Prologue
The land had been lying in wait for half a century by the time the young man arrived. Half a century of dormancy, of the deep, dark sleep of ancient things.
The moment he stepped out of the rental car in his battered hiking boots, a shudder went through the earth. The hares felt it, rippling through the long grass. The finches felt it, rattling the tips of the narrowest tree branches. Even the tiniest wildflowers felt it, coursing up through their trembling roots.
Beneath the earth, an old magic stirred.
He was tall, fair, and quick to smile. There was a girl with him, stoutly built with a bob of auburn curls. He beamed over his shoulder at her, golden and boyish in his goading.
As the young man – barely more than a boy, really –tightened the laces of his boots, the land rose up to meet him. Misty breezes caressed his scalp through his close-cropped blond hair, briars tugged insistently on his pant leg, and sedge grasses bowed beneath his feet like soldiers saluting their prince. He breathed in deep, filling his lungs with the scent of salt and primrose.
Earth, sea and sky ached to enfold him.
He turned his face up towards the clouds and closed his pale-lashed eyes against the sun. The light slanted across his curved mouth, his strong aquiline nose.
It had been so long. Years of waiting, of slow rot anxiously gnawing away at tangled roots.
The pair of companions chattered, in high spirits as they shared a swig of water from their communal flask. Though the land didn’t speak the garbled child-tongue of English, it knew what these two were after. There could only have been one destination, because the story had always been a circle, always a gyre turning in the sky, forever unfolding, forever beginning anew.
The young man strode out towards the cave, and the story began once again, with his name inked like blood on the first page.
CHAPTER ONE
Adam
Adam Lancaster was euphoric. Granted, they had been walking in circles across the rocky landscape for an hour already, and they had been forced to return to the car parked at the edge of the tiny village of Wyke to get their bearings, but Adam wasn’t deterred. His blood was singing in his veins from the sheer thrill of being here, in the right country, on the right patch of land. He had never been this close before, not in all his twenty-two years.
Nicola, however, was less enthused.
“I’m pretty sure we walked past every single house in the village,” she said, blowing a wind-tossed curl out of her face with a huff. “And none of them match that address. Are you positive this is the place?”
“Completely,” Adam replied, leaning against the compact silver Volvo they had rented at the airport.He produced the letter from his breast pocket, where it had been pressed against his heart, skin-warmed and secure beneath his fleece vest. The paper was soft to the touch, every sharp corner worn smooth with age and handling.
The return address was well known to Adam: it was the brick split-level in a Michigan suburb where his grandfather had lived right up until his death Adam’s junior year of college. That had been the year Adam dropped out, mostly because he had acquired enough graphic design skills to freelance without having to flush more money down the drain on tuition, but also because his grandfather’s death had been a blow he hadn’t expected. It had shaken apart something inside Adam that hadn’t quite come back together again.
The recipient address was the mystery he had come to Scotland to solve. It was made out to Arabella Kirkfoyle, and the post code matched Wyke, a town hugging the rocky coast of the south-west Highlands. But there was no house number on the envelope, and no road listed. There was just one word, written out in Adam’s grandfather’s heavy but neat script:Craigmar.
Adam may never have heard of Arabella, and he may never have heard of Wyke, but he recognized Craigmar from his grandfather’s bedtime stories. Adam had hounded his grandfather with his bottomless appetite for tales of far-flung adventures. His recalcitrant grandfather had been perpetually grumpy except around Adam, who he spoiledwith stories. When Adam had been an awkward, lanky preteen on the cusp of finally grasping the queerness that was already getting him bullied by the other boys, his grandfather would take him on long hikes around Lake Michigan and tell him stories of enchanted fjords and haunted Bavarian forests and always, Craigmar.
Craigmar wasn’t just a house, his grandfather would whisper late at night when Adam should have been asleep but was instead wide awake tending the campfire. It was a living place, an ancient stately home ripe with the promise of magic.
At this point, Adam didn’t care if half the bedtime stories were made up, or even if all of them were. He was grown now, less interested in enchantment than he was in geology and civic history. He just wanted to feel close to his grandfather again, to close the circle of love and mutual understanding that had been broken when his grandfather had his stroke.
“We must have missed it,” Adam said. “We should try again.”
“There’s only one road in and out of town. And we just walked the length of it, all two miles. I know this is important to you, and I really want to help you find the right house, but can’t we stop at the pub first for a a pint or something? Maybe someone inside can give us directions.”
Adam leaned a little further over the car’s hood, tapping against the metal as he thought. He brought himself closerto Nicola’s height as he did so, giving in to that unconscious slouch he had developed in his teen years when he shot up to six feet tall in one summer. Nicola was roughly the size of a thimble compared to Adam, which was to say, five foot three.
“What if they don’t want us poking around?” he asked, feigning concern. Everyone they had met on their travels had been more than willing to help them interpret road signs or find milk for their tea at the hostel. If Adam was being honest, he wasn’t worried about encountering an unfriendly face. He was worried about having to share this private obsession with Craigmar with anyone at all except Nicola, his very best friend.
“What are they gonna do, run us off with pitchforks?” Nicola snorted. “Burn us in a straw effigy? I doubt it.”
“That’s dark, Nikki.”
Nicola beamed, one of those sunny smiles that inspired countless men and women to throw themselves at her feet back home in the States. It had also been very popular with the locals since arriving in Edinburgh and spending the night partying in the Old Town before getting up early to travel to Wyke. She had been collecting phone numbers like souvenirs at every stop on the road since.
“Oh, come on, they could do much worse,” she said, as though this would make him feel any better. “If this was the Iron Age they would slit our throats and dump us in a peat bog as a human sacrifice. But if we’re polite,I’m sure we’ll escape with our lives and maybe even directions too. Lead the way.”
