Page 7 of Fierce Highland Guardian

“Fiona.” So we weren’t complete strangers, it would seem.

The vault ended where my survey said the castle ended—a dead wall of dressed stone, seven centuries old, nothing behind it but rock. Craig set his hand flat against it, fingers spread, a man touching something he’s touched ten thousand times.

“There’s nothing back there,” I said. “I’ve mapped it.”

“You’ve mapped what you were meant to.”

Something moved under his palm. It wasn't a door—I’d have found a door. A seam I’d stood a foot from and logged as mortar drew itself open, stone folding off stone, and cold air came up out of the gap smelling of salt and deep water.

I did the professional thing. I got out my torch.

“You won’t need it.”

“I need it the way other people need oxygen.”

He almost smiled. First one I’d got out of him. It didn’t reach anywhere near comfortable, but it was there. And it did something stupid to my heart. “Suit yourself.”

The stair went down farther than the castle had any business going, cut rough and later cut smooth, the marks changing as the centuries changed. I read them without meaning to—this course dressed with an adze, this one with a claw that left four clean furrows, this one older than any tool I had a name for. A whole history of one creature’s long solitude, written in the walls of his own stairwell. The sea got louder, closed over us, dropped away below—and the walls opened.

I stopped counting steps. I count things; it’s what I do when the floor of the world tilts. I’d reached forty-one and lost the will somewhere in the dark, because the dark had started to glow.

It wasn't torchlight. It wasn't any light I could name. It came up off the walls themselves, cold blue-green like the inside of a wave, and it showed me a space my training refused to file.

I blinked for clarity. It wasn’t a vault. A cathedral.

The roof went up into a dark I couldn’t measure. Gold lay underfoot, dulled to pewter, ankle-deep in the hollows—and I, who have photographed every coin I ever touched, stepped over a king’s ransom without a second glance, because none of it was the point. Warmth came from somewhere ahead, wrong and deep and wonderful against so much cold rock, and riding on it a scent I’d caught once on a cliff in a storm and never placed. Cinnamon. Old woodsmoke. Him.

“This is impossible.” My voice came out too small for the room.

“It’s old. Older’s the word you want. Impossible’s what people say when they mean nobody told them.”

I’ve spent my whole adult life on my knees in front of dead things. Brushing the dirt off a grain at a time, asking the one question I’ve ever really had—what happened here—and gettingthe same answer every dig, which is silence, which is you fill it in yourself and hope. Fifteen years of interrogating stone that could not, would not, answer back. And here, for the first time, was a site that could.

I asked the room, barely a breath, out of pure habit. “What happened here?”

And for the first time in my life, the site answered.

“We were real,” Craig said. Quiet. Like it cost him something. “That’s the part your people forgot on purpose. Dragons were as real as weather. There were many of us, once.”

“What happened to the many?”

“Men we trusted.” He kept his eyes on the far dark, not me. “We shared what we were. They wanted the whole of it instead of a share. There’s iron under half the cairns in this country and dragon under the other half.” A pause. “I’m the last to hold this coast.”

I have a rule about not saying the first thing that surfaces. I broke it.

“That’s the loneliest sentence I’ve ever heard.”

“You get used to the sound of it.”

At the heart of the room, on a plinth of black stone, sat the thing the whole cathedral was built to hold.

Fist-sized. Crimson going to gold and coming again. And it was breathing—there’s no better word, and I hunted for one—swelling and dimming slow as a sleeping chest, a pulse you didn’t hear so much as keep time with once you’d caught it. The same note I’d felt in my back teeth on the cliff, but gentled now, folded down into something almost like rest.

I have stood in front of a lot of old things. Grave goods, gold torcs, the small chalk hand-marks children left on cave walls before Britain had a name. I know the particular hush that comes over you in the presence of the genuinely ancient, the sense of a long silence looking back. This was that, and thenit was more than that, because the ancient thing was warm, and the ancient thing wasawake. The warmth of it moved on my face like breath. When the pulse rose I felt my own pulse reach up to meet it without asking my permission, the way you sway toward music, and when it dimmed something in my chest dimmed with it, tender and involuntary, and I understood I was standing in front of the loneliest object in the world and it had just noticed it wasn’t alone.

“The hoard’s a decoy,” I said. “The gold. It’s not what you’re guarding.”

“No.”