“I tried, Your Grace.”

The girl standing before Gabriel was little more than a child. But the pleats across her pink brow beneath the lemon plaits of her hair and the crisp cap were those of a woman with far too many cares.

“I commend you on the attempt, Miss Finn.”

“She attempted it four times, Your Grace,” came a sharp voice at his side.

“Aye. As your letter helpfully informed me, Miss Pike.”

“On the second attempt Cassandra swooned. But she tried it twice more.”

He glanced at the woman standing by his elbow, the entire top of whose head of close-cropped hair he could see from above. Pike craned her neck, and serious brown eyes set in a pale brown face met his with impressive impassivity.

“Miss Finn showed fortitude,” he said. “Fear o’ heights is nothing to scorn.”

Now Pike’s brow knit too. “I would have completed the repair of the roof myself if—”

“If no’ for the splint holding your leg together at present.”

“Your Grace.” She seemed to snip the words.

Gabriel drew in a slow breath.

“I’m no’ chastising you for falling through the rotted floor o’ the attic an’ breaking your leg, Miss Pike,” he said. “Indeed, as they’re my attic an’ my rotten floor, I beg your forgiveness for the incident.”

“Maggie made an attempt as well,” Cassandra said. “But she couldna grip the trellis ladder securely enough.”

Good God.

“While you were inspecting the roof, Your Grace,” Pike said, “a message arrived from the Solstice.”

“What does Mrs. Tarry have to say?” he said.

“It was marked to you confidentially. I will fetch it now.” Despite the splint, Pike departed silently, as all exemplary footmen did.

He returned his attention to the twenty-year-old Edinburgh lass who, a year earlier, had taken it upon herself to join the little colony that resided in his house.

Buried deep in a ten-mile-long glen with towering peaks on its northern end and easily defensible flats on its southern, Kallin was the ideal retreat for people desperate to hide from the world. He often mused that his rapscallion friend, Torquil Sterling, had chosen him for this project primarily because of Kallin’s remote location and only secondarily because of Gabriel’s ability to captain a ship across an ocean without anyone catching up to him.

“Now, Miss Finn,” he said, moving to his desk. “Give me your report o’ matters here.”

She sat down across from him silently. The members of this household all had the uncanny ability to make no sound when they moved, which—he supposed—had been a useful skill for most of them before they had fled their previous residences.

“Feel free to omit any mention o’ the roof.” He removed the stopper from the inkpot and took up a pen. “I’ve heard as much as I care to about this damn roof—I beg your pardon, Miss Finn—about this blast roof.” He dipped the pen into the pot.

“Aye, Your Grace,” she said, folding her hands on her lap. “Aside from the roof—”

“Roof silence, Miss Finn.” He upended the pot and knocked it on the ledger. Flakes of dried ink peppered the page. “What in the dev—where’s the ink?” He dug in the desk drawers.

“Aside from the leaks in the roof, Your Grace—”

He forbore growling.

“—we’ve a shortage of basic supplies—”

“Such as writing ink?”

“—such as tea, coffee, sugar, polish, rope, firewood—”

“Firewood? There are woodlands up an’ down the length of the glen.”

“—laying hens, candles, lamp oil, lye, paint, glue, paper, an’ writing ink. Molly also has a list o’ needs from the distillery.”

“Does she?” It was less question than sigh.

“Plum’s been harvesting herbs and roots down at the village.”

“Well, there’s something.”

“But we’re short on salt. An’ pickling spices. We also lack a suitable harness for the oxen.”

“Oxen? When did you purchase oxen?”

“Molly traded five barrels of gin at Inveraray last month.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Did she?”

“She didna tell you that last spring she an’ Maggie were making gin, did she?”

“She neglected to share that wee bit o’ information in the twenty-three—or perhaps ’twas an even two dozen letters the two o’ you sent to me last March alone.” He stood up as the study door opened. “Ah, Miss Poultney, I’ve just been hearing about the experiments with gut-rotting brew that you an’ the mistress o’ my distillery have been making there, despite my instructions to the contrary.”

“Good day, Your Grace.” The taking little brunette with skin as white as a porcelain teacup dropped a ridiculously deep curtsy for a woman mere days away from bringing a child into the world. “How be the roof?” She had the audacity to dimple up.

Inhaling slowly through his nostrils—a calming technique he had learned to do before battle—he turned again to Cassandra.

“Anything more, Miss Finn?”

“We’re about to have a shortage o’ linens.”

