Excerpt
The great ocean of society heaves and swirls in a maelstrom of money, power, and violence, and the ships of our lives battle across the currents and wind in a desperate attempt to dodge enemy broadsides and expel the water from past encounters. When a ship splinters apart and sinks into the depths, no one hears the cries of the drowning, for, if people were to pause in their own fight to help the fallen, they would fall as well. Society battles on in endless war, and once in a while, the survivors of a shipwreck wash up on the shore of the Enchanted Hills, an island off the coast of Northern Scotland. These survivors, having escaped society, scatter into the foothills, building a new life for themselves with their bare hands, only once in a while casting a disdainful look across the ocean at the swirling mass of humanity that continues to fight. These solitary people mix with the few native inhabitants and turn strange and quiet, seeing and hearing things the rest of the world ignores.
It was into this lonely landscape I found myself thrown one evening from a crashing wave, clinging to the last bit of a once-great ship, my clothes sodden with water and the blood of corporate battle. The business empire I had built had been attacked from so many directions it had fallen in wreck and ruin. None of the attacks had seemed connected, but the destruction had felt so finely orchestrated, so perfectly timed with deadly punches one after another, that it couldn't have been an accident. My financial ship had crashed and burned in horrendous bankruptcy. All my business and personal assets were slated to be sold off to pay my creditors. I had set out from Boston on my Princess V58 yacht on the eve of my final bankruptcy filing. I figured I'd take the gem of a boat for one last turn before the bankruptcy court claimed it. But the stateroom was as bare as my left hand where my wedding ring had sat for so many years. My husband's divorce announcement had been even more sudden than the bankruptcy, though I shouldn't have been surprised. We'd never been close. Of course, my husband would never allow himself to be caught up in the financial ruin and scandal of the bankruptcy.
My ocean crossing had been lonely, anguished, and brutally long. I hardly knew what drove me toward Scotland other than my mother had come from there—my mother, who abandoned me when I was young, leaving me to be raised by my mercilessly-corporate father. Having lost everything else, I was sailing toward some illusive connection I could not quite name. Hopes of finding my mother after all these years of silence were so slim I dared not verbalize them.
I had gone up on deck as I neared land and realized, after checking the charts, that the coastline in front of me wasn't Scotland but, instead, a large island offshore. The setting sun illuminated a land of rolling hills crowned by a tall mountain with a jagged peak, like four fingers reaching up to the sky. To my surprise, a ring of dark clouds formed around this peak. A surge of apprehension tightened my chest as lightning brightened the night and thunder rolled toward me. A wind rose, and the waves became choppy. Then, as if all the powers of darkness that had destroyed my life on land had been waiting here to finish me, the clouds billowed into a raging storm. Hurricane-force winds tore at me, driving my ship toward shore where ragged rocks like the teeth of some ocean monster waited, maw wide, to crush my boat and spew me into the water.
