2 August 950 (An Lùnastal)

The light had begun tae leave the hill before anyone came tae ask why we had stopped.

This didnae improve the branch. It remained where it had been placed, thin enough tae move wi’ one hand and important enough that three grown women stood on the wrong side of it while Brushy conducted an inspection of the other.

She vanished beneath a clump of fern, emerged wi’ a beetle between her paws, and ate it where we could see.

“She has crossed twice now,” Runa said.

“Brushy has never recognized a boundary that didnae flatter her.”

Lasair looked at the strip of wool tied near the cut end. “Mayhap this one did.”

Brushy chirred and rolled onto her back in the path.

I chose not tae ask what praise a blackthorn branch had offered her. There are questions a person may avoid if she wishes tae retain authority.

Runa pulled the blankets from our bundle and laid one over a patch of dry ground. “How long do we wait?”

“Till the Thornwife comes,” Lasair said.

“And if she does not?”

“Till we ken that too.”

Runa looked up the darkening path. “That answer has the same defect as Prasutagus’s.”

“A good answer doesnae become poor because ye dislike waiting inside it.”

“It does when night arrives first.”

They continued in this manner while I examined the land beyond the branch.

Nae visible ward stood between the thorn and the trees. Nae cold met mine. There was nae prickle over m’skin, nae pressure at m’ears, nae sense of a will pushing me away. The path continued uphill for twenty paces before bending behind hazel. Moss covered the stones. The roots beneath them lived ordinary lives.

That was almost certainly deliberate.

A wall announces itself because it expects force. A boundary such as this expected sense. I had recently acquired cause tae respect the distinction, though I didnae intend tae make a habit of admitting it.

I lowered m’hand toward the branch.

Lasair said m’name.

“I am nae crossing.”

“Ye are reaching.”

“I am looking.”

“Wi’ yer hand.”

“It is how hands are commonly used.”

Runa sat on the blanket and began cutting bread. “If you touch it and something removes the hand, I will not carry it separately.”

“I hadnae asked ye tae.”

“You rarely ask before creating work for other people.”

I withdrew m’hand. This wasnae obedience. It was a tactical decision made in the presence of two women determined tae misname it.

Brushy had stopped washing herself.

She sat beyond the branch wi’ her face turned toward the trees, tail curled tight against the ground. A note passed through her—too low tae be her song and too brief tae be called a warning. The roots beneath the path tightened.

Then a woman spoke from behind us.

“The wee one was invited.”

Runa came tae her feet wi’ the knife still in hand. Lasair turned more slowly. I brought cold up through the soil and found the woman standing inside it wi’ bare feet.

She had come along the path we had climbed. I would hae heard a mortal on the loose stone. Runa would hae heard one breathing. This woman had allowed the hill tae make room for her passage and hadnae troubled herself tae teach it noise for our benefit.

She was neither young nor old in any way I trusted. Grey ran through a braid the color of wet bark. Her brown dress had been mended at both elbows, and the hem carried mud from more than one kind of ground. A narrow knife hung at her belt beside three small linen bags. She held nae staff. She held a bundle of yarrow by the roots, soil still clinging tae them.

Her eyes moved from Runa’s knife tae Lasair’s bandaged hands, then settled on the cold whitening the stones around her feet.

“The cold one doesnae like being approached from behind,” she said.

“The cold one prefers people tae use the path in front of her.”

“I do.”

Nae stone had moved. Nae branch had broken. She offered nae explanation, and I disliked how little she needed one.

Lasair lowered her chin. “Are ye the Thornwife?”

“That is what folk call me when they hae brought a hurt they want named.”

“And when they havenae?”

“They generally dinnae climb this hill.”

Her gaze went tae Runa.

Runa sheathed the knife. “We were told you might understand a protection laid through living roots.”

“I understand many things folk call protection after the damage is done.”

It was said plainly, which made it worse than an accusation.

I let the cold sink. The woman watched it go all the way down.

“We waited at yer boundary,” Lasair said.

“Aye.”

“Ye kent we were here?”

“I kent before ye found the spring.”

The drag I had felt beneath the thorn returned tae me. “That was ye.”

“I asked the road what manner of hands were following it.”

“Ye asked the road. Nae us.”

“I touched it. Ye answered wi’ winter.”

I had nae useful reply that didnae require pretending I hadnae mistaken her touch for a threat. Runa’s mouth shifted once. Lasair found sudden interest in the wool tied around the branch.

The Thornwife passed between us, stepped over the branch, and crouched on her own side of the path. Brushy came tae her wi’out hesitation.

This betrayal was conducted wi’ haste.

The woman offered two fingers. Brushy set one paw upon them, sniffed the yarrow, then climbed the sleeve of her dress. At the woman’s shoulder, she settled beneath the loose end of the braid as though the place had been prepared precisely for her.

“She crossed before ye invited her,” I said.

“Did she?”

“I watched her.”

“Ye watched her step over wood.”

The Thornwife touched the wool. Brushy answered wi’ one soft note.

“A boundary doesnae become false because ye failed tae hear it speak,” the woman said.

Lasair looked from Brushy tae the branch. “What did it ask?”

“Whether she came hungry or hunting.”

Brushy’s jaw worked around the final portion of beetle.

“And she said?” Runa asked.

“Both.”

Runa nodded as if this were a respectable answer.

The Thornwife rose. “Who laid the working?”

“We did,” I said.

She looked from Lasair’s hands tae me.

“There is nae we in the mark ye left on it.”

The cold returned under m’heels before I called it. The Thornwife glanced down, attentive to its return.

Lasair stepped forward until her toes nearly met the blackthorn. “Sorcha held the first veil around her cottage. I guided the new working through the roots. Runa guarded us while we worked.”

“And the wee one?”

“Brushy sang.”

Brushy chirred from the woman’s shoulder.

The Thornwife inclined her head. “At least one of ye has given a whole account.”

“She is a creature wi’ limited responsibilities,” I said.

“She may be the wisest among ye.”

“That conclusion has been reached too early.”

“Wisdom often arrives before pride has finished dressing.”

Runa gave the trees her full attention wi’out moving her shoulders. I had kent her long enough tae recognize concealment when it became impolite.

The Thornwife set the yarrow upon a stone. “Tell it from the beginning. The one who first made the wall.”

I did.

I told her of the veil around m’cottage—cold drawn through stone, timber, root, and threshold until mortal notice slid away. I told her how it had held through every season since m’arrival. I told her of the bairn east of the stone and the need tae draw the protection around her home wi’out taking the home itself. I told her Lasair had found the living roots beneath both places and had shown the cold where tae go.

I told her the working had joined the two protections instead of distinguishing them. I told her it had reached north, found a grey creature and its song, and carried both tae m’door. I told her Prasutagus had returned the creature but wouldnae lay his will upon the working because it would make the bairn’s threshold answer tae him.

The Thornwife listened without interruption. This is often mistaken for courtesy. In her it felt more like a pit being allowed tae reach its intended depth.

When I finished, she asked, “Whose bairn?”

“She belongs tae the woman raising her.”

“That wasnae the question.”

“It is the answer that matters now.”

“The ground will decide that after it hears the one ye avoided.”

Lasair looked at me. Runa didnae. Runa already kent where every poor road in me began.

“She is m’daughter by blood,” I said. “Nae by claim.”

The Thornwife’s expression didnae soften. I respected her more for it and disliked her accordingly.

“Did the mother ask for yer protection?”

“She agreed tae settle near the stone under Prasutagus’s keeping.”

“Did she ask for yours?”

“Nae in those words.”

“In any words?”

I smoothed the front of m’skirt. The journey had put a tear near the hem, and this was therefore a practical act.

“She accepted that I would be near.”

“Near isnae the same as around.”

“I ken the oldest law.”

“Aye.” The Thornwife’s voice stayed quiet. “Ye ken it well enough tae choose yer words around it.”

The hill grew colder.

Brushy left her perch and returned tae mine, which demonstrated either loyalty or an instinct for the safest location during an argument wi’ winter. I accepted both.

“I took the child once,” I said. “I returned her. The law was laid upon me after.”

“By the king beneath the stone.”

“Prasutagus.”

The Thornwife’s eyes changed at the name, making room for something that hadnae been in them before.

“Does he call himself king?”

“He doesnae require the title. This is one of his more irritating qualities.”

Runa folded her arms. “He has others.”

“I had gathered.”

The Thornwife crouched again and pressed her palm tae the earth.

The ordinary roots I had felt beyond the branch answered first. Their small work came clear beneath us: water drawn upward, stone avoided, rot opened and used. Then her awareness moved farther. I couldnae see it, yet I felt the land lean in the direction of her hand. It went south beneath the path, past the spring, down through the miles we had climbed.

Lasair inhaled.

The Thornwife lifted her hand before the reach found the broken thread.

“The wound is still moving,” she said.

“It didnae move toward us at the spring,” I said.

“Ye felt it there.”

“A roughness. Nae more.”

“And ye left that from yer telling.”

“I didnae ken what it was.”

“Not knowing doesnae make a truth smaller. It makes the space around it larger.”

I had the distinct impression the entire hill had arranged itself tae agree with her.

The Thornwife held out one dirt-marked hand tae Lasair. “Yours.”

Lasair glanced at the branch.

“Ye may reach across,” the Thornwife said. “Ye may not step.”

Lasair put her bandaged hands over it. The Thornwife took the right one, turned it palm upward, and began unwinding the linen.

Runa moved nearer. “Those are split.”

“I see that.”

“They were clean this morning.”

The Thornwife examined the dirt worked through the new wrapping. “The morning hasnae remained.”

Runa accepted this as a criticism of time rather than her care, which was generous of her.

The linen came away wet with fresh blood. The swelling had gone dark around two joints, and cold lived in the cracks despite the day’s heat.

The Thornwife laid one yarrow root across Lasair’s palm.

It curled.

Nae wind touched it. The fine white roots drew toward the wounds as though seeking water, then recoiled from the cold inside them.

“Ye put yer hands where the cold entered the living root,” the Thornwife said.

“Aye.”

“What did ye ask before ye touched it?”

Lasair’s brow furrowed. “I listened.”

“That isnae asking.”

“I told it what we needed carried.”

“What did ye offer?”

“My blood, by the end.”

“Blood taken by a wound is a cost. It isnae a gift.”

Lasair’s fingers closed slightly beneath the root. “I didnae mean tae give it anything.”

“There.”

The Thornwife wound the linen back around Lasair’s hand, slower and looser than Runa had. “Ye poured winter intae a road and called it a gate. Winter doesnae care who walks through.”

“Sorcha’s cold was the protection,” Lasair said. “The roots were only tae carry it farther.”

“Only.” The Thornwife tucked the end of the bandage beneath Lasair’s wrist. “A root remembers every hand that asks it tae carry something. Yours asked twice and told the truth neither time.”

Lasair’s face tightened. “I didnae lie.”

“Ye said carry. Ye meant choose.”

Nae one breathed a word.

Below the path, a root shifted beneath stone.

The Thornwife released Lasair and turned tae Runa. “And ye?”

“I kept watch.”

“Wi’ an axe?”

“Yes.”

“Axes are poor tools for speaking tae roots.”

“They are useful when the danger has legs.”

A breath left Lasair that might hae become laughter if she had trusted the moment more.

The Thornwife regarded Runa for a long while. “Ye hae been carried by a working before.”

Runa’s arms unfolded.

It was the first true surprise the woman had drawn from any of us, and she noted it wi’out satisfaction.

“How do you know that?” Runa asked.

“The road kens yer shape.”

Runa looked down at the ground. “A thread pulled me from the coast in March.”

“Did it ask?”

“No.”

“Did it mean ye harm?”

“Still, no.”

“Did meaning alter where ye woke?”

Runa’s gaze returned tae the Thornwife. “No.”

“Then ye are not merely the hand wi’ the axe. Ye are what happens when a road is permitted tae choose for the traveler.”

Runa took this wi’out defense. It was one of the reasons she remained dangerous. She didnae waste strength arguing wi’ a blade already through the armor.

“The creature the roots carried to Sorcha lived,” she said. “It was frightened, but we returned it.”

“Who held it?”

“I did.”

“Who fed it?”

Runa looked at me.

“I placed bread near it,” I said.

The Thornwife waited.

“And moved away so it would take it.”

Runa arranged her face into perfect unconcern.

I pointed at her. “That detail wasnae required.”

“That is the first useful thing I hae heard about the hand that made yer wall.”

The insult took a moment tae arrange itself. “Feeding a creature isnae wardcraft.”

“Nae. Moving back was.”

Brushy climbed from m’shoulder tae the top of m’head. I allowed this because removing her would hae suggested disturbance.

The Thornwife sat on the stone beside the yarrow. Darkness had gathered under the hazel, but the path around her remained visible. It wasnae light. The land simply refused tae hide what she had decided we should see.

“The ground hasnae rejected yer working,” she said. “It is still deciding whether ye meant it kindly.”

“We meant tae guard a wee bairn,” Lasair said.

“One of ye meant tae guard. One meant tae carry. One meant tae keep the others alive. The small one meant tae sing. The roots received four truths and a command strong enough tae drown three of them.”

Her eyes came back tae me.

“Yer cold did what cold does. It covered. It held. It made the land inhospitable tae what ye feared. But a living road doesnae become a wall because winter lies upon it. It carries touch. It carries hunger. It carries grief. It carries whatever recognizes itself along the way.”

“And songs,” I said.

“And songs.”

“How do we make it ken the difference?”

“That is a different question from how ye close it.”

“We need both answered.”

“A hungry woman needs bread and patience. She doesnae get more bread because she refuses the second.”

I had begun tae understand why folk called her by a title rather than risk learning what her mother had named her.

Runa glanced at the sky. “Will you come and look at it?”

The Thornwife’s gaze moved across the three of us, then tae Brushy balanced in m’hair.

“At dawn.”

“We leave now,” I said.

Lasair closed her eyes.

The Thornwife didnae. “Then ye leave wi’out me.”

“The bairn is held inside a working ye say is still moving.”

“The bairn has remained held through the two days it took ye tae reach me. The working is moving, but it isnae failing this night. A few more hours of frightened haste willnae make yer hands wiser.”

“I can take us by an older road.”

That caught her.

Only briefly. Her eyes shifted toward the dark between the trees, where the world had folded for me long before there were paths on this hill. Then the branch reclaimed her attention.

“Can ye carry all who came?”

“Aye.”

“Can ye carry one who doesnae agree tae be carried?”

I said naething.

Runa sat down on the blanket again. “We leave at dawn.”

There are mutinies conducted wi’ shouting, weapons, and blood. This one required only a Norsewoman taking off her boots.

Lasair sat beside her.

The Thornwife leaned across the branch and moved the bundle of yarrow out of the path. She didnae move the branch itself.

“Ye may make a fire on that side,” she said. “Small. There is dry wood beneath the fallen pine behind ye. Dinnae cut the rowan.”

“We saw nae rowan,” Lasair said.

“Then ye are especially unfit tae cut it.”

Runa put her boots beside the blanket. “Will you eat with us?”

The Thornwife considered the bread.

M’bread had endured two days, one hill, and Runa’s opinion of how tightly it should be packed. It was still bread in the natural sense.

“I will bring broth,” she said.

“A wise woman,” Runa replied.

The Thornwife rose and walked uphill. Brushy watched her go from m’head, then chirred once in the direction of the bundle.

“Dinnae,” I said.

She went after the beetles beneath it.

Lasair began gathering the dry wood we had failed tae see. Runa cut the bread into pieces small enough that broth might forgive them. I remained before the blackthorn branch.

The wool moved although the air didnae.

Beneath the ground, the roots on either side touched without crossing, lives joined where nae boundary could be drawn cleanly between them. The branch had never stopped that joining. It had told those who approached what kind of joining was permitted.

I wasnae fond of the elegance of it.

The Thornwife’s voice came from beyond the bend.

“I said I would look. I didnae promise tae mend.”

“I heard the distinction,” I called.

“Aye,” she said. “The roots didnae.”

These journals remain free tae any soul that finds the road through the pines. The keeping of them is nae small labour — long nights at the page, the remembering, the sorting of what happened from what the wind’s rearranged since. If the telling’s worth a coin or two a month tae ye, a paid subscription’s what keeps it coming, and keeps the gate open for those that hae none tae spare. And if ye’ve nothing tae give, give it nae mind — sit by the fire regardless. Ye’ll owe me naething for it, and we’ll call it even.

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1–2 August 950 (An Lùnastal)

Lasair set off north before the rest of us had agreed tae follow.

She kent north and two women who had sought the Thornwife and returned better for it. Runa regarded this as several fewer certainties than a sensible journey required.

“Where does it end?” she asked Prasutagus.

His gaze followed the root as it crept between the stones. “I know only the direction it has chosen.”

“That isnae an answer,” I said.

“It is the answer I possess.”

Lasair had already reached the trees. Her hands were still wrapped from the six days she had spent working the veil through the roots beneath m’cottage. Summer warms most of the Reach, but the ground around m’home keeps m’cold in every season, whether I attend it or no. The working had carried that cold farther. Lasair had put her bare hands into it until her knuckles split, listened wi’ care each time we told her tae let them close, then gone back tae the ground.

She looked over one shoulder. “Are ye coming?”

“Aye,” I said.

“I was asking Runa.”

Runa passed me wi’out the courtesy of hiding her satisfaction.

We went home long enough tae gather bread, blankets, water, spare linen, and one of Runa’s axes. When she reached for the larger, Lasair pointed out that it would catch on every low branch between the Reach and wherever the Thornwife had hidden herself. Runa replied that only careless people walked beneath branches wi’out looking, so Lasair held out her hand and waited while Runa considered whether the forest might be persuaded tae alter its habits.

In the end, Runa gave her the smaller axe. Lasair bound it outside the bundle we had rolled our shared provisions into, then shouldered the whole before either of us could object.

Runa’s compliance wasnae surrender—Runa doesnae surrender—but she will permit another person tae be right once there is nae longer time tae punish them for it.

We left at dawn.

Prasutagus watched the stone. Naebody watched m’door, and I carried the sum of that north wi’ me.

Through the first morning, the pale root he had uncovered gave us our direction. I could feel the wrongness of our working moving beneath the ordinary roots: the veil stretched between Lyra’s home and mine, and from that joining a thin thread drew north. It wasnae a path a boot could follow. It bent under trees, vanished beneath rock, divided around water, and met itself often enough tae prove that roots hae nae respect for a person trying tae travel above them.

Lasair let the thread concern itself wi’ direction and followed the land. When it pulled straight through a bog, she took us round on higher ground; when it sank beneath a burn, she found the stones where feet had crossed before. She watched for old cuts in hazel, peat pressed dark beneath grass, and stones stacked by hands rather than weather. The root could tell us north remained the right answer. Lasair kept our legs unbroken while we went there.

I yielded the lead wi’ uncommon grace.

Nae one remarked upon this, which was how I kent they had noticed.

Near midday, Lasair stopped us before a strip of heather gave way beneath her boot. A narrow wash lay hidden below, deep enough tae break a leg and inconveniently short of killing anyone outright.

Runa leaned over it. “I would have seen that.”

“Mayhap,” Lasair admitted. “Now ye neednae.”

Runa crossed where Lasair pointed. Once we were over, she looked back at the bank rather than letting the matter rest, because she has never been able tae leave a bruise unpressed when it is her own.

“You saw the ground change?”

“The heather grows longer where the bank has fallen away.”

Runa studied the slope until she found the difference. The nod she gave Lasair was small, but Lasair took it for what it was and went on. “What it was” SEEMS OVERKILL the next paragraph explains it but it still feels a little overkill, but it also feels like something should replace it. Not simply removed.

There are people who turn being right intae a feast and invite the village. Lasair took nae more from it than she needed. This may be why Runa followed her wi’out argument for the rest of the morning. It may also be why I disliked them both a little before dinner.

As the day warmed, the thread weakened beneath the ground. I could still find it when I stopped and reached for the veil, but it nae longer pulled steadily ahead. Other roots crossed it. Water ran above and below it. The farther we went from the Reach, the less the land cared which part of its life I had come tae name.

I told Lasair I was losing the feel of it before it vanished entirely.

“Can ye still find it?”

“If I stand still and listen.”

“Then it can tell us when we’ve gone wrong.”

“It cannae tell us where tae put our feet.”

“That is why ye brought mine.”

She continued down through the alder toward the sound of water, having settled the division of labour tae her own satisfaction.

We found the spring in a hollow of black rock. A woman knelt beside it wi’ a bairn of six or seven winters held between her knees. His left sleeve had been rolled above the elbow. The skin around the joint was red and raised, and he wore the furious expression a wean wears who had been told a necessary hurt would be a small one.

Lasair stopped us above the hollow.

“Let her finish,” she whispered.

The woman dipped a narrow strip of wool intae the spring. She laid the wet cloth over the boy’s arm and pressed it gently along the reddened skin. His shoulder rose toward his ear. She put her other hand against the back of his neck and spoke too softly for us tae hear.

I caught nae name in the prayer, only the rhythm of the asking.

“What is she doing?” Runa asked.

“Asking the water tae draw the heat,” Lasair said.

Below us, the woman wet the wool again and passed it once more over the boy’s arm.

“Will it?”

“It may ease him. It may do naething. The asking isnae a bargain.”

The woman wrung the cloth over the rock, then helped the child stand and led him tae a thorn growing out of the bank, its roots bared where the spring had washed the earth away. Other scraps hung from its living branches, some dark wi’ weather and others worn near on tae thread.

She tied the wet wool tae a low branch wi’ one knot.

“The cloth touched the hurt,” Lasair murmured. “She leaves it where living root and running water meet, so whatever the water has loosened neednae be carried home.”

The woman touched two fingers tae her brow and breast. Then she laid her palm against the thorn’s trunk and bowed her head.

Runa watched the whole of it. “She makes the Christian sign and leaves the cloth to the tree.”

“Aye.”

“Does her priest approve?”

“I didnae ask him.”

Runa considered this. “Then he has been spared the work of being wrong.”

The boy’s arm remained red. He leaned against his mother while she gathered a cup and a small leather bundle. Whatever relief the rite offered hadnae arranged itself intae a miracle for the benefit of three women watching from the trees.

That made it easier tae trust.

When the woman stood, Lasair stepped onto the slope wi’ enough noise tae announce us. The mother turned at once and put the boy behind her.

“Peace tae ye,” Lasair said. She kept her hands where the woman could see them and didnae approach the spring.

The woman looked from Lasair’s bandaged knuckles tae Runa’s axe, then tae me. Her gaze lingered on the last. Mortal eyes often find cold before they find the person carrying it.

“And tae ye,” she said, though she hadnae yet decided whether she meant it.

“We’re seeking the healer they call the Thornwife.”

The woman’s hand tightened on her son’s shoulder. “Why?”

She wished tae know whether we meant the healer harm, and Lasair answered just as plainly.

“We laid a protection through living roots. It joined two places we meant tae keep separate, and it carried someone where they didnae belong. We need a hand that understands boundaries better than ours.”

“Did the one it carried live?” the woman asked.

“We returned him,” Runa said.

Her English lay clean-edged against the rougher speech around it, but the woman understood. Some truths require less familiarity than others.

“And ye left the road open?” she asked.

“We couldnae close it wi’out risking the child it guards,” Lasair said.

The woman’s hand eased.

“Keep this burn on yer right,” she told us. “Tomorrow ye’ll find a birch split white by lightning where the water turns east. There are two paths beyond it. Take the narrow one uphill. The broad path goes tae grazing ground and ends there.”

Lasair repeated the directions back. The woman corrected her once: the birch stood after the bend, nae before it.

“How far beyond the path?” I asked.

“Far enough that ye’ll want it tae hae been the other one.”

That was the first thing she said which might hae been intended as wisdom. It was also plainly a complaint about the hill, and therefore useful.

The boy peered around her skirt at Brushy, who was peering back from beneath m’hair.

“What is that?” he asked.

“Judgment,” I said.

Brushy chirred. The boy smiled, and his mother tried not tae.

Lasair thanked her, and we stood aside while they climbed out of the hollow. The boy looked back twice. Brushy endured the admiration as her due.

At the spring, I knelt beside the exposed roots and found our thread again. The running water had hidden its feel rather than broken it; beneath the thorn, it bent north, faint but certain.

Something roughened along it.

The touch was gone before I could follow. I felt nae voice and nae movement toward the Reach, only a brief drag against the grain, as though a far branch had shifted where there was no wind.

Brushy lifted her head.

“What?” Runa asked.

“I dinnae ken.” I kept m’fingers over the root a moment longer, but naething answered. “It may hae been water.”

Runa looked at the still leaves above the spring. “Water does not move branches.”

“Then it may hae been a branch.”

“That is not at all better.”

“I didnae claim it was.”

Lasair waited until I stood. “Did it come nearer?”

“Nae.”

“Then we keep moving.”

Lasair left me kneeling at the spring and trusted me tae follow.

The ground rose through the afternoon. The burn stayed on our right, simple enough that even I could hae led us, though neither of them offered me the chance. Trees closed around the water and opened again on wet stretches where the wind took hold of our skirts and Runa’s cloak. Lasair’s bandages darkened at the knuckles. She kept her hands moving whenever one of us appeared tae look too closely—lifting branches, testing stone, adjusting the strap of the supply bundle she had claimed at dawn.

