“I will not leave,” Glenna said, standing inside the cool dark shadows of the shed, toe to toe with Montrose. “Fergus! Fergus! “ she kept calling out, desperate and panicking. Did he crawl away? “He is here somewhere. He has to be here.”

“There is no sign of him, Glenna. No trail. I looked for him. You can see…here. Look about you.”

“You do not believe me. You think I am lying. That he was not here.”

He ran an impatient hand through his hair. “I believe you, but that does not change the fact that your dog is gone.”

She searched the dark corners of the small shed. “He must have crawled away.”

“There are no prints in the dirt.”

“But there was blood on the ground. By the fire last night. He was bleeding. It was there.” She moved to where a small stone ring held blackened fragments of burnt wood and ashes, and she went down on her knees. “It must be here.”

But there was no sign Fergus had ever been there. There was no sign of the blood she had seen. She stood, looking at the spot where he had lain, frowning. “There are no footmarks of mine…or of Munro and his men.”

“Which is why we are leaving.” He grabbed her hand. “Come. We cannot stay here.”

She pulled her hand from his. “I will not abandon him again.”

“You are not abandoning him. He is not here.”

“I will not leave without Fergus!”

He took her by the shoulders, clearly angry. “Do you wish to come face to face with that snake again?”

Silent, she crossed her arms and stuck out her chin.”I believe I am looking at him now.”

He swore, quickly picked her up, and threw her over his shoulder, in spite of her threats and shrieks, then strode outside and towards the stream.

She punched him hard in the back with her fist. “Put me down! Oaf!”

“Be quiet, Glenna.”

“I’m glad you did not kiss me,” she mumbled, trying to decide where to hit him where her fist could cause the most pain.

“What did you say?”

“Rot in hell, Montrose.” She hit him hard in the ribs for good measure before he set her down (dropped her really) by the horses. She shoved her hair out of her face and gave him a look that could melt a steel blade. “You have a hard, black stone where your heart should be.”

Silent, he turned his back to her and checked his saddle bags.

She looked from him to the black. “You do not take the time for the mere thought to give your horse a name.” She laughed without humor. “Why would I expect you to care about my dog?”

His hands stopped moving. He stood still as stone.

“You are a heartless man.” Words, bitter and ugly like toads, just spilled from her mouth.

He took a long, deep breath. “Perhaps I am,” he said evenly and adjusted his saddle strap. He did not face her.“But we are leaving.” His voice was gritty. “Mount your horse or I will do it for you.”

“If you ever have children what will you call them? Boy? Girl? What did you call you poor wife? Woman?” Still he was annoyingly silent. “What do you call her now…dead?”

“Enough!” He moved so swiftly she swallowed her words. His sword tip was at her throat. “One more word and I will call you dead.”

“I am not afraid of you.”

He groaned and let the sword tip fall to the ground. “You have no sense.”

“You have no soul.” She began to cry she was so angry and frustrated and hurting…and she was ashamed of the angry words she could not seem to control.

He looked at her, then turned back to his horse and mounted, his back to her as if he could not stand to see her cry. She, a weak and sniveling woman. She wiped her tears , sniffled, and found her pride.

Once in the saddle, she kneed Skye forward, her head high despite what she was feeling, and she stopped beside him. “ ‘Tis so cruel to leave without him,” she said quietly, her voice bitter and accusing. “You do not know what you ask of me.”

He turned in the saddle, his eyes glistening and his jaw so tight it looked carved from granite, and he said, “Ride.”

* * *

Tears streamed down her face. She hated feeling helpless and trapped and angrily swiped at her damp face. He would not know she was crying.

Let him ride like the devil himself.

And he did. They rode swiftly once they were over the ridge and down into the open lands to the south, and in silence, headed toward a place only Montrose knew. No matter how many times she had tried to pry their destination from him, he had denied her, saying only ‘to the south,’ or ‘the east’ or her favorite response, ’You will know when we arrive.’

Alone with her own thoughts, she tried not to think of Fergus, to be brave and say goodbye, because she knew despite how much she wanted the truth to be otherwise, her beloved hound was gone.

