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:

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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:

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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.

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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:

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26th March, 950

26th Là na Cailleach

The Cailleach lost today. She always does. I am nae her.

Six days since Runa arrived. Lasair has the fire and the kettle. Runa has taken the perimeter — she walks it before Lasair and I are up, reading the ground — what yields, what holds, where a body could be placed and nae seen. I have the window and the dark. Brushy sleeps where she chooses and answers tae naething.

We sat down tae the question this morning.

“The families in this territory,” I said, pointing tae a map Lasair had drawn. “The ones still holding the old ways. Nae performing them — doing them quietly because they cannae stop. I need tae ken which ones and where.”

Lasair didnae ask why I hadnae already found them myself. She has enough sense for that. What m’cold reads in the ground isnae the same as what a woman from Moray reads in a face, a threshold, a fire built a specific way. Different knowledge. Both useful.

She gave me three inland. The one at the head of the loch first — she described the approach, the markers I’d find, the name they’d respond tae if I needed them tae open a door rather than pretend nae tae be home. The other two east, smaller, quieter. One with Norse blood already in it from a grandfather who stayed.

Runa gave me the coast. Four settlements with deep enough roots, two of them too visible, one in particular — she described it with the same economy she uses for everything. An inlet. A household that had taken in a child before without asking what it was.

“That one,” I said.

“That one,” she agreed.

Seven families in total. I placed them in m’mind against what I already kent of the territory — the roads m’cold had traced, the ground I’d walked, the old paths that dinnae appear on any map a human hand has drawn. The picture filled itself in.

“Is that sufficient?” Lasair said.

“Aye,” I said. “That’s all I need from ye.”

The shape of what would happen next I kept tae myself. They didnae need it and I saw nae reason tae offer it.

I went outside after the others had gone in. The open air was nae longer a preference.

Brushy followed me out. The Dark Reach was still. M’cold and the evening’s, naething else. I stood at the treeline and she settled on m’shoulder and we were quiet together for a time.

Then Brushy sang.

One small creature on m’shoulder, and what came out of her was a Winter Court song — cold and old and entirely nae of this world. I hadnae heard it since before I left. Hadnae thought of it.

M’cold shifted when she did it. Pulled toward something I hadnae known was still in me.

I sang back before I chose tae. The same fragment, or the echo of it — rising out of me the same as cold does — below decision, below choosing. M’breath made it visible in the night air. It rose intae the Dark Reach and the trees held it a moment before it was gone.

Runa was in the doorway.

She looked at me. She looked at the trees. “I heard it from inside,” she said.

“Aye,” I said.

She made a face that said interesting and went back in.

I stayed until m’cold settled. I gave Brushy nae acknowledgment for what she had done. She didnae seem tae care.

The light had gone thin by the time I chose the path.

Lasair’s first — the holding at the head of the loch. Near enough that I could reach it and return before the night committed tae anything with intent. Far enough that whatever I touched wouldnae immediately echo back tae the cottage.

I didnae take the road.

The road is what men use when they wish tae be seen by other men. I had nae such requirement. I moved along the lines beneath it — the older paths that sit under habit and memory both, where ground has been taught tae yield without question.

The air changed before the land did.

Smoke. Settled. Worked intae wood and cloth and the breath of a place that has been lived in without interruption.

I slowed.

Two structures. One newer. One kept past its proper time. A fence repaired more than once in the same place. Wood stacked with care rather than abundance. Nae animals in sight. Either housed early or already gone.

I stood where the trees ended and let m’cold lower.

Not absence.

Reduction.

What made the eye slide past and find nothing worth stopping for.

A boy came out carrying water.

Seventeen winters, perhaps. Not yet set. Still deciding what kind of man he would be and already practicing the weight of it in his shoulders. He crossed the yard without looking up until he was near enough that not looking would have required effort.

He looked.

Stopped.

They always did.

It wasnae fear. It was the body recognizing a thing before the mind had decided what tae call it.

I didnae move.

“Water runs cleaner further up,” I said.

His eyes flickered tae the bucket, then back tae me. Measuring. “Aye,” he said. “It does.”

He didnae ask who I was.

Good.

I let the quiet sit just long enough that he would feel the need tae fill it.

“Ye’ve come down from the trees,” he said.

“Aye.”

His grip shifted on the handle. “We dinnae get many—” He stopped. Thought better of finishing the thought.

I stepped forward.

One step.

M’cold came with me.

It settled rather than spread. Like frost finding the edges of a thing and deciding tae keep them.

His breath shortened. He wouldnae ken why.

“Who keeps this place?” I said.

“M’father,” he said, too quickly. Then corrected, “Our family.”

“How long?”

He hesitated.

That was where I placed it.

Nae glamour. Nae lie.

Just the narrowing of the world until I was the only point in it that didnae move.

“How long?” I said again.

“Since m’seanair’s time,” he said. “His before him.”

“Good,” I said.

He swallowed.

“Ye take in strays?” I asked.

That caught.

A small fracture. Enough.

“What kind of strays?” he said.

“The kind that come out of the trees and shouldnae have made it through them,” I said. “The kind ye dinnae ask about because asking would require an answer.”

His eyes shifted then — not tae me. Past me.

Toward the trees.

There it was.

“Once,” he said.

I let it sit. Let him decide whether tae close that door or open it further.

“Not recent,” he added.

“Aye,” I said. “Nae recent.”

I stepped closer.

He didnae step back.

That told me what I needed tae ken about him.

“What was it?” I said.

“A girl,” he said. “Or—” He shook his head. “We thought she was.”

The word settled wrong.

I marked that.

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“And now?” I said.

He looked at me properly then.

He had begun tae resist. The instinct that tells a creature when it has revealed too much.

Too late.

“She left,” he said.

M’cold tightened, a fraction.

“Did she?” I said.

His expression softened at the edges. Not gone. Less his.

“She was taken,” he said.

I went still.

“By what?”

He frowned. Fighting it now. “I didnae see—”

“Ye did,” I said. “Ye just havenae let yerself say it.”

The world narrowed further.

He exhaled.

“The woods,” he said. “They came out of the woods.”

I let the cold ease.

Slowly.

He blinked, as though surfacing.

“I should—” he said, looking toward the house.

“Aye,” I said. “Ye should.”

I turned before he could ask me anything.

Before he could remember tae.

I had reached the treeline when it shifted.

