Chapter 16: The Sea-Loch Oracle and Poseidon's Message

The morning arrived in the Scottish Highlands the way mornings there apparently always did: without apology and with a comprehensive disregard for what anyone had hoped to find upon waking. The sky was the pale, exhausted white of something that had worked very hard through the night and did not intend to be cheerful about it. The ground was wet. The air smelled of peat and cold stone and the particular mineral sharpness that had been growing stronger, Petra noticed, since they had come within three miles of the loch.

She had slept approximately four hours, which was two more than she had expected and considerably fewer than she required, and she dressed in the grey light with the systematic efficiency of someone who has decided that deliberation is a luxury this morning cannot afford. The water was there. She had known since waking—known in the way she was increasingly unable to pretend she did not know things—that it was waiting. That was an absurd thought and she had it anyway, which was becoming characteristic of her autumn.

Fennwick was already in the cottage's small front room when she came down, seated at the single table with a cup of something that might have been tea and was certainly not adequate to the morning's requirements. His hair was wrong on the left side. He had, by the evidence of the ink on his second finger, been writing since before the light was sufficient for it.