But no matter how much she tried to send her mind elsewhere, Fergus’ silly, big-eyed, shaggy face came unbidden before her eyes: him loping beside her as a gangly pup; jumping up onto her cot in the small niche that was her room back at the island; chasing birds through the heather moors, and tragically, running across a grassy field with another bird—a chicken; and lying on his side by the flickering fire, blood dripping on the ground and an arrow sticking out of him.

To her horror a loud sob escaped her lips; it just seemed to spill from her throat.

Montrose cursed loudly and slowed, placing his hand on the cantle as he turned back in the saddle.

By then she had covered her mouth with a hand.

For a long moment he eyed her strangely. She had a hard time holding his gaze when everything inside of her wanted to turn away and sob.

Finally he said in a voice that was not unkind, “I must think of your safety, Glenna. I could not stay there and search.”

She dropped her hand and gripped the reins, rising in the stirrups. “I know that! I am not the village idiot.”

“But you often behave like one.”

She raised her chin and scowled at him.

He scowled back. “Your dog is gone,” he said sharply, almost shouting before he turned around and rode harder than before.

“Fergus!” she called out, urging Skye forward. “He is not Dog!” She would keep up with him if it killed her. He could not ever accuse her of holding them back. And she raised her voice as loud as she could and shouted, “His name is Fergus!”

Her words echoed back, sounding hollow and distant and dying.

Night was chasing them, turning the skies a deep purple as the stars began to shine in the clear sky, and the moon rose huge and bright from the east. They dodged hart and hare that came out in the dusk and soon they neared a wide rushing river. When he finally reined in, they had ridden inside yet another forest flanking the river and to a small spot where darkness was beginning to fall through the leaves. There had not been another civil word between them, and she was fine with the heavy silence. She would be fine if the oaf never spoke to her again. At least that was what she told herself.

The night was calm and the air still; it tasted clean, of pine and moss and rushing water. The trees were tall and she spotted flat rock ledges between the openings in the trees. He reined in when they came to a glade, where moonlight lit the grasses on the ground and the sound of the river was loud. She could see its lush and rocky banks were barely a fathom away.

He dismounted and began to remove his satchel and bags so she swung down from the saddle as if her legs were not jelly and her body not numb. She was determined he would not see any weakness from her. No more tears.

Montrose turned and casually tossed the water skins at her feet.

She stared at them. Surely he did not just throw them at her? She opened her mouth intending to voice a series of cutting words for him, but she snapped it close. She would bite his head off and what good would that do? And she was weary of arguing, weary of crying, weary of the loud, shrewish voice that sounded as if it belonged to someone else—someone she didn’t know and someone unlikable--and she was weary of hiding her tiredness and feelings…she was just plain weary.

“You can fill those skins at the river,” he said matter-of-factly and without a single glance in her direction.

Over the river, the moon shone as bright as a lantern, the water gleaming silver and rippling with a swift current flowing away and down a slight rise to rush over rocks and grow wider before it disappeared into the dark, sawtooth outline of tall trees. It was the kind of river filled with fish and ran clear and down in falls from the high granite cliffs. That he had happened to stop here was sheer blind luck, she told herself.

“The water is easier to reach down the lower bank, over there by the big tree.”

What was it about men that made them think they knew the lay of every thin plot of land, even a strange river bank in unfamiliar woods?

Once, when Alastair had sold three prime horses to the son of a Norse earl with holdings in the northern borders, she had spent a miserable half a day in the pouring rain and hail following Elgin in circles because he said he knew where he was going. Had she not found a road and stopped a passing carter to ask the way of things, they might still, two years later, be riding in useless, cold and muddy circles.

Ignoring Montrose, she silently tossed her saddle bag and blanket on the grassy ground, then removed her woolen cloak and made absolutely no attempt to bend down and pick up the skins.

Throw water skins at me and blurt out commands as if I am his lackey.

When she turned, she found him looking pointedly at the skins and back to her. She gave him what she felt was a scathing look of disdain.

She did not like the smile that teased his mouth; it showed a dimple in his right cheek. She did not believe ogres had dimples when they smiled.

He was shaking his head. “You might not feel or think of yourself as being born of royal blood, Glenna, but that look down you just gave me, down your noble little nose, is more proof than any decree or document or witness. Trust me, you are your father’s daughter.”

She did not know whether she should feel happy or angry, so she kicked one of the skins with the toe of her boot.