Near dusk, her right hand failed tae close around it. The strap slipped, and Runa caught it before the bundle reached the ground.

“I can carry it,” Lasair said.

“You have carried it.”

Lasair reached with the hand that had just failed her. Runa moved the bundle tae her far shoulder.

“If you split the wounds deeper, you will reach the Thornwife unable to touch the work you brought her to see. Carrying this farther would be foolish.”

“I heard ye before ye added the insult.”

“Good.”

Lasair let her keep it.

We made camp beneath three pines whose roots had lifted a shelf of dry ground. Runa cleared fallen needles while I set the fire. Lasair sat near enough tae the light for us tae see fresh blood through her wrappings and attempted tae look occupied.

“Give them here,” Runa said.

“They’re m’hands.”

“Yes. Give me the wrappings.”

Lasair looked tae me for support, which was an error. I had watched her put split skin back intae ground that kept m’cold more faithfully than it kept the season.

“I can freeze them tae yer knees until she’s finished,” I offered.

Lasair reluctantly gave Runa her hands.

Runa unwound the linen. The cracks across Lasair’s knuckles had opened and filled wi’ dirt from the road, so she washed them wi’ the last warm water in the cup, slow enough not tae tear the skin farther. I cooled the swelling. Runa bound each hand again and left the fingers free.

Nae one named this as care. Lasair could endure having dirt washed out of a wound; she would hae objected strenuously tae the other thing.

The moon rose near whole. Its light held the open ground beyond the pines in a pale shape after sunset, while the shadows beneath the branches remained black enough tae hide poor decisions. Brushy spent some time attempting tae catch a strip of moonlight where it crossed Runa’s boot. Each time it shifted away, she blamed the boot.

Lasair slept first. She had led since dawn and spent the last stretch insisting she wasnae tired, which is a reliable method of identifying a tired person.

Runa sat across the fire wi’ her knife and whetstone.

“That blade was sharp yesterday,” I said.

“It has had a difficult day.”

“It hasnae left its sheath.”

“It was forced to listen to you.”

I let that pass. Pride may be asked tae wait when the other person is putting an edge on steel.

The whetstone moved once along the blade, then her hand stopped.

“Can you still feel Lyra?”

“Aye.”

The thread tae m’bairn lay under every other sensation, distant but present. Our poor veil still held around her. I couldnae tell whether that comforted me or merely gave m’fear a more exact place tae sit.

Runa set the whetstone down and came round the fire. When she sat beside me, our shoulders touched through the wool.

There had been a time when I knew how tae inhabit the silence between us. Since she had carried Eithne across the country and put Lyra back intae her arms, it had acquired edges. This one kept them, but Runa stayed within reach of me and asked for naething.

After a while, she drew the blanket higher over Lasair’s shoulder.

“Sleep,” she said. “I will take the first watch.”

“I am nae tired.”

“Then lie down and remain awake where I do not have to listen to you.”

I did as she asked, though I stayed awake long enough tae mark that she hadnae moved away.

By morning, the fire was ash and the sky had gone thin and colorless. We followed the burn until the hills closed around it. Near midday, the water bent east, and we found the lightning-struck birch after the bend, exactly where the lass had said. White wood showed through a black split in its trunk.

Beyond it lay two paths. The broad one ran dry and level beside the water; the narrow one climbed through thorn and loose stone.

“She may hae lied,” I said.

Lasair took the narrow path.

Runa shifted the bundle on her shoulder. “You only think that because the truth is uphill.”

“Truth has nae cause tae be so badly placed.”

The climb took the rest of the day’s good temper. Thorn caught at m’skirt and Runa’s sleeves. The burn fell out of sight below us, though we could still hear it striking rock. Brushy went ahead through the branches, where being the size of a grievance proved useful.

Late in the afternoon, Lasair stopped.

A blackthorn branch no thicker than m’wrist lay across the path. Someone had cut it cleanly and set it there wi’ the thorns turned toward us, then tied a single strip of undyed wool near the cut end.

There was room tae step around it, as Brushy had already demonstrated. She sat on the far side washing one paw, unimpressed by human arrangements.

Lasair didnae cross.

“Is it hers?” Runa asked.

“I dinnae ken.” Lasair crouched wi’out touching the branch. “But someone set it tae be seen.”

“The woman said the path led to the Thornwife.”

“She said it led toward her. That isnae the same as being welcomed through.”

I reached beneath the ground. Our root-thread still lay behind us, faint from distance. Ahead, I could feel ordinary roots, water, stone, and all the small lives working through soil, but they offered neither invitation nor warning. I could name naething there wi’out making more of it than I kent.

Lasair stood. “We wait here till someone moves it or comes tae ask why we’ve stopped.”

I looked at the branch. It wouldnae hae barred a bairn and hadnae barred Brushy, yet the woman we sought dealt in boundaries. We had come because the last boundary we made didnae understand the difference between a wall and a road.

Runa lowered our bundle beside the path.

I didnae cross.

These journals remain free tae any soul that finds the road through the pines. The keeping of them is nae small labour — long nights at the page, the remembering, the sorting of what happened from what the wind’s rearranged since. If the telling’s worth a coin or two a month tae ye, a paid subscription’s what keeps it coming, and keeps the gate open for those that hae none tae spare. And if ye’ve nothing tae give, give it nae mind — sit by the fire regardless. Ye’ll owe me naething for it, and we’ll call it even.

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The creature sang in m’bairn’s voice.

It gave me one clear note and broke it across a throat never made for human sound. Lyra’s thread pulled tight beneath m’ribs. Brushy came off m’shoulder in a black rush, and I caught her before she reached the ground.

The creature folded farther in upon itself. Its long arms came over its head. The smile vanished, and that saved it.

I willnae claim mercy arrived before sense. I had frost halfway across the clearing and enough grief in me tae finish the distance. Then it cowered beside m’door, making itself small in a body poorly suited tae the attempt, and I saw fear where I had expected appetite.

“Dinnae sing that again.”

Its head lifted between its wrists.

“Ye hear me?”

The black eyes moved from me tae Brushy. Brushy strained between m’hands wi’ every part of her fixed upon murder.

“She isnae a useful example,” I said. “Look at me.”

It did, then sang the note again.

I put a ring of frost around it.

The creature watched the white rise out of the earth, reached one grey finger toward the edge, and stopped before touching it. The restraint might hae been intelligence. It might hae been fear. I credited it wi’ both and trusted neither.

Behind me, the cottage stood exposed.

I reached for the old veil and closed m’hand on naething. Near on a year before, I had drawn the working close around the clearing and settled it intae every root, stone, and threshold I could touch. It had become so constant I had ceased tae feel it at all.

Deep under the soil, the old working stirred along one root and failed tae reach the next.

I set m’hand against the lintel and pushed cold down through the wood. The cottage answered. The ground didnae. Frost climbed the doorpost, crossed the sill, and died where the roots should hae taken it.

The grey visitor made a low sound.

It wasnae the song this time. I was grateful enough for that tae resent it.

“What are ye?”

It lowered one hand and pressed its palm flat tae the earth.

“That is nae an answer.”

Its fingers made one line through the dirt, then a second branching from it. A third bent back toward the cottage and ended at the frost.

I looked from the marks tae the ground beneath m’boots.

“Oh, dinnae ye start.”

It drew the first line again.

I spent the rest of the night outside wi’ a guest I hadnae invited, a veil that had forgotten its work, and Brushy conducting a private war from the roof. The visitor made nae further attempt tae sing. It made nae attempt tae cross the frost either. When I set bread beyond the ring, it stared at me until I moved away, then took the piece and held it against its chest.

It didnae eat, which troubled me more than if it had.

At intervals it drew a new path through the soil. Each reached the frost, stopped, and began again from another root. By the fourth attempt I quit pretending I couldnae see what it was doing. It was looking for a way home.

I didnae move the frost. Mercy has limits, and mine had already worked through half the night.

By dawn the white had melted everywhere save the circle. The grey stranger remained inside it, bread held in both hands. It had drawn roots over near half the clearing.

Runa arrived first. Lasair came behind her wi’ both hands wrapped.

Runa stopped at the edge of the clearing.

Her hand went tae her knife.

“It hasnae harmed anyone,” I said.

“You?”

“I am included in anyone, mind.”

Runa looked at the frost, the drawings, and the bread in the stranger’s hands.

“You fed it.”

“I placed bread near it and stood well back.”

“You moved away so it would take the bread.”

“I wanted tae see whether it ate.”

“And you wanted it not to fear you.”

“I had enough fear for the both of us.”

Lasair went past her She didnae approach the stranger. She crouched at the first of the lines it had drawn and set two fingers beside it.

“Did ye make these?”

“I spent the night exercising remarkable restraint. I had nae time left for drawing.”

Its mouth opened. “Nae,” I told it, and it closed its mouth.

Runa took her hand from the knife. “It understands you.”

“So does Prasutagus. Understanding has never made him cooperative.”

She came nearer. The visitor watched her boots until they stopped, then raised its head and held it there. Runa went down on one knee beyond the frost.

“Were you brought here?”

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The stranger pressed the bread harder tae its chest.

“Runa,” I said, “if it could answer sensible questions, I wouldnae hae waited for sunrise tae ask them.”

“You began with what are you.”

“A perfectly sensible question.”

“For a horse trader.”

Lasair covered her mouth wi’ the back of one hand. It did little tae hide what she was doing.

The visitor shifted. Its knee crossed one of the lines scratched in the soil. The note came out of it again, quieter now.

Lyra’s thread drew tight in me.

Lasair’s hand dropped.

“There,” she said.

Runa looked at her. “What?”

“It didnae find the song.” Lasair moved her fingers along its first mark until they met a root rising near the surface. “The working carried it.”

I looked at our guest. “The veil meant tae keep listeners away has brought one tae m’door.”

“Mayhap.”

“Lasair.”

“I willnae make certainty from one note because ye prefer yer bad news tidy.”

She dug carefully beside the root. The soil came loose in dry clumps despite the damp morning. Beneath it, a fine pale strand ran north across the clearing. Lasair followed it wi’ her finger until it vanished under another root.

“I hae heard of a working moving through living ground,” she said. “Nae here.”

“Call yer veil.”

“It is gone.”

“Call what remains.”

I set m’palm tae the lintel again. Runa rose and moved beside the grey stranger. She didnae cross the frost. She simply stood near enough that it quit folding in on itself.

I pushed cold through the cottage.

The working answered weakly. Frost traced the doorpost and slipped beneath m’hand. This time Lasair caught the movement under the earth. She turned her wrist, guiding it along the pale strand.

The old veil lifted around the clearing.

For one breath it stood where it had always stood, thin and wavering between the trees.

The weight around Lyra vanished.

The wound beneath m’ribs opened so quickly I near lost m’feet. Beyond the trees, her thread flared bare and bright. Our visitor cried out. Its arms went wide, the bread fell, and every line it had drawn cut deeper through the soil.

“Let go,” Lasair said.

I had already done it.

The veil around m’cottage collapsed. The weight settled around Lyra again, poor and strained but present.

Runa caught the long-limbed body before its head struck the ground. It clung tae her forearm. She shifted its weight against her hip, found room for every elbow and knee, and let it hold on.

Lasair sat back on her heels.

“Say it,” I told her.

“We didnae make two.”

Nae bird called from the trees. Even Brushy had stopped her pacing on the roof.

Lasair rubbed dirt from her fingers. “The old veil and the new one are the same working now. We pulled strength through the roots from here tae there. When ye raise one, the other gives.”

“Then we cut them apart.”

“At which end?”

“Between.”

She pointed tae the roots around us. “Show me between.”

I looked down.

Our guest had scratched branches across branches, every line meeting another before it left the clearing. I couldnae tell which one led tae Lyra. I couldnae tell which belonged tae the cottage. The roots had nae reason tae care for the difference.

Runa ran her thumb over the creature’s narrow wrist. “A rope tied between two ships pulls both when one founders.”

“Which one is sinking?” I asked.

Lasair looked toward the dark trees between m’cottage and Lyra’s house.

“Both.”

Runa bent and retrieved the bread. The visitor took it from her and tucked it beneath one arm.

“What the sea casts onto the wrong shore is not an invader,” she said.

“The sea generally has the decency tae drown it first.”

“The sea has no decency. That is why sensible people respect it.”

She lifted it. One arm went beneath its knees, the other behind its back. Folded against her, it weighed little more than wet kindling.

“What are ye doing?”

“Taking it with us.”

“We are nae keeping it.”

“No. We are returning what your wall carried.”

I had never once reached down that root.

Runa kent this. Lasair kent it. Brushy said so at length from the roof, in the voice she keeps for m’worst moments.

“It came tae m’door,” I said.

“Because you fetched it.”

“I didnae.”

Runa adjusted the long grey legs over her arm. “Then your wall has worse manners than you do.”

I followed her intae the trees wi’out another word.

We went tae the stone before the day warmed. Brushy came off the roof as we left and took her place at m’throat.

Prasutagus was standing when we found him.

“Set it down,” he said.

“I hae spent the morning being ordered about by people who refuse tae explain themselves.”

“Then thou art practiced.”

Runa lowered the visitor beside the stone. It kept one hand hooked in the leather at her knee and the bread tucked beneath its other arm.

Prasutagus came down, crouched, and pressed his palm tae the earth. The visitor’s free hand hovered above the soil before settling beside his.

The hum under the stone roughened. A pale root pushed against the soil between their fingers, ran north and east, then bent back beneath the Reach.

Lasair knelt and scraped the earth away from it. I felt the path a breath later. The working had run along that root, gathered the creature and its song, and borne both tae m’door.

Prasutagus rose. “Thou hast built a road and named it a wall.”

“We did what ye gave us leave tae do.”

“Thou didst what thou understood.”

“I am finding that distinction tiresome.”

“It remains.”

Lasair stayed down by the root. “Can the two be separated?”

“Yes.”

The answer came so easily I disliked it before he finished giving it.

“Then separate them,” I said.

“No.”

The ground chilled beneath m’boots. I held the frost where it was.

“Ye hae made yer point wi’ that word,” I said. “Find another.”

Prasutagus dragged his fingers through the soil. The exposed root shuddered.

“A working remembers the hand that gives it shape. If I lay my will upon this one, it will answer to me before it answers to thee. The child’s threshold would fall within my keeping.”

“Ye keep the stone already.”

“I keep what was given into my care. I will not take what was not.”

M’teeth closed on the answer I had ready.

The visitor crumbled a corner from the bread and tucked the piece intae the earth beside the root.

“It belongs far from here,” Prasutagus said. “Thy working found it along a root that had no place in thy design. The root knew connection. It knew nothing of thy boundary.”

“Can ye send it home?”

“I can return this one.”

Runa folded her arms. “And when the road reaches another?”

“Then another will come.”

Lyra sang somewhere beyond the trees.

The note passed faintly through the ground. Brushy’s claws tightened once at m’throat. The visitor bent over the root and answered in its broken imitation of m’bairn’s voice.

Prasutagus laid two fingers beside its hand. The root drew taut enough tae show white through the soil.

The visitor rose. It pressed the bread intae Runa’s palm and didnae release it until her fingers closed. Then it went behind the stone.

I followed, expecting the long limbs tae appear on the other side. The root beneath m’feet drew away from the Reach. Naething followed it back.

“Ye told me what yer hand would do,” I said. “Ye havenae told me why there is nae other use for it.”

Prasutagus drew a second line through the soil, then three more branching from it.

“Because mine is not the hand the stone calls.”

“It called Lyra.”

“Yes.”

“It called tae me as well.”

“Long before thou knewest to hear it.”

The cold under m’boots eased.

“Boudicca did not set one road within the stone and command all old power to walk it.” He touched each of the branches in turn. “She made a place where roads might meet when they were needed. Thy wall has asked a question none of thee can answer. The roots have carried it farther.”

“Tae whom?”

“I know only that they have begun.”

“Names come off the threads of the stone,” I said. “Those were yer words.”

“And the ground reaches where it will. Those were also my words.”

“Ye are intolerable in full.”

“I am aware.”

Lasair rubbed both hands down the front of her skirt. Two dark marks followed them.

“There may be someone who can read what the roots hae made,” she said.

“Who?” I asked.

“A woman. Flesh and blood, so far as any tale agrees. I havenae met her. I ken those who hae gone tae her. Folk seek her when a well turns against a house, or a boundary moves in the night, or roots begin carrying what they shouldnae.”

“Druid work,” Runa said.

“Aye,” Lasair said. “Though call it that where the kirk can hear ye and she willnae let ye near her door.”

I had heard druids spoken of as dead men and older laws, never as a woman wi’ a door tae knock on. The kirk held they were gone. The kirk holds many useful beliefs about what it has failed tae kill.

“Where?” I asked.

“North.”

“There is a great deal of north.”

“She prefers it that way.”

“And her name?”

“They call her the Thornwife.”

“That isnae a name.”

“It is the only one she permits.”

At m’feet, the pale root split the soil and crept north wi’out waiting for our agreement.

These journals remain free tae any soul that finds the road through the pines. The keeping of them is nae small labour — long nights at the page, the remembering, the sorting of what happened from what the wind’s rearranged since. If the telling’s worth a coin or two a month tae ye, a paid subscription’s what keeps it coming, and keeps the gate open for those that hae none tae spare. And if ye’ve nothing tae give, give it nae mind — sit by the fire regardless. Ye’ll owe me naething for it, and we’ll call it even.

Subscribe now

🏰If this drew you in, Sorcha’s world is still moving—step into Soul Castle: The Guardian & The Keeper, a series on Amazon: HERE

July 24 950 (An t-Iuchar)

Twenty-four days since I last saw m’bairn. I had felt each one land.

There are those who will tell ye grief grows easier wi’ the wearing. They are either liars or they hae been handed a gentler grief than mine, and I hae never had much patience for the one sort nor much use for the other. Mine didnae soften. It went restless, which is far worse company tae keep in a cottage so wee.

The missing of Lyra I could endure. I did endure it, every day of it, because the only other course was tae break m’word and prove Prasutagus right in every insufferable notion he had ever held of me. I could wake wi’ the pull of her already sitting under m’ribs, carry it the length of the day, and lie down at night kenning another woman’s face was the last thing she saw before sleep. All of that I could bear.

What I couldnae bear was doing naething about any of it. I hae never been gifted at the business of doing naething. It is the one discipline I never troubled tae learn.

The pages before this one will be of little use tae anyone who comes after, and I willnae pretend otherwise. I apologize for them. Lasair doesnae. Runa holds there is naething wrong wi’ her own hand, and that any reader who cannae make sense of it should learn tae read. Brushy has added several contributions, and those, I am sorry tae report, are the clearest marks on the page.

There are trees drawn there, and streams, and three separate attempts at the Reach itself that agree wi’ one another on naething. One page carries a quarrel Runa and Lasair conducted entirely in charcoal, line scored over line until the vellum near gave way beneath them. M’own hand is nae better. I found a sentence yesterday that begins if the roots carry it and ends underneath a drawing of Runa putting a blade intae something. I nae longer remember what she meant tae kill. This troubles me, for at the time I plainly judged it worth the ink.

We were nae clever, whatever the pages might suggest tae a kind reader. We were desperate and busy both, which can pass for cleverness in poor light.

The idea was simple, as the worst of m’ideas always are.

I wanted a wall around m’bairn.

The first time I said it aloud tae anyone who mattered was the morning after I left the cottage and walked out tae the stone. I went tae Prasutagus full of purpose. I came away wi’ a good deal less of it than I had carried out.

I told him what I meant tae do with the roads and thresholds beyond Lyra herself. I couldnae enter her life. The ground her feet would cross was another matter.

He asked what I meant tae guard.

“The land.”

He waited.

“The roads. The house. The ground between them.”

“And from what wouldst thou guard them?”

“Everything.”

His hand settled flat against the stone at his side. Prasutagus doesnae startle. A person could tell him the sea had climbed a mountain and he would weigh it a while before asking whether the mountain had objected. But the hand moved, and I marked it.

“Everything is a broad enemy,” he said.

“I am aware.”

“Thou canst not bar the world because thou fearest what it may do to one child.”

“I can try.”

His fingers pressed harder against the stone.

I stopped. So did he. We stood a moment in the silence he keeps for making other folk uneasy, a silence that has never worked on me half so well as he believes.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“Ye touched the stone.”

“I often touch the stone.”

“Nae like that.”

He took his hand away, which was worse.

“What do ye ken?”

“Less than thou creditest me with. Names come off the threads of the stone, and the ground reaches where it will. Neither tells me what is sent and what is merely blown here. I do not know what I felt just now. I know only that thy words stirred the same threads.”

“I despise ye.”

“I am aware.”

I had gone tae him wanting a useful place tae set m’grief down. I came home wondering why the oldest creature I kent had heard the words a wall around m’bairn and shut clean up, as though I had blundered ontae the right question by accident and he hadnae yet decided whether tae answer it.

The wall didnae become a plan until Lyra began tae sing.

She had sung before. It was how I found her at all: a child’s voice carried down an old thread, farther than any voice so small had any right tae reach, and I had followed it because I wanted proof of what I already believed. Now she sang because she was a bairn, and bairns sing before anyone has taught them they might be overheard.

The stone heard her.

I felt the first answer from m’own hearth, the forest lying dark between. It came up through the Reach as a low stirring under everything, so faint I took it for m’own wanting at first. Then Lyra’s thread brightened in me, and out past the trees the stone answered her voice with recognition, deep and patient, older than any word for it.

The second time she sang, Lasair felt it. The third, Runa did. By the fifth, something else had felt it too. We never saw what. We saw only what it disturbed.

Runa cut prints near the edge of the holding that belonged tae nae beast she could name, and Runa kens her beasts. Lasair found milk gone sour in a covered bowl that had nae cause tae turn. Prasutagus found a stone shifted from where he had set it and wouldnae say why the shifting mattered, only that it did.

Naething harmed Lyra. Naething came close enough tae try.

Yet.

That word did most of the work of the days that followed.

I took the word back tae Runa.

This time she answered. She had a split leather binding stretched across one knee and was drawing it tight. She didnae look up.

“Then build one.”

I took it for mockery. “Out of what?”

“Something harder than stone.”

That appeared tae be the whole of her answer. Runa doesnae explain herself twice and rarely once. I waited anyway.

She pulled the binding once, testing it. “Stone stops what agrees to meet it. That is not what you fear.”

“Then what is?”

“Whatever finds a door where there should be none.”

I said naething.

“If men come, I can kill men. If fae come, you can. Whatever comes that neither of us can bleed”—she looked up on that one—“that’s what you build the wall against.”

She returned tae the binding. “So build it.”

That was the first page. Or mayhap the second. It is hard tae say now. One corner is gone, and Brushy willnae meet m’eye on the subject.

At the first we drew the line close around Lyra’s house. The old rowan leaning over it. Ground enough for m’bairn tae be turned loose upon when she was grown enough tae want it. Runa pushed the line farther out. I pulled it back. She set it wide again. I scrubbed it away entirely. The third time she waited until I had gone tae sleep, and I woke tae find the boundary near twice the size it had been.

I stared at it a long while.

“Ye might hae asked.”

Runa ate bread. “You would have said no.”

“I might nae.”

She looked at the charcoal in m’hand, then at the line I had already scrubbed out twice.

I didnae scrub out the third.

That is how the wall first grew, and it is as fair an account of working wi’ Runa as I can give.

Lasair broke the rest of it open.

We had spent the better part of a day arguing whether a veil drawn out from the stone would hold if the strength came from the stone alone. I said it would. Runa said it wouldnae. Neither of us kent near enough tae be spending certainty so freely. Lasair let us go at it, which is one of her more objectionable habits, and when we had worn ourselves down she took the charcoal from m’hand and drew a single line under the house. Then more, branching out from the first.

“What is that?”

“The roots.”

“I ken what roots look like.”

“Then why,” she said, “have ye drawn everything on this page except them?”

I opened m’mouth. I closed it again.

Runa smiled intae her cup.

“Ye told me the same working runs under his ground and yours both,” Lasair said. “And under the standing stones. Ye’ve spent a year feeling it and a week trying tae build a new working on top of it, when the old one’s already there, and stronger than aught ye could raise yerself.”

“It willnae reach the house. It reaches the bank and stops.”

“Then dinnae make yer veil work harder.” She set her finger on the mark for Lyra’s home. “Make what feeds it reach farther. It’s the same water. Ye’re only asking the well tae come tae the door.”

Runa’s cup stopped halfway tae her mouth.

We hadnae understood it. We had only come near enough tae see understanding waiting, and that is a worse place tae stop than plain ignorance. Ignorance lets ye sleep.

The next three days finished the vellum.

We stopped calling it a wall. A wall stands where ye leave it; this had tae live, answer, and ken friend from enemy at a threshold none of us could see. The veil was old as the roots, older, and all we could do was coax it tae reach a span farther than it had ever cared tae. Lasair kept it from drawing more than the roots could bear. Runa walked the ground till she kent every tree that stood along it.

Brushy found the thin places, and I only learned of it because she planted herself on a patch of ground north of the holding and wouldnae cross. There was naething there I could see. Runa walked it twice and found nae cause for Brushy’s refusal. Lasair stood square in the middle of it. I felt ordinary ground until I quit reaching for what was there and paid mind tae what was missing. The veil thinned there by only a little, and that was enough. Brushy had kent before the rest of us drew breath, and reminded us of it for two days.

