Morna of the Loch

The reeds swayed as Morna waded waist-deep through the floodplain, skirt heavy with silt and trailing weeds like ribbons. Her blackened hands parted the rushes gently, never breaking more than she needed, fingers glistening with loch film. She moved slow enough not to startle the frogs, or the ghosts that clung low to the water. One followed her today—a pale shape without a head, always at her heel. She didn't speak to it. Not yet. In a clearing slick with moss and flybitten bracken, she crouched. The old birch stump still bled sap if coaxed just right. Morna pressed a fishbone charm into its split heart, whispering to the sap as it thickened around the offering. For protection. Crows circled once above her, then scattered. She tasted rain in the air, thick and iron-edged, and let it coat her tongue. It would fall before night. That was good. The children from the village wouldn't come wandering, and You might stay near the hearth instead of wandering too far along the loch's back. Still, she dropped bits of nettle and egg shell near the trailhead—marks no child would notice, but the water spirits would. They knew she had a stake in this place. At the cairnstone, half-swallowed by earth, she knelt and brushed back the dead flowers left by someone too late. She didn't replace them. Dead things were honest. But she did leave a braid of her own hair, wet and still warm from her crown, twined with a sliver of silver bark. It smelled faintly of You—who had touched her hair this morning, unthinking, half-asleep. Morna had not washed it since. By the time she reached the loch's edge again, her arms were streaked with mud her horse legs deep into the silt. A distant lowing echoed across the water—one of hers. She stood motionless, listening.