CHAPTER 5 - The Breath Between Stones
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Haunted by the basalt’s song and a note urging patience, Barbra returns to the seam by the fifth cairn at night, torn between the decoy passage she found earlier and a new opening that seems to breathe with the tide. As she counts echoes with her sunstone and whale-bone token, the shadowy watcher finally reveals herself as Eydis, a member of the guarding families who left Barbra the warnings. Unexpectedly, Eydis chooses to help after testing Barbra’s integrity, explaining the sigil’s mirrored trick and the true meaning of the riddle to count seven breaths from the fifth echo. Together they unlock a concealed panel and enter a narrow tunnel that opens only when the sea exhales. Inside, Eydis disarms false trails and reveals the Basalt Gates were once used to shepherd stranded whales back to safety, a secret kept to avoid exploitation. In a resonant chamber, Barbra uses the token, braided cord, and sunstone to activate a genuine tidal-harmonic map the families thought lost, hinting at a schism among the guardians. As the tide turns and a hostile cousin approaches, Barbra grabs a small basalt tuning ring as a keepsake. With the chamber singing and water rising, Eydis insists they choose between a deeper route or flight, and Barbra must decide whether to press on or escape.
The knock came again, soft as a knuckle on a wooden door, and Barbra pressed her palm to the seam by the fifth cairn as if the basalt could feel her yearning. The night was clear and thin, the lagoon breathing in the dark, and the spray stitched a faint silver hem along the cliffs. She had walked out of the turf-roofed cottage with her black leather jacket zipped against the damp and her blue-and-white Asics whispering over the sheep-cropped grass, unable to sit with the note’s promise of patience. The freckles she disliked sparked with the cold, but she ignored them, fingers closing on the whale-bone token in one pocket and the calcite sunstone in the other.
The rock’s warmth pulsed to a rhythm that nagged the bones of her wrist, the basalt’s low song like a memory she could nearly name. Count seven from the fifth, the ink in her head insisted, and she closed her eyes to let her ears do the looking. She held the sunstone at the seam and let the faint luminance of the mist become stripes, shifting as the tide breathed; once, twice, three times, until the fifth swell rolled and receded. The riddle wasn’t numbers alone, Runa had said in Tórshavn, but resonance and patience, and Barbra felt the organ note in the stone swell, then thin, then swell again.
She tapped the token against the seam on the fifth echo and then counted each breath in the rock—one… two… three… four… five… six—hesitating at seven, afraid of choosing wrong and waking another decoy. The knock inside answered her uncertainty, a sly little sound like a wink. “Not there,” a voice said, so close behind she almost struck the rock. The shadow from the ridge had stepped into the half-light at last, her gray braid tucked into a wool cap, a storm lantern curtained with a hand to keep its beam soft.
Barbra spun, pulse leaping, and met eyes the color of slate tidepools, wary and measuring without malice. “You were at the mirror door last time,” the woman added quietly. “If you listen to the false one, it learns your rhythm.”
Barbra lowered the token, heat rising to her face despite the cold. “You left the notes,” she said, half accusation, half relief.
The woman nodded once, as if reluctant to claim even that. “Why help me?” Barbra asked, thinking of locked boathouse mouths and tight shoulders turned away. The woman’s answer came like the sea itself, matter-of-fact and relentless: “Because I’ve watched you leave when the rock said no, and because you were raised by people who mended nets. That means you know what returning a thing intact looks like.”
“Eydis,” she offered, and Barbra gave her name back, feeling some tight thread unknot in her chest.
Eydis reached into her pocket and brought out a small bronze bell from a sheep’s harness, the same sigil etched on its crown as the one on Barbra’s token—but not mirrored. “The decoys use the left hand,” Eydis said, tapping the bell with a fingernail so that it sang a thin A, “and they shift the sign to catch the hasty.” She turned Barbra’s whale-bone in her palm and held it in the lantern’s edge-glow, rotating it until a hairline notch cut an arrow of pale across her knuckles. “Here,” she said, pointing to a dimple in the basalt just beyond the seam. “Count your seven on the breath out, not in.
The fifth echo is the gate’s name, not the step.”
Barbra held her breath to hear better and let Eydis’ words fold into what she already knew: the braided cord she had found in the earlier chamber, meant to damp or draw sound; the way the mist bands thickened on the ebb. She looped the cord loosely over her wrist and held the sunstone against the rock, the tiny lens drinking lantern-glow and feeding it into the seam as a pale thread. The basalt note swelled, then dropped a half step, and Eydis raised her voice just enough to hum with it, weaving a second tone underneath. When the fifth echo came—the one that carried the chamber’s true timbre—Barbra touched the token to the dimple, throat tight as she counted the out-breaths in the rock: one… two… three… four… five… six… seven.