“You wrote to me about a storage chest full o’ bed linens that you discovered recently, aye?” So many letters. Their concern for apprising him of the use of his land and money was relentless.

“These be other sorts o’ linens.”

He tilted his head forward in question.

“Feminine undergarments, Your Grace.” Her cheeks were now red, but her gaze did not waver. A better man he could not pay to do the work of land steward that Cassandra Finn did for no more than his promise that he would never, ever tell her father where she had gone.

“Hm,” he said. “I suppose that is what I deserve for asking details.”

Both girls were blushing now. Not for the first time he wondered whether any of Kallin’s residents were aware of the man he had been until five years earlier. If so, they were remarkably discreet about it.

“We’re also short o’ nappies,” Cassandra said.

He made the mistake of glancing at Maggie. Hands resting atop her belly, she was grinning.

“Dinna look to me!” She giggled. “Yet.”

“Rebecca is helping at the Solstice three nights out o’ seven, with her wee one, o’ course,” Cassandra explained. “She’s been keeping linens both here an’ there.”

“I see.” He moved around the desk. “Purchase whatever the house needs, Miss Finn.”

She followed him toward the door. “Mr. Du Lac wrote that funds from the insurance on the Edinburgh house are finally at the bank in Inveraray.”

Xavier had written directly to Cassandra? Interesting. Either she had become far more capable than even Gabriel knew, or his partner in Portsmouth wished to spare him further conversation about the pile of ashes in Edinburgh. Or both.

Good man. Good woman.

“I’ll drive to Inveraray as soon as I have seen to the roof. Till then, buy the hens on credit, an’ anything else needed.”

“An’ the firewood?”

“Woodlands,” he said, gesturing toward the window. “Acres an’ acres o’ woodlands.”

“Pike usually does the chopping, Your Grace.”

Judas.

This girl—his land steward—was so young, so damnably young. So were all the others who kept this estate functioning. Yet they were still older than a girl he had once known, a girl who had thrown herself across an ocean and into a foreign land, and had not balked for even a moment when the world demanded of her what she had never given before.

A girl who still haunted his dreams.

“Are you telling me that we are shorthanded, Miss Finn?”

“Aye, Your Grace. With Plum gone to work for Mrs. Tarry in the village, an’ Sophie sewing morning, noon, an’ night to supply the shops begging for her gowns at Inveraray an’ Oban, ’tis all Rebecca can do to cook an’ clean an’ assist Pike now that her leg—”

He held up his hand. “All right.” He reached around Maggie and opened the door wide. “I will chop the wood.”

Cassandra gasped. “You canna chop wood, Your Grace.”

“I can. Now, go about your business—my business, that is.” He offered her the scoundrel’s grin that had once charmed females from Dover to Tobago.

With a rare ghost of a smile, she departed.

He returned his attention to the second of the two Scotswomen who had disappeared from Edinburgh and, in leaving her bloodied cloak behind, established his reputation as a monster.

“Miss Poultney,” he said firmly.

“Your Grace,” she said sweetly. “I—”

“Hush.”

She bit her lips together.

“I understand that you an’ my Master Blender, Miss Cromwell—on behalf o’ whom I paid gold to apprentice for ten months with a Master Blender on no other isle than Islay where, Miss Poultney, the gods have blessed the distilleries with peat an’ precious spring waters an’ all sorts o’ other magicks so that the sacred barrels may offer up malted ambrosia fit for kings—you an’ she, I understand, are making pig swill on my land. In my distillery.” The distillery he and Du Lac had constructed with their own hands. “Without my permission,” he added.

Her grin widened. “Aye, Your Grace.”

“Stow the dimples, Miss Poultney. I am furious with the two o’ you, an’ with Monsieur Du Lac for apparently approving it.”

She blinked a few times. “You’re keeping cool for being furious.”

“I commanded a fifty-six-gun frigate for His Majesty King George, missy. I’m no’ a man to fly off the handle.” He attempted a slight loom. “That doesna mean I canna.”

“Aye, sir.”

“If you waste the barrels, which didna come cheaply, an’ the labor, which is scarce, on fermenting bitter juniper berries for drunkards,” he ground out, “there will be no malted ambrosia to sell to kings in several years an’ make the fortune o’ this estate, Miss Poultney.”

“Gin be a quick cash crop, Your Grace.”

“I understand the reasoning behind it.” They were impatient for Kallin to bring in income. By the time he had left his family’s estates at age thirteen his father’s steward had taught him plenty about the patience required to husband the land. At sea those lessons in patience had served him well.