“Do not take your foolish anger out---“

But before he could finish reprimanding her, she kicked the skin up in the air like the finest of jugglers—she’d learned the trick from one--caught it, then turned her back and with her heel kicked the other skin backwards into the air and spun around and caught it, too. Tucking the skins under her arms with a smug smile, she walked past him, her head held regally high.

* * *

Lyall walked toward the fire pit he’d dug and dropped an armful of wood into its center, and dusted off his vest and tunic. Odd how he had realized for the first time that his walk was different here, on this ground of his childhood, his step lighter, natural and less careful than when he walked upon land elsewhere, where a man had to watch his step because he knew not what he would face next, and because his heart held no bond to those soils, no familiar scent or comfort, no knowledge of those places, just instinct to protect him from the unknown.

Outside of Dunkeldon, he felt forever like a stranger in a foreign land.

But here, for a time, his youth had been idyllic, growing up in the warm, lactescent breast of Dunkeldon, where the castle had sat upon its motte like a giant game piece, facing the road that led to its gates, surrounded by a velvet green robe of a forest with trees so tall and full of majesty they became the giant warriors he fought in his child’s mind—the enemy he vanquished in his youthful dreams toward greatness. He was shaped by this plot of land, the forest and the ever-changing river, where trout sought him out and salmon leapt into his hands, where a tree cradled him as he dreamt the dreams of young lads who believed in the existence of honor in men.

High in the treetops, the wind sang it’s languid, plaintive song and overhead the stars were beginning to shine as the sky grew into the deepest purple. If he were a lad, he might still believe in the magic of this place.

The night was unusually bright. A misty ring hung around the full moon; it would be cold tonight. Odd, he thought, the things that stick with one long after they should be forgotten.

His mind went back in time to when his father told him about moon rings and the weather—and how much more he had learned that single night. They had been standing together on the roof watch of Dunkelden, his father’s hands secure on his shoulders, making him feel safe even when the drop was dizzying and the ground looking far, far below. Lyall never liked heights. When Malcolm would dance over the walks along the guard walls, Lyall seldom followed. He preferred his feet to be flat on the hard ground.

That singular night, his father had shown Lyall each of the distant borders of their land. The misty ring legend originated from Ewan’s father, who first told it to his son on a cool, autumn night long ago and Ewan passed it on to Malcolm, and then to Lyall, those stories handed down through the male line.

His grandfather Robert had been a mariner who traversed the seas and rode with other men into Outremer, and who came home to lands that were dowered to him when he married the youngest daughter of one of the old Celtic earls. Lyall never knew his grandfather, who died before he was born. He had only his father’s stories and Malcolm’s thin memories of a large man with golden hair and a laugh that echoed in the rafters of the greatest halls.

But on that same night when he stood with his father, something else happened. Perhaps it had been the tone of his father’s voice when he spoke that night. Perhaps it was the way his father hunkered down and pointed in the distance, his arm on Lyall’s shoulders as if he were not just a lad but a man grown. Perhaps it was because Lyall had been born there, and his destiny was blood and bone of the place—the parts of a man that made him hollow and dead if you took them away.

On that night long ago, Lyall began to understand the rite of passage between fathers and sons, rings around the moon, the traditions in a man’s life, and the reverence of a man for the lands that gave him worth and defined him. As his father showed him all the places that marked their borders: the granite rock shaped like an angel’s wing; the distant hills, two in row, camel-like in their twin humps; the hook in the river where the wild aspens grew—what became clear to him, even as young as he had been, was that Dunkeldon and the ground upon which it was built, was the passion that fueled Ewan Robertson’s lifeblood. When Lyall turned away from the passionate light and pride in his father’s eyes to look out past the light of the moon, in the path of the stars over the trees and the river and grasses he had seen a thousand times and never thought twice about, he saw and felt something else. What it was, he did not truly understand, but felt deep in his bones the very seeds of something important to his measure.

He understood it all too clearly when it was too late, when he buried his brother in the chapel next to father, when he walked over that drawbridge and saw the traitor’s flag, when the stars misaligned and he had to turn his back on his father’s legacy, Malcolm’s and his own. The gift they could have given to their sons was suddenly gone with the first snap in the wind of a vile yellow flag.