Subtle.

Enough that any human would have called it wind and moved on.

There was nae wind.

The night pulled taut.

M’cold did the same.

Something watched.

Not from a distance.

From within the trees themselves.

I stood there a moment longer than was required.

Then I walked back the way I had come.

It wasnae the right family. Too long ago, whatever they had held. M’bairn is months old, nae years. I had crossed one name from m’list and learned only that this territory has its own history wi’ such things. That is worth knowing.

The something in the trees I noted and left where it was.

I was back before the fire had gone low.

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

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21st Alban Eiler, 950

21st March, 950

The world had tipped toward light by the time any of us slept. I was first tae wake. M’cold restlessness doesnae accommodate long sleeping, and after a night indoors with two humans and the veil still finding its depth in the ground below the cottage, the open air was nae longer optional. I went outside before the others stirred.

Brushy was already in the yard. She looked at me — self-satisfied, waiting tae be acknowledged.

I gave her none. She wasnae surprised.

Lasair was already at the treeline. She had beaten me outside. I stood watching her from the garth and felt nae need tae examine why. She was walking the perimeter as I walk it — slowly, reading the ground as she went. She cannae hear what m’cold hears but she kens the human patterns on this land — who moves through it, what their movement means — in ways that are useful.

When I came back inside Runa was awake. She was sitting at the table — eyes open, hands flat, doing the work of recovery without the luxury of it. She had mastered resting without sleeping. Her hand was nae longer on her belt but it wasnae far from it either.

I put the kettle on.

“Did ye sleep?” I said.

“Yes.” She watched me move around the room.

I set bread on the table between us. “When did ye last eat?”

“Two days ago.” She took the bread without ceremony. She had been hungry before. She didnae perform gratitude for food.

I sat down across from her. “The settlement ye came from before ye followed the hum — did ye leave people there?”

She looked up from the bread. “No.”

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“Family elsewhere?”

“No.”

“Anyone who would come looking?”

She set the bread down. She looked at me. She had been answering questions longer than she kent—and had just begun tae count them.

“You are deciding something,” she said.

“I am making conversation,” I told her simply.

“You are not.” She looked at me steadily. “You have been at it since you came through the door.”

I had been attempting discretion. I abandoned it.

“Who are ye?” I said. “Where are ye from? Who kens ye left and is anyone coming after ye? And what do ye want with this ground? Those are the things I need tae ken before I decide whether ye stay beyond this morning.”

Runa looked at me for a long moment.

“Took you long enough,” she said.

She told me.

Runa of Thorfinn Skull-Splitter’s household. Nae by blood — by standing. She had done this before. Explained herself, decided how much ceremony it deserved. The tone carried all of it. She had earned her place through combat, through repeated survival — enough battles that men had stopped questioning her presence in them. She had been the shield maiden. Nae a shield maiden. The shield maiden. She said it as I would state any other fact and I received it the same way.

“The sons were already turning on each other before I left,” she said. “I could see what was coming. I had no intention of being useful to any of them.”

“They had begun to discuss a marriage. An alliance. They hadn’t discussed it with me.”

“Ye left before the discussion became an order,” I said.

“Yes.”

I have watched power fracture when the man holding it stops holding it more times than I can number. The people worth keeping always leave first.

“No one will come,” she said. “I was an asset that removed itself. With the sons occupied by their own grievances, retrieval is not worth the cost.”

She had walked south without a destination. Somewhere in Sutherland she had felt the hum. She had followed it because it was the only thing in the landscape that wasnae trying tae use her for something.

I sat with all of this.

It was then the door opened and Lasair came in from the treeline, cold-cheeked, already pulling her wrap tighter. She stopped when she read the room. Looked at Runa. Looked at me. Looked at the bread on the table and the quality of a conversation that had just finished being something other than what it appeared.

“Have I missed something,” she said.

“A conversation,” I said.

“About.”

“Whether she stays.”

“And,” Lasair said.

I picked up the kettle. A warrior woman was an asset and I had made m’assessment quickly. “She stays,” I said. “For now. Pour yerself a cup. We have things tae discuss.”

Lasair sat. She had questions and had decided they could wait.

I told them both about m’bairn.

Not everything. The parts that were necessary. She existed. She had been taken from me at birth — left, as they do, for whatever came next. I believed a family had found her. Somewhere in this territory. I didnae ken their name. I didnae ken precisely where. I had followed a pull tae this ground believing it might lead me tae her. It led me tae the stone instead. Whether the two are connected I cannae yet say. What I ken is that she is out there and I am here and this is where I intend tae begin.

The room was quiet when I finished.

Lasair stood and circled the table. She looked down for a moment — nae at me, nae at Runa, at the table — and I understood that she was placing something. Every conversation we had ever had. Every morning she had watched me stand at the window. She was placing them all differently now.

She said nothing. I could see the result of whatever she had worked through but nae the working.

“How old,” she said finally, taking her seat.

“Wee still. She willnae be found easily — nae by her own presence.”

Runa had her hands around her cup. She was already somewhere else — I could see it: she had already taken the problem apart and was reading its angles.

“We cannot move through this territory without being seen,” she said. “Either of us.”

“Ye can,” I said. “The cold I carry turns attention away. It isnae a working — it is simply what I am. Ye would move beneath it as ye’d move beneath weather. Malcolm’s men wouldnae see ye.”

Runa set her cup down. “And in return,” she said.

“Ye stay here. Ye’re safe under the cold I carry — it holds around the cottage well enough. But I need tae move through this territory and I dinnae ken it. I dinnae ken which families hold the old ways quietly. I dinnae ken the coast or who among the Norse settlements has been there long enough tae have the old knowledge. I need tae ken those things before I move at all.”

A decision was being made without me. I let it.

“I ken the inland,” Lasair said. “The families, the roads, who tae approach and who tae avoid.”

“I ken the coast,” Runa said. “Norse settlements still standing. The ones with deep enough roots.”

“Then that is the arrangement,” I said. “The search is mine. Yer help with it is — welcome.” I should hae said required. I didnae.

Lasair looked at me for a moment. Then she looked at Runa.

Runa picked up her cup. “I have nowhere else to be,” she said. “And I owe a debt to Halliman that has not been paid.”

It wasnae an oath. It wasnae a formal agreement. It was three women at a table in the early light of Alban Eiler with a kettle on the fire and a veil around the cottage and a direction that hadnae yet become a plan.

