Galleys with good oars, sail to distant shores,
Stand upon the prow, noble barque I steer,
Steady course to haven, hew many a foe…
The words hung there, ancient and unnervingly familiar.
Flynn blinked. “That’s your song.”
Heather let out a breathless laugh. “That’s my lullaby,” she corrected softly. “She must’ve found this letter and realized it was coded. So she translated the verse… and then sang it to me for years.”
Flynn’s gaze flicked between the pages. “So the Prince writes in Old Norse to an ‘H.M.,’ and your mam picks it apart in the archives. Nobody else would look twice—it’s just an old verse. But she knew it meant more.”
“She knew it meantsomething,” Heather said. “She might not have known what. Not yet.” She pointed to a line in Eilidh’s neat script:Possible navigation metaphor? ‘Haven’ = specific geography?
“Skye,” Flynn said quietly. “Has to be. ‘Distant shores,’ ‘haven’—and Flora MacDonald’s letter is in this same file.”
Heather fished out another envelope markedFlora MacDonald — June 1746and checked the date. “First of June,” she murmured. “And he flees with her at the end of the month.”
“So he sends warning first,” Flynn said, following the trail aloud. “Letting Harris know where he’s headed. The gold, the rebellion, all of it.”
Heather stared down at the Norse and its translation, her mother’s pencil strokes looping between centuries. “Three hundred years,” she said quietly, “and they’re still talking to each other.”
Flynn’s hand settled warmly on her shoulder. “And now they’re talkin’ to you.”
She snapped a few photos on her phone, careful with the angles, then eased the pages back into their sleeves.
“We go to Skye,” she said.
“Aye,” Flynn agreed. “We follow your mother’s song.”
He squeezed her shoulder once more. “But this time, we do it with our eyes open. No more ghosts sneakin’ round your windows without us knowin’ their names.”
Heather’s gaze drifted up to the corner of the room, where a small red security light blinked above a camera. Steady. Watching.
“Good,” she said. “Let them watch.”
Chapter 20
Fiona Cameron—Loch Arkaig, 1746
Fiona had learned two things in the three days since Harris Mackenzie had called her his wife in a forest full of redcoats:
He still refused to tell her anything.
He was the worst traveling companion in all of Scotland.
He rode ahead more often than beside her, cloak snapping in the wind, Dubh’s massive hooves eating the ground in an unhurried, relentless rhythm. Each evening he made camp like a man who expected to be hunted before dawn—fire low, horses picketed inshadow, eyes sweeping the treeline twice over before he said so much as good night.
And still she followed.