The problem was that his estate was in the hands of children. But he had been a child when he had achieved the rank of officer in His Majesty’s Blue. And he’d been given the charge of much more than whiskey barrels and sheep.

Yet there was no denying that the women of Kallin were already performing miracles.

“Where is Miss Cromwell?”

“In the distillery, hiding behind the chemistry table.”

He lifted a brow.

Maggie’s dimples reappeared. “Pacing.”

“Tell her I will speak with her when I’ve finished patching up the roof. Tomorrow.”

“’Tis fixing to snow.”

“Aye.” He would have to make quick work of the repairs. Roofs and ice did not mix well, and these women did not need a man with a broken back laid up in this house all winter. Even when he was here briefly, as now, they barely tolerated him. “Now off with you, lass. An’ no more climbing up trellis ladders, do you hear me? No’ till after the wee one comes.”

He should start searching for a medical man—a female medical man, if one could be found. As yet only three women had sought sanctuary at Kallin while with child. But more could come.

“Lass.”

Maggie paused and turned curious eyes up at him.

“There are men aplenty in this countryside looking for work.” Veterans, traveling laborers, boys who had watched their fathers march off to fight Napoleon who, now grown to manhood, had no war or other prospects. And Kallin needed workers.

Maggie said nothing, which for her was the wrong kind of miraculous occurrence.

“No?” he prodded.

“You’d best be asking Cassie, Your Grace.”

“She would say no, wouldn’t she?”

Maggie nodded.

“All right. Be gone.”

Kallin’s footman came forward propelling herself now with a shillelagh tucked beneath her arm.

Gabriel recognized the walking stick. Seamus Boyle, Theia’s surgeon during the three years Gabriel had commanded the frigate, had given him the shillelagh as a gift for his premature departure from the navy, a jest about his youth upon retirement.

Now, there was a medical man he wouldn’t welcome within leagues of Kallin, an exceptional sawbones but a philanderer of the worst sort. Gabriel had gone to that hospital in Kingston the first few times simply to make certain Boyle was not propositioning the nurses and female patients.

No. That was a lie. One of the old lies he’d told himself for five years.

He had gone to that hospital for the girl. Again and again.

Pike proffered the promised message from Mary Tarry.

“’Tis a fine crutch, Pike.”

“I found it in the attic.”

“Before the floor caved in, I guess. Serendipitously.”

Her lips remained a line.

“If you have any needs from Inveraray,” he said, “add them to the shopping list Miss Finn is writing up—without, apparently, any ink.”

“We make do,” she said shortly.

“Aye. I know, lass,” he said.

“If you don’t like me using this stick, I’ll find another in the woods.”

“’Tis yours, Pike,” he said, leaving off the title, as she had asked him when they had first met. He ignored the instruction whenever others were near. But in private he honored it, though he had no idea why she had made it. Every one of the residents of Kallin had secrets.

“Will that be all, Your Grace?”

He waved her away and snapped open the seal on the letter, glancing up to watch the girl’s uneven progress toward the front of the house. These women were doing their best with the slimmest resources. He could only marvel at their tenacity and resilience.

Still, they would be the death of him.

In two years he had never so much longed for the cigar smoke-filled masculine retreat of the Theia’s wardroom, where his officers drank brandy and on occasion traded ribald stories. They had always halted those stories the moment he entered the room. A captain was master of his officers, never one of them.

His days on the Fairway, when he had still been one of the lads clamping his lips shut as his captain strolled into the wardroom, hiding laughter behind discipline, were some of his finest memories. His happiest.

He wondered if Pike smoked cigars, or whether the footman’s breeches and coat she preferred were the limit of her tolerance for the male sex. Probably. Of all the residents of Kallin, Pike had come from the worst circumstance: abused daily, and at least two pregnancies ended by her rapacious master’s fist to her belly. Small wonder she would rather break her own bones keeping the house habitable than allow a man near the place.

But she had survived. Through her own intelligence and ingenuity—and Torquil Sterling’s network of accomplices in the West Indies, England, and Scotland—she had escaped and somehow reached Leith.

He ran his palm over his face and focused on Mary Tarry’s writing. It was like the writer herself: firm, strong, competent. Wise and thoroughly no-nonsense, the daughter of Kallin’s old butler and housekeeper had been Gabriel’s first choice as keeper of the Solstice Inn. He had barely begun to explain what he needed when she accepted. Within six months she had restored the inn on the east-west road at the base of Glen Irvine, making it a welcome retreat for weary travelers and a moneymaker.

