He managed to wait till Wynne had turned away and disappeared back inside the carriage— indeed, until the carriage had begun to trundle away and he’d left the hard-packed dirt at the side of the road for the softer stuff that led deeper into the woods beyond the line of trees.
He had barely run a half-dozen steps before his transmutation began.
Sometimes a change was painful. Wretched.
Other times, it was gloriously easy.
This was one of the easy ones. There was no effort at all, just a rippling flow as the wolf surfaced, overtaking his human form. The cool, wet earth on the soles of his feet brought forth the beast's eagerness to run. The rain on his bare skin gave rise to an ardent desire for a warm pelt that began to materialise the instant he ached for it. He lifted his head to catch the heady scents of the forest and glimpsed his own dark muzzle. Human colour leached away and in its place was silver, iron, pewter, storm-cloud, haze-of-rain and mist-grey. The thousand greys of broken stones and lichen-rash and icy pools.
In these first moments of transformation, his longstanding curse didn’t feel like an affliction. It felt like the source of all joy, all delight.
Lindsay lifted his head to the scarred silver moon and howled.
––––––––
HE WOKE IN THE COBWEBBYlight of a pale grey dawn, miles from where he’d begun. He had shifted back as he slept, and his human body was cold and filthy.
Groaning, he sat up. Beside him lay the satchel Wynne had buried for him, and several feet distant, at the base of a tree, there was a dug-up hole. He was very glad the wolf had undertaken that task for him. Claws were infinitely better for digging holes than human hands.
Lindsay blinked a few times and rubbed at the back of his neck. The taste of blood was in his mouth, so it seemed he had hunted last night. He fished inside the satchel and drew out a flask of water, drinking deeply, then rinsing out his mouth. The freezing water made his teeth ache. He used more of it to clean his face and hands then slowly rose to his feet. The action of standing, stretching his long body upward, gave him an odd feeling after the hours he’d spent on all fours. Head up instead of down, nose in the wind instead of to the ground. There was nothing that felt more human than the act of rising up on two legs. At times like these, when he was close to the wolf, Lindsay would sometimes wonder how the creatures of the world reacted when they saw humans standing up. Rising, towering over them.
It must be horrifying, he thought.
Monstrous.
He felt like a monster now, stretching upwards, defying his beast’s natural form, arrogantly exposing his belly and sex organs. Gazing out at the world not as one of its creatures but as one of its masters.
Lindsay reached for the satchel again and drew out the bundle of simple clothes tucked inside. With each garment he donned, he became a little more the man, and a little less the beast.
At last, pulling on a pair of worn leather boots, he was fully human again.
He was not at all far from the city, thank God, and Wynne would be there already, installed in their rented rooms and probably unpacking.
Poor Wynne. He’d likely be beside himself by now, wondering when Lindsay would appear. Probably wearing holes in the carpets with his pacing. Ah well, Lindsay would be there soon enough.
The sun had risen fully now, though its glory was hidden by a layer of soft grey clouds, and the morning air was sharp and cold. Lindsay was very familiar with that greyness, and with the spare, northerly air. The familiarity of it was oddly disconcerting, like putting on shoes and finding them already moulded to your feet inside. Part of him wanted to soak in every familiar sight and sound and smell, to let this feeling ofhomefill up every empty space inside him. But another part of him—the slave part, the cur—urged him to flee. To run while he could, before Duncan MacCormaic found him.
Lindsay knew that was not a rational way to think. Duncan was in Spain, heading for France now. Lindsay had come to Scotland precisely because he was safer here than in Paris.
But he did not—could not—feelsafe.
Lindsay ascended the final steep rise of the Caldtoun Hill, stopping at the crest to gaze down at the vista below. It had once been a very familiar view, but now he barely recognised it.
Long ago, when he’d been a boy, he and his brother used to come up this hill to play. They’d climb over the crumbling wall at the back of their close then scramble down the steep, muddy bank to the stinking shallows of the Nor’loch. They kept a leaky old barge there—little better than a raft really—for crossing the stagnant, filthy water. When they reached the other side, they’d stash the barge in a hidey-hole, then scamper through the fields till they reached the village at the foot of the hill. A scrambling run took them to the summit, and from there, they’d look down at this very same vista, at the great black crag of the Castle Rock and the body of water—the Nor’loch—that stretched before it.
Now half the Nor’loch was gone and the drained part was naught but mud flats, littered with centuries of mouldering rubbish.
When he and his brother were boys, they could smell the Nor’loch, even from here. The filthy water used to stink like the devil’s own privy. The tanners and dyers had used it for their noxious trades, and everyone threw their waste in it. Back then, it was where they’d tested witches—mostly unprotected women, stripped to their thin shifts anddookedin the filthy waters. There had been executions by drowning too. People nailed in barrels and chests and thrown right in to drown in their makeshift coffins. Oh, the misery those waters had seen. Lindsay and his brother had been convinced it teemed with ghosts.
But now... now much of the water was gone, and at the edge of the exposed, muddy ground the wooden frame of a pump squatted, its massive timber arm slumped in the silt, awaiting its masters’ return for another day’s work. To the north of the mud flats, new buildings had already begun to spring up, all sharp, symmetrical edges, the newly quarried sandstone bright in the dawn’s light. And from those few finished buildings spread signs of further industry, half-built walls and deep ditches ready for foundations to be laid.
This, then, was Edinburgh’s “New Town.”
Francis had been here when the town’s Council had come up with the ambitious plan. The city was vastly overcrowded so they’d decided they would drain the ground to the north and construct new houses there, a battalion of modern, elegant ones, each built to exacting requirements. This new town would be grand and elegant. It would draw the wealthy Scots back from London with their money and their business.
When Lindsay had first heard of the plan, years ago now, he’d been sceptical. Would so many people want to buy new houses in Edinburgh? Would London exiles really return? At first, it seemed that his scepticism had been well founded. There had been reportedly little interest in buying plots, particularly after the run on the banks in ’72, but looking down, it seemed therewassome appetite for the plan. Standing here in the dawn light, with all these signs of burgeoning industry before him, Lindsay could finally see the possibility of it. Already, more than half the Nor’loch was gone and elegant houses had begun sprouting up like daffodils in spring, bright and new. There was a great bridge too, long and poker-straight, linking this newborn place to its mother’s dark and wretched womb to the south. Old town and new; two sides of the same city.
Lindsay stood on the crest of the hill for long minutes, gazing out at the familiar skyline of his old home and at the modern city it was giving birth to. Briefly, excitement flickered in him, but he suppressed the feeling quickly and ruthlessly. The fate of this place did not matter to him. He wouldn’t be here long enough for it to matter, a few weeks, a couple of months at most, then back to the Continent.
