With Baldie and the alderman dead, his father was perfectly positioned to replace them both. There had been nothing he could do to prevent it. With him the Yvag required one less body in Ercildoun—he’d acquire the MacGillean property through Innes. The knowledge that he’d been right tore at Thomas like an Yvag’s barbed blade; it was as if his words had cursed his father, and maybe his sister, too.
Waldroup’s shade was back at his side. “I know you feared this,” said the ghost.
“Is he like Baldie, then? Some part of him still displaced within, unable to speak or appear to us while the monster moves him about?”
“Do we think they do it any other way?” asked the ghost.
They didn’t. “Murdered and alive at once.” The guilt he’d felt over his failure to rescue Onchu roared back as a kind of self-hatred. Killing Stroud and Baldie and then running away—he’d cursed his father.
Waldroup’s shade tried to talk him out of it: “Don’t you see, they’d have taken you and me, and still picked him?”
His only consolation was that Innes wasn’t there below, too. That offered a tiny hope to cling to, while it made more urgent the question of whether she was alive. Baldie had killed off every member of his family. Now with his own father turned by the elves, would she have been eliminated, too? Surely they didn’t need to dispense with her, but how much did need have to do with it? If everyone already thought her mad, maybe his father hadn’t needed to kill her. Might they have left her in that huge stone keep? Perhaps guarded. He’d wanted to know her situation all these months, but hadn’t dared to show his face for fear that someone would recognize him, hadn’t dared ask after her for fear it would identify him the way it had originally. Now that he’d identified the villains allied against him, his father amongst them, he became desperate to know Innes’s fate. He’d promised her he would come back. He needed to protect someone.
At that moment, something like a horsefly buzzed right at his head, and instinctively he ducked, turned, and craned his neck, wary. Horseflies didn’t fly at night, and this was improbably large.
The thing circled above him on the hillside. It was more like a tiny wren, or a bat with hummingbird wings. It dove and shot right at him again. Moonlight flickered silvery off the little thing. As it neared, its buzzing became a tiny, angry voice, like a deranged bee.
This time he didn’t duck, but waited still, then slapped the air, smacking the creature hard enough that it spun against the rocks beside him. He grabbed it where it rolled, dangled it up against the moonlight by its tail.
It seemed to be made of moonlight; its head was like the cap of a tuber—rounded, with large ovoid growths to each side like bulging black eyes. The hideous hob came alert then, and the top of the “tuber” opened, revealing needlelike teeth. In his head, he felt the pressure of Yvag voices. The thing twisted and strained to bite him and let out a furious screech. “Shush.” Thomas whacked it hard against the rocks, after which it dangled limply. He ducked down again. This was identical to the little nightmare that had flown out of the first crypt in Old Melrose. Waldroup had called it a homunculus.
One of the barbed knights was looking in his direction, scanning the hillside. The outline of its large eyes glowed green as the fiery, spitting ring itself. He could almost feel that glow sweep like a sunray over him in his hiding place.
The other knight shook its head and rode forward toward the ring. A moment later the first one gave up looking Thomas’s way and followed. The green fire burned and the two Yvag knights vanished into the opening.
Thomas took the time now to memorize the others in the glow of the fire: the gray-haired man was broad across the shoulders though slightly stooped; he wore a red and black cotehardie. His nose looked to have been broken, flattened, at some point, and he had pouchy eyes. The woman was stouter. She wore a whitish wimple, which hid her hair from view, but her face was round, with fat ruddy cheeks. Her gown was dark. It might have been belted with a rosary, he couldn’t be sure. “She might be a prioress,” said Waldroup. “I’m sure they’d find that a useful placing.”
“Or a landowner’s wife.” He watched her awhile. “But where do they lie, Alpin? They’re not in the crypts below any longer, are they?”
His ghostly friend recited from the riddle he’d spouted in a fit back in Italia, and which they’d picked over since: “‘Find us you won’t where a whisper can pass, nor where it’s high and the bright.’ Didn’t correspond with anything at the abbazia di Santa Maria di Lucedio.”
Thomas shook his head resignedly, but even as he did, something niggled at his thoughts. “Below the living, with the dead—that’s the same as before, a crypt or a grave, but not here, not in the ruins. Nothing high and bright about it.”
“But it says high and bright is where they aren’t,” argued Waldroup.
“So, not in towers then, not a castle.”
“But someplace that has heights, otherwise why mention them at all?”
There was something Cardden had said to him when they’d first met. They had been talking about the Abbey of St. Mary at Melrose that he and Waldroup had worked on. “Just this season finished,” Cardden had said. “A wonderful, bright place.”
“‘Wonderful, bright place’ . . .” Thomas muttered in sudden wonder. “Alpin. It has to be the new abbey of Melrose, St. Mary’s. The east tower and transept. We didn’t stay to see it finished, nor the glass installed. All the panes of the Catherine window when the sun lights them . . .”
“High and bright,” said Waldroup.
“And remember, Stroud’s party who came to see the progress—Clacher said all they cared about was—”
“The north transept, which wasn’t done.”
“But the steps down into the crypt and the crypt itself were dug out and marked.”
“No whisper passing in the dead air of a crypt.”
“They just traded the new one for the old. But then why still cut the air here and not there?”
Waldroup made no answer.
He sat alone in silence and watched the three figures seal up the green fire. Their dark shapes moved away from the ruins, separating among the small markers.
The gray-haired man, it turned out, had a horse at the ready not far off. The woman went west on the path that led by the new abbey and on to Selkirk. His father plodded across the corpse-road bridge on foot and was quickly lost in the darkness and distance, heading back to Ercildoun. The horseman rode up the hill and straight past Thomas, who crouched down behind a stand of gorse. He watched the man skirt the heights of Eildon as well and disappear over the top.
The place below was empty now.
Thomas stood up with his unstrung bow. He held up the little monster he’d killed, to look at it again, but its body had melted into a dripping gooey strand through which a wiry core glistened, as if its skin had been painted upon an interwoven plait of hair. He flung it away, wiped his fingers in the grass, then headed down toward the ruins.
“What’s this development?” asked Waldroup’s shade, suddenly at his side again. “Surely, you’re not.”
“I have to find out,” he answered, and with such resolve that Waldroup dissipated. “If she’s alive . . .”
He wouldn’t need to come here again. The hunt had changed form: He’d met the foxes and was nearly certain of the location of their den now. But that was for another night.
He walked cautiously past the ruins, where there was no sign of anyone. After a few moments’ pause to listen, he headed for the river bridge. The figure of his father was already lost to the darkness on the road ahead, and Thomas took care as he went not to catch up with him before branching off onto a smaller path, now mostly overgrown, that led west of Ercildoun and up toward the estate of clan MacGillean.
Castle MacGillean stood dark and forbidding, a sharp-edged silhouette on the rise ahead of him. The lack of torchlight was encouraging—if all of the household were sleeping, then it was unlikely any of them were involved with the Yvag. Nobody would be watching for him.
With his bow strung and fitted with an arrow, he cautiously approached the gate. It was, as it had always been, open. He eased beneath the bailey tower, pressed into the deepest shadows against the palisade, and kept it at his back as he circled around the yard.
Above, the keep was as dark as the various outbuildings, including the stables down the far end, everything appearing not merely empty, but abandoned. No one and nothing moved. He kept to the shadows until he reached the base of the motte. Then, exposed, he hastily ran up the steps to the keep.
