PART ONE
SIC INSIPID (IT BEGINS)
PROLOGUE
Vale of Morning, the Scottish Highlands
Year of Our Lord 1476
Fat, fat, the water rat,
Thirty daggers in his back!
He heard thechant.
Terror filled him.
Then came the stones: small stones, larger stones, and stones of every size, raining down on him in the vale that had been calm and peaceful until the deluge of rocks began. He’d made the mistake by cutting through this little valley, green like the emeralds his grandfather used to describe, knowing full well what waited for him there. Everyone in his village knew and that was why they avoided this particular glen.
But not him.
Now, he was going to pay the price for that arrogance.
A rock hit him squarely in the head, right above the eyebrow. Already, he felt the trickle of blood.
“Halt!”
Someone was shouting at him, but now there was blood in his eye.Och, it stung!He was still trying to run, like an idiot,but soon there were bodies all around him. He wasn’t going anywhere.
Someone shoved him onto that emerald-green grass.
“Where are ye going,górach?”
A man-boy voice spoke, thumping on him as he tried to wipe the blood from his eye.Górach, they called him. It meant stupid in the Gaelic.
Indeed, he was very stupid.
“Home,” he said bravely. “I just want tae go home. Leave me be.”
The gang around him began to make crying noises, like babies, and he determined that he was surrounded by children for the most part. Oh, he knew who they were. This glen he was traveling through was called theGathan Gadainn, or the Vale of Morning, but it also had another name—
Gathan Deamhain.
The Vale of Demons.
On this sunny day, the demons had found him. A gang of children and youths who had claimed this vale as their particular hunting ground. Young or old, man or woman, it didn’t matter to them. A victim was a victim. As he sat on the green earth, blinking up at the children surrounding him, a young lass with bright red hair plopped down beside him.
“What’s yer name,górach?” she asked.
He’d just managed to clear the blood from his eye. “Cam.”
Her gaze drifted over him, studying him. “Where do ye come from, Cam?”
He gestured to the east. “Netherton.”
The lass continued to study him. She was a pretty thing even though she had a dirty face and matted red ringlets. At perhaps eleven or twelve years of age, she still had that spindly but tough body that girls in the Highlands had. Figures honed on hard work and the scarcity of food.
It was survival of the fittest.