Every one of the women in Glen Village was loyal to her, and therefore to him.

Perhaps this Anne Foster had extra ink. Or a pencil, for that matter.

He tossed the note atop the grate. If Mrs. Tarry had any idea how many people regularly poked about his properties, from Haiknayes to his ships berthed at Leith, she would not bother writing to him about one traveler’s curiosity.

If this Anne Foster had not asked for sanctuary and was not wearing the Haiknayes star—the badge Tor had insisted would help identify women seeking sanctuary—she had no need of Kallin. He wasn’t worried. The little community at Kallin and in Glen Village had managed to hide its purpose for more than two years already. One lone female would not unmask the Devil’s Duke.

As he closed the ledger that Cassandra Finn carefully kept, the sun was dipping toward the hills across the river. He had time to begin the roof repairs.

Or chop wood.

Out in the cold he blew frosted air, bound his tartan more firmly around his neck, and hefted the axe. Logs from an ancient evergreen lay about the yard. From within the stable, the sound of an ox’s snort came softly into the dusk. The river, gurgling on its way to the rapids farther downstream, was the only other sound. Even the dogs Pike kept to frighten away fox had retreated inside to warm themselves by the fire.

The stillness was sublime, like the mizzen watch on a winter night on the Sargasso—only without the creaking rigging and his bosun’s snores emanating from belowdecks like a foghorn.

Nearby a rooster offered a pathetic crow.

“Poor bastard,” he mumbled. “If you were a hen, they’d have use for you. But your days are numbered, laddie. Shame you canna chop wood an’ repair a roof.”

Now he was talking to chickens. Somewhere up there in the heavens, that rogue Torquil was splitting his sides laughing.

Smiling, Gabriel hauled a log onto the chopping block and brought the axe down.

Snow came overnight. After meeting with Kallin’s Master Blender, Gabriel tugged a wide-brimmed hat over his brow, gathered tools, and climbed to the roof. Setting his boots firmly at the apex, he surveyed his domain.

The world glittered brilliantly: golden sun, azure sky, silver river, milky fields, and forests of the darkest fir stretching up the hills on either flank of the glen and tipped with snow. On the Irvine’s opposite bank, a dozen deer stood out against the white, unworried about predators in this frozen paradise.

Days, weeks, months had passed in the past two years during which he had wished his father still alive, even his wretched brother, and himself standing beneath full sails on a cresting sea. But this—this heaven on earth—he could not be unhappy that this was his.

Kallin needed money. The insurance from the Edinburgh house inferno would help. The fine malt aging in the long shed would eventually secure the estate’s prosperity. In the meantime, the women were indeed making do. In Portsmouth, Xavier was seeing to investments. All was well.

Gabriel drew a tunnel of frigid air into his lungs and released it slowly. For the first time since he had left the sea behind, he was content.

The temperature had risen since dawn and water ran in rivulets all down the myriad sloping roofs of the house. He pulled a tool from his belt and pried the offending tiles loose.

He was hammering a nail into a chipped tile when an uncomfortable tingle skittered up the back of his neck. Damn wood chopping. Setting the hammer down and reaching up to rub at the complaining muscles, he turned his head and saw her.

Everything—running water, crackling snow, his heartbeats—halted.

It was not every day that a man saw a dream materialize before him. In Gabriel’s experience, it had only happened on one other day in his life.

This time, like a faery out of ancient legend she stood on the hillside in snow up to her ankles, skirts whipping in the wind, hood thrown back to let loose wild tresses of mingled sunshine and fire.

He almost fell off the roof.

Grabbing the first thing that his hand hit, he gripped tight and dug his heels into broken slate.

Here she was. On his land. She. Not a trick of the light on gleaming snow. Not another woman of similar appearance to mistake for her at this distance, as he had done time and again in five years.

But she.

An English girl has come to the village . . . she is asking questions.

Anne Foster. Anne: her sister Emily’s second name. Foster: her mother’s family name.

A false name. Hiding in plain sight. From him? Who else could she possibly know in this remote corner of the world? This simply could not be an accidental trespassing.

Of all the curious spectators to his life, never in a thousand years had he expected to see Amarantha Vale here—or on any property he owned.

Below, Pike’s dogs catapulted out of the house, vaulted over the fences, and flew across the field, barking madly and tearing up the hill straight for her.