By week’s end we had a poor plan, as first plans generally tend tae be. It was ours, and it drew on strength the Reach already possessed, asking the old working tae stretch farther.

What we didnae have was any way tae make the wall ken the difference between what was merely strange and what meant her harm. Brushy is strange. I am a good deal worse than Brushy. Prasutagus would take strong exception tae being barred from his own stone. We needed the wall tae let its own through and turn the rest away, and nae one of us could say how it would tell them apart.

That was the part we carried tae Prasutagus. He didnae make the plan. He had done enough deciding for the lot of us tae last a century. But the stone was his keeping, and everything we meant tae attempt began there. And I suspected he kent more than he had told me, which was nae revelation at all.

The four of us set out after dawn. Runa carried the vellum. I had offered. She folded it once, looked at me, and secured it beneath her belt.

Lasair carried a small knife and whatever patience the gods had allotted her by mistake. Brushy rode at m’shoulder.

Lyra wasnae at the stone. She was in the house, a little short of it, and the pull of her didnae care for the distance. By then I could walk beside the pull wi’out stepping intae it, and that day I managed.

We found him where he most often sits, which is tae say the exact spot a person would choose if he wished tae make himself a nuisance tae approach. Runa stopped. Lasair stopped. I didnae.

His eyes came off me and went tae Runa, then tae the pale fold of vellum held beneath her belt.

“Ah,” he said. That was the whole of it.

Runa turned tae me. “He knows.”

“He doesnae.”

“He said ah.”

“That isnae evidence.”

“From him, it is.”

Prasutagus came very close tae smiling, and I liked him the less for it.

I set m’feet. “We hae a plan.”

“I see the vellum. I see thy companions. Yes. I know thou hast a plan.”

“Do nae be pleased yet.”

“I am not pleased. I am listening. Thou hast that much and no more.”

Runa handed me the vellum. I unfolded it, the wind caught one corner, and Brushy caught the other before I could. She held on. I spread the page over the flat stone beside him and set one finger on the small mark that stood for Lyra’s home.

“I want this hidden. I want whatever means her harm tae lose the road before it ever kens it has found one.”

His gaze stayed on the mark beneath m’finger.

“Fae. Men.” I didnae lift m’finger. “Whatever else is listening when she sings.”

His stillness changed by so little most wouldnae have marked it. Runa saw it too; I kent because her thumb stopped moving against the belt leather.

“Continue,” he said.

So I laid it out. Lasair set me right twice and was right both times. Runa marked a fourth approach I had missed. He heard the whole of it wi’out a word until I came tae the part I couldnae answer, and he found it before I could hand it tae him.

“When one crosses meaning her no harm,” he said, “and another follows meaning her every harm—how will thy wall tell one from the other?”

“It will keep out what means harm.”

“How will it know harm when harm arrives?”

I gave him the only answer I had. “By its intent. Nae by what it believes of itself.”

“Intent is rarely simple.”

“Neither am I.”

He set two fingers on the edge of the vellum, near the mark for the house, and kept them there a moment before he spoke.

“The worst of what comes to her will not come as an enemy. It will come as thou camest. It will follow her voice across country that should have silenced it, and stand at the door certain it has been called, certain it is owed the finding.” He let that lie where it fell. “Thy wall would have barred thee, Sorcha. Wouldst thou have built it, knowing that?”

I had nae answer for that either.

Runa’s head came round. Lasair’s hand found the hem of her sleeve and gripped it. She didnae let go till he had finished speaking.

Prasutagus let the silence do its work, then took his fingers from the page.

“And the cost?” he asked.

“We dinnae ken that either.”

“Then thou dost not have a plan.”

Runa folded her arms. “We have enough of one.”

He looked at her a long moment. “A wall whose strength thou canst not measure. Carrying a judgment thou canst not define. Through roots whose limit thou dost not know.”

“Yes,” Runa said.

“Thou findest this sufficient.”

“For a start.”

He considered her. Then he laughed. Once, low, gone as soon as it came. I had never heard him do it in all the months I had kent him, and it unsettled me more than any of his silences ever had.

Lasair recovered first. “Will ye help us?”

The laugh went out of him. “No.”

I had frost under m’feet before the word had finished leaving him.

Runa’s hand closed on m’arm. One hand, nae more. The frost stopped. I turned m’head. She let go. A full argument passed between us in the space of it, and I lost it.

“For what reason?” I asked him.

He rose. “Because thou hast mistaken what thou needest from me.”

He put his palm tae the stone. The hum under the ground went deeper. Brushy pressed herself small against the side of m’throat. Lyra’s thread turned over in me. The roots answered.

For the first time, I felt the lines themselves where before there had been only a vague old working under m’feet: ancient, buried, reaching farther than I had let m’self imagine. Some were thick as a man’s leg, some thin, some so faint they were gone the instant I found them. Lasair drew a sharp breath. Runa looked at the ground between her boots. Then he lifted his hand. It faded, and the world was only the world again.

“Thou dost not need my help to make thy wall,” he said. “Thou needest my leave to draw on what feeds it.”

He was right about the distinction, and I despise when this occurs.

“And?”

“And thou hast it.”

He gave it wi’out warning or ceremony.

Lasair made a small sound and stopped it. Runa took the vellum up off the stone. I stood where I was. I said naething.

“Why?”

His eyes went past me toward the house I couldnae see from where I stood, toward Lyra.

“Because she sings.”

I waited for the rest of it. There was none, of course.

I wanted tae take him by the front of his tunic and shake him. I looked at Runa instead. The smallest tilt of her head promised later.

On the road home, Runa fell into step beside me and stayed there.

I didnae thank her. She wouldnae hae thanked me for it.

We began the next morning. It took six days tae draw the veil around m’bairn, though we were still pleased tae call it a wall.

I hae nae orderly account of it. The days ran intae one another and the vellum stopped being any use tae us by the second, when the ground disagreed wi’ the drawing and we found it was the drawing that had tae give way.

The roots carried more than I had feared. The veil took less than I had hoped. Lasair worked wi’ her hands in the soil until the cold cracked her knuckles open. She wrapped them and went on. Runa slept four hours and rose before either of us every morning of the six. On the fourth I looked down and found I had drawn the same line over itself for the better part of an hour wi’out marking that I was doing it. Lasair took the charcoal off me and said naething about it.

On the sixth day, Runa rose from the ground and caught herself against the trunk of an ash. By the time I looked at her, she was standing straight.

Neither of us mentioned it.

I set m’own working through the length of it.

The first time the veil closed over Lyra’s house, I felt it from halfway across the Reach. She remained under m’ribs, as she had done since June. That was mine, and naething in three worlds could take it. But something settled around her along wi’ it. What had been a wound went back tae being a weight. Safety, of a kind. For the first while in near a month I breathed wi’out having tae remind m’self of the way of it.

We had done it poorly, and I kent that even then. The ground we had covered was small, and the roots ran strained where we had pulled too hard, and Prasutagus warned us the strength had come from somewhere and wouldnae say where, a lesson being much improved, in his view, by letting everyone concerned suffer their way toward it.

I should hae listened harder.

I came home after dark. Brushy slept at m’throat. The Reach lay quiet, and I was near foolish enough tae take the quiet for peace.

The wall we had made stood around Lyra’s house. The older veil around mine had held a year wi’out my thinking on it once.

I didnae notice aught amiss until I stepped intae the clearing.

Something sat beside m’door.

Small. Grey. Long in the limb, longer than any child, folded down on itself in the dark. Its head came round as I drew near. Two black eyes took up what little moonlight the trees let fall.

I stopped.

It smiled at me.

I had never once asked it in. And worse than that, far worse, it shouldnae hae been able tae find me at all.

Brushy woke.

The creature beside m’door opened its mouth.

“Oh,” I said.

And somewhere under m’feet, the veil around m’own cottage gave one small, tired shiver and stopped being a veil at all.

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30 June 950 (An t-Ògmhios)

I had wanted, often enough, tae be left alone. I had not once considered what it would be tae be left.

I have roamed the land long enough that I ought tae hae learned this before now. I hadnae.

Lasair was the one who told me.

She had been packing bread intae a cloth for a good while before I understood the bread was leaving wi’ her. Two rounds, yesterday’s by the look of them, and the last of the hard cheese wrapped separate. Runa stood by the door wi’ an axe over one shoulder. She hadnae asked what I thought of it, and wasnae going tae.

I watched Lasair fold the cloth over.

“Where are ye going?”

She looked up.

It was a stupid question. I kent that before she’d answered it.

“The other house.”

I might hae called it any number of things. The old holding. The place near the stone. The roof Prasutagus had found standing empty beneath one old rowan tree, far enough from m’cottage that I couldnae see so much as its smoke and near enough tae the thing he kept that m’daughter would never again be beyond his reach.

The other house was apparently what we had settled on.

I disliked it immediately.

“What for?”

Runa shifted the axe.

Lasair’s eyes flicked tae Runa, then back tae me. Lasair looked at me like she was gauging how hard I’d break. It set m’teeth on edge worse than pity.

“The roof’s gone soft on one side. There’s a place near the hearth letting water through. Prasutagus says the floor wants lifting in the back.”

“Prasutagus says.”

“That’s what I said.”

“I didnae ken he had developed opinions on floors.”

“He has opinions on everything,” Runa said.

I waited for the crack in her that usually gave the joke away.

It didnae come.

Once, the looking between us had carried enough amusement tae save a conversation from itself.

This one didnae.

Lasair tied the bread closed.

“There’s work tae be done,” she said. “They’ve nae much wi’ them.”

Because they had walked three days carrying only what Runa let them stop long enough tae gather.

Because they hadnae expected tae leave their home.

Because I had taken their bairn. My bairn.

The cottage didnae say any of that aloud. It didnae need tae. The silence had grown skilled at it.

I turned toward the window.

The glass was clear. I hadnae frosted it since they returned.

I had noticed this yesterday and decided it meant naething.

“I suppose the old man will be wanting a palace by week’s end.”

“Óengus?” Lasair asked.

“Prasutagus.”

Runa made the smallest sound through her nose, nearly a laugh, gone before I could decide whether tae be grateful for it.

“Niall can do most of the roof,” Lasair said. “Runa says he cannae.”

“He can’t,” Runa said.

“He says he can.”

“He can say it from the ground.”

“Which is why ye’re taking the axe.”

“I’m taking the axe because the handle on theirs is shit.”

Lasair closed her eyes briefly.

I looked between them.

They had spent three days in m’cottage since I gave Lyra back.

Three days wary of me, the pair of them, like a beast that had already turned on them once.

Lasair had found reasons tae be at the hearth.

Runa had found reasons tae be near the door.

Neither had spoken m’bairn’s name.

Neither had spoken Eithne’s.

I had noticed all of it and been angry at them for noticing me.

Now they meant tae go.

A sensible arrangement.

I wanted them gone.

That is important tae set down.

I wanted the cottage empty of every glance held too long and every conversation that stopped when I entered it. I wanted Lasair tae quit finding things that didnae need stirring. I wanted Runa tae stop sharpening the same knife until the blade wore down tae naething but intention. I wanted m’own walls back.

“Go, then,” I said. “Be gone wi’ ye.”

Lasair’s hands stopped on the bundle.

“I didnae ask permission.”

“I didnae give it.”

That earned me a look.

Better.

Runa pushed off the wall.

“We’ll be back before nightfall.”

“Ye neednae report where ye tread tae me.”

“We weren’t.”

“Ye’re doing an excellent imitation of it.”

Runa’s mouth shifted at one corner.

“I was telling you so you don’t decide we’ve been murdered.”

“I would feel the disturbance in the peace.”

“There she is,” Runa said.

Lasair’s eyes went from Runa tae me and back, weighing which of us needed managing first.

Then she picked up the bread.

“We’re going because they need the help,” she said.

Plain. Nae weight stacked behind it, nae blame the way I’d braced for.

I found I preferred the blame.

“I ken.”

“And because ye need—”

She stopped.

Runa went still by the door, axe forgotten on her shoulder, waiting tae see whether Lasair would finish it.

Lasair wasnae a coward. I had seen her stand in m’own doorway and tell me tae carry m’daughter back down the reach east and put her back in another woman’s arms. There are battles she will choose wi’out hesitation.

Apparently this wasnae one of them.

“I need what?”

“A bit of quiet,” she finished.

I almost laughed.

It would hae been cruel, and worse, dishonest.

“Aye,” I said. “I do.”

Lasair nodded.

Runa opened the door.

Brushy, who had been curled up at the corner of the hearth-stone wi’ her tail over her nose, watched them both.

“Come on,” Runa told her.

Brushy didnae move.

Runa waited.

Brushy scratched behind one ear.

“Fine.”

The door opened.

Lasair paused beside me.

For one moment I thought she meant tae touch m’arm.

She didnae.

“There’s broth,” she said instead.

“Of course there is.”

“Eat it.”

“I hae survived considerably longer than ye wi’out instruction on broth.”

“Then ye ought tae be excellent at it by now.”

Lasair let herself look pleased for half a breath, the old satisfaction of winning clean.

Nearly.

I turned m’head. She was studying the bundle in her hands rather than me, mouth still soft from the joke, taking visible care nae tae look up.

It hurt worse than if she had.

It hurt so badly I wanted her gone at once.

“Go mend yer roof,” I said.

“It isnae my roof.”

“Then ye’re an even greater fool than I took ye for.”

“Aye.”

She followed Runa out.

The door shut behind them, and I listened until I couldnae hear them anymore.

I had wanted them gone.

There is nae revision of that sentence that makes it less true, so I willnae attempt one. I had wanted every pause taken elsewhere, every kindness stopped before it could feel like another thing I’d broken.

They had given me what I wanted.

I stood in the middle of m’cottage and discovered I hadnae thought much past the getting of it.

Brushy was tucked close against m’neck, where she had been since before Lasair began wrapping the bread. She had made nae effort tae follow them, though I had felt her stir when Runa spoke tae her. I reached up and laid two fingers lightly along her back.

“At least one creature in this house has retained some sense.”

One small paw pressed against m’skin.

“I wouldnae congratulate yerself overmuch. Ye’ve had a poor week for judgment.”

She chirred low and tucked herself closer.

The cottage hadnae changed.

That was the first thing I noticed once there was naebody left in it tae notice instead.

The hearth was where it had always been. The sheets of vellum on m’table were stacked badly because I had stacked them badly. Lasair’s pot sat near the fire, the broth inside it apparently possessing such importance that she had mentioned it while fleeing tae repair another woman’s roof. Runa had left a whetstone on the bench. I had built every wall around me and chosen the placement of every useful thing, and for near a year I had thought the room exactly large enough for the life I meant tae have in it.

Three days wi’ a bairn had ruined the dimensions.

There was a basket near the hearth that hadnae been there before.

Lasair had found it somewhere on the first evening. I hadnae asked where. For three nights Lyra had slept in it, though slept is generous for the first of them. She had lain listening tae every old Winter Court song I kent until Lasair informed me, wi’ considerably less patience than was warranted, that a bairn gone silent wasnae necessarily a bairn gone tae sleep.

The blanket was still folded inside.

I crossed the room and picked it up.

Then I put it down.

There are some griefs a person can inspect from every side and remain herself. There are others that will take any object ye hand them and make a weapon of it.

I left the basket where it was.

The window was easier.

It faced west because I had decided, when I built this place, that anything strange enough tae pull at me from beyond the forest deserved tae be watched from a comfortable chair. I had thought m’self clever at the time. I have had many opinions about m’own cleverness that didnae survive acquaintance wi’ the future.

I held there anyway.

There was naething tae see.

Trees. The same pines I had watched through winter and spring, dark beneath their own canopy, the June light finding only what gaps they allowed it. Beyond them the Reach ran toward Arkaig, though from the cottage a person could hae sworn the forest went on forever. The stone was somewhere past what m’eyes could reach. So was the old house Prasutagus had given Eithne’s family, and whatever work Runa and Lasair were making of it now.

So was Lyra.

I couldnae see so much as smoke.

I felt her as I had felt her every day since the moment I kent her on that bank.

Distance had changed naething.

That shouldnae hae surprised me. The thread between us had reached across country before I understood what I was following, through a scrap of cloth, a song, and all the wanting I had spent a year pretending was evidence. Giving her back had changed where she slept. It hadnae changed what she was tae me, nor whatever it was in us that had recognized the other before either of us had the sense tae ask whether recognition gave me any right tae act upon it.

She was there.

I couldnae tell what she was doing. That mercy, at least, had been left tae me. I didnae feel every breath or hunger or passing unhappiness, and I was grateful for it because there are limits tae what even an ancient thing can bear wi’ dignity. But beneath everything else there remained the certainty of her. A presence in the same place the bank’s hum had lived before I ever kent why it called tae me, altered now because the nameless thing had a name.

Lyra.

I rested m’hand against the window frame.

The part I hadnae understood when Prasutagus set his terms was that watching didnae require sight.

Mayhap he had understood it.

That thought gave me someone tae be angry wi’, which was useful, if I am being honest.

“Did he ken?” I asked.

Brushy moved against m’neck.

“Of course he kent something. He always kens precisely enough tae be intolerable and nae enough tae be useful.”

She made a small questioning sound.

“Nae, I dinnae expect ye tae answer.”

She answered anyway.

“I said I dinnae expect it. I didnae say ye were forbidden.”

Brushy settled again, apparently satisfied wi’ the distinction.

I remained at the window until I became irritated wi’ m’self for remaining there.

Then I went tae the hearth.

I ate Lasair’s broth because I am nae entirely unreasonable, despite what several people had recently implied.

Afterward I tried tae write.

This is what I do when the world becomes too large tae hold in one mind. I put it on the page and make it stand still long enough tae be examined. I have recorded m’own cowardice, m’cruelties, errors of judgment that would hae been kinder forgotten, and enough bad decisions tae provide instruction for several civilizations.

I sat down.

I warmed the ink.

I wrote the date.

Then I stopped.

Brushy had come down from m’shoulder and was nosing through the edge of m’cloak where it lay bunched beside me. I watched her instead of the page.

“I gave her back.”

She stopped what she was doing.

“I hae already written that.”

One paw appeared from the wool and disappeared again.

“I wrote it plainly. I was very proud of the plainness.”

Brushy emerged enough tae peer at me.

“It doesnae appear tae hae helped.”

She came the rest of the way out and crossed the small distance tae m’hand.

I lifted the quill before she could interfere wi’ it.

“Nae.”

Her paw reached.

“Absolutely nae. The last page ye helped wi’ required scraping.”

The paw remained extended.

“Ye cannae write.”

A paw, insistent.

“That isnae an insult. It is an observation.”

Another.

“Fine. Ye can write. Ye simply choose a script unknown tae every learned creature in three worlds.”

She withdrew the paw wi’ considerable offense and turned away from me.

I stared at the empty page.

The truth was that I had naething tae put on it that I hadnae already set down at the end of the last.

I would stay.

That was the sentence.

It had seemed enormous when I wrote it.

Three days later it was only the beginning of the problem.

Staying required time.

It required waking in the morning and knowing where she was. It required reaching midday and knowing still. It required evening settling across the trees while somewhere beyond them another woman prepared m’daughter for sleep.

It required tomorrow.

That was the part Prasutagus hadnae troubled tae explain.

I set the pen down.

Somewhere outside, a raven called.

Brushy turned so quickly that her whole wee body shifted beneath m’hand.

“No.”

She stilled.

“I ken that posture.”

The raven called again, farther into the trees.

Brushy was already moving.

“Brushy.”

She ignored me.

“Ye hae nae quarrel wi’ it.”

Apparently she did.

She disappeared into the folds of m’cloak, came out the other side at speed, and was halfway tae the open door before I caught enough of her movement tae understand the direction.

“Absolutely nae.”

She went out.

I closed m’eyes.

The raven called again.

I remained where I was.

There came a rustling from beyond the door, followed by a sound from Brushy that suggested negotiations had failed at an early stage.

I opened m’eyes.

“I am nae coming after ye.”

Silence.

Then the raven.

Then Brushy.

I waited.

Another round.

I stood.

“This is coercion.”

Naething outside appeared concerned.

I crossed tae the door and stepped through it.

The warmth surprised me. I had spent three days indoors and stopped marking anything past the walls. Summer had been summer when I left it and was summer still.

Outside, the Reach was exactly as I had left it. The pines kept most of the summer light above them, what little found its way through falling green and broken across the ground. The air smelled of damp earth and resin, warm enough beneath the canopy that the cold clinging tae m’own skin felt out of place.

I put a hand tae m’own doorframe and breathed.

For the first time that day I wasnae facing west.

Brushy was several strides away, occupied wi’ something in the lower branches of a pine. I could see the raven above her, entirely untroubled by whatever grievance she believed existed between them.

“Ye are embarrassing us both.”

The raven shifted higher.

Brushy followed.

“One of ye can fly properly. I leave ye tae determine how this ends.”

I should hae gone back inside.

Instead I stepped away from the cottage.

Then another step.

The thread moved wi’ me.

I stopped.

Nae because anything had changed.

Because naething had.

Lyra remained where she had been when I stood at the window.

She emained where she had been when I stood at the window, the pull between us unchanged.

I had kent, if asked, that the cottage walls couldnae be what held the arrangement together. I am nae so foolish as that. Prasutagus had given me no boundary around m’own door, no distance I was forbidden tae walk, only the one road I couldnae enter: hers.

Still, some part of me had spent three days behaving as though the cottage itself were the bargain.

Mayhap because walls are easier.

A wall can be hated.

A door can be opened.

This was only a choice I had promised tae keep making.

I stood beneath the pines and let that settle where it would.

The wanting was still there. It would always be there. I could feel the direction of her as surely as I could feel where winter sat in a cloud before the snow began. I could follow it.

I didnae.

For three days I had thought staying meant sitting still enough tae prove I could be trusted.

That wasnae living.

Worse, it wasnae useful.

Brushy came back tae me then, the quarrel wi’ the raven either resolved or abandoned on grounds known only tae herself. She climbed tae her usual place and pressed close against m’neck.

“Did ye win?”

A sound.

“I’ll take that as a nae.”

She objected.

“Ahh. A tactical withdrawal, then.”

That seemed tae suit her better.

I walked.

Nae far.

Only through the trees I had walked a hundred times before, except the ground felt different beneath m’feet because I was paying attention tae the wrong thing for once.

I had spent days feeling only Lyra.

Now I let m’self feel what held her.

The veil was there.

It had always been there, though that word hardly contains it. Veils are meant tae be thin things, cloth laid between one thing and another. This was older and stranger, tied through root, water, and the deep workings of the land, the same hidden order I had drawn upon when I built m’cottage without understanding whose work m’own had touched.

Prasutagus had strengthened m’threshold for Lasair while I was gone.

That still troubled me.

Nae because he had done it. Because he had been able tae.

Because what I had considered mine alone had never been alone at all.

I walked farther, slowly now.

Beyond the forest was the stone.

I felt that too.

It was naething like what I felt from Lyra, and naething I could mistake for it.

The stone was a different weight in the world: old, fixed, and patient. I had never once been patient. Yet the same veil touched both places. His ground and mine had spoken tae one another before I understood they shared a language.

The cottage had answered when I brought Lyra home.

The ground had been uneasy before I found her.

Prasutagus had watched m’coming and going because something beneath all of us had already begun tae move.

I stopped beside one of the oldest pines.

The bark was rough beneath m’palm.

Brushy went still.

“I have been very stupid,” I said.

She flattened herself against m’neck, which I understood perfectly.

“Careful.”

Another.

“I said very stupid. Nae entirely.”

She settled.

I kept m’hand against the tree.

There was no revelation.

I want that understood.

The earth didnae open and show me its purpose. No ancient voice told me what work remained. I had become suspicious of answers arriving too cleanly and wouldnae hae trusted one if it came.

I only understood that I had spent three days asking the wrong question.

What was I allowed tae do for Lyra?

Naething directly.

Prasutagus had been painfully thorough on that point.

But Lyra didnae exist in an empty world. She would grow in Eithne’s house, less than a morning’s walk toward the stone from where I stood, under a roof I could name and beside a hearth I had already seen swept. She would walk ground I kent near as well as m’own dooryard.

She would also, one day, walk beyond it, learn the paths mortal feet had cut around that house, and the older ones her blood would eventually teach her tae find on her own.

There were paths and thresholds beyond the bairn herself that might still be guarded.

I didnae yet ken whether that thought was wisdom or merely grief looking for somewhere else tae land.

For once, I didnae decide on m’own.

I took m’hand from the pine.

Brushy shifted as I turned back toward the cottage.

“We are going tae see him.”

Her small body went still.

“Aye. Him.”

She made a noise I understood perfectly.

“I agree.”

Another.

“I agree wi’ that too.”

I went inside only long enough tae take what I needed and make certain the hearth wouldnae burn the finest dwelling within several centuries tae the ground while I was away.

Lasair’s pot was still sitting where she’d left it.

Runa’s whetstone remained on the bench.

For some reason I touched it as I passed.

Then I left it there.

Outside, the thread found me at once.

Lyra.

I felt the pull and let m’self stand in it.

I could turn toward her.

The road was open.

I turned toward Prasutagus instead.

Nae because I had forgiven him.

I hadnae.

Nae because I accepted the terms more easily than I had three days ago.