So under the night’s moon with a ring around it, Lyall sat back on his heels in the clearing in the forest and studied the sky, watched the colored edges as they deepened into almost black, the bright spots of starlight some claimed were small holes in Heaven that shone down to mortal men the merest glimpses of its bright light.

Lyall found that fable of Heaven unlikely, but then he did not believe in much anymore. Life and years had changed him. He had lost his belief in the alignment of the stars and the warm, fate-changing glow of magic trees, and even his belief in the goodness of man.

Away from the vastness of the night sky, he glanced at the river. Glenna was gone. Where was she? Her horse was still there by his. He moved swiftly, calling her name. At the river’s edge, he found one of the water skins in the thick grass alongside one of her shoes.

Had she fallen in? He cupped his hands about his mouth. “Glenna!”

There was no sound but the rush of water over some rocks downstream. A hot wave of panic swept over him. He shouted, “Glenna!”

No response.

His vest hit the ground and he stripped off his tunic and boots. A heartbeat later he was in the river. “Glenna!” he called out, standing in the water with his feet wide apart to counter the current, and he looked around him and off towards the blackest edges of the water, where the moonlight was blocked by the shoreline trees stretching out along the opposite bank.

He saw nothing and his heart pounded, his panic grew.

“Glenna!”

“I am here,” she said calmly and came striding through the water easily around a small bend, pulling herself along by exposed tree roots along the river’s edge, seemingly unaware he wanted nothing more at that moment than to strangle her. She stopped when she was a few paces away.

Fortunately for her…out of his reach. He stood chest deep in cold water and glared at her, overcome for a moment with relief made his chest ache strangely as if bound by tight ropes. He took a long breath and wiped his wet face in frustration. “You could not find your voice long enough to answer my call before I jumped into the water?”

Her back was to him as she tossed the water skin she carried onto the grass near the bank and spun in slow circles, looking down to search the water around her and completely unaffected by anything he said. “I’ve lost my shoe.”

“You have what?”

“I was filling the skin, and it slipped, and I reached out to grab it and fell in the water, and so I caught the skin, but now I cannot find my shoe.” She faced him frowning, clearly annoyed—she, who could not find her voice a moment earlier.

He spotted her shoe caught in the roots to her left, and next to what looked like a fat cluster of river mussels. He waded closer, took out his knife, cut the mussels away, and tossed them on the bank. Then he found another cluster under the waterline. Now they had food. He put away his knife and faced her. “This shoe?”

“Oh! That is quite wonderful. You found it. I was certain I was going to be riding around in a boot and shoe.” She grinned, her eyes bright. “See? There was a reason you jumped in.”

“Aye. I wanted to freeze to death tonight.”

“Cease your grousing, Montrose. ‘Tis not all that cold and you were beginning to smell like your nameless horse.” She paused. “Do not glower at me like that. I speak the truth. I would know since I had to ride downwind of you. And I…I smelled of that pit,” she said viciously as she shivered slightly and grabbed a handful of roots to pull herself up the bank.

“Wait! Glenna...do not move.”

Of course she turned around, and her movements sent a strong ripple over the surface of the water. “Why?”

It wasn’t enough she had disturbed the water. She also had to speak. Standing still as a stone, he swore under his breath and said evenly, “Do. Not. Move.”

“Why can I not move? You said yourself the water is cold. You do not have to—“ She shut up as he tossed a large, spotted trout high over her head and well onto the bank, where it flopped and twisted in the grass, its scales sparkling like jewels in the bright moonlight. “Good Lord in Heaven.…” She turned and looked at him, stunned.

He stepped closer and used his knuckle to close her open mouth. “You might catch waterflies, love.” In a blink he picked her up and plopped her on the bank, then jumped up and joined her, both of them soaked and dripping water, and he looked down into her amused face and said, “I assume you are as hungry as I.”

She laughed. “How did you do that?”

He shrugged. “It swam into my hands. There would be two fish had you merely obeyed me and ceased your talking.” He stood then and water dripped down his chest and onto her head and he bent to gather up the mussels. “All your chattering frightened the other one away.”

She picked up the fat fish and followed him, a slight smile on her lips. “We have mussels to eat and this fish. Looks to me to be plenty for both of us,” she chattered.