He did not call off the dogs. Believed by Britons from Edinburgh to London to be a diabolical abductor of helpless maidens, and satisfied enough to be acknowledged as such, he considered the useful effects that a quartet of slavering, ebony whelps running breakneck across the slope would have on the delicate sensibilities of an Englishwoman. Also, of course, there would be the effects of the stories she would subsequently tell of this harrowing encounter, which were bound to be taken up by gossips and ensure his continued privacy and the privacy of the residents of Glen Irvine. It had been months since mention of the Devil’s Duke had appeared in any paper. Fresh rumors would serve him well.

He failed, however, to consider the peculiarities of this particular Englishwoman: she was neither a maiden, which he had learned in the most painful manner possible, nor helpless, which he had learned without suffering any pain whatsoever—rather the opposite.

She remained still as the dogs greeted her like long-lost friends. Gathering about her with joyful leaps, sniffing her outstretched crimson mittens and wagging their tails, the turncoats showed themselves no more immune to her natural allure than Gabriel had been five years earlier.

At that time, however, he had not yet become the Devil’s Duke. And the Devil had a reputation to uphold.

Lifting his fingers to his mouth, he let fly a whistle that could be heard above cannon roar; it pierced the wintery wind and reached the dogs’ ears. As one, they broke from her and careened back across the snowy valley toward the house.

She shouted into the wind. He saw her throat stretch, her hand swipe the tresses from before her face, and her lips move—lips about which he had dreamed many frustrated dreams. But he heard nothing; the wind was far too strong.

This was idiocy, remaining here staring across the hillside, without moving. But concern for those in his protection and an equally powerful instinct for self-preservation prevented him from acknowledging her now. With the sun at his back, the brim of the hat shaded his face. She could have no idea that the master of Kallin, the duke himself, was playing handyman on the roof of his house.

She shouted again.

“Mary Tarry believes you are an urisk!” came to him over the frosty slope, barely audible and swiftly whisked away by the wind. Still it was her voice, the voice he had dreamed about like he had dreamed about her lips: vividly, repeatedly, for too many months before he had finally wiped the memory of her from his senses. Unsuccessfully. Invariably the memory of her returned whenever he was very tired, very drunk, or—damnably—very angry.

Now he did not reply. What could he reply? That if urisks had hearts that pounded like kettledrums, then certainly at this moment he might be one of those solitary, curmudgeonly creatures of legend.

Anyway, if he shouted the sound would not reach her; he was downwind. Fortunate, although not accidental. Centuries earlier the house had been situated with attention to the patterns of wind through the glen, to give its inhabitants ample warning of invaders approaching over the hills without giving the invaders the opposite courtesy. Thank God for his ancestors’ strategic wisdom.

She remained with her hands at her sides, cloak billowing, and he thought—he knew—that this was simply another punishment for having misspent his youth so vilely. It seemed he would never be finished atoning.

Then she laughed.

Intoxicating laughter.

He must end this now. This was not, after all, a suitable time to make good on the agreement he had made aboard his ship in the midst of a storm: his pact with the devil.

That pact had seemed a wise choice in the moment. Seeing her now, here, however, it was eminently clear to Gabriel that the particular terms of that deal had been very poorly chosen.

Judas, his chest hurt.

Turning his back to the hillside, he took up the hammer, reaffixed the slate in its rightful spot, and drove a nail into the peg attachment. Another nail followed—unnecessarily—and yet another, until the thing was so well fixed in place that not even a tornado would wrest it free. Then he did the same with another tile. And another. And another.

For the next hour he did not so much as tilt his head to either side.

By the time he stuffed the tools back into his belt and finally allowed himself a quick glance at the hill, there was nothing there but snow and a lone black stream running from a crevice in the hill downward.

Excellent. Excellent.

He climbed down the ladder and into the dry warmth of the house and took the stairs to the ground floor two at a time. In the drawing room the dogs picked themselves up from before the hearth and circled him.

“Disloyal mongrels,” he muttered.

An ancient chamber that had not been updated since his grandfather’s time, it boasted comfortable furniture, thick tapestries, and a few paintings of former lairds of Kallin, each whiskered duke wrapped in tartan and bearing arms. Here and there were hints of the house’s current residents: a book of poetry on a side table, a shawl draped over a chair, a sewing bag tucked into the corner of the sofa, and a cat lolling on a cushion.

He bent down and snapped open the door to the sideboard.

The cabinet was empty. Entirely empty. No brandy. No whiskey. Not even any gin.