I didnae.

I went because he had spent nine hundred years standing over a thing he couldnae force tae answer before its time, and I had spent three days discovering I possessed none of that skill.

Mayhap he could teach me.

Mayhap I would only annoy him until one of us learned something by accident.

Either would do.

I set off through the trees wi’ Brushy against m’neck and m’daughter pulling at every step I took in the other direction.

I felt her all the way.

I went anyway.

These journals remain free tae any soul that finds the road through the pines. The keeping of them is nae small labour — long nights at the page, the remembering, the sorting of what happened from what the wind’s rearranged since. If the telling’s worth a coin or two a month tae ye, a paid subscription’s what keeps it coming, and keeps the gate open for those that hae none tae spare. And if ye’ve nothing tae give, give it nae mind — sit by the fire regardless. Ye’ll owe me naething for it, and we’ll call it even.

Subscribe now

🏰If this drew you in, Sorcha’s world is still moving—step into Soul Castle: The Guardian & The Keeper, a series on Amazon: HERE

24–27 June 950 (An t-Ògmhios)

The old road set me down on the near side of the treeline, one step east of the pass wi’ m’bairn in m’arms, the next among m’own pines. I hadnae taken three strides toward the cottage before I kent I wasnae marching toward it alone.

He was there before the smoke reached me. Nae shape at first, only the cold going out of true, the treeline holding its breath, the ground beneath m’feet turning its attention from the loch toward me wi’ a suddenness that had teeth in it. I felt the hum under it too, the one that lives in the stone a loch away, running up through Lochy’s own ground tae meet me before I’d taken three strides, as though the two waters had never truly been one tae him at all. Then he stood among the trees, his now familiar warrior-shape, unhurried, settled there for all I could tell since the trees first came up. I understood in the same instant that the veil I had walked through a hundred times wi’out thought had told him the moment I crossed it.

“Thou intendest to use what I give freely,” he said, “to hide a wrong I did not agree to hiding.”

I didnae understand him yet. I had a wean gone quiet against m’chest and a guardian standing between me and m’own door, and understanding was a luxury I hadnae the room for.

“Move,” I demanded.

He did not. “I set my own hand to thy threshold nine days past, when the Moray woman could not hold it alone. She asked. It was hers to ask and mine to give, and I gave it freely, as I have given little else on this bank.” He said what needed saying flat and stopped, and didnae trouble himself further whether I believed it. “While I held thy door, thou wert east, taking a child from a hearth that had already kept her. Thou hast carried her home to sleep beneath the working I strengthened to keep thee safe. Maybe I did not know what I was keeping safe.”

“Nine days.” The bairn’s weight had gone soft against m’chest, sleeping or listening, I couldnae tell which. “Ye set a hand tae Lasair’s threshold nine days past. Fine. She asked, ye gave it, that’s a thing done and finished. But ye didnae leave when it was done. Ye stayed. Ye hae watched this bank nine days — watched the veil, watched me cross it and cross back, counted m’goings the way a man counts a tide he doesnae trust. That’s nae a threshold-working. Why?”

“Thou wilt keep to the cottage,” he said. “Thou and the child both. Thou wilt not cross the treeline. Not for water. Not for air. Not for any cause I have not heard and allowed.” A pause, weighing something he’d already counted. “The shield-woman marches this bank alongside the mortal mother, three days by her own reckoning, four if the weather turns against them. I will not hold thee past their arrival. Until then, thou wilt keep to the cottage. Until I know what I am helping keep.”

“Ye’re changing the subject.”

“I am setting terms. It is a different trick.”

“It is the same trick wearing better boots.” I shifted her weight ontae m’hip, a motion I had watched Eithne make from behind a hedge like a thief, one m’body did wi’out asking me. “Ye hae given little else on this bank in nine hundred winters, ye said. Ye said it yerself, wi’ some pride in it. And then ye spent nine days of yer nine hundred watching one fae woman go back and forth through a veil. Why me. Why now. Answer that.”

He was quiet long enough that I kent I had put m’hand on something festering.

“Because the ground was uneasy,” he said. “It has been uneasy since before the snow went. I do not watch what does not trouble the stone.”

The cold in me went still. It does that when something lands.

“Uneasy,” I repeated.

He wouldnae meet m’eye.

“A cottage wi’ a Moray woman in it, a kettle, a wee creature singing at the rafters, and a bed naebody has slept in since the equinox. That is the whole inventory of it. There is naething under that roof tae trouble a stone.” I heard m’own voice climbing and I didnae stop it. “Unless it wasnae the house that troubled ye. It was what the house was waiting on.”

“I have not said the house was waiting on anything.”

“Ye hae said the ground was uneasy, which is the same sentence in a longer coat, and I will take it.” I came a step closer, which was unwise. “At the water. When I told ye I had a bairn taken from me before I could learn her face. Ye said — what belongs tae this ground finds its way tae it. In time. I hae turned that sentence over every night since and worn it smooth as a river stone, and I took it for comfort. Was it comfort?”

“No.”

“Then what was it?”

“It was the terms.”

“Say it plainer.”

“A soul carried,” he said, “is not a soul that came.”

I stood on his bank wi’ m’daughter on m’hip and heard the floor go out from under the year I’d spent.

“Ye’re waiting on something.” It came out of me slow. “Ye hae been waiting on it a long while. Ye said finds its way like a man counting off the days it still hasnae.”

He said naething. The saying of naething was an answer, and he kent that I kent it, and neither of us troubled tae pretend otherwise.

“Ye think she’s it.” I heard m’own voice come out wrong. “The bairn I lifted off a mortal hearth this morning and set down on yer bank inside a single breath of an under-road. Ye think she’s what ye hae stood on this stone waiting for. And ye think I hae broken the manner of her coming by fetching her m’self?”

“I do not know.”

“Ye —”

“I do not know,” he said again, the only time that morning he put weight on anything. “I have a name I did not choose and did not ask for, and it has come off the threads of that stone so long I have stopped hearing it as a name. I have a household on the wrong road out of Moray, running from men with crosses, and I cannot tell whether they were sent to me or blown to me. And I have a child asleep against a woman the ground reached for long before she ever set eyes on it.” He stopped. Water moved on the shingle below us, three or four times, before he spoke again. “Thou wouldst have me be certain. I have been certain twice in nine hundred summers. I buried both.”

“Then take her back yerself.” M’voice wasnae steady and I willnae pretend it was. “If the manner of her coming is so precious tae ye, and I hae ruined it, walk east and put her back on the hearth and hae done wi’ me. Ye hae the strength. Why let me keep her at all?”

He looked at me a long moment before he answered, and the looking cost him something. I dinnae ken what.

“Because thou wert drawn here. I have watched thee walk this bank a year, believing thou chose it. I am not persuaded thou didst, and I will not treat as a trespasser a soul that may have been sent.”

“May,” I said.

“May. I do not deal in more than that. No one who has kept a stone nine hundred summers deals in more than that and keeps it a thousand.”

I asked him a dozen things more. He gave me a dozen answers, all built of the same metal: true, small, cut tae leave me naething tae stand on. I willnae set them down. The archivist has her limits and I had reached mine on the wrong side of a treeline, wi’ m’daughter’s weight going heavy on m’hip and the smoke of Lasair’s fire going up beyond the pines wi’out me.

I carried her the last stretch under his eye, which I minded less than I expected, having already been minded by worse things that morning.

Lasair was at the door before I reached it. She looked at me, then at the bundle against m’chest, and her hand came up tae grip the frame and stayed there. Lasair isnae easily frightened. She left Moray ahead of men who would hae burned her for what she kens. She looked at the bairn in m’arms and she didnae step aside tae let me in.

“What hae ye done,” she said.

“I found her.”

“That isnae what I asked.”

“Lasair. Let me by.” I reached for a reason tae hand her and found I had none that was true. I noted the having of none. I said it again wi’out one. “Let me by.”

She didnae move. “Something came in wrong wi’ ye. The whole house felt it the moment ye crossed the slope.” Her voice was low and it shook, nae wi’ any fear of me. Wi’ something harder tae stand against. “It’s nae glad, Sorcha. It’s waiting. Ye taught me the difference yerself.”

“She’s mine,” I said.

“Aye.” Her eyes were wet now and her jaw was set. “And ye took her. Baith are true, and the second doesnae stop being true because the first is. Ye ken that. Ye said it tae me once, near word for word, about a thing I wanted that wasnae mine tae take. Ye stood where I’m standing and ye said it tae me kindly, and it was the kindest cruel thing anyone ever did me.” She wiped her face wi’ the back of her wrist, angry at it. “So I’m saying it tae ye. Take her back. Whatever ye hae tae cross tae do it. Take her back before this gets bigger than the both of us.”

I didnae take her back. I’ll set that down plainly and let it be as ugly on the page as it was in the doorway. The mortal woman I keep, lesser in years and in power than me, wi’ threshold-craft she came tae slow as green wood, stood in m’own door and told me the truth in m’own words, and I looked at her and didnae heed her. The small weight against m’chest had gone still and listening, one wee hand flat over the cold where m’heart is, and I couldnae give that up. I hae given everything else up across a long and frozen life. This I wouldnae give up. That was the whole of m’reasoning. It isnae much of a reasoning. Grief makes a poor lawyer and an excellent thief.

M’arms didnae loosen around her once, the whole while I stood there failing tae answer Lasair honestly. They werenae asking m’permission either.

What followed I hae decided tae set down plainly, because plainness is the only honesty I hae left in me for it.

Three days. Real days, wi’ a sun that rose and set, nae held light and nae working of m’own. I kent it wasnae mercy. He wasnae giving me time; he was watching what I did wi’ it, three days running, and I kent that too and took it anyway. I hae asked m’self since why he gave me that much. I hae nae answer that satisfies, only a guess: a creature willing tae call a mortal-raised bairn something the ground reached for is a creature that hasnae yet settled whether tae be m’enemy. Generosity, in things that old, is often naething but a decision deferred.

She was called Sìle. I had the name off m’own mouth before I kent I was using it, having heard it called across the dooryard in the days before I ever lifted her. It had lodged in me like a burr in wool, small and persistent, impossible tae shake loose wi’out tearing something. I hae nae right yet tae the name I wanted tae give her. I kent that. I used Sìle anyway, and it sat wrong in m’mouth every time, like borrowed shoes.

I hae never mothered anything. Let that stand plainly, for whoever reads this after me and imagines I came tae it wi’ any manner of instinct. I didnae ken what a bairn of near a year wants at dusk. I offered her bread she couldnae chew. I sang her the wrong songs, Winter Court songs, cold and old, that made her go quiet and listen rather than sleep, which I mistook the first night for success. Lasair took the wean from m’arms on the second evening wi’out a word and hummed something plainer, a low easy tune a bairn could climb intae. Sìle’s eyes went heavy inside three verses. I stood in m’own cottage and watched a mortal woman do wi’ ease the one gift I had wanted past all else in this world and couldnae manage.

Lasair didnae forgive me the taking. She told me so plainly on the second morning, over bread neither of us wanted. “I’ve nae changed m’mind,” she said. “I’m nae doing this because I think ye were right. I’m doing it because the bairn’s here whoever’s right, and she’ll nae go hungry for m’principles.” I hae nae better friend in this world and I dinnae ken that I deserve her.

Brushy attached tae the child inside a day, curling against her in the basket at night, singing her fragments of the old songs low enough that only I would ken what they were. She left m’shoulder tae do it and didnae come back tae it, the three days through. She kept tae the basket, tae the child, and watched the door more than she watched me. I let her. I hae never once told Brushy nae when it came tae loving something, and I wasnae about tae start.

On the second evening I caught m’self humming, wi’out choosing tae, a low three-note tune I couldnae place. Sìle’s head came up off the blanket and turned toward me. She hummed it back, near enough tae the note that the hair on m’arms stood. Neither of us could hae said where either tune came from. I wrote it down and didnae speak of it tae Lasair. I hadnae the words for what it might mean, and I hae learned this year tae distrust wanting something tae mean more than it does.

He watched. I felt him the three days through, a presence at the treeline that never came closer and never left. More than once I caught m’self thinking that a creature nine hundred winters patient over a stone had nae business being this patient over me. I hae kept watch m’self, in m’longer years, over things I loved and things I distrusted both, and I ken the weight each kind of watching carries. His didnae sit plainly in either. I noted it. I didnae understand it. I’m nae certain I understand it now.

On the third evening the wind changed. Brushy cut off mid-note and went flat tae the bottom of the basket, and I kent before I heard him that something was coming up the glen at a run.

Niall broke the treeline first, ahead of the rest, a bare knife in his fist and his breath tearing out of him from the last hard stretch of the road. Twenty strides of open ground lay between the trees and m’step, mayhap less. He didnae stop tae weigh it. He saw me on the step wi’ Sìle against m’shoulder and came straight on. I hae stood before powers that could hae unmade this glen wi’out troubling tae raise a hand, and none of them frightened me as one furious mortal boy wi’ a blade frightened me in that half-second, because none of them had ever come at me wanting what I held.

M’cold answered before I chose it tae. It is below decision and below choosing; I hae written that already in this record, and I never felt it truer than I felt it then. It rose and went out of me wi’out m’leave, ice thrown thick and fast across the last few strides between him and the step, a wall I hadnae willed and couldnae call back. I stood behind it wi’ m’breath caught, disliking the business considerably. I hae never enjoyed being ridden by m’own nature, and I enjoyed it the less that evening, wi’ witnesses tae it and the shame already at the back of m’throat.

The knife rang off the ice and Niall’s arm wi’ it, thrown wide and numb tae the elbow. He staggered back, went down in the wet grass, more astonished than hurt. I hadnae meant tae hurt him, and I hadnae. I willnae pretend otherwise tae make m’self sound less the monster he took me for in that moment. Deserved, even.

Eithne came over the rise a dozen strides behind him, wi’ the last of whatever had held her upright these three days, and she went down at the sight of the wall and the bairn behind it, her knees choosing the ground before she could. “Sìle,” she said, again, and again, the name coming apart in her mouth a little further each time until it wasnae a name any longer, only a wailing left over after the words are gone.

Sìle stirred against m’shoulder at the sound of it. A fine white edging came up along her wee fingers where they curled at m’collar, frost finding a groove it half fit, the same cold I carry answering its like in her where it had never before had cause tae answer so plain. She didnae cry. She went stiller, colder, her small face taking on at the edges the sheen of a body held too long against ice.

M’own face went wi’ hers. I felt it go, the forgettable face I hae worn a year coming apart in the same breath hers took the frost, the discipline of it giving way under a mother’s stare and her every right tae see what I truly was. I didnae fight it.

Eithne’s voice stopped mid-word on the name. She looked down at the mud between her hands. Then she looked up, and her eyes didnae go tae the child at all. They came tae me and stayed. I watched her stop believing there was anything left tae save Sìle from that hadnae already happened.

I could hae looked away. I hae looked away from worse, in longer years, when it served me. I found, wi’ m’true face bared tae a ruined mother’s stare, that I had nae wish left tae spare m’self that much.

And then the thing that had carried her east at dawn woke again and did not ask m’leave. The ground thinned under one foot. An old road opened tae m’wanting, a fold in the world wide enough for a woman and a bairn tae step through and be gone past any finding. I had her against m’chest. I was halfway intae the step before I kent m’feet had chosen it. The cold is below choosing; so too, I learned in that half-stride, is the running. A thousand years I had named m’self the one who leaves cages, and I had not kent the leaving lived that far down, below the place where I keep m’reasons, until it tried tae carry m’daughter out of the reach of the folk who had walked three days tae fetch her.

He did not let it finish. It wasnae slowly and nae kindly. The glen stopped still, frozen in time. Prasutagus closed his hand over the moment entire. The half-road under m’foot, the smoke over the thatch, Eithne’s stare, all of it held still at once. The fold sealed wi’ m’foot still in it. It felt like a hand shut round m’throat. I was caught mid-step, half out of the living world, and there was naething left in me strong enough tae finish the step or take it back.

Runa came over the rise then, Óengus a half-step behind her, his bad hip carrying him on stubbornness alone where younger legs would hae given up. She hadnae hurried on his account. She had read the wall from a distance and slowed tae the old man’s pace, judging speed had naething left tae win here that patience wouldnae better achieve.

The hold eased. It loosened wi’out letting go, enough for the air tae move again and m’foot tae come back onto solid ground, the fold gone from under it, the road shut. I stood where he had let me stand, small in front of all of them, a bolting beast brought up short by a wall it couldnae pass. I minded that. I hadnae the standing tae mind it aloud.

And intae that loosening, Sìle lifted her head from m’shoulder. She did not look at the loch, nor at the wall, nor at the strangers ringed round m’dooryard. She looked at Eithne. At the woman on her knees in the mud wi’ the ruined name still on her mouth. She kent that face. Whatever a bairn of near a year kens, she kent it was Eithne’s, and she reached for it wi’ the only thing she had.

And she sang.

I willnae render the song. I hae refused the great songs before in this record and I refuse this one, and for once the refusal is mercy and not craft. But I’ll set down what it did, because that much I owe.

It came out of her small and went through me on its road tae Eithne. I felt it pass, cold, the same cold that lives in me, and none of it was meant for me. M’being close was the only reason it crossed where it did; I was the ground it went over tae reach her, naething more. I felt what the child felt, and what the child felt was Eithne. I stood there wi’ m’daughter’s love for another woman going through me in m’own cold, in the one register I couldnae mistake for anyone’s but m’own, and I didnae get tae keep a drop of it.

And under it, the water. The loch answered her, the hum that has lived beneath this ground since before there was a mouth tae name it rising tae meet her one note. The bank’s note. The note Brushy carried out of the Winter Court. The one note, always, and the bairn’s voice was already in it, as the loch’s was and the stone’s and m’own. A year I had lived above that hum and called it comfort, and never once kent the child in m’arms was kin tae the thing I was listening for.

Then Brushy came. Out of the basket at the door and up m’sleeve tae m’shoulder, small and unbidden, and she gave the child’s note back. The two of them held it over the water, the oldest small creature in m’keeping and the youngest, and I stood between them wi’ nae breath in me tae add tae it.

I knelt then, wi’ m’bairn in m’arms and her note still ringing off the loch, and I gave her the one thing I could give free and clear, before anyone told me I couldnae.

“Lyra,” I said.

M’own voice cracked on it, one clean break, the first m’voice had wanted in front of any of them and the last I let it hae.

For the song. For the lyre of her, the note she had sounded across the water tae a home she didnae yet ken was hers. Lyra. I gave it free. I kept naething back and asked naething for it, and the moment it left m’mouth it was hers, sealed, a thread run between us that can never become a hand laid on her hair, and can never, either, be cut.

The guardian took the name intae himself and it set there, frost intae ground. Then he went still, and it wasnae the stillness of the stone he keeps. That stillness I ken. This was another, the name reaching in and stopping something that had been turning in him a long while. I hae heard him say, on this bank, that he carried a name off the threads of that stone and had long since stopped hearing it as a name. I didnae ask him whether it was this one. His stillness asked and answered itself, and I let it lie.

“Now I know,” he said. For the first time since he named himself tae me on this bank, there was nae hedge left in him. “The song tells me what she is. The name tells me whose. I have waited long to be sure of the second, and I will not pretend the waiting was patience. I had no cause. Now I have been given it.”

“And?” I said, because I had tae hear him say the rest.

“And she is not thine to keep. That thou lovest her does not unmake it. Thou wilt have the rest of thy long life to sit with that, as I have had nine hundred winters to sit with mine.”

“She was mine tae keep before she was ever theirs.” It came out low. I let it. “Ye ken the rule ye stand on. A soul found and loved by mortal hands cannae be taken back from them, and I hae lived inside that rule a full year wi’out once arguing it. Turn it over now, guardian. That same rule is the one the world used tae take her from me. She was found. She was kept. She was loved by hands that werenae the first hands, and the first hands were mine, and empty, and nae law in this ground rose up tae fill them. Ye would bar me from m’own daughter wi’ the very rule that let her be stolen. Tell me that is just.”

“The terms do not change for being called unjust.”

He held m’eye then, which he hadnae done once the whole morning.

“I will not tell thee it is just,” he said. “I keep a line. I have never called it a kind one. The rule that emptied thy hands and the rule that fills Eithne’s are the one rule, and it does not trouble itself which of you it wrongs. I did not make it. I stand where it runs, and I watch it take from those I might otherwise have loved.”

He set the terms down then, flat, each one placed where it would bear weight.

“Thou mayest stay. The cottage is thine. The veil is thine to draw from, as thou hast. The ground will hold thee as it has held thee, and it will not drive thee out. Thou mayest live within sight of her growing, in this glen, as long as the wanting will let thee. That is the kindness.”

The loch moved below us.

“And thou wilt not touch her. Thou wilt not speak to her, nor be known to her, nor lay a hand to her road in any manner, great or small, kind or unkind, ever. She is Eithne’s, and after Eithne’s, the line’s, and the line is not thine to walk into. That is the grief of it. Thou mayest bear it daily by staying, or end it once by going. Thou art not caged. The door stands open. Thou needest only walk through it to be quit of the watching. Thou wilt not. And the choosing will be thine own, every day, as long as thou choosest it.”

I hae never been human. A thousand years and I never once managed the trick of it, and I’ll not learn it now tae pass on. That half of her belongs tae Eithne, tae the hearth, tae the reaching I’d felt go out of her toward another woman. I cannae give it and I cannae teach it. The fae in her is mine tae ken, though, if it’s mine tae naething else, and I would not leave even that tae folk who’d fear it.

“One thing,” I said, before he could take the terms for finished. “I’ll give ye the touching and the speaking and the being kent. I’ll rot at yer treeline watching her grow up another woman’s daughter and never lift a finger tae unmake it. But she is half of what I am, and that half will wake in her as it woke just now, sudden and wi’out asking. The folk ye’ve handed her tae couldnae tell a seiðr-cold from a fever, nor a fae road from a fever-dream. When it wakes, someone must ken what they’re looking at, and that someone is me. Every question of the blood she carries comes tae me, through the household, through yerself, through any road ye like that isnae her own ears. Ye may keep me from being her mother. Ye’ll nae keep me from being the one who kens what she is when the kenning keeps her alive.”

He weighed it, and when he answered he let me see it wasnae for m’sake.

“Granted. Not as a gift to thee. A fae child raised blind to her own blood is a danger to herself and to what I keep. Thou wilt teach through the household and never past it. The day she learns there is a Sorcha to ask, the arrangement is void, and I will not be gentle about the closing.”

So I won it: the right tae every question of her blood but the one that would hae meant most, any she might hae carried tae me her own self. She never will. She’ll carry them tae Eithne, who cannae answer. Eithne will carry them tae me by a road the child never sees. The answer will reach her wearing another woman’s mouth. I bargained hard for that. A mother who cannae hold her child will hold whatever use the world leaves her.

I hae fled a court that flew me like a hawk and hooded me when I grieved. I left it sooner than be a thing kept on a tether and let down only when I was of use. And here, at the end of m’long road east, on the bank of m’own loch, a guardian held out a tether I could slip any hour of any day.

I could slip it, and that was the trap of it. Because I had tried tae run wi’ her twice already between dawn and dark, once east and once intae a fold of the world, and neither time had I chosen tae. Running is what I am, below the place I keep m’reasons, and it does not ask m’leave. I could give him m’word and mean it and still wake some black hour wi’ her in m’arms and the ground gone thin under m’foot. And a thing that will always run is nae a thing tae trust wi’ a child it loves. I had spent a thousand years despising the court that caged me for a wildness it feared. I understood it a little, standing there. It had seen plain the thing I had only that morning felt move in m’own feet.

So I did the one thing left tae me. He had bested me. His terms were unjust, and he’d owned them unjust wi’ his own mouth. None of that was why I did it. I handed her back because I couldnae be trusted tae keep her and nae steal her again, and because a glen wi’ her in it, held off from her though I’d be, was more than the world had granted me in a long age.

“I’ll stay,” I said.

“I know,” said the guardian, and there was nae triumph in it, and that was the last mercy anyone did me that day.

I gave Lyra back.

I lifted her out of the place against m’chest where she had lain since before this land had a settled name, and I put her intae Eithne’s arms, intae the shawl that had crossed the country tae fetch her. She went tae her keeper easy as water finding low ground, home, nae kenning she had been anywhere she oughtnae hae been. She put her wee hand flat on Eithne’s breast, in the place she had kept it on mine.

Eithne looked at me over the top of m’daughter’s head. What she gave me was not forgiveness; I hadnae earned it and she didnae offer it. Nae hatred either, which was more than I had standing tae receive.

They’ll settle in this glen. The guardian arranged it wi’out fuss and wi’out asking, so that Lyra would grow within reach of the stone she is bound tae down the long road of her years. Which means within reach of me. I will see her. That is the kindness and the price both, the one coin pressed intae m’hand twice.

Runa came tae stand beside me as Eithne carried Lyra down toward the cottage, Óengus following slower on his staff, Niall’s arm still numb at his side and his eyes nae yet willing tae meet mine. Lasair stepped out tae meet them, her hands already at the work of taking broken folk in. She didnae look at me once, the whole time. I understood it for the mercy it was. She’d said her piece in the doorway and wouldnae make me hear it twice.

“Ye should hae let me keep running,” I said.