It was enough tae begin.

One thing more. In five days it will be Là na Cailleach. The day the Cailleach is said tae make her final struggle against the spring before she is defeated and the world tips fully toward light.

I am nae the Cailleach. I have said this before and I will keep saying it.

But the timing is nae without irony.

If this drew you in, Sorcha’s world is still moving—step into Soul Castle: The Guardian & The Keeper

20th Là na Cànain 950

The moon was all but gone. Lasair had chosen the night deliberately. I didnae ask how she knew.

We set out an hour before the equinox proper. I asked her why the hour before and nae at the moment itself.

She explained. At length. Lasair explains everything at length — this is simply what she does and I will admit it took me some weeks tae stop finding it tiresome. What I have since discovered is that the length is where the interesting part lives. Strip away the ceremony of her explanations and ye lose the thing she is actually saying. The monks would strip it. I am nae a monk.

The power is in the anticipation, she said. The moment itself is already committed. Ye arrive before the door opens, nae as it does.

I have been paying closer attention tae how humans carry their knowledge than I once thought necessary. The reason for this is m’bairn. She is out there somewhere, raised among them, and when I find her I will need tae understand what she has been given and what it has made of her. Lasair is m’education. M’human. She doesnae ken this. I see nae reason tae tell her.

I drew m’cold around us as we left the treeline. Nae dramatically — cold doesnae announce itself, it simply arrives. The world adjusts. Eyes slide past. The not-quite-seeing that m’cold produces is less a working than a fact of what I am — I dinnae make myself invisible, I simply become cold that doesnae invite attention. The darkness helped. The absence of the moon helped more.

Brushy stayed on the threshold when we left.

The Dark Reach was different at this hour. I have walked it at every hour since I arrived but there is a quality tae the equinox night that is distinct from ordinary darkness — the precise moment before the world tipped toward light again. The standing stones were visible against the sky, blacker than the black around them. Lasair walked ahead of me, her feet finding the path without hesitation. She has been walking here in her mind since long before she arrived at m’door. I understood this about her without being told.

She didnae speak. I didnae speak. There was nothing tae say that the ground wasnae already saying.

The stone announced itself before we reached it. It does this — a quality of attention in the ground that shifted as ye approached, a room rearranging itself around a new awareness. I have been coming tae this bank long enough now that it kens m’step. Whether this pleases me I havenae decided. I am leaning toward aye.

Lasair stopped at the bank’s edge and began her preparations. I stood back. This part is hers. I ken what I am bringing tae this working and it is nae ceremony — it is cold and it is age and it is a decision — that this ground is worth the keeping. That is sufficient. The ceremony is Lasair’s contribution and I have learned tae let her make it.

It was then I noticed Brushy.

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She was sitting three feet tae my left, perfectly still, watching Lasair with the fixed, absorbed attention she keeps for the threshold tributes. Her tail curled over her back. Her fur caught nae moonlight. There was none tae catch.

Brushy looked at me. I looked at Brushy.

I turned back tae the working.

I had a reaction. I willnae set this down.

The working itself I will describe in practical terms because that is what it was — practical. Lasair threaded the working outward the way Ulf had shown her, the seiðr fragment she has carried since girlhood, the technique that has never quite sat right in her hands because she learned it incomplete. She has adapted it. Made it approximate. It reaches further than the Gaelic working would alone, pulls tighter than the thread Ulf showed her had any right tae pull, given how little of it he had time tae teach her.

I brought the cold in underneath. Pressed it down intae the ground, toward the stone, asked the stone tae hold what we were placing over the cottage. Asked is perhaps too gentle a word. I have been sharing the earth beside this stone through two turnings now. We have an understanding. It isnae warm, this understanding — warmth isnae what either of us trades in — but it is solid. It held.

The veil seated itself at the fourth hour.

And then something went wrong.

The thread Lasair was using — the seiðr fragment — it reached. It does this, apparently. It seeks a living anchor when it cannae find a fixed one, and the fixed anchor I had provided wasnae quite speaking its language. The thread went out past the veil. I felt it reach — seeking something I hadnae given it leave tae seek. Past the treeline before I could call it back.

The ground protested.

And then there was a woman inside m’veil.

She had come in low and fast, already balanced, already reading the space for threat. Her hand was on her weapon at her belt. Her eyes went tae me first — which told me she had some sense — then tae Lasair, then tae the ground, then back tae me.

She was Norse. I can always tell. There is a cold in them — a sea cold, different from mine, that kens the open water rather than the deep ground. She carried it as something born into the bone rather than chosen — sea cold, not learned.

She was also, quite clearly, furious.

“What was that?” she said, in Norse.

I looked at Lasair. Lasair looked at me. Brushy, I noted from the corner of m’eye, hadnae moved.

“A working,” I said, in Norse, because I have been speaking every language long enough that switching costs me nothing. “It reached further than intended.”

The woman’s eyes sharpened at the language shift. She looked at me differently then. I had ceased tae fit what she had decided I was.

“You are not Norse,” she said.

“Nae,” I agreed.

“Then how—”

“I am old,” I said. “And ye are inside m’veil. I suggest we speak before I decide what tae do about that.”

She decided tae speak.

Her name, she told us, was Runa. She had been following the hum for eleven days.

I turned and walked back toward the cottage. After a moment I heard two sets of footsteps behind me instead of one.

Brushy rode m’shoulder the entire way back. I didnae remark on this either.

Inside, I set the fire higher. Lasair put the kettle on — she has taken this over entirely and I have surrendered it without discussion. Runa stood in the center of the room and looked at everything with the methodical precision of a fighter reading ground. The ceiling. The walls. The space itself, larger than it should hae been. She said nothing about any of it which told me she had seen strange things before and had learned tae process them quietly.

She was looking at Lasair now.

“That working,” she said. In Norse still. I had switched tae Gaelic for Lasair’s benefit and was managing both without difficulty. “The thread you used to anchor it.”

Lasair looked up from the kettle. “Aye.”

“You used it wrong.”

Lasair’s mouth drew slightly, then stopped. She set the kettle down with care.

“I used it as I was shown.”

“You were shown wrong then.” Runa’s tone wasnae cruel. She was stating fact. “The thread seeks a living anchor when it cannot find a fixed one. You are supposed to close it before it reaches. You left it open.”

“I closed it.”

