ruth stood there in the doorway in—this is what the island’s old women said later—liminality. Land and sea; deep dark and the surface of the water. In the lush fullness of that moment, Ruth stayed.
She drove back across the island in the grip of that moment of decision. When they got home Tosh showed Ruth around her house as though she’d never seen it and it was probably the right thing to have chosen. Probably the biggest choice Ruth would ever make. Not like choosing to have coffee over tea, a few days afterwards; to remind Sandy that it was two sugars. He walked to her desk and set down the mug.
“If you haven’t got enough witches on the island it’ll sink,” he said, and Ruth never went back to London.
(London is sinking already, sinking regardless; nine Tube lines pinned through the clay and still sinking. So Ruth has to stay: Mainland Shetland, in its disconsolate skidding across an open ocean, needs all the help it can get.
And so does Tosh. It’s what she says, once the dust has settled. Come be a detective inspector in this land where you were born in; come help me help keep the peace. Solve crimes and go to the pub after. None of the rest matters. Come be with me.)
Only now they’re walking down the harbour’s edge, with Sandy by the pier waiting. Ruth doesn’t know how he knew. Maybe she gives off vibes; a preacher’s daughter with a darkness in her blood. Maybe he’s seen her old file. A white van zooms off into the distance and otherwise there’s no one around. Sandy shows them the blood on the cobbles, and the mess of splayed limbs. A woman in a stained sequinned dress; Ruth remembers it’s New Year’s Eve. Eyes black and staring, and Ruth kneels down. She lays a hand on the woman’s cold skin and knows. “No witchcraft,” she says, looking up at Sandy. “Bring in forensics. We can start work in the morning.”
“What she said,” Tosh says, all competence and skill though half an hour ago she had a dildo in hand. Ruth loves her. “Put the initial report in, Sandy. And get the body dealt with, she’ll have to sit on ice for now.”
The ice in the mortuary is permanent, the sharp blocks charmed to survive a warming. You don’t want corpse water in the drains. That’s what Ruth was told as a child. Though she’s an internet witch, really, who got the meagre things she knows from the forums and the apps. Both the stilted NHS ones, about practising folklore safely; and the other kind of app. Dates with pink-haired Hackney hags and the wise women of the Wandle. It’s not her mother’s fault that she knows fuck-all. Eleanor Calder was a fine witch. But she left, and then Ruth left.
They say their goodbyes to Sandy, wish him a happy new year for when it comes. Then they head for home in Tosh’s Land Rover. Pretty soon after Ruth decided to stay Tosh sold her share in the flat she’d shared with Donnie and the two of them moved out to Brindister with the gulls. As the car crests the ridge, Ruth sees a handful of lights visible in the house, but not many; Louise is staying with Alan tonight, so Ruth and Tosh can have date night. When they get back inside, Ruth thinks maybe the mood has been ruined but they could still see the new year in well. Maybe even fetch back the little one, for whom all the years spill far in front. It’s so still and beautiful here, Ruth thinks, for the thousandth time. You could drive out over the wind-carved country, and never feel anything but safe.
It isn’t safe. A witch should know it.
“It’s a hell of a lie to tell me,” Tosh says conversationally. She hasn’t taken off her coat. “Let’s go down to the beach.”
Ruth freezes in place, then nods. It’s still bitterly cold, but she’s dressed for it. They settle on a sheltered place behind a dune where they left driftwood in the summer, where the wind can’t reach. They light a small fire. The Norse blood in both of them quickens at the crackle.
“I didn’t tell you a lie,” Ruth says, into the quiet.
“You’re even lying to me now!” Tosh says, exasperated. She reaches out to the flames, holding her palms as close as they can go. “You lied to me about that girl. Not killed by witchcraft, you think I’m thick? New Year’s Eve and her pupils blown black? Some bastard wants a bit of fucking luck for 2026!”
“Tosh—”
“And you.” Tosh is furious but she’s also deeply hurt. “You never told me. You’re a witch, a witch of the Norðreyjar, and for some reason you never… I don’t know. Don’t you trust me? I'm a police officer! Don’t you trust me with section 12A of the Equality Act?”
Ruth almost wants to laugh at that. That section was added long after it would benefit her, and really there is no discrimination against witches on the islands. They’re held in high if wary regard. Tosh was raised on the mainland where things are different.
“Yes,” she says. “Of course I trust you. Tosh, I’m sorry. I just—”
How to explain it. How to explain that she’s not much of a witch, not really, and kneeling alongside a woman on the year’s turn and knowing how she passed is something anyone with the slightest of magic can do. That she’s never done much with it, otherwise. That the past is gone and her mother is dead and it’s all too late. For things like this it’s always too late.
And—what the hell. Might as well say it out loud.
“There’s a man on the island,” she says. “With a babe of his own blood. And I took his wife and I took his hearth and I let the wind rattle his heart and shutters.”
“Not by magic.” Tosh distrusts the word. “Not by witchcraft.”
“Really?” Ruth asks.
Because this is it. This is the tale that fits the telling. Ruth Calder, always of strange folk, returns after decades, and makes a place for herself by the sea’s edge as women of power always do. And the child will end up like her. A girl who grows up in a house where a woman wields wind and water; well, she won’t be the same. Every woman is her own universe. But she’ll be the same.
Tosh is looking right at her, her eyes bright and intense. The firelight is soft as a rose. Then she leans forwards and she’s kissing Ruth, with wind and water in her kiss. With the might offlame. Ruth yields, pushed backwards by that force.
“Take me,” Tosh says fiercely. “Steal me away if you want to. Wrap me up in your wiles. Give a home to me and my child. Do whatever you want.”
“Tosh…” Ruth shakes her head. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Fuck you.” Tosh leans back. “I left Donnie. I know what I want. Ruth, if you’re a witch, it’s okay. It really is. I still love you. But you had no right to lie to me.”
“I didn’t steal you away.” Ruth hates herself for being a little tearful. “I didn’t take you away from your man and your life. I just asked you.”
“And I asked you to stay.” Tosh’s eyes are luminous in the darkness. Ruth thinks helplessly of that decision, of choosing to stay.
When the fire dies they climb back up to the house and find the new year has come. They’ve caught it in its very moment, its transformation. It’s the witching hour on the isles, Tosh says, arch and loving. She pours them both a glass before they go to bed.
*
In the morning, Ruth and Tosh go down to the water’s edge again with Louise. The snow has been falling overnight, thick and rich like heavy cream. Ruth breathes in the sharpness of the air and wonders why she ever lived anywhere else.
They light another fire, translucent in the daylight. And in the layers of ice and sand they bury things: a kitchen fork and a dildo, a letter and a flag. It’s a lesbian Pride banner; Louise likes the pink. Jewellery. Thyme and salt from a witch’s hand. And iron. “It’s the only bit of working my mum had time to teach me,” Ruth says, apologetically. “And it only works when the world is at a point of turning.”
“That’s fine,” Tosh says. “It’s fine.”
They kiss, soft and perfect, and Ruth knows she's forgiven. But maybe this won’t work, she thinks: maybe a sacrifice to the new year’s powers only works for murderers, like that man last night who killed a witch.
It doesn’t matter. Women sacrifice. Build what they can without magic or luck. Back at the house Ruth makes coffee and knows it will be all right. The islands called her back here, and she can do a witch's work, as well as a police's officer's, if she has to. This is her place and people.
"You forgot the sugar, you silly witch"--and Tosh is her heart and hearth.