“You should have,” said Runa. “You’ll thank me for it. Not in words. You’ve never had those.”

“I willnae.”

“You will.”

She was right. She is usually right. I hae not told her so. I’m telling this page instead, which is a coward’s way tae tell the truth and the only way I hae ever managed it.

I went east after m’daughter. I found her. I kent her. I took her by force, as she was once taken from me. Lasair told me tae give her back. Runa told me the same before ever I lifted her. The ground itself rose up tae stop m’running. Nae one of them set her down. I did.

I named her Lyra. That much is mine, freely given, kept forever, the one clean thing in a season of dirty ones.

And I will stay.

The salt wants freshening before dark.

— S

These journals remain free tae any soul that finds the road through the pines. The keeping of them is nae small labour — long nights at the page, the remembering, the sorting of what happened from what the wind’s rearranged since. If the telling’s worth a coin or two a month tae ye, a paid subscription’s what keeps it coming, and keeps the gate open for those that hae none tae spare. And if ye’ve nothing tae give, give it nae mind — sit by the fire regardless. Ye’ll owe me naething for it, and we’ll call it even.

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23 June 950 (An t-Ògmhios)

RUNA

She was there, and then she was not. The child went with her. I was left on the hillside looking at the grass where she’d stood.

I’d seen her step sideways before to spare herself a walk. I hadn’t seen her leave a person standing in the gap.

I didn’t go after her. There’s no going after that. I turned downhill, and Eithne’s screaming reached me before the steading did. There were no words in it.

Niall came off the higher field at a dead run, and when he found a stranger with a sword standing over his wife he changed direction without breaking stride. He had a knife out before his feet stopped. Big through the shoulders, field-built, and holding the blade like he’d seen it done and never had to do it. Strength enough to matter. No notion what to spend it on. I didn’t fault him. In his place I’d have wanted a spear.

“Get back,” he said.

“I’m not the one who took her.”

“Ye’re standing in the verra place she stood.”

I stepped off the stone, put my hands where he could see them, and let him decide what to do with that. A man with a blade and a screaming wife doesn’t owe a stranger patience.

Óengus arrived slower and read the ground faster. He took in me, the empty stone, the knife in his son’s fist, and laid a hand flat on Niall’s chest.

“She’d hae killed ye already if she meant it,” he said to Niall. “Put it down, lad.”

Niall didn’t put it down. He kept it low, kept his gaze on me, and knelt by Eithne with the blade still clinched in his fist, which told me how much trust I had with him. None. That was understandable. I hadn’t earned any.

Eithne banked the scream to a low burn and turned on me. “What did she take her for?”

“She believes the child is hers.”

“She isnae.” Eithne didn’t raise her voice for it. She didn’t need to. Every morning since the child came to them was standing behind those two words.

“I know that’s what you believe.”

“Dinnae call it believing.” She got to her feet. Niall’s hand went to her arm and she shook it off. “I ken the weight of her. I ken the sound she makes when she wakes hungry. Ye’re asking if I believe my own arms.”

I couldn’t give her the answer she wanted. I’d stood on that bank and heard it answer the woman I travel with, a sound the bank threw back, one hum reaching for another, and I wasn’t going to lie to a mother’s face to make it sit easier on either of us.

“I know the woman who took her would die before harm reached her. That much I’d carry the iron for.”

Niall stood, knife still out. “And ye were wi’ her.”

“I was.”

“And ye just let it happen.”

“I did.”

He came at me again, faster this time, and Óengus didn’t get there in time. The knife caught my sleeve before his father’s fist closed on his collar and hauled him back. Nobody was measured about it. Eithne shouted something at both of them that wasn’t words. Niall fought the grip for three breaths. Then it left him all at once. He went down on one knee in the mud with the knife still in his fist, not fighting anymore, just holding it.

“I won’t pretend I tried to stop her,” I said, into the quiet after. “I told her the child was kept. She went anyway. I stood on that bank and watched her go.”

“Then ye’re nae better than she is,” Niall said, from the ground.

I didn’t argue it. I asked instead whether either of them had marked anything strange about the child — how fast she grew, how little she slept, whether she’d ever wept the way an ordinary child weeps.

No one spoke for a while after that. Eithne had stopped hearing us; her lips moved over some count of her own. Niall stayed down, breathing hard.

Óengus broke the silence first. “Where’s she taken her?”

“West. Two lochs over. A cottage on the near one, and on the far bank a stone with something old bound to it. It doesn’t sleep and it doesn’t miss much. My own people have a word for what that stone’s keeping.” I didn’t say it. It wasn’t the right word for what I’d felt on that bank, and I don’t hand out words I can’t trust.

Eithne was already turning for the house.

“Óengus.” I waited until his eyes came off his son and onto me. “Get what you’ll need to walk three days — food, boots that’ll hold, whatever you’re bringing to fight with, though I’d wager you don’t need it. I’ll take you to her, I’ve already decided that. You walk there whole, or you don’t walk there at all.”

Eithne stopped. “How far?”

“Three days. Four if the weather turns.”

“Then we’ve nae time to—”

“You’ve time to eat and sleep one night under your own roof,” I said. “You’ll be no good to her dead on your feet by the second day, and I’ll not carry you.”

She didn’t answer. She took the shawl up off the ground herself, wound it twice round her fist, and went in ahead of the rest of us.

We slept that night under their own roof, all of us badly. I took the door out of habit more than need. When I looked in on her near dawn Eithne still had the shawl wound round her fist, and I don’t think she’d slept at all. Her hands were a worker’s, thick-knuckled, the nails broken back to nothing. Strong hands, come apart round that shawl. I knew the grip. I’d held a thing like that once, when holding it was the only use my hands had left.

Óengus caught my arm on the way out. “With him behind you the length of it,” he said, meaning Niall, meaning the knife. “Until he decides otherwise.”

“No argument in me.”

We set out at first light. Niall walked behind me with the knife bare in his fist, close enough that I could hear his breath and the drag of his boots keeping pace with mine. By midday the back of my neck was tired of the attention.

I stopped. He nearly walked up my heels.

“Three days to the cottage,” I said. “Three nights of me on watch while you sleep. If I wanted you dead, the knife wouldn’t matter. Put it away before you trip on a root and save Malcolm’s men the trouble.”

He stared at me. Behind us, Óengus made a sound through his nose that might have been the first laugh out of him since the steading. He walked it off stiff, one hip that had given up part of its work years ago and been argued with every day since. Niall put the knife up. His hand stayed on the hilt the rest of the day. I let him have that much. There was something of a drengr in him under the temper, if he lived long enough to grow into it.

The hum found me on the second day. The same low drag under the ribs that hauled me eleven days south, months gone. Stronger now. Leaning west, toward a loch, a cottage, a stone with a dead king guarding it. My own people would call it a fylgja and think it meant a death coming. I’ve followed it too long to still believe that’s all it ever means.

I’d stood on that road once and thought the pull was for me. I was only standing where it ran through. I still don’t know what it wants. I know it’s stronger with every day we walk. Thorfinn’s skald had a way of telling a tale where you could feel the next verse coming before he sang it. This felt much the same. We were dancing straight toward the rest of the song.

Three days. Four if the weather turns. Whatever waits on that bank will see us coming a long way off.

Good. Let it.

These journals remain free tae any soul that finds the road through the pines. The keeping of them is nae small labour — long nights at the page, the remembering, the sorting of what happened from what the wind’s rearranged since. If the telling’s worth a coin or two a month tae ye, a paid subscription’s what keeps it coming, and keeps the gate open for those that hae none tae spare. And if ye’ve nothing tae give, give it nae mind — sit by the fire regardless. Ye’ll owe me naething for it, and we’ll call it even.

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23 June 950 (An t-Ògmhios)

We went east, and I let the cloth lead.

That isnae a thing I would have set down a season past, that I who have walked the old roads so long would take m’direction from a scrap of weather-worn wool a green-coated liar pressed intae m’hand. The archivist prefers tae record that her course was reasoned. I will record instead that it was followed. I have stopped pretending I dinnae ken which side of that I stand on.

The cloth didnae sing again after the first note. I want that plain. It had sung once at the upward burn, one bright note in the place under m’ribs where the bank’s hum has lived since the first day I felt it through the soil, and then it fell quiet the way a struck bell falls quiet, keeping the memory of the sound in the metal. Quiet isnae silence. I had learned long since tae distrust gone. I hadnae learned tae distrust quiet, and the day meant tae teach me.

The land east of the high pass doesnae announce itself, and I near walked past the wrongness of it for being so ordinary. The under-road country two nights gone had worn its strangeness on the outside: water running uphill, stars beneath the roots, a fire that became an eye when it suited. This was the reverse, and the reverse sits colder in the gut. The grass kept its manners. The burn ran the right way down. A steading sat in the fold of the glen below with smoke going off the thatch, straight and grey and domestic, and somewhere under it a woman was calling beasts in for the evening in a voice that had nae idea it was heard.

“There,” Runa said. Flat. Her eyes had already left the smoke for the ground around it, the slope and the cover and the one path down.

“Aye.”

“You feel it?”

I felt it. It caught lower than the bank’s pulse and quieter than the thread, a held place threaded through the whole hollow, grown thick with a steadiness that had never burned, only settled. It meant tae stay. I had forgotten what it costs tae stand at the edge of a keeping ye were never offered a place in.

Brushy’s claws set hard in the wool of m’cloak, the same grip she’d given me on the road before Eògan came round the bend. Her whole small body locked. She fixed on the smoke and would look nowhere else. I set two fingers against her back.

“Who?” I said.

She pressed herself flat tae m’neck and would nae answer.

“Twice now,” Runa said, watching her. “She does not do that for nothing.”

“Nae. She doesnae.”

I should have minded the warning in m’own creature. Let the record show I had it twice over, the cloth gone quiet and Brushy gone small, and I read them both as proof I was close when they were warning that what I came tae wasnae mine tae come tae. Want is a poor reader of signs. It turns every omen tae its own favor. I had kent that for a thousand years. I went down the hill regardless.

The bairn was at the water.

She sat on a flat grey stone where the burn widened intae a pool, her knees drawn up and her head tipped tae one side, listening. She listened with the whole of herself gone intae it, waiting for the water tae finish a sentence it had been speaking since before she sat down, as m’own blood would hae. The burn ran over the stones and said whatever burns say. She nodded, small. She’d gotten her answer.

I stopped on the bank above her. Runa stopped at m’shoulder. The trees held the slope in shadow behind us, and we stood in it, though neither of us had chosen tae. The bairn had the last of the sun. It came down through the gap where the burn cut the glen and put her in gold. The water threw more of it up at her from below, and she sat lit from two directions at once while we watched her from the dark, like two things that had wandered in from outside the story. The cloth in m’sleeve didnae sing, but I felt it lean, and the whole right side of m’body had gone with it before I gave the leave.

She was too old.

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I did the counting there, on the bank, with the evening going gold and m’heart going hard at m’ribs. M’bairn was taken at the birthing, less than a year gone, autumn tae summer, nae even one full turn of the wheel. The child on the stone had four summers in her if she had one, the roundness already leaving her face and the long bones starting underneath. Fae bairns age as they will, and nae as the calendar instructs them.

“Eògan,” I said, very quiet, tae nae one. Three nights past, or thirty years. Time keeps nae manners around the thread.

Then she turned her head and found me.

I have worn a face for the better part of a year that mortal eyes slide off of. It works by disinterest rather than hiding; hiding draws the eye, and what I wear lowers the world’s attention until men forget tae wonder. I built it with care. The bairn held it anyway. She looked up from her water and her eyes came tae mine and didnae move. She wasnae afraid. She tipped her head at me as she had tipped it at the burn, patient and listening, as though I were the next sound she meant tae make sense of.

The cloth sang. One note, the same bright note from the upward burn, and it didnae come from m’sleeve this time. It came from her, from the small, listening silhouette of her on the grey stone, and I saw it before I understood I was seeing it, a thread of gold, thin as a hair pulled from the sun itself, running from her wee chest tae mine and gone again before I could swear tae the color of it. The bank answered it from forty miles west — one struck bell waking another. It came from her, from the small listening silhouette of her on the grey stone.

I kent her. I kent her below decision and below choosing. She sat in the gold light and rang the one note m’grief has made for a year, and every part of me I have spent a year governing stood up at once and said mine.

I couldnae trust a word of it.

That was the cruelty I hadnae braced for, the one Eògan set in me at the burn and I had carried east like a stone in a wet boot. Ye have kent it so hard ye near made it true by force. M’sight could tell me the bairn was fae-touched. It couldnae tell me she was mine. I have carried one grief every hour of a year. I would fit it tae any face that held m’eye long enough, and the wanting would swear tae it every time. The wanting is the one witness I had been warned nae tae believe.

So I stood, and I couldnae move, caught between a knowing I dared nae trust and a doubt I couldnae bear. Intae that crack the woman came up from the steading.

“Sìle,” she called, soft, a mortal name, and the child turned from me at once, the whole listening weight of her swinging away toward the voice. “Sìle, a ghràidh, come away in, the damp’s coming.”

She came down the path with a shawl over her arm and her sleeves still pushed up from the evening’s work, a woman of nae forty years with flour worn intae the creases of her skirts. She crossed tae the stone, crouched, and put the shawl about the wee shoulders with a tenderness so plain and so unthinking that I felt it go intae me the way a blade goes intae a seam, intae the meat where I am held together.

She loved her. There was nae mistaking it. She tucked the shawl, said something low that made the child’s mouth go round with delight, pushed the hair off the wee brow with her thumb, her hands knowing the shoulders before her mind had given them the order. That is nae labor. That is the place yer hands go home tae.

The child was warded, though nae by working, nae by thread drawn from sill tae lintel. This had grown on its own, frost intae stone, one winter after another, until there was more frost in the stone than stone. Care had claimed her. That was all. And the oldest law there is says ye dinnae take what a hearth has freely loved and freely kept.

I could see the ward. I could see, too, that it had nae hold on me, and that is a horror I hadnae prepared for. A made ward might have stopped me. This one only forbade. It stood between me and the bairn and it said not yours, plainly, in the one tongue I have honored every day of m’long life, and it had nae power behind it tae make me heed. Only the law. Only that.

“Sorcha.” Runa’s voice, low, at m’side. She had read m’face. “Sorcha. Look at me.”

I didnae look at her. Couldnae.

“We go,” she said. “Now. The way we came. Whatever this is, we speak of it on the road, not standing in someone’s dooryard.” Her eyes stayed on the woman below. “She has done nothing. That child is—”

She stopped. Runa names a threat before she names anything else, and she had nae word ready for this one. The pause told me more than a word would have, and when it came it landed the harder for waiting. “That child is kept, Sorcha. You of all the world know what it is to take a well kept thing.”

“Aye,” I said. “I do.”

“Then you know this is where we walk away.”

The bairn looked back at me once more over the woman’s shoulder. Found me. Held me. Rang the one bright note under m’ribs, nae knowing she did it, nae knowing she was the whole sum of m’grief sat four summers deep on a grey stone in the gold light, calling me mine in a voice that used nae words at all.

Brushy made a sound against m’neck I had never heard from her. Small. Wretched. A no with nae mouth tae shape it.

I have written more than once in these pages that I am the archivist and nae a mourner come tae kneel, that some things belong tae the night that gave them and nae tae the page, and I will keep that bargain even here. I willnae set down what broke in me on that bank. It does nae render. It would only come out smaller than it was.

I will set down only what I did.

I crossed the bank. I went down tae the grey stone, and the woman half-rose with her ordinary face going from courtesy tae question, and I didnae let the question finish. I took m’daughter up out of the curve of that shawl and intae m’own two arms, where she has always belonged. She didnae cry. She put her wee hand flat against m’chest where the cold lives and listened, the same listening she’d given the burn, patient and whole, as though I were the next voice in the water and she had waited all her short life tae catch the sense of me.

The ward guttered as I broke it, the grown light of all that loving folding down and out and gone the way a flame goes when ye take the air from it. Behind me the woman’s voice broke and I will carry the sound of it as long as I am alive.

I had been owed something. The world had broken even an ancient one and given her nae word of acknowledgment, and I had told m’self so for a year, and flown it east like a standard, and this was the ground it brought me tae.

I took her. I turned for the old road. Forty miles west the cottage leaned toward me through the soil, the whole held breath of the house I built turning toward what I carried, and I was fool enough even then, with another woman’s grief still ringing at m’back, tae read it as the world agreeing with me at last.

These journals remain free tae any soul that finds the road through the pines. The keeping of them is nae small labour — long nights at the page, the remembering, the sorting of what happened from what the wind’s rearranged since. If the telling’s worth a coin or two a month tae ye, a paid subscription’s what keeps it coming, and keeps the gate open for those that hae none tae spare. And if ye’ve nothing tae give, give it nae mind — sit by the fire regardless. Ye’ll owe me naething for it, and we’ll call it even.

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🏰If this drew you in, Sorcha’s world is still moving—step into Soul Castle: The Guardian & The Keeper, a series on Amazon: HERE

20–21 June 950 (Alban Hefin)

Ye have just read what Lasair made of being left with the door. I set it before m’own account of those same days on purpose. The archivist arranges as she sees fit and I’ll nae gild it further. This is what the rest of us were about, while she kept the cottage.

The rumor had come tae us through three mouths, which is two more than I trust and one fewer than makes a tale worthless. A bairn east beyond the high pass. A household with nae proper kin tae claim it. A woman who had told the tale twice and altered it only once, and that, more than any of the rest, was why I had set m’feet east at all. Lies change easily. Truth changes only where memory touches it.

We left before light. As we walked I lowered us out of the world's notice — nae hidden, only nae worth the eye's trouble. Present, and unworthy of it. Runa kept close enough tae breathe m'air and didnae complain of it, which I have learned tae count among her virtues.

The land east of the loch rises as if it resents admitting there is anything beyond it. The ground folds, lifts, breaks itself intae bog, stone, and water that hasnae decided where it means tae go. June had taken the hard edges off the world without troubling tae make it kind. Our skirts were wet tae the knee inside an hour. The midges found Runa before they found me, which improved m’humor.

“You are amused,” she said.

“Nae.”

“You are.”

“Aye.”

She slapped at her neck. Her hand found her steel and stayed there while she came tae a decision.

“It willnae,” I said.

“What?”

“Whatever ye are thinking.”

“You do not know what I am thinking.”

“I ken the shape of it.”

Brushy, from m’shoulder, made a sound that was nearly laughter. We went on.

A bairn who didnae cry as other bairns cry, they said. Who listened tae running water as though it were speaking and she had only tae be patient tae catch the sense of it. Absurd, all of it, which didnae make it useless. Mortals embellish what frightens them. But the root of a fear is rarely invented.

By midday the trees had thinned and the sky opened too wide for m’liking. Open sky gives the world too many directions from which tae be presumptuous. Runa didnae share the view. She walked easier in the broadness — shoulders loose, eyes moving, one hand never far from her steel. The sea had made her, even this far inland. She read distance as I read cold. She didnae want walls. She wanted a horizon.

Then Brushy went quiet.

That, more than anything in the day, changed it. Brushy is quiet when she sleeps, when she sulks, when she eats, and when she is about tae become someone else’s difficulty. She had ridden m’shoulder since dawn, tangling her paws in m’hair, humming tae herself, and then she stopped. Her whole small body locked.

I stopped. Runa stopped with me.

“What is it?” she said.

I didnae answer at once. The ground hummed under us, but nae with the bank’s deep pulse. This was thinner, higher — a thread drawn taut across distance rather than rooted down through stone. Familiar, and nae. It made old bones recall roads they had been pretending nae tae ken.

Brushy’s claws tightened.

“Ah,” I said.

“Ah is not an answer.”

“It is the beginning of one.”

Ahead, where the way bent between two low rises, there was music. Nae loud, nae quite near. Fiddle, or pipes, or a voice doing the work of both — a foolishness some of us indulged in when nae one was set tae watch. It didnae cross the distance tae reach us. It was simply there, laid in the air like light on water.

Runa heard it too. Her hand told me so.

“Dinnae draw steel,” I said.

“I had not.”

“Ye were about tae.”

“I was considering it.”

“Consider something else.”

Brushy made a small, distressed noise and pressed her face tae m’neck. That was new.

I set two fingers against her back. “Who?”

She didnae answer. Brushy can speak when it suits her. It didnae suit her.

The music turned. A line of song wound through it, old, sweet, and far too pleased with itself.

Then a voice came round the bend.

“Well. There ye are.”

I closed m’eyes a moment.

“You know that voice,” Runa realized.

“Unfortunately.”

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A man stepped intae view — and I call him a man because that is what he had chosen tae resemble, and courtesy asks that one honor the effort even when the effort is plainly malicious. Tall enough. Young enough tae irritate. Hair the color of wheat in a sun that wasnae shining. A face built for trust, and therefore nae tae be trusted with anything.

He wore green.

“Brushy,” he said, warm enough tae soften a harder creature than she pretends tae be. “Ye wee faithless thing.”

Brushy vanished down the back of m’cloak.

His smile widened. Then his eyes found me, and his performance dropped.

“Sorcha.”

Nae Lady. Nae Winter’s blade. Nae one of the titles I have been given by creatures hoping tae live through the giving. Just Sorcha. I hated him for it at once, and with the ease of long practice.

“Eògan,” I said.

He laid a hand over his heart and bowed enough tae make the bow an insult. “She remembers me.”

“I remember fevers as well.”

“And the same tongue on her still.” His eyes went over me, and there was the danger in him — nae his power, though he had that, nor his age, though he wore less of it than he carried. The danger was that he recognized me. “They were right, then.”

“Nae one is ever right.”

“They said ye had taken tae walking mortal ways with mortal women, and a household creature playing at wild.” He leaned, as if tae see past me. “Come out, Brushy. I havenae eaten anyone ye liked in a century at least.”

Brushy stayed hidden.

“We are passing through,” I said.

“Aye,” said Eògan. “That is what folk say in the breath before they dinnae.”

Runa spoke, in Norse. “Who is he?”

He answered her in the same tongue. “An old friend.”

“Nae,” I said.

He changed languages wi’out effort. “An old enemy?”

“Nae.”

“An old disappointment?”

“Closer.”

His smile went quieter. “There she is.”

I should hae turned back at that. Let the record show I understood as much at the time and chose otherwise — nae from folly, tae which I have never been much inclined, but from calculation, which is the worse fault, for folly can be forgiven in hindsight and calculation insists on defending itself.

“Ye are east of where ye belong,” I said.

“So are ye.”

“I belong naewhere.”

“That was always the lie ye told worst.”

“Do we kill him?” Runa asked.

Eògan brightened. “I like her.”

“We dinnae kill him,” I said. “Nae yet.”

“A sensible compromise.” He turned and gestured toward the bend. “There is a fire past it. Food. Music. A night’s rest, if any sense is left in ye.”

“Nae.”

“Hospitality, Sorcha.”

“Nae.”

“Freely offered.”

“Nae.”

“Freely refused, then?”

There it was.

We are made of older bones than flesh, m’kind. Offer and answer. Gift and refusal. Threshold and invitation. The words carry the weight, and Eògan was always better with the form of a rite than the truth it was meant tae bind.

“We have a purpose on this road,” I said.

“And the road will still be under yer feet come morning.”

“What happens if we accept?” Runa questioned.

“An evening,” said Eògan. “Naething more.”

“That is never true,” I said.

“It is true on occasion.”

“Nae from ye.”

The music past the bend warmed. Under m’cloak Brushy shifted, the smallest movement, and it betrayed her — nae fear in it. Want. I felt it through the cloth: the pull of old music on a creature older than the music, the grief of exile that doesnae always arrive loud. Sometimes it is only a small body going still when a song she kent before the losing finds her on ground that hadnae been made for it.

I could have refused. I didnae.

“One night,” I said.

Eògan’s smile gentled, and I liked that less than the mockery. “One night.”

“Nae bargains.”

“Nae bargains.”

“Nae debts.”

“Nae debts.”

“Nae names taken.”

His eyes flickered. “Careful still.”

“Alive still.”

He stepped aside, and we went past him and round the bend.

The world changed politely. That is the worst way for a world tae change. A violent change can be met — a tearing, a splitting, a door thrown open where nae door stood; such things have at least the decency tae be plain. This had none. The way went on. The grass stayed wet. The light stayed June. And then the hill on our left had stars beneath its roots, and the burn running beside the way was flowing uphill.

Runa stopped. I didnae.

“Keep walking,” I said.

“The water—”

“Has poor manners.”

“The sky is under the ground.”

“Aye.”

“You knew this would happen.”

“I suspected.”

“You agreed.”

“Aye.”

“Why?”

Brushy crept back up tae m’shoulder, eyes wide, whiskers trembling.

“Because sometimes refusing a door makes it follow ye,” I said. That wasnae the whole of the answer. It was enough of one for the walking.

The fire stood in a hollow that hadnae been there from the road. Around it gathered more of the old kind than I had seen in one place since before I left the Court. Nae a court itself — worse. Courts have rules. Witnesses. All the theater that power wants when it wishes tae be admired. This was older than court, and looser: a between-place for those who had stepped aside from their proper roads and hadnae yet been claimed by another.

Tables stood where nae tables had been a breath before. Food enough tae insult moderation. Cups filled and filled again by hands I never saw. Music from three corners at once. Laughter moving through the trees as if it were alive.