“You closed it after it had already gone.” She gestured at herself. “I am standing in your cottage.”

I didnae interrupt tae point out ‘tis m’cottage.

Lasair had nothing tae say tae this because it was accurate. I watched her decide nae tae say so. This wasnae argument. This was ownership.

“Where did you learn it?” Runa said. The same tone she had used at the stone.

Lasair was quiet for a moment. She turned back tae the kettle. “A Norseman taught me. Years ago.”

“Where from?”

“Halliman,” Lasair said. “On the Firth. His people had been there long enough tae have roots.”

Runa’s face changed — quick and unwelcome. The sharpness that had been sitting there since she arrived — the readiness, the combat edge — it didnae leave but it changed quality. Became something else.

“I know that place,” she said quietly.

“He was called Ulf,” Lasair said. Her voice had gone somewhere careful. “He had been there since he was a child. He kent things — old things, things his amma had taught him. He taught me what he could before they took him.”

The kettle was boiling. Neither of them moved tae address it.

“Took him?” Runa said. The word landed and stayed there.

“Aye, as a slave,” Lasair said. “They took the ones worth keeping and burned the rest.”

Runa said nothing. She didnae need tae. She had seen Halliman after. She was dangerous. Admirable. I hadnae decided yet whether that would be a problem.

I had opinions about what had been done tae Ulf and the people like him. I have watched power decide that certain people are property since long before either of these women’s grandmothers were born. They always find a god willing tae bless the doing of it. The god changes. The doing doesnae.

Runa picked up the cup Lasair had set out for her. She had been walking for eleven days. The fire was warm and this room had earned a moment of her stillness.

Lasair and I joined her.

The three of us said nothing for a while. Outside, the equinox turned. Brushy was asleep on m’chair.

I sat somewhere else and didnae mention it.

If this drew you in, Sorcha’s world is still moving—step into Soul Castle: The Guardian & The Keeper

A note on these pages: I have nae intention of subjecting ye tae everything. I have been alive long enough tae understand that the difference between a record and an affliction is editorial judgment. The weeks between the last entry and this one existed. They were nae without event. The events were mine and I have decided they are nae yers.

I am the archivist. These are m’standards.

Ye’re welcome.

26th An Gearran, 950 (The Gelding Month)

26th February, 950

Lasair is still here. The cottage has rearranged itself around this fact with its usual pragmatism — practical about things whether or not its inhabitant has caught up. There is a second blanket now. A second cup. The rushes get changed on a schedule I didnae establish and have nae objected tae. She has opinions about where things belong and has been implementing them, moving slowly enough, and steadily enough, that the opposition willnae notice until the moving is already done.

I have noticed. I have said nothing.

Brushy has taken tae watching from the yard when Lasair is about. She sits at the base of the nearest pine and observes. Mornings bring small tributes on the threshold: ice-wrapped berries, neat circles of frost on the step, once an entire tiny pine cone balanced on a frozen droplet.

We have spent the intervening weeks doing two things. The first is the ordinary business of two people occupying a small space without killing each other — which requires more negotiation than I had anticipated and which I will attribute entirely tae Lasair’s stubbornness rather than m’own contribution. The second is the matter we have been circling since the day I brought her back through the trees.

This morning we set out through The Dark Reach tae see the source properly. Lasair had spoken of it over the fire at first light with the matter-of-fact tone she uses for decisions already made. I had been about tae say the same. I didnae point this out.

She approaches thin places as her people have always done — nae from the north, always sunwise, never empty handed. She had explained the customs tae me thoroughly.

I didnae need convincing. I have been walking thin places since before her tradition had words for them. But I listened because she kens things I dinnae ken about this particular ground and this practice and I have learned, in these weeks, that listening tae Lasair costs me nothing and occasionally produces something useful.

“Ye’ve been near it before,” she said. “The stones. Ye go there.”

“Aye.”

“But nae tae the bank where the true power lies.”

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I had nae been tae that stretch of bank. The pull had always come from the direction of the stones and I had followed the stones. Loch Airceig lay black and still beyond the western trees. The pulse hadnae come from the water.

Lasair gave me the look she uses when she kens something I dinnae — deciding whether tae say it plainly or wait for me tae arrive at it myself.

“They’re nae separate,” she said.

We set out at midmorning. The light in late February had begun tae remember its own existence — thin, provisional, offering presence without commitment. The snow had drawn back from the loch’s edge, leaving the bank dark and exposed, the ground soft as though the earth had finally released a long-held breath.

Lasair walked ahead of me along the bank. She moved more slowly here than she moved in the cottage, each foot placed as though reading the ground as she went. She had brought an offering. A small thing, wrapped in the same careful cloth as before. She hadnae told me what it was and I hadnae asked.

I felt it before I saw anything.

The pulse I had attributed entirely tae the standing stones rose instead from the veiled stone anchored on the bank.

I stopped walking.

This is old. Placed with clear purpose. The difference between what has always existed and what was anchored here by design — I ken that difference — and this is the latter. The veil over it is nae accidental.

That is all I ken with certainty.

It is considerably more than I kent this morning.

Lasair had stopped too. She studied the ground at her feet. I kent that look.

“It kens we’re here,” she said quietly.

“It has always kent,” I said. “It has been waiting for us tae notice.”

She knelt at the bank’s edge and set the offering down sunwise, with the care of long practice. She murmured words I wasnae meant tae hear and I made nae effort tae catch them.

Then she was still.

The pulse shifted. Nae dramatically — subtly, as a fire deepens with the right wood. The stone beneath the bank acknowledged the offering. Nae language. Nae image. Only the attention of something ancient that has been addressed correctly and finds the address acceptable.

I stood on the bank of Loch Airceig in the February light and felt the true scale of what has been buried beneath m’feet since the night I arrived.

This stone was anchored here with craft meant tae endure. Kingdoms have always swallowed older powers in the same fashion — renamed them, claimed their blessing, erased the root. This one they left tae wait.

What I stand beside is nae merely a thin place. It is an anchored stone, deep-rooted, connected tae threads that run far beyond this bank. And it has rested here, beneath the dark water and the standing stones and The Dark Reach, since long before I arrived and long before anyone now walking this land was born. It will outlast Malcolm. It has outlasted worse.

“We can use it,” I said.

Lasair looked up at me from where she knelt. “Carefully,” she said.

“Aye,” I said. “Carefully.”

