Ruairidh looked about in bewilderment and some alarm. His skin was nowhere to be found. It should be atop the very rock he was standing on. Quite obviously it had gone astray— but how? The tide had not yet turned its course. There had been no wind to blow it away. No one ever visited this beach at this time of year.

And yet something or someone had taken his skin.

For one moment, he wondered if it was the finmen he had smelled up at the furrier's cottage.

He knelt down on hands and knees and lowered his nose to the rough stone, searching for their foul scent. He knew it now for it had been all about the grounds of the abandoned Crot Callow.

Instantly he reared back, shocked at the scent that was at once foreign and yet completely recognizable. No one among his people had had first-hand experience with it for several generations, but he knew it all the same. The smell tightened the hair of his scalp and sent shivers over his bare flesh.

A woman had been there and performed the ritual of The Summoning. She had come to the sea at sunset and shed her requisite seven tears onto the sea’s stones where they were collected at the high tide-- and then she had taken his skin away with her!

It seemed unthinkable, but there was, at this very moment when he needed to return to Avocamor with his news, some brash female demanding that he join her in an illicit affair.

Ruairidh muttered a phrase he had learned from some drunken Orkney merrows and then started angrily up the trail that led to Fintry Castle. This was an outrage! It wasn’t even Johnsmas Eve— midsummer eve, the humans called it. The People should have been free to bask on the skerries and rocks for weeks yet without being molested by aggressive females! But this one had obviously decided to get a headstart on her companions and resorted to the old trick of stealing a selkie skin to get herself a lover.

What was the world coming to that first a fisherman's father should violate a century old pact against hunting, and then some over-bold female should steal his skin before Midsummer’s Eve?

Probably she was very ugly and shrewish and had need of such vile trickery to get a mate! Or maybe she was an earth-witch!

The thought made him wince. It was unjust, but the rules said that he was bound to her until his skin was returned. The consideration of her ugly nature added to his infuriation with the situation. It would be even worse if she knew some magic.

Well, he simply had to get it back. He was needed in Avocamor! He would compel her to give back his skin.

Ruairidh leapt from the rock and landed a dozen feet below on the grainy sand, his ankles untwisted and his joints unjarred.