For one moment all of it went quiet.

Then someone said, “Sorcha?”

A woman by the fire stood. White hair braided through with black thread. Antlers rising from her brow, for subtlety had never once troubled her. I kent her, and wished I didnae.

“No,” said another voice.

“It is,” said a third.

And the gathering let out its breath. Nae reverence — I would have kent what tae do with reverence. Recognition.

Runa stood at m’side, taking in the impossible, already counting the ways out. I could hae told her there were none. It would hae been unkind and nae use.

Eògan arrived at m’other shoulder. “Ye see? A simple evening.”

“I will freeze yer tongue in yer mouth.”

“Later, perhaps.”

Brushy launched herself from m’shoulder.

“Brushy,” I said. Too late. She crossed the hollow in three bounds and landed on a table with a dignity nae creature her size has earned. A cheer went up. A cheer. For Brushy.

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Runa turned slowly tae look at me.

“Nae,” I said. She had asked naething. “Nae,” I said again.

On the far side of the fire something antlered and ancient offered Brushy a berry from a silver dish, and Brushy took it as her due.

“Everyone knows her,” Runa said.

“It would seem so.”

“You did not know?”

“I have found it best nae tae inquire too closely intae Brushy’s arrangements.” Which was true. Mostly.

The night turned difficult after that. ‘Twas nae frightening. That I could have written plainly. Instead it was pleasant, and pleasure makes a poor witness. The music got intae the bone and persuaded it that it had always been meant for moving. Cups arrived at our hands. I didnae drink from mine, at first. Then Eògan laughed at me, and I was young enough again tae answer mockery with spite in place of sense. I drank. It tasted of snowmelt over apple blossom, and the first lie anyone ever enjoyed hearing.

Runa didnae drink. At first. Then a woman with blue-black skin and eyes like peat smoke set a cup before her and said something in old Norse that took Runa somewhere she wasnae letting me follow.

“What did she say?” I asked.

Runa took up the cup. “Nothing.”

“She said something.”

“She said my dead would not begrudge me one night.”

I looked at the woman. She looked back. Eògan was, of a sudden, elsewhere. Coward.

Runa drank.

After that the music altered, and I willnae account for the whole of it. I am the archivist, nae a supplicant. There are things that belong tae the night that gave them and nae tae the page.

I remember Brushy dancing on the rim of a bowl while six creatures older than several kingdoms clapped the time.

I remember Runa laughing once, only once, the sound slipping past some locked door before she could stop it, when a moss-made creature tried tae teach her a reel and failed — she kept turning it intae a fighting step.

I remember Eògan beside me, nae touching, nae asking, only there beside me, as he had been once, before we ruined it.

“Ye still sing?” he said.

“Nae.”

“Liar.”

“I will remind ye I promised nae tae kill ye for one night only.”

“Nae, ye made nae such promise.”

Which was true. Irritatingly.

Then Brushy, traitor that she is, began tae sing from the table. The song was Winter Court. Nae the polished nonsense they perform in the halls — older, lower, carried between thresholds, sung before names had settled properly intae power and power had learned tae wear a crown. I hadnae heard it whole in a long while. I had heard a fragment of it from Brushy’s throat once before, and answered it before I chose tae.

Now she sang the next line of it.

The hollow changed. Nae stopped. The dancing held, the fire kept, but the attention of the place swung my way.

“Brushy,” I said, verra quiet.

She sang louder.

Eògan smiled without triumph, and that was how I kent he hadnae arranged it.

“Do ye remember?” he said.

“Nae.”

“Liar,” he said again, softer this time.

The song pulled. Memory is nae a thing one opens; that is what fools believe. Memory is a thing that opens ye, once it has found the right weakness.

I remembered ice over black water, and a version of m’self before the exile, standing barefoot on the ice because someone had dared me to.

I remembered Eògan going through that ice three times because he wouldnae admit he couldnae follow.

I remembered Brushy small enough tae sit in both m’hands, furious at the fact of being saved.

I remembered laughing.

That was the worst of it. Nae the pain — pain is honest, it comes with its purpose plain on it. Joy come back after a long absence is the crueler inconvenience, for it tells ye that some part of ye didnae die when ye gave it the order.

Runa had found me across the flames. She had never seen that woman. Neither had Lasair. Neither had I, for a long while.

The song rose. I didnae mean tae answer it. I did.

M’voice came rough at the first, unused in that manner, then cleaner, colder. The hollow took it the way ground takes frost — nae surprised, only changed. Brushy’s tail curled over her back. Eògan closed his eyes.

The words were older than Gaelic, older than any tongue the mortals near this loch would ken, and I willnae set them down. They would only come out smaller for it.

When the song ended, nae one clapped. That was well. I might have killed someone.

The night moved on. At some point Runa sat beside me on a fallen star that was pretending tae be a log.

“That was you,” she said.

“I am still deciding.”

“You were different.”

“I was drunk.”

“You had barely drunk.”

“I was bewitched.”

“Yes. But that was still you.”

I looked at the fire. “Ye have grown inconveniently observant.”

“I was always observant.”

“Aye. Quieter about it.”

She let that stand as fair.

On the other side of the flames Brushy had fallen asleep on the antlered woman's shoulder. The woman didnae move, though she plainly wished tae, and that pleased me considerably.

“Are we safe?” Runa said.

“No.”

“Are we in danger?”

“Also no.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the only true one.”

She set her forearms on her knees. “Where are we?”

“Between.”

“Between what?”

“Whatever we were, and whatever we are fool enough tae become.”

She looked at me. I let out a breath. “It is one of the under roads. Nae the old roads I use — older than those, and far less obedient. The places where the world keeps what willnae sit neatly inside it.”

“And he brought us here.”

“Eògan opened a door. We walked through it.”

“Hospitality is dangerous among your kind.”

“Everything is dangerous among m’kind.”

Runa nodded slowly. “That explains a great deal.”

I chose nae tae ask what.

The fire threw sparks upward, and they didnae fall. They became small birds and flew off beneath the ground, where the stars were. Runa watched them go.

Then she said, “He knows about the child.”

The between-place seemed tae listen.

“Aye,” I said.

“He has not said it.”

“He doesnae need tae.”

“Will he?”

“When it serves him.”

“That sounds like an enemy.”

I looked across the fire at him. He was talking with a woman made of shadow and ash, his hands too broad in the telling, beautiful and careless with it, and as yet untouched by any of it.

“No,” I said. “That sounds like an old friend.”

Runa didnae press. I was grateful. I was also vexed tae be grateful.

Later, though later had become a word I couldnae trust, Eògan found me by the upward burn. I had gone there because the water offended me and I wished tae judge it in private. He stood beside me a while and neither of us spoke. That had once been easy between us. I didnae care tae find it still was.

“I heard what happened,” he said at last.

“No ye didnae.”

“I heard enough.”

“Then ye heard it wrong.”

He looked at the water. “No. I heard ye survived.”

That landed where he had aimed it. I said naething.

“They speak of what was taken from ye,” he went on. “They speak of the bairn, for a loss is easier tae admire when it is small enough tae picture. They dinnae speak of what the taking did tae the mother.”

“Careful.”

“I am.”

“No. Ye are almost careful. It isnae the same.”

A faint smile. “There she is again.”

I turned on him. “Did ye bring me here tae open old wounds for sport?”

“No.”

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“Then why?”

“Because ye were walking toward grief with a sword-woman and a sleeping scrap of winter for company, and someone ought tae remind ye that ye werenae born grieving.”

The burn ran upward between us. I hated him then — nae for the cruelty. For the accuracy.

“What do ye ken?” I said.

“Of the child?”

“Say it.”

“Less than ye want. More than ye’ll like.”

“Say it.”

“She lives.”

“I ken that.”

“Aye. Ye have kent it so hard ye near made it true by force.”

I stepped closer. He didnae move; that, at least, hadnae changed.

“She lives,” he said again. “She is loved. And the thread that holds her runs nearer tae yer own ground than ye have let yerself believe.”

I went cold. Nae court’s doing, nae the season’s.

“When?”

“I dinnae ken.”

“Where?”

“If I kent it, I would tell ye.”

“Would ye?”

Hurt showed in him before he could close it off. Good. Let him keep something.

“Aye,” he said. “I would.”

The words rang clean. That was worse than a lie.

He reached intae his sleeve and brought out something small. A strip of cloth, naething bound intae it, nae map hidden in it, nae longer than m’hand, faded with weather and handling. Along one edge, in a quick uneven stitch, ran a pattern of three marks repeated — nae writing, nae quite. A child’s notion of a pattern, or a woman’s careful hand marking what was the bairn’s.

I didnae touch it.

“What is it?”

“Caught on a thorn east of the pass. Three nights past, or thirty years; time isnae keeping its manners around the thread.”

“That is useless.”

“Aye.”

“And yet ye kept it.”

“Aye.”

The cloth stirred in a wind that wasnae blowing. And then it sang. Nae aloud — nae in any manner Runa would have caught had she stood at m’elbow. It sounded in the place where the bank’s hum had been living since the first day I felt it under the ground. One note. Small. Bright. Gone near before I could name it.

I took the cloth.

The moment it touched m’fingers the hollow shifted at our backs. The laughter stretched thin. The music drew out tae a single long note. The fire was a star, then an eye, then a coal again.

“Ah,” said Eògan.

“What?”

“The night is ending.”

“I didnae agree tae that.”

“Ye agreed tae one night.”

“This wasnae a night.”

“It was enough of one.”

The under road began tae fold. I felt Runa before I saw her, moving fast, already kenning that something was happening and disliking it. Brushy came from nowhere and struck m’chest hard enough tae make me step back, which I will deny if asked.

“Hold tight,” I said.

Runa reached us. “What is happening?”

“We are leaving.”

“I did not choose to leave.”

“Did ye choose tae arrive?”

She opened her mouth. The world answered for me. The fire drew inward. The tables became roots. The roots became dark. The music tucked itself in behind m’ribs, where it had nae leave tae be. Eògan stood across a distance that hadnae been there a breath before.

“Sorcha,” he called.

I looked at him. He smiled, and for one instant I saw him as he had been before courts, before grief, before the ruin each of us made of ourselves.

“Ye still talk too much,” he said.

Then the road came up and struck us with morning.

Runa woke first. I ken this because when I opened m’eyes she was already crouched with her knife drawn, looking as though she meant tae murder the nearest tree for failing tae account for itself.

We were on the eastern road. The same place, near enough — packs beside us, weapons still our own, boots wet with dew, the sky pale with first light. Brushy asleep in the hollow of m’cloak with a berry held in both paws.

Runa turned slowly toward me. “What happened?”

“We were entertained.”

Her eyes narrowed. “By whom?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes.”

“Then unfortunately it does.”

She stood. “You knew.”

“I kent enough.”

“You knew we were being taken somewhere.”

“I kent we were being invited.”

“That is not the same.”

“With m’kind it is often near enough tae be inconvenient.”

Runa looked at the road, the hill, the burn running in its proper, ordinary direction. “Was it real?”

Brushy snored.

I opened m’hand. The strip of cloth lay across m’palm. Runa saw it and said naething.

“Aye,” I said. “Real enough.”

She looked at me then, properly. “The child?”

“Nae proof.”

“But something.”

I didnae answer that.

The cloth made nae sound now. Worn cloth, small stitches, and a note that had reached me through a night I hadnae meant tae accept.

Runa sheathed her knife. “Do we keep following the rumor?”

I looked east, toward whatever household had bred the tale that drew us out. The rumor might still be false; most are. But the thread beneath it had pulled tight.

“No,” I said. “We follow what the rumor is tied tae.”

“And that is?”

I closed m’fingers over the cloth. For the first time since I came intae this mortal dark, the answer didnae feel like wanting. It felt like tracking.

“Her,” I said.

Brushy opened one eye, made a satisfied sound, and went back tae sleep. I looked down at her.

“We will discuss yer reputation when I have the strength for it.”

She didnae trouble herself tae look concerned.

Runa shouldered her pack. She didnae ask more, though I could see the questions ordering themselves behind her eyes. A sensible woman. Some questions want ripening before they are any use.

We walked on.

Behind us, where the path had bent and nae bent, the music held one breath longer than it should have. Then even that was gone.

Or seemed tae be. I have learned tae distrust gone.

🏰If this drew you in, Sorcha’s world is still moving—step into Soul Castle: The Guardian & The Keeper, a series on Amazon: HERE

As ye well ken, Lasair was left alone at the cottage while the rest of us were east on the road, after a rumor I willnae set down yet. What follows is what I came home tae.

She kept her own account of the days in Ulf’s shorthand — half runes, half a quick hand, the marks ye set down when ye need something kept and have nae time tae make it fair. I’ve rendered it intae this tongue as I do m’own. The seeing is hers, and I’ve left it hers.

I set it here because she asked me tae, and because she was right tae write it. That’s the whole of m’reason. Dinnae look for another.

— S

Lasair

Seven days they’ve been gone.

I keep the work the same. Salt at the sill in the morning, the rowan switch fresh above the door, iron where iron should be. I bank the fire at night and wake it at dawn. Sorcha keeps fires now, for Runa and for me; she made a great matter of saying she would, so I keep hers while she’s away and dinnae let it die. A cold hearth tells the glen the house is empty, and I’ll nae tell them that.

Brushy went east with them. I hadnae known how much noise a creature that small makes about a house until there was none of it. Runa’s kettle sits where Runa leaves it; I moved it twice the first morning before I owned it was already where it belonged.

On the third day I found tracks at the foot of the hill that were nae deer and nae mine. Two men, maybe three. They came up from the Mile, stood where they could see the door, and went back. I’d half-kent it since the gathering — that someone there marked the church-woman taken in at the loch, counted the heads at this hearth, and saw three had gone tae one. A woman alone is an easier thing tae come for.

I’m nae fool about what they are. I left Moray ahead of men like these. I’m nae frightened of men; I know the look of a place being watched before it’s taken, and I know what tae do with a door.

On the fourth evening I went out tae see the salt fresh before dark, and the prints were there again, closer. Three sets this time, bold across the open ground, one of them come right tae the edge of the yard.

I know tracks. I have read worse ground than this, so I’ll set down what I saw plain and let it be as strange on the page as it was under my feet. Their prints came up tae within a stride of the door-yard, and there they stopped — both feet set, all three men, not a step further. Then they turned and went back. The strides going were longer than the strides coming. They left at a run, and men dinnae run from nothing.

There was nae print on m’side of the line. Naething had stood there that I could see, naething that left a mark. But the midges kept off that stretch of ground, in the thick of a June dusk. They wouldnae cross it. I wouldnae either. I went back inside and barred the door. I didnae feel foolish for barring it.

So I set the door as Ulf taught me — the thread drawn from sill tae lintel, named, tied off. It’s a small working and I was never more than half-good at it; he died before he could teach me the rest, and it’s aye come tae my hand slow, like green wood tae a flame.

It didnae come slow. I drew the thread and it answered back. A second will closed over mine and pulled the working tighter than I have ever pulled it. The door went hard against the night as a good door should, and never has for me. I stood with my palm flat tae the iron. I had set a small working, and a far greater one had pressed its palm beside mine.

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That’s what I keep turning over. Not the men. Men I understand.

There’s one who keeps the stone on the far loch. We stood at the bank with Sorcha in the spring, the day the stone gave its name. It’s his ground, and I’ve never been more than a guest on it. But the help in the thread came from that water. I felt it before I could name it, a weight, and a turning-toward. It has never reached this far before. Never come tae my door.

By the fifth day the hum off the bank was stronger. There’s aye been a hum off that water, felt in the teeth more than heard, but I caught it that morning from my own door, where before I’d have walked half the Mile tae find it. That ground has waked. I dinnae think it waked for me.

That night I dreamt, and it wasnae my dream. I stood at the door, and the dark beyond it was full, and the men were in it, but what held the ground was older than they were, had planted itself between us, and meant tae stay. I woke before dawn with the taste of cold iron in my mouth, and the door had held the night, nae from anything I did.

I dinnae like where that leads. Whatever that strength is, it doesnae trouble itself with a Moray woman and her salt for naething. Power has never had reason tae stop for me before. This is keeping watch, and watch is nae kept over naething. It’s minding me for what this house is, and who it waits for. I’m being kept as a fire is kept — banked against a need that hasnae arrived yet.

I’ll write it plain, since there’s nae one here tae say it tae: I’d sooner face the men. The men have a reason I can hold in my two hands. This other has a reason I can measure the edges of but nae name, and that’s worse tae stand next tae in the dark. But I’ll stand next tae it. Sorcha went east after one bairn and left me the door. I’ll keep the door.

Seven days. I dinnae ken how many more. The fire’s lit, the salt’s down. Whatever comes up the Mile will find the door held and me behind it. I’ve run from worse than Malcolm’s men. I’ve stopped running.

That’s as much as I’ll write. The light’s going, and I want the salt fresh before dark.

These journals remain free tae any soul that finds the road through the pines. The keeping of them is nae small labour — long nights at the page, the remembering, the sorting of what happened from what the wind’s rearranged since. If the telling’s worth a coin or two a month tae ye, a paid subscription’s what keeps it coming, and keeps the gate open for those that hae none tae spare. And if ye’ve nothing tae give, give it nae mind — sit by the fire regardless. Ye’ll owe me naething for it, and we’ll call it even.

🏰If this drew you in, Sorcha’s world is still moving—step into Soul Castle: The Guardian & The Keeper, a series on Amazon: HERE

Let me step out from behind Sorcha for a minute and talk to you as myself.

If you’ve walked the Dark Mile with me this far, you already know that Sorcha doesn’t waste words and doesn’t hand you comfort she hasn’t made you earn. I’ve tried to write her the way I’d want to be written — honest, a little merciless, funny exactly when you don’t want her to be. So believe me when I tell you, plainly, with no marketing gloss on it: the chapters I’m polishing right now are the ones this whole serial has been walking toward since the very first page.

The question that’s haunted Sorcha since she built that cottage on the bank, the thing she’s been quietly organizing her entire grief around, is about to get an answer. And answers, on the Dark Mile, are never free. That’s all I’ll say. You’ve trusted me this far, so trust me on this too: what’s coming is worth the wait, and you'll want to be caught up when it lands.

Here’s the other thing I’ve been sitting on, and I can’t keep it to myself any longer. The Dark Mile Journals has never been a side story. It’s the deep past of a much larger world — the Soul Castle series — and the threads Sorcha is pulling on right now run all the way forward into those books. Which brings me to the news: Soul Castle Book 3 is now in the works. It’s been rattling around in my head for months, and the moment these chapters are polished, I’m starting it in earnest. The old powers on that bank are not done with anyone. They are, if anything, just getting started.

If you’re caught up — thank you. You have no idea what it means to write for readers like you. And if you’ve fallen behind, now is the time to go back to Chapter One and walk the Mile from the beginning, because you are going to want the full weight of it under you when these next chapters drop.

Stay close. It’s about to get really good — in the worst, best way Sorcha knows how.

— Melissa

Start your journey through The Dark Mile Journals

19th June, 950

We came off the moor on the fifth day, ontae higher ground that kent its own name again, and the relief of walking on earth that didnae lie about whether it was earth nearly undid me more than the moor had. Runa allowed us a fire that night, the first since the ford. She judged the ground safe enough for it. I didnae argue. Brushy sang the whole evening through, making up for the silence she’d kept across the water. I let her. And I will set down that the sound of her was the closest tae comfort I had felt since I left m’own door.

The woman came tae the fire near the end of it.

I say woman. She had the silhouette of one — old, bent, a creel on her back as though she were out gathering, which nae one is, on that ground, at that hour. Runa was on her feet wi’ the blade before the form had finished arriving. I put a hand out. This was nae creature of the moor’s. This was older and far more tired, and wanted nae part of us as meat, one of the wandering sort, the ones who walk the edges of places and trade in what they have seen. What they have seen is all they own, and so they are careful wi’ it. She wanted the fire. I let her have a share of it. It is cheap, and the old ones remember who was open-handed.

She warmed herself a while and said naething, which is manners, among her kind. Then she asked where we were bound, and I had learned at the ford what these askings cost and what they are worth, so I told her true: east, past the moor we’d crossed, after a child.

She made a sound at that. Nae a word, the small noise that comes when what’s said willnae fit what ye already ken. And she told me, careful as they are careful wi’ all they own, that I was going wrong. That there was indeed a child, but nae east. South, she said, and inland, down off the high country intae the soft green straths where the people are thicker on the ground. A child that aged nae as a child should age. The mortals down that way had it at two winters old, she said — but she offered the number lightly, wi’ a look that said she kent as well as I did what a mortal’s count is worth against a fae-born bairn. She had the tale from another of her sort, who had it from the wind off that ground, and she gave it tae me plainly, as ye hand over a true thing, because she believed it was the child I sought and she meant me a kindness.

I didnae take it as she meant it.

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I hae sat wi’ it since, and I will set the trouble of it down honestly, because the trouble is the point. The water at the ford said east, past the moor, and said it had cost me a true thing tae be told. This one says south and inland, meant me well, and her telling cost her naething tae give and me naething tae take — which is its own kind of warning. The cheap truth and the dear one dinnae always agree, and when they disagree a wiser creature than I might ask which is which. There is a child east. There is, it seems, a child south. And here is where a careless woman would find her answer and be wrong: m’own bairn hasnae seen a full turn of the year; the mortals put the southern child at two winters; so by any plain reckoning the southern child isnae mine, and the matter’s settled. But a mortal’s count is worth naething against a bairn that ages as fae bairns age — they cannae tell ye the years of one whose years dinnae run as theirs do, and the woman kent it, gave me the number regardless, and let me see that she kent. So the one measure I hae, the one plain sum that ought tae rule a child in or out, is the very measure I cannae trust. I dinnae ken whether the two of them are seeing one child from different sides, or two children entirely, nor whether either is mine, nor how a woman who doesnae ken her own bairn’s face, and cannae even count its years against another’s, is meant tae tell one strange child from another across the whole green back of the country.

The wandering woman saw, I think, that she had given me a burden where she’d meant tae give me a gift. She didnae apologize — her kind dinnae — but she sat a while longer than she’d any need tae, which is the closest tae sorry they have. Then she took up her creel and went back tae walking the edges of places, and the dark took her in the ordinary way.

Runa asked me what she’d said. I told her. Runa thought about it as she thinks about everything — as though it were terrain. “Two leads,” she said. “One you paid for. One that came free.” She set another piece of wood on the fire. “We finish the one we paid for first.” Then she lay down wi’ her back tae the warmth and her face tae the dark, and slept as soldiers sleep: all at once, and entirely.

I didnae sleep. I sat wi’ the two directions, Brushy gone quiet in the basket against m’side, and I thought about what the creature at the ford had told me last, unasked, which I havenae been able tae let go of since — mind which of us has been looking for the other. East. South. A child that doesnae age right, in either telling. And me at a fire on high ground between the two, certain of this much only: that I am going tae be wrong at least once before I am right, and that I hae never in m’long life had less notion of which wrongness I was about tae choose.

But Runa had the right of it, as she has the right of most matters on a road. We finish the one we paid for first. East, then. In the morning.

17th June, 950

The moor began on the third day past the ford and I will set down that I hae crossed a great many empty places and disliked this one wi’ a particular freshness. It isnae empty. That is the trick of it. It is full of water lying in wait of being walked into — black eyes of it set in the green, some nae wider than a step, some that would take a horse and its rider both and close over the meal wi’out a ripple. Runa went first the whole of that day, finding the ground wi’ a staff before she trusted her weight tae it. I came behind in her steps. Brushy didnae sing. She had sung across worse. She didnae sing here.

It came in the last grey hour, when the light goes flat and the eye cannae tell standing water from solid ground — the hour the moor keeps for exactly this work.

It was a horse. I will write what I saw, which is that it was a horse — a fine one, grey going white, standing on good ground a little off our line wi’ its head low, the most welcome sight in the whole of that drowned country. A horse means a road. A horse means a man, a holding, a fire. It turned its head and looked at us, too long and too knowing for any horse, and that was the error in it, the one thread pulled wrong in an otherwise perfect weaving. There wasnae a mark on the bog where it stood. Aught of that weight, on ground that soft, and nae a print. It stood on the water as if the water were ground it owned.

It chose Runa. I felt it choose her — the warm one, the mortal one, the one it reckoned it could drown and have — and I will own, because I said these pages would be honest, that in the half-breath after it chose her I made the same reckoning it did. I saw a tired mortal woman at the end of a hard day’s walking and a creature out of the old water come tae take her, and I didnae wait tae see what she would do. I reached for m’cold.

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It comes before I bid it, the cold. That is the truth of what I am — it stands up below decision, below choosing, and by the time I hae decided, it is already half done. So it was rising in me, the water nearest us beginning tae remember it was meant tae be ice, when the matter resolved itself wi’out any reference tae me at all.

It came for her fast, faster than the shape it wore should move, the false head stretching long and the mouth in it opening onto something that wasnae a mouth. And Runa wasnae where it came. She had stepped off its line before it committed tae her, having watched it the whole while and only let it believe she hadnae, and the blade was already moving when she did. She put it in below the false jaw and drew it hard, the motion of gutting something ye mean tae empty. Nae heat in it, nae hurry. She might hae been finishing a chore she’d decided on some moments past. It screamed, water forced through a place too small for it, and came apart in the bog, the false hide sagging, the shape going out of it, until it was a wet place in the heather and naething more.