We stood there a while longer, the two of us, on the bank beside the stone I have been sleeping near for many moons without properly recognizing its nature.

It offered nae objection.

On the walk back I felt another presence at the edge of m’cold. Nae close. Moving parallel tae the corridor, unhurried. Older practice. Nae Malcolm’s men.

I marked it. I said nothing tae Lasair. Enough already pressed for consideration.

It had gone by the time we reached the treeline.

There is still the matter of what I came here tae find. That search has been set aside these past weeks. M’human currently requires most of m’attention. But m’bairn is out there somewhere.

If this drew you in, Sorcha’s world is still moving—step into Soul Castle: The Guardian & The Keeper

4th An Gearran, 950 (The Gelding Month)

4th February, 950

The corridor had been busy.

I had spent three mornings at the treeline listening tae what m’cold carried through the pines — voices, hoofbeats, the rhythm of men with orders rather than men with destinations. Malcolm’s reach intae Moray wasnae simply a matter of sending men after practitioners of old customs. I had understood that much from Lasair’s arrival. What I hadnae understood, until I listened properly, was the scale of it.

They were moving people off land. Nae quietly. Loudly. With the confidence of authority that has decided its own justification is sufficient. Families displaced. Holdings absorbed. The Mormaer of Moray’s territory being digested intae Alba as a larger creature digests a smaller one — thoroughly, and without sentiment.

I told Lasair this on the fourth morning.

She was at the table with m’ink and a piece of vellum neither of us had discussed, drawing something I hadnae yet looked at closely enough tae identify. Her hands stopped when I spoke. She listened without surprise — she had already been living with the answer.

When I finished she was quiet for a moment.

“My mother’s house,” she said.

“I dinnae ken specifically,” I said. Which was true. I kent the pattern. I didnae ken her mother’s house.

She looked at the vellum in front of her. Whatever she was drawing, she had stopped seeing it. “There were six families on our road,” she said. “We’d been there since before anyone could say when. Since before the name Malcolm meant anything tae anyone, mind.”

I offered her nothing.

She went back tae the drawing. Her hands moved again but differently — with less fluency than before, moving without her while she went somewhere else entirely.

I sat with this for longer than I had anticipated.

What I hadnae been examining for four days — why I had let her fire burn higher than was necessary, why I had produced white cloth without being asked, why I had sat at a hearth that wasnae mine on a threshold night and watched the fire do things I willnae document — had presented itself again insisting on acknowledgment whether or nae acknowledgment had been invited.

I declined tae acknowledge it. I went tae the treeline instead.

When I came back she was gone.

The brìdeog was still at the hearth. The brat Bhríde strip still on the outer sill. Her drawing on the table — I looked at it properly now. A map of sorts. Roads and landmarks rendered in a walker’s shorthand — walked, nae surveyed, every mark of it. Her mother’s road was marked. Six small marks for six families. I could see it in the ink — her hand had gone back tae that corner. Heavier there. Like a bruise.

She had taken nothing that was mine. On the table — the map, and beneath it, a note. She thanked me for the shelter and the warmth. She didnae say where she was going.

I stood at the table and read it twice.

I had told her. I had given her the information. I had done the practical thing.

I had let her go.

Then I listened through m’cold.

Past the first bend in the corridor. Past the second. The particular signature of something familiar moving through ground that kens me — and beneath that, close behind it, voices. Men with bloody orders.

I set the map down.

I let the human face go. I went.

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As reported tae me by Lasair afterward, one moment she was pressed against an ancient pine with nae good options remaining, and the next she was at the cottage door. She said there was cold, and then there was the door, and nothing she could account for in between.

That is accurate.

I set more wood on the fire. The human face had reassembled itself — habit. M’hands were steady.

Lasair stood in the centre of the room. She looked at her own hands first. Then at the walls. Then at me. As though she was accounting for each thing in turn and needed tae finish the list before she could speak.

“I always kent,” she said finally. “Since the first night. The cold. The ceiling. The manner ye move.” A breath. “I just didnae ken the scale of it.”

“And now ye do,” I said.

I put the kettle on. I dinnae entirely ken why I had a kettle or when I had acquired the habit of using it. It seemed like the appropriate action. I committed tae it.

“My people,” she said, after a while.

“Aye,” I said.

She looked at the map she’d left on the table. At the brìdeog still keeping its vigil by the hearth. Then at me.

“I cannae go back yet,” she said. It wasnae a request. She had assessed the situation, had it confirmed, and arrived at the only practical conclusion available.

“Nae yet,” I agreed.

I found I had nae objection tae any of this.

She is m’first human. The fae dabble — we observe, we intervene when it suits us, and we withdraw when it doesnae. We do nae, as a rule, acquire.

I appear tae have acquired.

One thing more. Brushy has taken up residence in the yard. I cannae say I’m surprised. She has a tail that curls up over her back and brushes along her own spine when she moves — I named her for this when I was still in the court, when she was small enough tae sit in m’palm. She is still small enough tae sit in m’palm.

She didnae ask whether she could come. She simply arrived.

I havenae told her tae leave.

It occurs tae me that neither of them asked permission. I appear tae have become somewhere things stay.

If this drew you in, Sorcha’s world is still moving—step into Soul Castle: The Guardian & The Keeper

Chapter 6 Lives Here:

1st An Gearran, 950 (The Gelding Month)

1st February, 950

She was still there in the morning.

I had half expected otherwise. Sensible folk sometimes recover their composure in the night and think better of shelter offered by a stranger with nae fire burning and an exterior that discourages inquiry. But Lasair of Moray had apparently exhausted her supply of caution somewhere on the road from Moray and was already moving through m’cottage when I came in from the treeline — purposeful, unhurried, carrying her own sense of place inside her and requiring very little from the surrounding architecture.

She had the rushes out. M’bundle from near the door, half of which she had already claimed the night before for the cross in the window. Now she was working with the remainder, her hands moving with a fluency that belonged tae childhood and hadnae left, weaving a small figure at m’table.

“Brìdeog,” she said, without looking up. She had heard me come in without startling, which I had already noted. “A doll for Brigid. Ye give her a body tae inhabit, so she can walk intae the hearth and leave her blessing on the household.” She turned the small figure in her hands, examining it with the critical eye of a craftsperson checking their own work. “My mother made one every Imbolc. Her mother before her.”

