I stumble through the gate, past outbuildings that should have been rubble. People and animals fill the space, bustling like a movie set come to life. Women gather under an open tent, laughing, weaving hay into thatch. Across from them, sheep press together, their blank, dead eyes watching from behind a crude wooden fence.
Beyond, a boy scrapes flesh from a hide. I force my gaze away from the crimson stains marring its shape, only to see an old man slouching on a wagon. Flies hover over his gnarled, swollen legs. He shrieks a stream of Gaelic as a pack of filthy children race past.
The place hums with life. Real life.
My shock dulls. Horror sets in.
Callum was right about all of it.
Campbell land. 1622.
The man holding me yanks my arm back. I yelp, nearly tripping. But he’s only stopped me from colliding with Campbell.
“What do I do with this?” he asks, shaking my arm like I’m nothing more than a scrap of meat.
I clench my fists, but I’m too numb to resist. Instead, my gaze drifts to the roses.
My mother’s voice whispers in my memory—words I’d long forgotten.Hush now, my wild Alba rose.
What does she have to do with this?
I try to piece together everything Donag and Callum said. But I didn’t believe them. Didn’t listen.
A jab from behind. A rough voice. “Answer the laird.”
Iblink. “Sorry…what?”
Campbell’s suspicious, calculating gaze is fixed on me. And beneath it, something almost like…anguish.
“You’ve the look of a Craignish Campbell,” he says at last. “Who sent you?”
I swallow hard. “I…yes…I’m Rose?—”
“Tell me now. Why do you have the look of her?”
Her.
I almost askwho, but I already know. “This is about Janet, isn’t it?”
Campbell’s face flushes crimson. “You dare mock my grief.” His voice booms over the courtyard. “The pit for her, till she’s ready to speak truth.”
The pit. That narrow shaft in the ground.
At the thought of it, at the image of myself in the deep and dark, my knees buckle, my body collapses, and I fall to the ground vomiting.
The world tilts, shouts explode around me, but I can’t stop. I retch until there’s nothing left, until I’m gasping, shaking, wiping spit from my chin.
Campbell’s boots come into view, covered in my puke. He slams one into my shoulder, and I crash to the side, pain streaking through me.
“Get this vile thing away.”
I barely feel the hands that haul me up and drag me inside. I’m weak. Insubstantial. As if my body hurled up my heart along with everything else.
I barely see the people we pass. But I feel their fear.
The hallway, the rooms, the stench of a kitchen beyond—it’s all exactly as I’d imagined in the ruins.
The dining room, too.