It was done before m’cold had anywhere tae go.

I stood wi’ winter half out of me and nae target for it, which is, I will tell ye, a worse feeling than spending it clean. Ye cannae simply set it down. It has tae be called back, and it doesnae want tae come. For a while after, I was colder than the night warranted, and there was a high thin ringing in me where the unspent cold had been. I had summoned the whole of m’self tae save a woman who hadnae the slightest need of saving. She had seen the want of a print on the bog before I had. She had chosen her step before it chose its lunge. She had, in plain fact, been ahead of me and ahead of it the entire while, and had let the both of us think otherwise — for Runa, letting a foe underestimate ye is simply how a fight is best begun.

She wiped the blade on the heather though there was naething on it tae wipe, the kill having left her clean. She wiped it regardless, finishing a motion she’d started. Then she looked at me, at the cold caught half-loosed in m’face, and she said, “You were going to do something.”

“I was,” I said.

“Don’t, next time,” she said. “Not for that.” She went on east into the last of the grey. I came behind her, and I didnae say what I was thinking — that I had spent a great many centuries as the most dangerous creature on any ground I stood on, and had just been handed a small sharp lesson against assuming it.

Brushy began tae sing once the water was behind us. Low. I let her.

🏰If this drew you in, Sorcha’s world is still moving—step into Soul Castle: The Guardian & The Keeper, a series on Amazon: HERE

14th June, 950

14th An t-Òg-mhios, 950

We are three days east of the loch, which is two days past the edge of any ground I could draw ye a map of, and I hae noticed that I mind this less than I ought tae. The country here goes up in long grey shoulders and comes down in water; between the two there isnae much that wants tae be walked. Runa walks it regardless. She went ahead this morning wi’out asking whether I wished her tae, came back near midday, and said only, “There’s a crossing before the light goes. We’ll want to be over it.” I asked her over what. “Water,” she said, “that I don’t like the look of.” I hae learned tae let that be a complete answer.

Brushy rode in the basket and sang the morning through it, which I permitted because the songs keep her content and because, if I am honest in these pages and I said that I would be, I like tae hear them. She has nae notion of being quiet in open country. I considered, once, telling her tae hush, and decided against it on the grounds that I am traveling openly this time and a singing creature in a basket is the least of what gives me away.

I havenae worn another face since we left. I havenae gone wi’out one in longer than I’ll set down. The forgettable face is a small steady discipline, worn so nae eye settles on ye; tae go wi’out it is tae be looked at, and bearing the eyes of others is a habit I hae let lapse. I will manage. I am managing. I noted, this morning, that I had smoothed m’skirts before midday wi’ the ground giving me nae reason tae, and I will leave that observation here wi’out remark.

Runa saw this face this morning as we left, when I set the other one down. I had braced for it. Three days of being looked at, and hers the first of the looks. She regarded me a moment and said, “That’ll be harder to forget.” Then she shouldered her pack. She hasnae remarked on it since, and I find I am put out by how little it troubled her — which is unreasonable of me.

The crossing Runa misliked was a ford where a burn came down off the high ground into a pool before it ran on, the water gone flat and black, deeper than it looked. Runa stopped a spear’s length short of it and didnae go nearer. “I’ll judge that in daylight,” she said. “We camp here.” She was right tae. I could feel the pool as I feel most water, a cold that is nae mine. And under it, older than the water, something had turned tae look at us.

Brushy stopped singing. That, more than Runa or the pool, was what made me set down the basket and pay attention properly.

It came up at the last of the light — nae all the way out, never all the way, just enough that the dark of it stood separate from the dark of the water. Small. Near the size of a child, though it was nae a child and nothing about it asked tae be mistaken for one. I hae seen its kind before, or kinds near enough: the old place-bound dwellers in the lochs and the fords before any court drew a border and called the ground its own. They are nae court fae. They keep their patch. They are, as a rule, beneath the notice of anything that might carry word of me back tae the people I left, which is the entire reason I let it look at me.

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It looked a while. Then it looked at the basket, and it spoke — nae tae me. Tae Brushy. And it spoke in the old tongue, the one beneath the tongues, the speech the Winter creatures sing in before they are taught anything cleverer. I willnae render it here. I am nae certain I could, and I am certain I should not. Brushy answered it. The two of them went back and forth, the creature in the pool and the creature in m’basket, and I — old beyond most of what lives, and vainer than the lot of it — stood at a ford in country I couldnae name and waited tae learn whether I would be spoken tae.

It decided I would. Brushy had vouched for me, I think, in the only terms that creature recognized: she sounded like home tae it; I was the one she had chosen tae sit on the shoulder of; that was apparently enough. When it spoke tae me it didnae use the old tongue. It used mine, or near enough — bent, and slow, a century or two out of the fashion of it, but mine.

It asked me where I was going. I hae thought, since, about lying tae it, and I am glad I didnae, because I dinnae think it would hae kept talking tae a lie. And because, and this is the part I dislike setting down, it had already cost me something tae be looked at this long, and I didnae want the cost tae buy me naething. Such creatures dinnae take coin. They take true things, and ye feel it leave ye. So I told it the truth: that I was looking for a bairn, east, that had been taken from me, and that I didnae ken her face nor her name nor whether she was living.

It was quiet at that, the length of three slow breaths of what lay beneath the water. Then it told me a true thing back, which is the trade. The true thing was this: that there was a child east of the great empty ground we hadnae yet crossed — past the moor where, it said, the ground forgets the names of them that walk it — a child the land had taken note of, that didnae sit right in the house that kept it, that the small folk shied from and the old ones didnae. It didnae say the child was mine. It didnae ken that, nae more than I did. It said only that there was a child, east, past the moor, and that I had asked the right water on the right night, which doesnae happen often, and which I shouldnae expect tae happen twice.

Then it spoke once more, unasked, and that is the part I hae been turning over since. It said that when I found the child, I was tae mind which of us had been looking for the other.

Then it went back under. The pool was only a pool again — deeper than it admitted, cold in the ordinary way.

I hae written it down exactly. I dinnae ken what it meant. Runa, who had stood through the whole of it wi’ a hand on her blade and hadnae understood a word, asked me what it was. I told her. She thought about it. “So we cross in the morning,” she said, “and we go east.” That is Runa entire: a creature from under the water hands me a riddle I’ll be carrying a year, and she hears in it a direction and an hour tae leave. I find I am glad of her. I wouldnae tell her that.

Brushy sang again once the pool was quiet. I didnae stop her.

11th June, 950

11th An t-Òg-mhios, 950

There is naething in these pages between April and now because naething between April and now earned the candle.

The ground has been quiet. The veil holds. We three have kept our rhythm and I have kept m’own counsel and the search has sat at the back of everything — present, unresolved, and waiting on something I couldnae yet name. I dinnae perform patience I am nae feeling. I have simply had nae better option than tae wait for one.

Today gave me one.

There is a settlement half a day’s walk east that gathers on the feast days — nae a town, nae quite only a crossroads, but trade finds it on feast days regardless. I have been twice before. M’human form draws nae particular attention there, which is the entirety of what I require from a place.

Lasair and Runa stayed back. Lasair had her reasons and Runa had her face, and between the two of them I was better served alone.

The fair was loud. Open-ground loud — voices, trade, roasting meat, nae walls tae hold any of it in. It’s a different racket than settlement noise, looser and less defended. People spread themselves out when they dinnae have walls tae lean on. I moved through it wi’out hurry, handled what I had come tae handle, and was considering whether anything remaining warranted m’time when I heard them.

Malcolm’s men are nae difficult tae place. They carry themselves as men told recently they’re on the right side of something and havenae yet had reason tae doubt it. Two of them settled at their ease beside a trestle, talking loud, as men do when they’ve forgotten anyone can hear.

I became uninteresting and listened.

They werenae quiet about it. They had nae reason tae be. There were perhaps twenty people within their hearing and m’cold had thinned them all intae background — a market’s worth of folk whose attention was bent elsewhere by inclination and by m’work. I let m’self stand close enough tae hear wi’out standing near enough tae be noticed.

The taller one had a piece of bread he wasnae eating. He used it tae gesture wi’ as he talked, which is a habit I considered a particular waste of bread.

“…ye’d nae believe what I walked intae yestreen.”

The other one had a piece of mutton on his knife and was bringing it tae his mouth. “Mm.”

“A woman, alone. Cottage half-fallen, the way they go. Took me in for the cold and one thing led tae the other. Mostly her doin’ the leadin’ and me doin’ the followin’ like a daft eejit, mind. And ye ken what happens next.”

“Aye.”

He waited for more interest than he was being given. The mutton went on.

“She had a bairn.”

The other one stopped wi’ his knife near his mouth. “While ye were —”

“In the next room. Or near enough. Shut up in a basket, but I went tae see it after, when she was sleeping. Curious.”

“Hm.”

“It looked at me.” He shook his head once. “Wide awake. Looking. Eyes on me a way a bairn’s eyes shouldnae be on a man. Didnae cry. Didnae make a sound. Just looked.”

“How old?”

“That’s the thing. I dinnae ken. A year, maybe. Could hae been older and small for its age. Could hae been younger and just —” He gestured wi’ the bread. “Nae right. The face was wrong. Old eyes, I’d say. Old eyes on a bairn’s face.”

The mutton-eater took his bite. Chewed. “And ye stayed the night.”

“Aye, well. The cold.”

“Mm.”

He waited. The mutton-eater didnae give him the laugh he’d been working toward. After a beat he went on regardless.

“I went down tae the village this morning afore I left and I was telling old Tearlach about it — and he stops me, says, ye’ve been at Aifric’s, hae ye, and I says I dinnae ken her name, and he says aye well that’s her, the woman wi’ the queer bairn. Husband’s deid, nae kin. Priests hae been tae her twice already, moved her on once afore that, willnae give the bairn up tae the kirk. He’d heard the same story a fortnight back coming through frae the strath.”

“Where is she?”

“East. Beyond Tummel. Some place wi’ nae name on it I could mind. I wasnae much watching the road by then.”

“So, ye stayed the whole night through?”

“What was I tae do, leave?”

The mutton-eater set the knife down and reached for his cup. “I’d hae left.”

That was the friend’s contribution tae the proceedings, and the taller one heard it and didnae like it, and they moved on tae other matters — a horse one of them wanted, the price of something, the usual business of men wi’ opinions and ale.

I listened tae enough of it tae be sure they hadnae more tae offer, and then I moved on m’self.

I have been listening for word of m’bairn since autumn and have heard naething approaching usable. The mind doing this rendering kens that one careless conversation at a feast-day trestle is the thinnest thread imaginable. East beyond Tummel could mean many things. A strange bairn could be any child a frightened mother is hiding from priests who would take it. A mother who’ll nae yield could be a hundred mothers in this island who’d rather lose their lives than their children.

I ken all of that.

I am going regardless.

The intelligence I hae is poor, the source is two men who think the people around them are furniture, and the bairn in question may be m’own or may be a stranger’s or may be nae more than tavern-talk that has traveled. I dinnae care. I hae had naething tae move toward since autumn and now I hae something. The fact that it may be wrong is something I will reckon wi’ when reckoning is required. Today is for moving.

I walked home wi’ the news in m’mouth like a coin I wasnae certain was real.

Brushy was on the windowsill as I approached the cottage. I came in through the door before dusk tae Runa at the table — she has acquired the habit of being at the table when I return — Lasair at the hearth wi’ something simmering. Domestic. The cottage performed domesticity at me whenever I crossed its threshold and I have given up pretending I dinnae note the effect.

I sat down at the table.

I told them what I’d heard. Nae all of it — the man’s account of how he came tae be in the woman’s cottage bore on naething that mattered, and Runa would hae kent enough from m’face wi’out the detail. The intelligence I gave plain: a woman named Aifric. Lasair’s spoon stopped. East beyond Tummel, wi’ a bairn whose eyes didnae sit right. Runa squinted at me. The priests hae been tae her twice. She has been moved on more than once. The tale is at least a fortnight old by the time it reached the trestle and may be older.

“It could be her,” Lasair said softly.

“It could be many things,” I said. “It is more than I had yesterday.”

“Ye’re going.”

“Aye.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow at first light.”

Runa locked eyes on me. “With me.”

“Aye. Wi’ ye.”

Lasair didnae say anything immediately and I didnae look at her as she considered what she was going tae say.

“Ye’re going wi’out me,” she said.

“Aye.”

She waited.

“It isnae a journey for the one who holds the cottage,” I said, which was as much as I would give her, and which I think she kent wi’out my naming. “The cottage needs holding. Yer craft is what holds it. Mine and Runa’s are what travel.”

“Brushy.”

I hadnae prepared an answer tae that, because I hadnae yet admitted tae m’self that I had prepared a decision.

“Brushy will come,” I said.

Lasair looked at the windowsill. Brushy hadnae moved. The last light was on her tail.

“Good,” Lasair said. And turned back tae her spoon.

I am going tae set down what I am doing about Brushy here, because the archivist owes the record an honest accounting and because I find I want tae say it somewhere even if I willnae say it aloud.

Brushy is Winter Court. Small, palm-sized. The courts kept her sort for their songs, their curling tails, their charming manner of falling asleep upon any lap that sat still long enough. She left the court when I left. She didnae ask. She simply arrived, and has been wi’ me since.

There are fae in this world who ken the broad outline of m’leaving. The Winter Court did naething wi’ m’grief that reflected well upon them; they are aware of this, which means others are aware of it. There are fae who hae an opinion of the business, fae who hae nae opinion, fae who are waiting tae see what would be the politic thing tae conclude. I have been content for some months tae let them all conclude whatever they liked from a distance.

I am about tae stop being at a distance. I am about tae walk through several days of Alba wi’ a Norse warrior, a small Winter creature, and m’own face. It says I am Winter Court fae who fled the court. It says I have nae taken anything of theirs, except, perhaps, this small creature who chose tae come, which is nae taking. It says I am moving openly, in m’own person, wi’ a mortal at m’side and a small one of m’own kind upon m’shoulder.

That is a statement.

I am nae bringing Brushy tae make that statement. I am bringing her because she would come regardless. Because the cottage is nae safer wi’ her in it than wi’ her abroad. Because she has been wi’ me through the worst months I hae known, and I dinnae wish tae be wi’out her on the road.

That is the truth.

It is also true that bringing her openly may make me less safe in certain ways and more safe in others. The fae who would carry word tae the court will carry word regardless. The fae who wouldnae — the ones who hae silently thought m’leaving wasnae the scandal the court framed it as — may see Brushy and find their reasons easier tae hold. I dinnae rely on this. I merely want tae note it.

I record what is. What is, is that I am taking m’small Winter companion intae the wider world for the first time since I left the court, and I am doing it knowing how it will read, and I am nae sorry about that.

There. It is written.

We set off at first light. Lasair spoke a Gaelic blessing over the door as we went — for the going, nae for the page. Brushy slept against m’neck before we’d cleared the loch.

Runa carried what a Norsewoman walking intae unknown country carries — a seax at her hip, an axe lashed across the pack, the bow she favors and the arrows she’s particular about, a flint, a small pot, and rolled wool. I had m’journal, m’ink stoppered against weather, and what little else I needed, the lighter pack by some considerable margin.

The road east isnae a road in the sense that anyone wi’ a Roman education would recognize. It is the line that walking-people hae walked sufficient times tae press the ground flatter than the heather around it. It runs through the glen, over a saddle, down intae another glen and out across an open stretch I hae nae love for but which is the shortest line tae what I want. We took it.

The first day was uneventful, which is the sort I most prize — it produces nae story for the record.

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By evening we had come tae a stretch of birches near a burn, and the sun hadnae fallen but had gone behind a ridge — light leaves a glen long before night comes. We made camp. I hae been useful around hearths often enough. I hae been useful around camps less so, and let Runa work.

Brushy stirred.

She climbed down from m’shawl, stood on the moss, and stretched — tail high, back legs trembling. Then she trotted three paces toward a tree root, stopped, and made a small sound I hadnae heard her make in some while.

Something at the tree root made the same sound back.

I didnae move.

Out from under the root came a thing about Brushy’s size — moss-tangled, a leaf stuck behind one ear, blue eyes far too bright for a wood at dusk. It saw Brushy. Spared the rest of us a glance and went back tae her.

Brushy padded over. They touched noses. Whatever passed between them passed wi’out sound. Then the thing turned and slipped back under its root.

Brushy looked at me.

“Aye,” I said. “Go on, then.”

She went.

Runa was on her feet wi’ her hand at her hilt. She hadnae taken it off since the thing first showed itself.

“It’s harmless,” I said.

“I’ll judge that.”

“Ye’re welcome tae. It’s still harmless.”

We followed. I extended m’cold a degree as we walked — nae a working, a courtesy. The thing didnae appear tae notice. It led Brushy and Brushy led us, perhaps thirty paces in, around a stand of birch I hadnae marked from the path, and intae a hollow on the far side that had been somebody’s camp once, long enough ago that the hands that arranged it were gone but the arrangement remained.

Drier ground. A ring of small dark stones where a fire had been. The burn closer than it had seemed. Wind kept out by the lie of the land. Moss thick enough tae sleep on.

The thing looked at Brushy once more and was gone under another root.

Brushy climbed back tae m’neck and slept.

“That.”

“Aye,” I said.

“Will I be told what that was?”

“I dinnae ken what that was, exactly. I ken what it was approximately.” I looked at the hollow. “I think it was a small fae creature kin tae Brushy, who recognized her as one of its own kind, and who chose tae show us a better camp than the one we’d intended tae make for ourselves.”

Runa took this in. Then: “Does that happen often.”

“Nae,” I said. “Nae often.”

She nodded. She built our fire in the old stones. The hollow held the heat. The open ground wouldnae hae.

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I am writing this at the edge of the new fire wi’ Brushy still asleep at m’neck. A thin waning moon has risen through the birches, scarce a day past the quarter, and sheds little light over the hollow — enough tae catch the burn, naething more. The wood-creature hasnae returned and I dinnae expect it will. I dinnae yet ken what tae make of what was given. A safe hollow on the first night of a journey I havenae been certain would hae a second isnae naething. It was given wi’out words, wi’out payment, wi’out — so far as I can tell — anything asked in return. I will hae tae sit wi’ that longer than I will sit wi’ it tonight.

It was given. That is what I ken. The rest can wait for the morning.

8th April, 950

She came before light.

Nae through m’cold. I have been keeping it close since the bank. This came through what lies beneath it. The place that existed before I ever learned what I was. It stirred, and I came upright in the dark already knowing something had visited me again.

This wasnae him.

The weight was entirely different. Where he is stone and standing water and the cold of ground that has held the same purpose since before anyone now walking this land was born. This was something else. Older, but pointed elsewhere. Nae guardian-cold. A heat that has stood in fire and found it acceptable. M’own cold pulled back from it without being asked.

She didnae arrive as a shape. She arrived as a certainty.

When she spoke it wasnae in any tongue I have used in this journal. I am rendering it as close as I can tae how it arrived — formal, archaic, entirely without softness. The words came hot.

Thou hast slept above what I placed here. Thou hast stood beside him and spoken plainly.

I said nothing. I had nae cold tae reach for and nae language that felt adequate.

My name is Boudicca. Remember it.

The heat lifted. M’own cold returned tae the room. Then she was gone.

Naething else. Nae explanation. Nae instruction. A name and the impression of something vast and intentional that I was somehow inside — though what it was or what it wanted or what m’presence on this ground had tae do with any of it, I couldnae have said. I wasnae meant tae understand yet. That much was clear.

I sat in the dark with it for a long time.

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Runa was at the table. She had been there a while. She had heard Lasair leave before light and hadnae gone back tae sleep. She looked up when I came through and her eyes went tae m’face and held there.

I sat down across from her.

“Another one,” she said.

“Aye. Different.” I looked at the table. Then at her. “She gave me a name.”

Runa waited.

“Boudicca.”

It wasnae her ordinary stillness. It had sharpened.

She set her cup down. “Queen of the Iceni,” she said. Placing it carefully, nae performing it. “She led a revolt against Rome. Burned three of their cities. Nearly drove them from the island entirely.” Her eyes went tae the window. “She is known in my tradition. A queen who chose fire over submission. She died in the revolt or shortly after — the accounts differ.”

I was already there.

“Prasutagus,” I said.

“Was her husband,” Runa finished. “He died before the revolt. Rome seized the Iceni lands after — took the daughters, treated Boudicca as though she were nothing. She burned half of Roman Britain for it.”

There was nothing tae add tae that. I didnae try.

The stone beneath the floor pulsed as it always did.

I thought about what it would mean tae lose everything ye loved and choose tae put something of yerself intae the ground rather than surrender it. And what it would take tae be the one ye trusted tae keep it. Tae stay.

I thought about what he had asked me tae come back and answer.

“I’m going tae the bank,” I said.

Runa looked at me. “Now?”

“Aye. Now.” I reached for m’wrap. “Dinnae tell Lasair. She’ll want tae prepare something and this isnae a ceremony. It’s a conversation I should have had before I started taking from this ground.”

Runa picked up her cup. Said nothing.

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The bank was still in the early light.

I came tae it without m’cold extended, without anything in m’hands. I stood at the edge and looked at the ground and I said what I had come tae say.

“I ken yer name now. And I ken whose work ye keep.” I stopped. The words I had been arranging since I left the cottage rearranged themselves intae something simpler. “I have a bairn. She was taken from me before I could learn her face. She is somewhere in this territory being raised by people whose names I dinnae yet ken. I followed a pull tae this ground because I had nothing else tae follow and I have been here since autumn and I cannae find her.”

The last part I hadnae intended tae say.

He was there. He came tae me without the night-weight he had carried before. Nae demand this time. Only the listening. He had asked his question and received his answer. Now he was deciding what tae do with it.

He didnae manifest. Only the presence. Only the sense that I was being heard.

He let the silence run on. I had time tae think he wasnae going tae speak at all.

Then:

“What belongs to this ground,” he said, “finds its way to it. In time.”

I opened m’mouth tae ask what that meant.

He was already gone.

The bank was quiet. The loch lay dark and unmoving and the stone thrummed beneath m’feet and The Dark Reach held its silence at m’back. I stood there long enough tae be certain m’cold had returned fully tae itself.

Then I walked home.

Runa was still at the table. She didnae ask. She pushed a fresh cup across and waited for me tae sit.

I sat. She poured something and set it in front of me. I found I had nae objection tae it. We said nothing for a long time. The light had come fully by then.

I have been sitting with what he said since I returned.

What belongs to this ground finds its way to it. In time.

I dinnae ken what it means. Whether it was comfort or simply an observation from something that has watched this stone long enough tae notice patterns, I cannae say. And I dinnae ken whether it has anything tae do with m’bairn or whether I am placing m’own hope intae words that were never meant tae carry it.

I have written it down exactly as he said it.

That will have tae be sufficient for now.

🏰If this drew you in, Sorcha’s world is still moving—step into Soul Castle: The Guardian & The Keeper, a series on Amazon:

👉https://a.co/d/0fyT8uLN

6th An Giblean, 950

We left before the dawn had any conviction tae it.

Lasair had been up before either of us, moving through the cottage with a deliberateness that told me she had already decided this mattered. She had her offering prepared — I didnae ask what it was and she didnae say. That was correct. What ye bring tae something sacred is between yerself and the thing ye are bringing it tae. I had learned enough from her by now tae ken that.

Runa was at the door when I came through it. She had the knife on her belt and then she looked at me and took it off and left it on the table. I hadnae asked her tae. She had reasoned it herself.

I had one piece of business before we left.

Brushy was on the threshold — expectant, entirely certain of her own inclusion. I crouched down tae her level, which I dinnae do as a rule, and I explained the situation. She has a talent for making herself known at inconvenient moments and I had nae interest in whatever she might decide tae contribute tae a negotiation with something ancient and guardian-bound and already disinclined tae find me trustworthy. I explained this tae her at considerable length. She regarded me with precisely the expression I deserved for trying.

I told her she was staying because it was safer and I didnae need her blowing whatever fragile cover three women approaching something that old without their defenses might manage tae hold. That was the reason. That was the only reason.

She stayed.

I dinnae ken why I felt the need tae explain m’self tae a creature that fits in m’palm.

I set m’cold aside at the treeline.

Deliberately. Consciously. Like setting down something carried so long the weight had become invisible — only apparent in its absence. It wasnae gone — it is what I am made of and it doesnae leave — but I drew it in. Until it wasnae reaching. Wasnae reading. Just existing, inside m’own skin. I went tae that bank as what I was without the part of me that has always been able tae make the world accommodate it.

I dinnae intend tae make a habit of this.

The Dark Reach received us without ceremony. It kens all three of us by now. The trees held their silence. They had decided something significant was occurring and it wasnae their place tae comment. The ground was soft underfoot. The light came in thin and pale through the canopy, present without warmth.

I felt it before the bank came intae sight.

Nae through m’cold. Through the soles of m’feet, the air against m’face, and the stillness that comes when something very old becomes aware of approach. The ground here has always had a pulse. Today it had something else beneath that. Attention. Focused and still and entirely aware that we were coming and had chosen tae come as we had come.

Lasair stopped at the bank’s edge.