She paused, smoothing a rough edge with her thumb. “Brigid’s the daughter of the Dagda. The good god — the father of all good things, of plenty and wisdom. He sent her among us. Tae tend what needed tending.” Said it as ye say something learned before ye were old enough tae question it. Not recitation. Inheritance.

“Ye dress her in white if ye have it,” she added.

I had white cloth. I considered this for a moment longer than was strictly necessary. Then I produced it.

She took it without ceremony and wrapped the small rush figure with the same careful attention she had given the weaving. Settled the brìdeog by the hearth when she was finished, facing the fire. I had nae objection tae that positioning. I declined tae examine why.

The cross was already in the window. Before I had come in she had laid a strip of cloth along the outer sill, weighted flat against the wind with a smooth stone.

“Brat Bhríde,” she said, catching my eye. “Brigid’s mantle. Ye leave a cloth outside on her eve so she can bless it as she passes through. Come morning it carries something of her in it.” A measured pause. “Healing, they say.”

“And do ye believe that?” I asked.

She was quiet for a moment, turning it over honestly rather than reflexively. “I believe m’mother’s hands gave her less grief on the difficult days when she wore the cloth she’d set out. Whether that’s Brigid’s doing or m’mother’s own belief doing the work —” She lifted a shoulder. “I’ve stopped thinking those are different things.”

I sat with that longer than I had anticipated.

The morning settled intae a comfortable industry after that. She swept — again, without soliciting permission — and I allowed the fire she had built tae climb, and said nothing about it, which I attributed tae the cold outside and left unexamined. She moved through the space with the same quality she brought tae everything: deliberate, unadorned, taking nothing for granted. Each small act accumulating — the cross in the window, the cloth on the sill, the brìdeog at the hearth. Lasair of Moray was, without announcement or apparent intention, putting her hands on things. 8675309

I was waiting for the irritation that rightfully accompanies uninvited domestication of one’s dwelling.

I kept waiting.

When the light had moved past midmorning she settled by the hearth in the stillness of long habit — nae theatre in it. She looked intae the fire as ye’d look when ye have spent a lifetime being told that fire, on this particular night, is worth the looking.

“Brigid speaks through the flame,” she said, almost tae herself, her voice pitched as people pitch things they are saying for their own benefit as much as yours. “On her night especially. If ye sit wi’ it properly, wi’out wanting anything specific from it, sometimes it shows ye something.”

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I am, by any reasonable measure, jaded. I have observed enough human ritual tae be thoroughly inoculated against its theatre. I have sat beside more fires than I could enumerate and found nothing in them but combustion. I had nae business sitting down.

I sat down.

The fire did what fire does when the veil is thin and something beneath the ground has been awake and attentive for months and has chosen a threshold night tae become more particular about it.

I willnae call it a vision. That word implies a surrender I am unwilling tae document.

What inhabited the fire briefly wasnae the fire. Something traversed it — swift, peripheral, dissolving the instant I attempted direct examination. The impression it left was of a child set among people she didnae belong tae. Nae suffering in it, or nae suffering I could discern. Just the specific dissonance of a thing displaced from its correct location. It arrived before I could construct a proper objection.

Then it was gone, and the fire was only fire, and Lasair was watching me. She had seen something. She had decided it wasnae her place tae name it.

“Ye saw something,” she said.

“I saw something unreliable,” I said.

She understood the territory between a denial and a lie. She chose nae tae occupy it.

I went tae the stones after dark. Imbolc thins the veil over this ground in ways I have been marking since m’arrival, and this night had an edge tae it I had felt since waking. Something in the air that was nae quite weather. I went for that reason, and one other has nae reason tae be named.

The cold received me as it always had — as its own, without ceremony. The stones held it differently tonight. More intentional. The pulse from beneath the earth, the one that has accompanied every night I have spent in The Dark Reach like a second and more reliable heartbeat, had altered its character. Nae in volume. In specificity. It had spent these months, I understood suddenly, simply confirming m’presence. Tonight, with the veil drawn thin and Brigid’s daughter having apparently sent some manner of communiqué through m’hearthfire, it had decided tae be more forthcoming.

I stood among the stones while Loch Airceig lay black and motionless at the forest’s edge and the sky held the crystalline clarity that follows when cloud cover dissolves and the cold has scoured everything clean.

What rose from the ground was nae language and nae image. Focused attention — purposeful, ancient enough tae make m’own age feel provisional. And beneath it, threaded through it, the same directional pull I had felt in the fire. The same note of displacement. Two sources, entirely unlike each other in nature and origin, in complete concordance.

I have been standing beside something significant since the night I arrived here. I am beginning, reluctantly, tae entertain the possibility that it kens more about why than I do.

I walked back through The Dark Reach alone. The trees held their silence as they always did — as if they kent something and had decided it wasnae their place tae say.

I came back inside. Lasair had fallen asleep against the wall, m’blanket pulled tae her chin, the brìdeog still keeping its quiet vigil by the hearth.

I put more wood on the fire.

I have still nae satisfactorily explained that tae myself.

If you enjoyed this, you may be interested in what is going on in Sorcha’s world, currently. Find out: Soul Castle: The Guardian & The Keeper

31st Am Faoilleach, 950 (The Wolf Month)

31st January, 950

Something came through the trees last night.

I kent it before I heard it. The Dark Reach has its own silence — weighted, deliberate — and when that silence changed I felt it the same as feeling a shift in cold — bone-certain, before thought. I set down m’pen.

The moon was almost full. It hung heavy and pale above the treeline, one edge still dark, as if it hadnae quite finished becoming itself. Enough light tae see by. More than enough, I thought, for men on a purpose.

She came out of the trees with naething left in her but forward — nae grace, nae direction, just the body doing the only thing it still kent. Dark hair. A woman grown. She clutched something tae her chest wrapped in cloth, the same careful wrapping I had seen at the settlement stone a week past. She didnae see me. She wasnae looking for a cottage. She was only looking for dark enough tae disappear intae.

I was out the door before I had decided tae be.

This is worth recording because I am nae impulsive. I am the opposite of impulsive. I have been alive long enough that impulse is something that happened tae me once, long ago, and I have had nae patience for it since. And yet there I was, in m’doorway in m’cold, already moving tae meet her.

I ken what I thought I was seeing. I have seen it before. I have lived it. A woman running in the dark from something that walks on two legs and calls itself a man.

I was wrong about what she was running from. I didnae ken that yet.

