Prologue
Strathnaver, Scotland, 1814
The sun has not yet illuminated the morning sky, but the fires are already burning. The timbered roofs groan and hiss under the assault, but hours pass before the heavy beams succumb to the flames and collapse, still smoking, into the small farmhouse kitchens. It’s not a place for women or children, but they’re there, weeping quietly as they watch their homes reduced to cinders on the ground.
The men aren’t quiet. This is the Scottish Highlands, where men wear the dirt of the land under their fingernails, just as their fathers did, and before them their grandfathers, digging a living from the soil. They’ve earned their fury, their hatred.
Greed, one farmer mutters as charred black fragments of his roof float upward in the hazy predawn sky. Patrick Sellar lit Will Chisholm’s house up with his mother-in-law still inside. Murderers.
Murderers, another farmer echoes, his voice hoarse from the smoke. Robert MacKay’s roof set afire, with his two sick little girls still lying in their beds.
There are no landlords here to witness the destruction. The Countess of Sutherland has sent her factor, Patrick Sellar, to clear the land for thesheepherders who will take possession as soon as the farmers have been driven away. Aside from a barn here and there, Sellar burns every building in his path, so the Cheviot sheep will be free to roam and graze at will.
The men who come to burn the houses, like Sellar, are Scots themselves—sheriff’s officers, constables, and Sellar’s own sheepherders. Their faces are hard, uncompromising as they set their fires in service to Sellar, to the Countess of Sutherland. They came from the south—from England, or the Scottish Borders—on horseback. These men here today with their blazing torches weren’t the first to come, nor will they be the last.
Sometimes they wait until the families leave the farmhouses before they set them alight.
Sometimes they don’t.
Every house in Rosal Township is set ablaze, one after the other. They all burn at once. A gray cloud envelops all of northern Scotland. People as far away as Thurso can taste smoke and ash on their tongues.
Margaret MacKay, Chisholm’s mother-in-law, dies of her burns five days later. A day after her death, the last of the Rosal fires burn themselves out.
In 1814, Logan Blair is twenty-four years old. His father has been dead for a year now. Logan’s clansmen now consider him Laird of Clan Kinross, and so he would be, if a lairdship were determined only by a man’s love for his clan.
Logan has traveled north from County Ross to Kildare, and then further north to Strathnaver, to see for himself if the tales of the devastation of Clan MacKay are true. Before he arrives, he tells himself it can’t be as terrible as he’s been told.
Now, he watches as the haze of smoke from the fires billows against the horizon, turning the sun blood red. Rage coils inside him, hot and ugly, a serpent writhing in his chest. The confusion, the terror, the grief of the people defies description.
The smoke lingers much longer than the people do. The homes, their valued possessions—in some cases even their kin—are left behind in the ashes. Families, entire clans are disbanded. Some board ships to try their luck in North America. Others are relocated to coastal Scotland to scrabble out a hard living as kelp farmers, fishermen, or coal miners.
All of them are devastated.
Greed.Landlords, squeezing Scotland until English pounds fall out.
Highland chiefs, turning on their own people, their own kin.
Logan was raised on Kinross soil, like his father before him, and before his father his grandfather, reaching back for generations. But these lairds are nothing like his grandfather, who fought and died at Culloden. The chiefs today are more English than Scottish, and the laird of Clan Kinross is no different.
All of Logan’s clan claim him as their laird. Not because they don’t know better, but because in every way that matters to them, heislaird. But theDuke of Blackmore owns the castle, and all the land surrounding it. As far as the law is concerned the duke is the true laird, leader of a clan he’s never seen, and doesn’t understand.
A clan he has no love for, and feels no loyalty to.
The Duke of Blackmore is Logan’s maternal uncle. Logan’s twin brother is the duke’s heir. Logan has never spoken to his brother, and he’s never seen him. Years ago, the clan midwife told Logan he and his brother were indistinguishable from each other as newborns—that from the day they emerged from the womb until the day the Duke of Blackmore took his brother away to England, they slept with their tiny hands clasped together.
His brother is half English, half Scot, just as Logan is, but his brother has never set foot on Scottish soil. He’s never worn the Kinross tartan, or chased a Scottish lass through the heather. He was raised as an Englishman, by an Englishman, with an Englishman’s sensibilities. He and Logan share their parents’ blood, but there is no history between them. There are no memories.
His brother has an Englishman’s name.
He was christenedGavin Blair, but now he goes by the name Fitzwilliam Vaughan. When their uncle dies, Fitzwilliam Vaughn will become the sixth Duke of Blackmore.
That’s when he’ll come to Scotland.
It won’t be today, or even tomorrow, but someday he’ll inherit the land, and he’ll come to assess his new properties. Measuring, calculating profits and losses with his every step over Kinross land.
No good ever came of an English aristocrat on Scottish soil. Logan isn’t fool enough to believe Fitzwilliam Vaughan will prove an exception to this rule. Soon enough he’ll discover Cheviot sheep are more profitable than people, and then the evictions will begin. If the future Duke of Blackmore chooses to be merciful, the people might lose only their homes. If he chooses not to be, the more vulnerable among them could lose their lives.
Logan sucks in a breath of air, coughing as smoke fills his lungs. Sellar’s burning party moves on to the next farmhouse, then the next, until the air becomes so heavy with thick black smoke that Logan can’t draw a clean breath.
