Aberdeenshire, c. 570 CE
Forcu dreamed in Irish.
She woke to Pictish—the guttural consonants of the cart driver cursing his oxen, the creak of wheels on muddy track—but the dream still clung to her: her mother's voice singing a song about seals, the green hills above Dún Laoghaire falling into gray water. Fifteen years since the raiders had taken her. Half her life spent in this harder country, speaking a language that sat wrong in her mouth, serving a purpose she'd never asked for.
She sat up in the cart, wool blanket damp with morning mist, and looked at Drust.
He was awake. She could tell without seeing his eyes—something in his stillness, the way his breathing had shifted. He lay wrapped in furs against the spring cold, staring at the sky.
"You were walking again," she said quietly. "In your sleep."
"The northern roads." His voice was rough from three days of fasting. "Something moves there. I keep seeing it from different angles, but I can't hold the shape."
He turned to look at her. His eyes were the color of winter sky—pale, distant, as if part of him was always looking beyond the visible world. She'd known him twelve years now, held his thread through hundreds of descents. She knew the cost better than anyone.
The gray in his hair had come early—he was only forty-seven, but he could pass for sixty. His hands trembled sometimes, worse after deep descents. He forgot things—names, faces—as if the weight of what the land…