She saw me and stopped. The stopping was almost worse than the running — her whole body locked — the stillness of prey that has just found what it feared most. She was looking at me standing in the moonlight outside a cottage the forest hadnae agreed tae contain, and she made the calculation every mortal makes when they encounter something they cannae explain. Is this worse than what is behind me?

She decided it wasnae.

She covered the last distance between us and I stepped aside and let her through the door.

Then I turned tae face the trees.

Three men on foot — nae horses, the ground too frozen and too rooted for horses here. I could hear them moving through the pines, careless as men are when they believe themselves on the right side of something. They had moon enough tae track by. They were following her footprints in the snow.

I considered this. Then I considered the cold, which is mine and has always been mine and which responds tae me as a well-trained animal responds tae its keeper.

The temperature dropped. Nae dramatically. Just enough. Enough that the breath in those three men’s lungs became a problem they were suddenly aware of, that their sweat turned tae discomfort, that the cold stopped being weather and became something with an opinion about them specifically. A mist came up off the snow — low and white and certain — and swallowed the footprints whole, and the moonlight with them, and whatever certainty those men had carried intae the trees.

I didnae touch them. I didnae speak. I simply made the cold inconvenient for everything except myself.

They stopped. I heard them arguing in low voices — one afraid, one stubborn, one already thinking about the fire he had left behind. The afraid one won. He was the most sensible.

I waited until the sound of them had gone entirely before I went back inside.

She was standing in the middle of m’cottage with her back tae the wall and her chin up, eyes moving across everything as a creature crosses unfamiliar ground — marking the shelves, the fire, the ceiling that goes considerably higher than it has any business going, marking where the door was and how far — she had done this before, I thought. Needed tae.

The wrapped bundle sat on the table where she had set it down. An offering, I thought. Bound for somewhere it would now never arrive.

She was perhaps thirty winters. A face that asks for nothing, which I respect. And she was reading me as she had read the cottage — measuring, trying tae name what I was before I could name myself.

I let her look.

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“They were hunting ye,” I said.

“Aye.”

She had come from the north and east. A long way tae travel in January on foot with men behind her.

“For the offering,” I said, nodding at the bundle on the table.

Her expression changed. Nae fear. More like resignation. She had been caught before. Discovery had stopped surprising her.

“It is Là Fhèill Brìghde tomorrow,” she said.

She was running from Malcolm’s men. She had been out making offerings on Imbolc eve for a goddess Malcolm’s church has already decided tae rename and claim as a saint. The men he sent didnae see the difference. They rarely do.

This is what kingdoms do when they decide they have found the only correct way tae be. They send men intae the dark tae collect the people who havenae agreed yet. They call it righteousness. It has always looked like this.

“I ken what tomorrow is,” I told her.

She looked at me again then — that particular look, somewhere between fear and recognition. She had grown up hearing stories. She had just found herself standing inside one. From her expression, it was colder than the tales had suggested.

“What are ye?” she said.

A direct question.

“Does it matter?” I said. “I amnae Malcolm’s men. Sit down.”

She sat. I set water tae warm and she watched me move about with those careful eyes. I hadnae come here for company. I hadnae stepped out of that door for company. I had nae interest in company.

She told me her name before she slept.

Lasair.

Flame.

I found this appropriate. Flame and ice have always understood each other better than either will admit.

They say the Cailleach gathers her firewood on Imbolc eve. They say foul weather tonight means she sleeps and winter is nearly done.

I made the weather considerably fouler this evening.

I amnae the Cailleach. I want that noted clearly.

Winter is nae nearly done. Winter answers tae me, and I amnae finished with it yet.

If you enjoyed this, you may be interested in what is going on in Sorcha’s world, currently. Find out: Soul Castle: The Guardian & The Keeper

Chapter Four continues here

Am Faoilleach, 950 (The Wolf Month)

January, 950

The coldest morning yet and I left the cottage before the light had properly committed tae arriving.

This is nae coincidence. I am Winter Court. I go where I am most myself, and I am most myself in this — a January so committed tae its own bleakness that it has frozen the loch solid and silenced every tree with ice. The world has arranged itself tae suit me. There is something tae be said for that.

I have a direction. That is perhaps too strong a word. I have a sense — older than thought, seated in whatever I am made of — that she is somewhere tae the east and north of me. Nae a thread tae follow. Nae a sound or a scent or any useful thing. Just the certainty of knowing that something of mine exists in this world and I have nae idea where.

I walk. Like a mortal. On m’feet, on the frozen ground, through The Dark Reach — ancient pine, most of them, older than anything nearby that breathes, their bark the color of dried blood in winter light, their roots so deep and so certain of themselves that the frozen ground makes nae sound beneath them. The cold here settles. It considers. At the edge of m’sight — large, unhurried, gone before I could name it. It didnae flee. I noted this.

Out the other side intae a landscape that has gone white and still and entirely mine without asking m’permission. Loch Lòchaidh stretched tae the left of me, iron grey under ice, the far shore swallowed by low cloud. Nothing moved. Even the birds had the sense tae stay wherever birds go when the world decides tae be serious about winter.

I pass through a settlement before midday. Calling it a settlement is generous — three structures, a fire, the smell of animals and unwashed wool and something boiling that might be food. Mortal life in winter is a determined kind of misery and I observe it with the attention it deserves, which is moderate.

There was a woman at a door — measuring, wary, already calculating whether I was worth the trouble of acknowledgment. I nodded. She nodded back. We understood each other perfectly and I moved on.

What I noticed, and what I will record because it seems worth the recording, is this:

At the edge of the settlement there was a stone. Old. Older than the structures around it, older than the people who have built them, perhaps older than the trees that framed it. Someone had left something at its base — a small thing, wrapped in cloth, placed with the deliberate care of a person who believed it would be received.

Twenty strides away, scratched intae the bark of a birch, was a cross.

Neither acknowledged the other. The people moving between them acknowledged neither. They simply went about the business of surviving January, hedging their devotions with the thoroughness of people who have learned nae tae commit tae any position that might later prove inconvenient.

I approve of this more than I expected tae.

The light began tae fail before I was ready for it, which in January takes nae great effort — the light here fails as a matter of principle, making a brief appearance and then thinking better of it. I had covered considerable ground. I had found naething. Nae trace of what I am looking for. Nae pull toward any direction that feels like more than wishful navigation.