She closed her eyes briefly — the simple internal gathering before something that required her full self present. Then she began tae move sunwise along the bank, slowly, each foot placed with the care she brings tae thin places. She murmured something I wasnae meant tae hear. I made nae effort tae catch it.

She knelt. Set the offering down. Remained still.

The ground shifted — subtly, as it had shifted before when she addressed it correctly — the attention beneath our feet becoming more specific, more present. He had received it. He hadnae spoken. But something in the quality of the air changed and the three of us felt it. We stood in it together.

Then I spoke.

I had been deciding since before first light what tae say and I had arrived at plainness, which I have found serves better than strategy when strategy has already been tried and found insufficient.

“I have been drawing from this ground,” I said. “Since the night we used it tae anchor the veil over m’cottage. From the edge of what ye keep. I called it borrowing and I kent while I was saying it that the distinction was mine and nae yers.” I paused. “I am nae apologizing for it. I am acknowledging it, which is different, and I believe ye can feel that difference.”

The silence that followed wasnae empty.

Then he was there.

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Nae arrived — simply present where he hadnae been the moment before. The difference between cold as weather and cold as intention. Warrior-shaped. Tall enough that the eye went up before it went across. He carried himself with nae performance of strength at all. It had been so long since he needed tae that what remained was only the thing itself.

His eyes went tae me first.

I held that. I am Winter Court and I have stood in worse regard than this and I didnae look away, though I will record that it required more from me than I had anticipated.

Then his eyes moved tae Runa and stayed.

The set of him changed — the slightest thing. A warrior recognizing something in another warrior that requires nae translation. She met it without flinching, without deference — direct, and having earned it. He gave her a moment longer than was necessary.

Then he came back tae me.

“You acknowledge,” he said. His voice was long unused, and had lost none of its authority in the interval. The language wasnae Gaelic, nae Norse, and nae anything I could place cleanly — old enough that I was hearing the cadence of it rather than the words themselves, and understanding arriving somewhere beneath the hearing. “Acknowledgment is a beginning.”

“What comes after the beginning,” I said, “is what I am here tae discuss.”

There was recognition in it — nae amusement exactly. A position he had occupied himself once, standing on ground that wasnae entirely his yet, making a case tae something that had every reason nae tae listen.

“You have been sleeping above what I keep,” he said. “Since the cold came.”

“Aye,” I said.

“And before that you walked this ground without knowing what it was.”

“Aye.”

“And now you know.”

“Enough,” I said. “Nae all.”

He took his time before answering. Then, as though setting something down he had been carrying for reasons that may nae have been entirely necessary:

“Prasutagus,” he said.

We had nae frame for it. I turned the word over, searching every language I had ever learned, every tradition, every court and kingdom I had moved through in the centuries before I arrived at this dark stretch of trees, and found naething that fit cleanly. A name from somewhere far from here and long before now. I have written it as it sounded. I dinnae ken its origin yet.

Lasair looked at me. I gave her nothing because I had nothing tae give.

Runa said nothing. Her stillness had changed — she was placing it somewhere, nae standing over it wondering where it belonged.

“Sorcha,” I said. And then, because it was correct and I had come here tae be correct: “I have been taking from yer ground. I am asking what ye require in return.”

He considered me.

“Come back,” he said. “Without the others. When ye are ready to answer the question ye refused to answer.”

Then he was nae longer there.

The three of us stood on the bank in the thin morning light with the loch dark and still at the forest’s edge and the stone pulsing beneath the ground as it always had. As though nothing had occurred. As though a warrior who had been standing watch on this ground since before any of us had arrived hadnae just told me tae come back alone and answer for m’self.

We walked back through The Dark Reach without any words passing.

I have been thinking on what he said since we returned. Come back without the others. When ye are ready to answer the question ye refused to answer.

He wants tae ken why I am here. What I am doing on this ground. What gives me the right.

I refused tae answer in m’sleep because I wasnae ready and because I dinnae answer things I havenae decided tae answer. That is still true.

What is also true — and I am recording this because honesty has been the only currency that has worked on this ground so far — is that I am closer tae ready than I was.

I noticed on the walk back that m’cold had returned tae itself without my asking. It had simply come home when the bank was behind us.

I noticed also that Runa hadnae spoken since he looked at her.

Both of these things I have put away and I am nae taking them back out tonight.

Brushy was on the threshold when we returned. She looked at me as though she had kent exactly how it would go and had opinions about having been left behind.

I gave her nae acknowledgment.

She came inside anyway.

🏰If this drew you in, Sorcha’s world is still moving—step into Soul Castle: The Guardian & The Keeper, a series on Amazon:

👉https://a.co/d/0fyT8uLN

A note from the archivist’s editor:

The Dark Mile Journals has been free to read since Chapter One, and it will stay that way. But starting with Chapter 13, paid subscribers will receive new chapters two weeks early — same story, same Sorcha, just first through the door.

If you’ve been reading since the beginning and want to support the series, a paid subscription is $8/month or $80/year. You’ll get early chapter access and the knowledge that you’re the reason this journal keeps getting written.

Free subscribers, you’re not going anywhere. The chapters will always arrive for you. Just fashionably late.

— The Editor

(Sorcha has no opinion on any of this and has been informed that her opinion was not requested.)

5th April, 950

5th An Giblean, 950

It came again last night.

The same weight. The same regard. I was upright before it had fully arrived, m’cold already reaching — and it simply waited for me tae finish doing that before it resumed looking. As though m’defenses were a courtesy it was willing tae observe rather than an obstacle it was required tae respect.

I have been taken apart twice now in m’own sleep in m’own cottage beside a stone I have been sleeping above for the better part of a year. I am nae going tae wait for a third occasion tae decide what tae do about it.

I told them at first light.

Lasair had the fire. Runa had the knife — the first one this time, which told me she had heard me come upright in the dark and had been awake since. I sat down across from them both and I told it plainly, which I had promised m’self I would do.

There is something in the ground beneath this cottage. I said. Something that has been there since before I arrived or became present when I did — I cannae yet say which. It has been in the trees. It has been following me. And it has been coming intae m’sleep and I have been allowing that and I am nae allowing it any further.

Lasair set her cup down. “What manner of thing?”

“Ancient,” I said. “Bound tae the stone on the bank. Whatever was placed there — whatever purpose it was anchored tae — this thing is keeping it.”

“A guardian,” Lasair said.

“Aye.”

She was already somewhere else in her mind — I could see it, the procedural instinct running beneath her expression, sorting through what she kent about correct approach and proper address. I let her go there. It would be useful later.

Runa hadnae moved. She had the knife flat on the table under her hand and she was looking at the space between us, working through it from the inside out.

“How did it come at you?” she said.

“Through m’sleep. Through the cold — m’cold went flat and it came in underneath.”

She turned the knife once. “Did it speak?”

“It asked why I was drawing from what was its tae keep. When I wouldnae answer —” I stopped. Started again. “It used what I had. M’own grief. The thing I have been building this search around without letting m’self look at it directly. It held that up where I had tae see it.” I said this as flatly as I was capable of saying it, which wasnae as flat as I would have liked. “It didnae do this with malice. That is almost the worst of it. It simply turned me over tae the light and looked.”

The room was quiet.

“It sounds like einherjar,” Runa said. She said it carefully, placing it rather than stating it. “Or something close. In my tradition — the Norse understanding — there are those who remain past death. The draugr, who stay in the mound because they cannot release what they held in life. The haugbúi, the mound-dweller — bound to a place, keeping it against those who would take from it.” She paused. “The einherjar are Odin’s chosen dead — warriors who fell with honor and were gathered. They wait in Valhalla for the last battle.” She looked at me. “I have never encountered any of these. But the shape of what you describe — something that stayed, something that watches and guards and has no interest in being negotiated with — it fits the shape of those traditions.”

“It fits,” I said. “And it doesnae.”

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She waited.

“A draugr stays because it cannae let go. A haugbúi stays because it is tethered tae what it claimed. What is in that ground —” I considered how tae be precise about this. “It stayed because someone asked it tae. Someone it loved, or something close enough tae love that the difference is academic. It has been keeping faith longer than anything else on this ground kent — nae because it is unable tae leave but because it chose nae tae.” I set m’cup down. “Ye can negotiate with something that wants tae be released. Ye cannae negotiate with something that doesnae.”

Runa absorbed this. “Then what do we do?”

“We go tae it,” I said. “Tae the bank. On its ground, on its terms. We dinnae take anything. We dinnae approach through the working or through m’cold or through any method that looks like what I have been doing. We go as what we are and we address it correctly and we find out what it requires.”

Lasair had been quiet through all of this — the deliberate kind, building something in her mind that she wanted tae be right before she said it. She looked up.

“I ken how tae approach a thing that has been keeping watch over something sacred,” she said. “Nae this specific thing — I willnae pretend otherwise. But the principle. Ye come sunwise. Ye come wi’ an offering that costs ye something. Ye dinnae ask for anything until ye have given something first.” She looked at me. “And ye dinnae lie tae it. Nae even by omission. Something that has been watching long enough tae see through a Winter Court fae in her own sleep willnae be managed.”

“Nae,” I agreed.

One nod. A thing decided. “Then I ken what tae bring.”

I looked at them both. Lasair already moving through the question of correct approach. Runa sitting with the knife and the shape of something her tradition had given her a name for but nae a map tae. Two women I hadnae come here tae find and had found anyway, each of them holding a different piece of what this required.

I have watched kingdoms decide there is one correct form of knowing and send men intae the dark tae collect the ones who disagree. What sat across from me this morning was three different traditions in the same room, each of them reaching toward a thing none of them fully kent. I find this considerably more promising than the alternative.

We go tae the bank tomorrow.

I made that decision and I have recorded it here and I amnae going tae examine what it cost me tae make it. Going tae him rather than waiting is nae a concession. It is a strategic choice.

I have decided that and I am leaving it there.

For Fun: Sorcha says going to the guardian is not a concession. What does she call it instead — and why does she need to record that?

🏰If this drew you in, Sorcha’s world is still moving—step into Soul Castle: The Guardian & The Keeper, a series on Amazon:

👉https://a.co/d/0fyT8uLN

3rd An Giblean, 950

Before light —

I am writing this now because I dinnae trust m’self tae write it later in the manner it deserves, which is plainly.

Something came intae m’sleep.

Nae the cottage. Nae the stone as I have come tae ken it — the pulse, the reach, the attention that has been learning m’step since autumn. This was different. Older. The weight of something that has stood its ground so long the ground has shaped itself around it.

It had nae face at first. Then it did. Warrior-shaped. Old enough that m’own age felt recent beside it. It looked at me as a sentry looks at someone who has been walking through a gate they didnae build and calling it a public road.

I kent immediately what it was asking.

I refused tae answer.

I willnae write what came next. Nae yet.

M’cold hasnae returned tae m’self fully. Brushy is pressed against m’side and has been since I came upright in the dark. She hasnae moved. I am going tae let that mean what it means and nae press it further.

I will write the rest at the proper time.

— S

Later —

I had intended tae go out today. The second family on Lasair’s list — the one east with the Norse blood already in it. I have been putting it off in favor of the coast and I had decided this morning would be the morning.

The weather disagreed. I will nae be entertaining alternative explanations.

Rain from the northwest, deliberate, wi’ nae interest in stopping. The Dark Reach grey and close and the ground soft enough that moving through it would leave a record I had nae interest in leaving.

I stayed in.

Lasair made something with what we had. Runa sharpened the knife — the other knife this time, which is progress of a kind. I sat by the window. The stone pulsed beneath the floor as it always does. I gave it nae particular attention and it gave me none in return.

That is what I will say about today.

Evening —

I have been thinking since before the light came what tae put down here and how much of it is mine tae keep. I have decided on plainness. I reserve the right tae find it disagreeable.

We returned from the coast two nights past. The cottage received us as it always does — unchanged, unhurried, the veil sitting quiet in the ground below. I noted the stone’s pulse when we crossed the treeline. It was different than I had left it. More specific. I attributed this tae three days’ absence and went tae bed.

That was the error.

Nae the sleeping. The assumption that absence from a thing means the thing has been absent from ye.

I had been in that voluntary stillness — the lowering I have been practicing in the mortal fashion — when m’cold went flat. Nae by m’own choice. That was the first wrong thing. M’cold doesnae leave me. It is what I am made of. And yet there it was — nae gone, but set aside — as a candle becomes irrelevant when a larger light enters the room.

Then the weight arrived.

I have been around long enough tae ken the difference between power that is performing itself and power that has simply always been. What stood at the edge of m’awareness was the latter. Warrior-shaped when it chose tae be. Otherwise it was simply presence. Power that has been in the same place so long it has become a quality of the ground itself.

It didnae speak at first.

It looked.

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I have been looked upon before. I am Winter Court. I have sat in rooms where looking was a weapon and I have returned it without flinching. This was nae that. This was a different order of looking. It saw through me without requiring m’permission tae do so.

I found I couldnae be cold at it.

I want tae record that plainly. I tried. I am made of cold. It is below decision and below choosing and it has never failed me. In that place, in that particular weight of attention, I reached for it and found it simply didnae apply. Ye cannae be cold at winter itself.

Then it asked.

The words arenae the point. The point was the question beneath the words — why are ye drawing from what is mine tae keep. What gives ye the right tae the edge of this veil.

I said nothing.

This wasnae courage. It was refusal. Whatever stood in that dream knew the difference between them before I did.

It looked at me a moment longer. And then — without violence, without anything I could call intention, as simply as turning something over tae the light tae see it properly —

It showed me what I was.

Nae m’power. Nae m’cold. The thing I had been organizing m’days around without letting m’self look at directly. The search tae give it purpose. The lists of families, the coastal visit, the disciplined march through mortal hours as though this were a campaign rather than a grief. M’bairn — months old, already held by people whose names I dinnae ken — and the space where that fact lives in me that I have been refusing tae sit inside since the night I arrived here.

It held that up where I couldnae look away from it.

I have nothing tae report about what happened after that. I was upright in the dark with m’cold in pieces and Brushy against m’ribs and the stone beneath the floor pulsing exactly as it always has — patient, steady, as though nothing had occurred. As though I hadnae just been taken apart by something that kens this ground considerably better than I do and found me lighter than I had believed m’self tae be.

I sat there until m’cold settled.

Then I wrote the first part of this.

Then I sat until evening.

Then I wrote this.

There is one thing more I will record and then I am done wi’ this entry because I have given it more than it is going tae get from me.

Whatever stood in that dream is the something that has been in the trees. I ken this the same as I ken cold — absolutely, without requiring confirmation. It has been there since before I arrived, or it became present when I arrived and made m’self notable tae it. I cannae yet say which.

It isnae Malcolm’s men.

It isnae anything I have a name for yet.

And it kens exactly what I have been taking from this ground and has decided, apparently, tae make that known.

I dinnae intend tae stop.

But I am going tae need tae think carefully about what I am willing tae offer in return.

If this drew you in, Sorcha’s world is still moving—step into Soul Castle: The Guardian & The Keeper, a series on Amazon:

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31st Am Màrt, 950

31st March, 950

The evening I visited the holding at the head of the loch there had been something in the trees watching me leave. I hadnae mentioned this tae either of them. I had m’reasons.

By the fifth morning since that visit I had heard it twice more. Once at the treeline at dusk. Once closer, in the hour before light, when The Dark Reach goes entirely still and anything that moves in it does so with purpose. Both times I had done the same thing. Let m’cold sit flat. Listened. Let it sit and listened again.

Whatever it was, it wasnae Malcolm’s men. It wasnae mortal at all.

That was what I hadnae wanted tae say aloud.

It kens me. That is the unsettling truth of it — nae threat in the attention it pays, and that absence of threat is, in its own way, more alarming than threat would hae been. A thing that watches and decides ye are worth watching without deciding ye are worth acting on has its own long purpose. I dinnae enjoy being assessed by something I cannae name. I dinnae enjoy it at all.

I went tae Runa.

She was at the table with the knife. She has taken tae sharpening it in the mornings — nae because it requires sharpening, three times this week, the same blade. It is what hands do when the mind is already working on something else. I recognized this because it is something I have done with ink and vellum.

“The coast,” I said. “The household ye described. The one that had taken in a child before without asking what it was.”

“Yes.” She ran the stone once more along the blade. “An inlet settlement. An older woman. Her people have been there long enough that they’ve stopped counting generations.”

“Ye’ve been there?”

“Once. When I was with Thorfinn’s household. They traded with her.”

I sat down across from her. “How far?”

“Two days on foot. One and a half if we move before first light and push the pace.”

I considered this. The families Lasair had named inland were slower burns — the sort of intelligence that required patience and the right approach. This household operated through a different kind of knowing. Worth the distance.

I could halve that. I said nothing. I have learned more walking this territory slowly than I ever learned stepping sideways through it, and the ground between here and the coast is ground I havenae listened tae properly yet.

“We go tomorrow,” I said. “Before light.”

Runa looked at me. “The cold cover.”

“Aye.”

She set the knife down, edge away. “I want to know how it works before we move through it,” she said.

That was a reasonable thing tae ask. I had perhaps expected her tae take it on faith, which wasnae particularly reasonable of me.

“It isnae invisibility,” I told her. “Ye can still be seen. What it does is simpler than that and harder tae explain. It lowers the interest. Eyes slide off. A person moving through it becomes unremarkable. The eye notes them and moves on before it has decided tae.” I considered how tae be more precise. “If ye stepped out of it and stood directly in front of someone, they’d see ye. Their attention simply doesnae go looking for ye in the first place.”

She worked through it. “What do I need to do?”

“Nothing,” I said. “It comes from me. Ye only need tae stay close enough that it reaches ye.”

“How close?”

“Close enough that ye’re breathing the same air,” I said. “If ye fall behind, I cannae guarantee it holds.”

She turned the knife once in her hand. Set it back down. “And if we meet something that can see through cold?”

“Then we deal with that,” I said, “when it becomes the relevant problem.”

She looked at me steadily. She had accepted worse odds on worse ground. I could see it.

“I’ll tell Lasair,” she said.

“I’ll tell Lasair,” I said.

She had the grace nae tae argue about it.

Lasair took the news with the composure she applies tae things she doesnae like but has already decided are correct. She moved the bread off the heat and turned with her arms crossed and that particular set tae her jaw that means she has three objections and is deciding which one is worth the breath.

“How long will ye be gone,” she said.

“Three days. Perhaps four.”

She looked at the window. At the walls around her. At the veil she kens is there and cannae see. “The veil holds without ye here?”

“Aye. I set it in the ground. It isnae dependent on m’presence.”

“And if something—”

“The cold around the cottage is mine. It stays when I go. It has enough of a set now that it will hold against ordinary attention.” I let a beat pass. “Runa has been walking the perimeter every morning for a week. She kens it better than either of us at this point.”

Lasair looked out the window. Then back tae me.

“I have things tae do here anyway,” she said.

“Aye,” I said.

We both understood this wasnae the point of what she had said. I had nae intention of acknowledging that I understood, and she had nae intention of pressing me tae say so. It has taken us some weeks tae arrive at this mode of communication. I find it considerably more efficient than the alternative.

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We left in the hour before light, as Runa had said.

M’cold came down over us as we cleared the treeline — nae sudden, nae dramatic. The adjustment I make when I want the world tae lose interest. The dark and the hour helped. Runa fell intae step beside me without being told, close enough, matching m’pace rather than setting her own.

The first hours were mine tae watch and hers tae listen. M’cold read the ground as a skilled tracker reads a path — nae by looking, but by what it told me was moving over it. Men tae the east, distant, purposeful, nae our concern. A fox somewhere south of the loch. And something else, at the edge of the forest that matched us — moving when we moved, going quiet when we did.

Once I chose tae stop.

Runa stopped the instant I did. She has good instincts. I will allow her this credit once and then take it as established.

We stood in the dark for a count of thirty. Nothing moved.

“Something follows?” Her voice barely above breath.

“It has been following since last week,” I said. “It wasnae behind us this morning when we left. It joined us at the first bend.”

“The same thing each time?”

“The same signature in m’cold.”

“Threat?”

“I dinnae ken yet. It hasnae moved against us.”

She looked ahead. “Then we move,” she said.

We moved.

Uncertainty, I have found in these past days, is more taxing than threat. A threat I can act on. Something following me wi’ patience and nae apparent purpose produces a problem I cannae resolve by acting.

The coast reached us before we saw it — the smell first, salt-deep, carried inland on a wind that Runa’s shoulders recognized before mine did. She lifted her head — the small involuntary thing that happens when the body recognizes what the mind hasnae caught up tae yet. Salt. Distance. Something lost long enough tae have become its own category of grief.

The inlet was smaller than I had pictured — tucked rather than open, small enough tae have resisted naming — its own inconspicuousness its best defence. Three structures. A fourth that was more shed than house. Boats pulled above the tide line, all of them old enough that the wood had gone past any suggestion of original color.

An older woman stood in the door of the largest structure. She had heard us coming. She looked at the path rather than at us directly, and I judged this cannae-see against can-see-and-has-decided-nae-tae-show-it. I lowered m’cold, testing.

“Which,” Runa murmured.

“We’ll ken in a moment,” I said.

The woman’s gaze moved tae me without any of the usual accommodation. Nae the moment of adjustment I produce in most people. She was looking at me as ye’d look at something ye have been half-expecting.

“I wondered when,” she said. In Gaelic, then in Norse: “When someone like you would come.”

She stepped back tae let us through the door.

Inside — nets and tools and the smell of oil and years. A fire that had been burning in the same place so long the stone above it had changed color. She had a table, two stools, and the manner of someone long past requiring company. When it arrived, it would have tae earn itself.

She poured something. Set it down.

“Sit,” she said.

We sat.

She looked at me across the table. Her people had been on this coast long enough tae lose count of generations — and nae because they’d been left alone. Because they’d been too small tae be worth the trouble. I have watched kingdoms swallow anything bright enough tae catch the light so long, I ken what survival looks like when it has had tae become deliberate. It looks like this. A woman at a table who has learned tae give the world nothing tae look at.

“The last one who came from the trees was near forty years ago,” she said. “A different manner of thing. Nae like you.”

“And the child,” I said.

She turned her cup in her hands. “Before my time. What I ken is what was told tae me.”

M’cold settled flat.

“Tell me,” I said.

She told it plainly, as people who have carried a thing for years will tell it once they have decided the right ear has arrived. A child found at the edge of the winter wood two hard winters before her own birth. The people here had taken her in — nae fae-blooded themselves, but with enough of the old knowing tae understand what they held, and enough sense tae understand they didnae know as much as they thought. The child had aged nae as children age. Had stayed. Had gone eventually — nae taken, gone. Willingly. Some point in the previous generation, toward the south. A pull, they had said. As if she had heard something calling.

I kept m’expression unrevealing.

“They kept nae name for her,” the woman said. “The child arrived without one and they gave her something tae use here, but I dinnae think that’s what she kept.”

I thought about a child whose features had sharpened rather than softened over years that moved too fast for everyone around her. Hearing something in the south she couldnae name.

I thought about a stone on a bank, pulsing since before I arrived.

“Further south,” she said. “Inland.”

South. Inland. The loch.

I said nothing. I will nae write this as confirmation because it isnae confirmation — it is a child who wasnae mine, who went south toward something that may or may nae be the ground I sleep above, decades before m’bairn was born. I am recording it because it belongs in the record. Because this territory has been holding children of the wrong kind of old for longer than I kent, and whatever the stone on the bank considers its business appears tae extend tae the gathering of them.

That is sufficient reason tae write it down.

I dinnae need it tae be more than that. Yet.

Before light Runa came and stood beside me at the water’s edge.

We stood there a while wi’out speaking. The shore here has a quality the loch doesnae — nae treeline tae hold the eye, nothing for m’cold tae lean against. M’cold didnae quite ken what tae do with that much sky.

“The child,” Runa said finally.

“Aye.”

“You think she went south.”

“I think it isn’t impossible,” I said. “That is all I will say.”

She was quiet. The water moved against the shore. It would be doing this long after we were gone.

“When I followed the hum,” she said. “The eleven days south. There were moments when it felt less like I was walking toward something and more like something was pulling me along a thread.”

I looked at her. Really looked.

“Like the thread already existed,” she said, “and I was only going where it pointed.”

I had been pulled along a thread m’self and had spent considerable effort pretending I was walking toward something rather than being pointed. I had nae useful answer for that.

“The stone,” she said. “The one on the bank.”

“Aye.”

“It set the thread, didn’t it? The one Lasair used for the working. The one that reached and found me.”

“I dinnae ken,” I said honestly. “I have been sleeping beside that stone for near on a year and I am only beginning tae understand what it considers its own business.”

Runa let an incomplete answer sit without trying tae complete it herself. I have come tae value this in her.

“We should go back,” she said.

“Aye,” I said. “We should.”

The thing that had followed us south was at the tree’s edge. I could feel it from here. I left it where it was.

We stayed the night. The old woman gave us what she had with the economy she gave everything, and I found I had nae objection tae receiving it. She saw m’vellum and ink when I set them on the table — I have learned nae tae travel without them — and gave me the corner nearest the fire without a word. I am writing this there now, while the day still has its shape. Some people understand a record being kept without requiring it explained tae them.

If this drew you in, Sorcha’s world is still moving—step into Soul Castle: The Guardian & The Keeper, a series on Amazon:

https://a.co/d/0fyT8uLN