He felt for his hip. The knife wasn’t there. “When did you take that?”
“This morning. I was going to ask but you were fast asleep.”
“You came into my room and stole my knife without waking me?”
“Are you angry?”
He couldn’t help smiling. “No one has ever managed to do that, not in all the training I did with the clan. You must be quieter than the morning mist.”
“Here,” she said, passing him the knife and almost dropping the fish as she did so. “I used it for the hook and for…well, let’s get some breakfast going shall we?”
“I’ll get some more kindling.”
“Already done, did it before I went fishing.”
“How did you have time? When did you wake up?”
“Just before dawn. I know this is going to sound crazy, but I woke up hearing a woman talking in your room. I came to look but there was just you, fast asleep.
“I thought seeing as I was up, I might as well go look for that loch you were talking about. It’s really beautiful over there, I can see why you lived here.”
“I didnae have a choice. Did you see the village? Is it rebuilt?”
Her shoulders sagged slightly and she looked down at the ground before looking back up at him. “Empty and burned I’m afraid.”
“When word o’ the plague gets out, some think fire’s the only cure. Is it ever rebuilt in the future?”
She shook her head. “There’s no village there in my time. Just this house and then the forest below.”
“What’s done is done. Let’s get the fire going. We have a long journey ahead of us today. Take ma flint while ah feed the horse.”
She headed inside while he led the horse over to a lush patch of grass. He left it to eat, heading back to the house. He was almost inside when he decided to go see the village for himself. He wasn’t sure why he even wanted to go.
It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her, he did. It was more that he wanted to say a final goodbye to the place. If it was never rebuilt it would soon return to the earth.
The only thing that would be left was his memory of it.
He climbed the ridge and scrambled down the far side, pushing through the trees until he came out into the open.
The village itself was in a natural amphitheater. To the left was the loch, drifting far north and wide, sparkling in the morning light, the ripples in the wind reminding him of the movement of chainmail just before battle, shimmering and catching the eye.
Around the loch were tall crags of mountains, snowcapped and steep, sprigs of heather creating spots of color here and there but otherwise gray and brown, curlews flying low, swooping over the loch.
He didn’t want to look right but he could only look at the water for so long. Finally, taking a deep breath, he turned his head.
He prepared himself mentally as much as he could, but it was still a shock. The village he’d known so well was nothing but a blackened ruin.
The cleansing fire had long burned out. Nothing grew there. The crumbling foundations of few buildings remained amongst the black and gray dead land. It was a place of decay.
And yet there was a flash of color down there. What was that?
He walked down, thinking of the people he’d known when he was younger. There was the baker, Tam and his wife, crossing from Ireland as a bairn, settled thirty years, wee un on the way. All of them gone in the first weeks.
The tailor, red beard and fierce eyes on old Damos, yelling at him every time he passed that he needed to take better care of his tartan, that it brought shame on the clan. Gone.
The children he’d played with. Little Sasha, the oldest of their group, the one he’d had an irredeemable crush on, the one he planned to marry when he hit the ripe old age of five.
Her death had been the first one. She’d been with her father to market and come back talking about a beggar they’d met on their return, how he’d hidden his face but when he held out his hand for alms they’d seen the buboes on his wrist.
