Heather’s eyes stung. “They sent them away on purpose,” she whispered. “To Culloden. To Arkaig. They made them chase rumors.”
Flynn nodded slowly. “Harris knew the stories would grow teeth. He gave them something to gnaw on.”
But the map didn’t end there.
A third line branched away like an afterthought—and yet, the brushstrokes were surer, the ink bolder. It bent westward, across sea-colored wash, to a shape Heather recognized from every book and postcard she’d ever hoarded.
Skye.
The island was drawn smaller than it deserved, but it was still crowned with a careful dot where its southern coast hooked inward.
Beside it, instead of a place name, someone had painted a tiny black horse, mane flying, and above its back, sketched in faint, fine lines, the outline of a saddle with crosshatched panels where the leather would sit.
Next to that, in English, a single line:
What cannot be buried, must be carried.
Heather’s pulse tripped. “Dubh,” she whispered. “The black horse. Eilidh wrote about him in the notes—Harris’s favorite. She said… they had to turn the gold into something they could move without notice.”
“Flora MacDonald, perhaps?” Heather continued, the name falling out of her like an answer that had been waiting on her tongue. “Eilidh mentioned her in the early research. Said there were gaps in her movements between helping the Prince flee and her own arrest. Gaps no one could account for.”
Flynn’s mouth twisted in something like awe. “You think she helped them?”
“The Prince trusted her, obviously,” Heather said. “So Harris and Fiona could’ve too.”
He huffed a soft, incredulous breath. “Bloody history’s been held together by women with more courage than credit for centuries.”
Heather couldn’t help it; she smiled, even through the ache. “You’re not wrong.”
They studied the map in silence for several beats, letting the paths sink into them. Glenoran, Culloden, Arkaig, Skye. The decoys. The truth.
Finally Flynn sat back on his heels. “The box,” he said quietly. “What else is in there?”
Heather’s stomach fluttered, and she let loose a ragged laugh. “I don’t think I can take much else.”
The folded pages lay where they’d been nestled, the ribbon that bound them powdered at the edges. Heather lifted the packet with both hands.
The first page bore no date, only a salutation in the same voice that had written to “the lass who bears my name or my blood.”
To the one who finds what we have hidden…
Her throat tightened. “Do you want to…?”
“You read,” Flynn said. “I’ll listen.”
Heather swallowed, drew a breath, and began.
If these words lie open in your hands, then Glenoran has notforgotten us.
Know first that we did not fall silent because we lacked the will to speak.
We were forced.
My husband, Harris Mackenzie of Glenoran, bore the Prince’s trust and the weight of his gold. When hope still rode upon the roads and the heather burned beneath hoof and boot, we believed we might yet turn the tide. We were wrong.
Culloden took our brothers. It near took Harris himself. What the English did not kill with their guns, they hunted with their laws. When they could not find the gold, they set about hanging the men who might have moved it.
Harris saw, before I did, that the gold could no longer serve an army that had scattered. “It must serve what comes after,” he’d said. “Or it will serve no one.”