“May I assist Your Grace?” Pike said from the doorway.

“No.”

In the top cabinet his mother had kept vases. Desperate, he opened it anyway. Bottles gleamed within. He grabbed the cognac.

“Rebecca’s little one, Clementine, has started to crawl,” his footman said, apparently apropos of nothing.

“Did anyone call at the house while I was up on the roof?”

“A red-haired stranger stood on the south hill for a bit. But she left without coming to the house. The gates around the pastures are always locked, as is the gate at the wall. Shall I inquire after her at the vill—”

“No. No stranger may come into this house or the yard or anywhere near. As per my usual order.” He peered down at his toes and then at the empty bottom cabinet.

Rebecca’s little one has started to crawl.

He swallowed the remainder of the spirits. He was colossally unfit to be the guardian of a group of young women and infants. He needed to return to Leith as soon as possible. Or London. Or Bristol. Dover. Anywhere but here. Find investors, potential partners. Let this odd little family trundle along with their overlord at a safe distance of eighty or two hundred miles away.

But first, he must get rid of a curious Englishwoman.

That old swell of infuriated pride was overtaking him, followed swiftly by the old familiar pain. He welcomed neither.

Mary Tarry seemed to have no idea that the new arrival was the daughter of a nobleman. Which meant that if he contacted her family and invited them to Kallin, she would have no choice but to reveal herself. But he could not invite anyone to Kallin without risking all, especially not the sort of gay socialites he understood the Earl and Countess of Vale to be.

Her elder sister, Emily, was another sort of woman altogether, a bluestocking who lived alone in London. How would she respond to the news that her sister was living under a false name in a Scottish village?

He would write to Emily Vale—anonymously—and bid her come fetch her sister.

Filling the glass anew, he threw back the dram. But no quantity of spirits could erase the images he conjured now—not of a pretty girl whose plentiful freckles and snapping eyes and unguarded tongue had entranced him. Rather, the image of the horror that his words had inspired the night he discovered she had married.

He could not see her again. Ever.

Best to leave the past in the past, where she belonged.

Amarantha supposed that could have gone worse. The dogs could have actually attacked her.

Walking alongside the river back toward the village, boots sodden and nose numb, she watched her breaths plume in little clouds and stuffed her hands more deeply into her pockets. Even bathed in brilliant sunlight this northern land was chilly—

This land of hills and rivers so glorious they stole the frigid air from her lungs and made her dizzy.

This land of people so kind that she, a lone woman, had found welcome in every place she had sought rest.

This land in which her motherless nephew was welcomed into another family’s home as though he were one of their own.

This land of breathtaking beauty and generosity.

This land in which her quarry was impossible to run to ground.

She had thought it was he on the roof. His shoulders, the very manner in which he moved, even the way he raised the hammer—the man on the roof had seemed so familiar—as though he were the man she had watched so closely, so hungrily, in that other time and place far from this reality.

Apparently not.

Or the man on the roof was in fact the Duke of Loch Irvine, and he did not recognize her.

She did not know which prospect disconcerted her more: that she had traveled so far to find the duke, only to be told in the village he was not in residence at the castle and, when she made the two-mile walk in the snow anyway, to be met with locked gates and dogs; or that the man she had once been in love with did not remember her after only five years. Both were maddening.

The people of Glen Village must know something of their overlord, even if they seemed reticent to speak of him. She would remain in the village and continue to ask questions until someone answered them. The Solstice Inn was wonderfully warm and comfortable, and the trade Mary Tarry had made with her was ideal: work at the tea shop for a cot at the top of the house and a corner of the kitchen when she was not working.

And she was weary. Weary of the journey. Weary of making friends only to swiftly lose them. Weary of being alone.

The river to her right, sparkling in the setting sun, rippled and bubbled comfortingly. Along the narrow road layered with snow, the stark trunks of birches and dark evergreen boughs and the tiny streams rushing down the hillside toward the river spoke to her of elves and faeries, of trolls and all the other creatures that had populated her childhood: her fondest friends besides Emily.

Now thanks to Mary Tarry she knew of another creature: the Scottish urisk.

Paul had told her that fantastical creatures had no place in a woman’s imagination. Imagination had no place in a woman. Only virtue.

She wondered if the man on the roof believed in urisks, or if he had simply thought her a madwoman, standing on that hill, shouting into the wind.

Smiling, she tucked her hood more closely about her face and her steps were so light that her feet barely made marks in the snow.