She is out there. I ken it as I ken cold — absolutely, without requiring proof. A child of mine is somewhere in this frozen world being raised by people whose names I dinnae ken, growing in ways I amnae watching.

I took the old roads home.

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The old roads are what they are — the places where the world folds, where a step sideways takes ye somewhere else entirely, where distance becomes a suggestion rather than a fact. I use them rarely. I decided when I built the cottage that I would keep tae mortal ways. I am in this world. I may as well move through it properly — walk on m’feet, sleep in a bed, observe the pace of mortal days. There is something tae be learned from it.

That resolution lasted until efficiency became the more compelling argument.

What I will record is this: when I stepped back out of the old roads and intae the treeline, the cold hit differently than it had that morning — deeper, quieter — cold that had been sitting undisturbed since before I left. The pulse beneath the ground was different too. Stronger. Or — nae stronger exactly. More present. As if the ground had noticed I was gone, and noticed more keenly that I had returned.

I stood in the trees a moment longer than was necessary.

Then I went inside and wrote this down.

She is out there. I will find her.

The stones beyond the forest say nothing, as is their custom.

I find this less reassuring than usual.

I should note that I had intended tae begin this record the day I arrived. That was some months ago now. The cottage required attention. The land required attention. I required attention.

I am writing now. That will have tae be sufficient.

— S

If you enjoyed this, you may be interested in what is going on in Sorcha’s world, currently. Find out: Soul Castle: The Guardian & The Keeper

Chapter Three continues here.

A note on these pages: I have been writing since before this land had a settled name for itself. What follows has been rendered intae a more current tongue. The words are mine. The translation is also mine. I make nae apologies for either.

— S

Chapter One

An Dàmhair, 949 (The Deer Roaring Time)

Autumn, 949

I ran.

That is perhaps the most honest thing I have ever said about myself, and I have been alive long enough that honesty has become something of a rarity. Ancient things dinnae run. We wait with the endurance of creatures who have watched entire civilizations rise and bore us intae the ground.

I ran anyway.

I found the dark place. A stretch of trees so old and so deliberate about their closeness that the light gave up somewhere above the canopy and went home. I built something here. Small. Stone. Built without asking permission from the land — the land will take it back eventually, and we have both made our peace with this.

I was nae hiding.

I was biding. There is a considerable difference. Anyone who argues the point is welcome tae try.

The loch has a name already. It has had one since before I arrived, which I found presumptuous and then, on reflection, appropriate. The people here call it the dark goddess. They dinnae ken why anymore. They have forgotten the original reason and kept the name, as mortals do — carrying the weight of a thing long after they’ve lost the memory of what it was. I have watched them do this with everything that matters.

There were stones nearby. Standing ones. I had felt them before I saw them — a pull beneath the ground, like a hook set deep in the soil, old and veiled and deliberate — as though someone powerful had buried something there and told it tae wait. I understood that feeling rather more than I cared tae.

So I stayed. I watched. I began tae write things down.

This is those things.

I should describe it properly. The cottage. Since I am doing this — recording things — I may as well be thorough.

The vellum is cold under m’hand this evening. The ink needs warming before it flows properly. The cold is always mine first.

It is small. Deliberately. I am nae small — I want that understood clearly before anyone draws the wrong conclusions — but I have learned across many years that power announces itself most effectively through restraint. Any creature can be enormous. I had been enormous recently and found it undignified. What I built instead was precise.

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Stone. Local. The kind that has been cold since before the trees outside it were saplings — colder still, now that I am in it. One room. One hearth. One window facing west because I am practical about these things — if ye are going tae feel something pulling at ye from beyond a forest, ye may as well be comfortable doing it.

The interior is another matter.

Suffice tae say that what I brought with me from the fae world does not follow mortal rules about space, and a room that appears from the outside tae hold perhaps a bed and a grudge contains far more than that. Mortal architecture has its charms. I simply choose not tae be constrained by them.

It is the finest dwelling within several centuries of here.

No one will ever know that.

It will do.

I am wearing a face.

This is nae unusual for my kind — we wear what is useful and set it aside when it isnae — but this one I have chosen with some care. Young. Or young enough. A face mortal men look past rather than at, which suits m’purposes entirely. Dark hair. Unremarkable height. Features that suggest competence without inviting conversation.

I tried three others before this one.

The first was too striking. I have learned that striking faces draw attention, and attention draws questions, and questions draw mortals who have mistaken persistence for a personality. I have nae patience for that.

The second was too young. It felt dishonest in a way I found irritating, which surprised me. I had not expected tae care about honesty in something as practical as a face.

This one is right. For now. I reserve the right tae change my mind. I have been changing my mind since before this land had a name and I see nae reason tae stop.

It is mine. That is what matters.

Everything from here is mine.

Why I am here rather than there — there being the court I was born tae, the world I was made for, the people who looked at what had happened tae me and found it inconvenient — is a thing I will address once and then set down.

They were wrong.

Nae about what I was. Nae about what I am capable of. About what was owed tae me when the world proved itself capable of breaking even ancient things. I had expected — I dinnae ken what I had expected. Something. Some acknowledgment that what had been taken from me had value. That I was more tae them than a hawk on a tether, tae be flown when it suited them and hooded when it didnae.

I received instead a great deal of practical advice.

I left.

I took nothing with me that was theirs. Everything I have is mine — earned or made or simply claimed because I decided it was. The fae world can manage without me. They have been managing without honesty or loyalty or basic decency for far longer than I have been alive and I see nae reason they will stop now.

I dinnae miss them.

I have said that every morning since I arrived and I will say it again tomorrow.

The stones beyond the forest say nothing. They are better company than most.

My days have a shape now. This would surprise the court considerably, given their opinions about my methods.

Morning — I watch the forest from m’window. It does nae move either. This suits me well enough. The frost on the glass is mine. I dinnae apologize for it. Afternoon — I walk the trees. The Dark Reach kens me already. M’own name for it. Old things recognize old things. We have an understanding. Evening — I write.

And beneath all of it, beneath the stone floor and the old roots and somewhere beyond the western trees, something pulses. Quiet. Veiled. Waiting longer than I have.

I dinnae ken what it is yet.

But I intend tae find out.

If you enjoyed this, you may be interested in what is going on in Sorcha’s world, currently. Find out: Soul Castle: The Guardian & The Keeper

Chapter Two Lives Here