Page 4 of Fierce Highland Guardian

I blinked twice and crouched and did the thing I’m good at. I analyzed what I found. Deep tread, lugged, a work sole—instead of the soft-soled trainers the site allows. Big. Longer than my hand plus my spread fingers. Fresh, because the drip from theceiling hadn’t yet pocked them. Two people, I decided, reading the overlap—one heavier, one who walked on the outsides of his feet. And the stride ran the wrong way. They weren’t toward the crypts, or toward the stairs up to the light. They were toward the sea passages. Toward the dark that goes down.

I photographed them. Four angles, scale card in frame—you log anything you’ll have to defend later. The camera made its small satisfied clicks.

I followed them.

The passage narrowed and dropped. My headlamp threw a cone of white into wet, black stone, and the sea’s boom came up through the rock, muffled, patient. The prints went as far as the footing let a sane person go, and I went one step past that, because I am not always sane about a trail, and the floor I put my weight on wasn’t floor. It was a skin of silt over a gap, and it gave, and the whole cold weight of the passage tilted, and I went down hard with one leg swallowed to the hip in a crack full of moving water. The sea had a hand in here. I felt it grab—the undertow of a passage that fed the open water, sucking, insistent, cold enough to stop my breath—and I scrabbled for a grip on rock slick as soap and found nothing, and the water pulled, and I understood in one white flash of arithmetic that I had made exactly the mistake the locals had warned me about, in a place no one knew I’d gone.

Something caught the back of my jacket.

Not something. A hand—I’d swear to a hand, broad and hot, hot the way nothing two hundred feet down in the sea-dark has any right to be—and it hauled, once, hard, and the crack gave me back my leg, and I came up onto solid rock on my hands and knees, coughing, streaming. I spun the headlamp around.

Nothing. Wet stone. The passage empty as a held breath, the drip and the boom and my own ragged breathing, and the imprint of warmth still fading between my shoulder blades.

You grabbed a ledge,said the sensible woman.You threw yourself back and you’re calling it a miracle because you’re frightened.

But my hands were empty and scraped, and there’d been no ledge, and I’d stopped being able to afford the sensible woman’s version of events sometime around the moment the sea stood up. I got out of there fast. This time I didn’t tell myself I wasn’t running.

At the end of the trail, before it dropped me, there’d been a stub of surveyor’s chalk, blue, snapped clean—and a smell. Burnt. Metal-sharp, a struck match held under the nose, with something scorched under it that didn’t belong in sea-wet dark. I stood in the daylight of the upper ward with that smell still in my nose and the list I’d made falling apart in my hands.

The dragon I could file under sleep. The dragon was mine to doubt. But a boot print is evidence, and evidence doesn’t care whether you slept. Somebody real had come down here on purpose, chalk in hand, running toward the thing my software flagged and my eyes wouldn’t hold. Somebody was surveying my site from underneath.

Moments later, I hopped in the car and drove.

Stonehaven had never cured me of anything, and I no longer expected it to. The town’s charm was a salt-scoured thing, battered by wind and grimed with gulls, and more honest than any of the city places I’d tried to live. The main street trailed along the river, lined with narrow, pasted-together buildings whose backs hunched against the North Sea gales. Maybe it wasn’t much, but it was alive, and its aliveness was the whole point.

I parked by the harbor and walked among the ordinary—diesel and fish guts and wet rope, a chip shop opening, a woman scolding a dog in an accent I could listen to all day. Halfwayalong a row of stalls I hadn’t noticed on the way in, an old woman in a green shawl put a cup of tea into my hands.

I hadn’t asked for it. I know I hadn’t, because I don’t order tea I have to hold while I’m walking.

“You’ve the look of someone counting things that won’t add up,” she said, not to me exactly, more to the tea. Her herb-stained fingers trembled. Her eyes too young for the rest of her.

“Long morning.”

“The Highlands aren’t asking you to believe anything.” She tucked a dried bunch of something into a jar. “Only to look. Folk forget there’s a difference.”

I laughed, because that’s what you do.

“Storms and sleep.” She turned an old tune under her breath, half a line of it, and let it go. “That’s what you’ll tell the mirror tonight. The mirror’s heard worse liars.”

On her tray, among the tied herbs and the chipped saucers, a small silver charm caught light the gray day hadn’t earned. A thistle.

She followed my gaze, and her mouth curved. “Funny. I don’t remember putting that one out.”

“How much?”

“For you? Whatever’s in your pocket.”

I don’t buy trinkets. I have a life that fits in a dry bag on purpose. But my fingers closed on it before my sensible self could file an objection, and I paid her in coins, and when it settled into my palm it ran warm—a low, steady warmth, sun-warmth, though there was no sun. I blamed the sun anyway, and pinned it to my collar. When I turned to thank her, the stall had someone else at it, and the green shawl was three stalls down with her back to me.

I went back up to the castle because I’d left markers on the seaward stretch, and because I’m a professional, and professionals finish.

He was at the wall.

The old stretch by the postern, the one no contractor would touch, ten steps from where my last markers still sat. A big man, dark-haired, working stone into stone with one broad hand flat against the granite the way you’d gentle a horse. A coat that belonged to no decade I could name. And I recognized the set of those shoulders, because I’d watched them come apart out of the sea and reassemble into a man on the black rocks below.

He raised his head. His eyes did the most unusual thing—took the flat afternoon light and threw it back pale and molten, silver where there should’ve been color. The same wrong silver I’d logged in the storm and told myself I’d invented.

He was beautiful, and I hated that I noticed. I noticed anyway.