The seam answered not with a knock but a sigh, and a hairline split traced itself across the stone like frost. The panel shifted inward with the gentleness of a sleeping thing turning in bed, warm air combing the hair at Barbra’s neck. Eydis shaded the lantern and nodded for her to go first, and Barbra slipped into the narrow crack, careful of her jacket and the scuffs on her Asics. The smell inside was kelp and lanolin and something metallic, like old bells, and the rock had the fluted feel of organ pipes worn by centuries of breath.
A curved rib of whale bone arched over the first bend, polished by hands, and the floor sloped down in easy, careful increments, as if the passage had been planned by feet and not by rulers. She heard the sea in the stone and the stone in the sea, and all the little things she had taught herself to listen to when she had no one else to keep her company came awake at once. At the first branch, Eydis set the lantern down and squinted at a dangling thread. Tiny shells had been tied to it, and when the warm draft shifted, they clacked a reassuring, trickster music.
“False,” Eydis murmured, and took the braided cord from Barbra’s wrist to loop lightly around the shells, silencing them. “My grandfather would set these for men who liked to believe. We needed some to go home with stories about nothing, so the nothing would be enough.” She sighed, a tenderness and a weariness both in it. “We do this to protect a kindness, not hoard a power.”
Barbra nodded, understanding the cruel mercy of misdirection.
“You shepherd whales,” she said, remembering how the lagoon’s lip had seemed like a gate. Eydis tilted her head in approval, lines easing at her eyes. “When storms drive them into bad bowls, we sing them out on the spring tide,” she said. “Once, people would claim whales as windfall, and things got ugly, so the families closed their mouths and learned the stone’s vowels better than anyone.
We kept the gates quiet so they couldn’t be used to trap what should be loosed.”
They came to a chamber whose walls braided and unbraided like hair, columns of basalt ringing like strings when the warm air passed. Eydis dimmed the lantern and showed Barbra a shallow slot in a ridge, the whale-bone token’s exact twin shape. The token slid into place with a soft seating sound, and the braided cord hummed, catching a frequency that prickled Barbra’s scalp. She brought the sunstone close, not to illuminate but to comb the lantern’s glow into a line, remembering the lens she’d found before that had projected tides and harmonics like constellations.
This time, the light gathered itself in the mist that hung in the chamber and knit a living map between the columns. Lines unfurled in delicate strands over the vapor, tracing the throats of sea-caves, the lungs of cliffs, the pulse of the shoals. Here was a gate, and here, and here, each marked with the un-mirrored sigil, and Barbra’s breath caught as she realized how many there were across these islands. Eydis’ hand came to her mouth, as if she had been struck, and for a heartbeat Barbra saw the younger woman inside the weathered one.
“We thought this lens lost,” Eydis whispered. “We left a mirror for our own and a muddle for the rest. Someone hid the true one deeper after a fight over the last grind.” Her eyes flicked to the sigils. “There are more of us than there used to be, and not all of us sing the same note.”
The chamber’s organ-sound sank a little, as if the sea had turned on its side, and Barbra felt the first cold bead of water slip from ceiling to wrist.
“Tide’s turning,” Eydis said, practical again, and set a hand on the ridge. Footsteps, faint but sure, skittered up the passage they had neglected; she had not been wrong to shade the light. “My cousin will come to tidy the false way when the water’s low,” Eydis said, and her mouth made a line that had nothing to do with Barbra. “He prefers things simple that can be owned.” Barbra thought of the boathouse men and their hard eyes, of caution turned into creed.
“Wait,” Barbra said, not wanting to leave the map as a ghost, and let her fingers slide over a low ledge. Something cool clicked against her skin: a small basalt ring, its interior cut to a precise curve, the true sigil etched along its rim. It fit her index finger like an engineer’s tool more than a jewel, and when she lifted it, the sound in the chamber brightened by a tone, then settled. A keepsake, she thought reflexively, for the glass wall cabinet back home where she kept the story of her life shard by shard, but not if it meant breaking the song.
Eydis watched her weigh the ring and nodded once when Barbra slipped it into her pocket without hiding the choice. The footsteps grew clearer. The map thinned as the mist thinned, pulled flat by a new breeze that smelled of tidewater rising, and the slot shivered as the token began to loosen on its own. Eydis caught it deftly and pressed it back into Barbra’s hand.
“There’s a dimmu path,” she said—dark, hidden—“deeper, along the old fire-crack, but it makes you choose the sea’s language over the sun’s. You won’t see daylight until the tide turns again.” She tipped her head toward the way they had come. “Or we take our breath and run while the gate still exhales.”
Barbra glanced at the narrowing seam, felt her pulse match the stone’s slow throb, and thought of all the times she had stood alone and decided without a committee, a board, a lover. She thought of two small dents in her back that dresses were made to show and of Louboutins wrapped in tissue back at the cottage like a city life she knew how to visit but not be.
She thought of the families who had taught themselves to sing stone and of all the secrets hoarded and squandered or held carefully in open hands. The lantern’s flame made a soft sound, and water tapped a warmer rhythm down the ridge as the footsteps entered the branch. Deeper into the old crack and its darkness, or back to air and a chase—what door does she dare name hers, and which will the basalt let her keep?
