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“Taken to Old Melrose,” said Thomas, when Janet told him. “Led there by elven soldiers and human hosts.”

“But why?” she asked, and to that he had no answer. Even the Yvag they’d cornered so long ago had not told him and Alpin the why of the teind. Why his brother? Why the need to kidnap anyone at all? They stole babies and left changeling things, bedazzled children and adults alike on some timetable he couldn’t make sense of, and all for a purpose no one knew. He hadn’t any idea, and he knew more of the Yvag than perhaps anyone else alive.

It turned out that the Carterhaugh girl’s name was also Janet.

Janet Cardden had never heard of Innes Rimor de Ercildoun, though they lived within a half day’s ride of each other. A day later, while Thomas was up in the shieling, she asked her father if he knew anything about Innes. He enjoyed local gossip, she knew, which was one of the reasons he was so fond of Forbes the miller, whose mill seemed to provide more intersection of tittle-tattle than even an alehouse.

No surprise then that her father knew a good deal of the elder Rimor and his holdings, and was able to corroborate most of the family’s tragic history—at least what was said of it: Both sons had disappeared on the same day some years earlier, presumed drowned in the Yarrow, if he recollected right, by one of them. “An idiot, it is said.”

The daughter, Innes, had married into another powerful family with which he was also acquainted, the MacGilleans.

“That family,” he told her, “was if anything the worse blighted. The patriarch I knew quite well. We’d met at festival in Roxburgh, oh, when you were in swaddling. On a bone he choked to death, oh, eight years gone now? One son fell down a well, another his own life took, most likely in grief over his father’s and brother’s deaths. The one Innes Rimor married, called Balthair, he was the youngest, and the last of the clan. And then she, the poor girl, herself almost in childbirth died, lost her babe within a week—a son, they said. And as if that wasn’t enough stones piled upon any family, Balthair, the only family heir, a year later vanished in the company of an alderman of Ercildoun, whom I believe you met once here. Stroud. A very strange man, but also very influential. Powerful.”

“I don’t recollect him,” she replied honestly.

“No, well, no reason you would do. About that event, all sorts of stories arose. Two strangers at the time had in Ercildoun been seen and nobody ever saw them again, so ’twas guessed they were cutpurses who waylaid and killed the local men. And because on the corpse road out of the town Stroud and MacGillean had last been seen, well, it became the ghosts of the dead Rimor boys, or MacGillean’s brothers’ spirits seeking him because, I suppose, for the family fortune he must have killed them. It was even put about that the men’s bodies had been located among the graves of Old Melrose, but in a state suggesting terrible dark magics. Of course that spot has always been associated with magical goings-on. There were tales of all sorts when I was a boy. Ah, but enough of that. Others think somebody was digging up the old graves, hoping to find jewelry or some such, and didn’t bother with putting the bodies back, and that someone else mistook them for Stroud and MacGillean, who, accordingly, were never found. Masons there were, working on the nearby abbey. Most had gone for the winter, but the remaining few knew nothing of any of this. So many tales. Yet no one to accuse on hand, and no certain thing to accuse anyone of—the sheriff never even found their horses. But, you know, people love stories, especially when you can fit them up with ghosts and murder and magic. Soon enough, that girl from Carterhaugh will find her way into some tale or ballad of elves and fairies when more likely she wandered off or ran away with her lad. Doesn’t need to make any sense at all, so and it thrills.”

She smiled patiently. “Yes, I’m certain, Father, you are right on all of that, but what of Innes Rimor?”

“Oh, yes. She of course inherited the MacGillean holdings, once Balthair was declared dead. That took another year, and in the interim her mother died. And that, after losing her own child and then her husband, well, the poor girl wisnae right in the head any longer. The holdings became property of the Rimors, and thus that family has come to own now more land hereabouts than anybody. Quite the power to be reckoned with. The father, he used to be a fine man, but he’s turned cold and bitter, and, to be honest, quite distasteful. Well, I mean, he’s lost both sons and wife, as well as the heir the daughter should have delivered. It’s nae wonder he believes he’s punished by God. As for the girl, Innes, well, he did the only thing he could. He sent her to a convent where she can be looked after. Cluny, isn’t it? Old Rimor can well afford the beneficence. There’s a hospital of sorts there. I hear they’ve even female surgeons, if one can countenance such stories. Not that the poor child is for the saw. What ails her cannae be cut out.”

Janet drank it all in. Pieced together, her father’s rumored events aligned remarkably with what Thomas had told her; she wondered both how many other stories of local families her father knew and had never mentioned, and how much she would have to withhold from him beginning this moment forward.

Cardden disrupted her thoughts by patting her hand. “Are you worried,” he said, “that I might send you away, daughter, rather than permission give you to wed that knight of yours?”

Baffled, she stared at him, for a moment unable even to comprehend to whom “that knight” referred. Her father beamed proudly and rubbed his hands together, thrilled, it seemed, to know something else that his daughter did not.

“He asked me early this morning for your hand,” he said. “Has he kept it from you?”

“No.” She could barely get the word out around the knot in her throat. Her heart threatened to lift her up with the angels. “Not kept it at all.”

Their first winter together, Thomas lived with Janet in her father’s keep while he and Lusk’s twins, Filib and Kester, worked together to enlarge the house he’d built for himself. The rear oak cruck became a middle support; he laid down new padstones on which new crucks would stand, and pushed out part of one wall to build a new and much larger hearth that ventilated through a chimney hole in the wall above it rather than through a central hole in the thatch—a version in miniature of the great hearth inside Castle MacGillean. It meant far less smoke wafting through the interior of the house than when the roof hole didn’t draw well. With the central fire pit gone, there was space now for his wife’s loom. Above their bed, on crosspieces, he laid boards for a storage loft and lay his bows and arrows there. He dug the original floor out, filled the pit with straw, and then laid planks over it. Separate from the house he erected as well a wooden byre beside the small stable he’d already built. In some ways he was simply creating a house he saw in his head drawing upon construction he had observed and absorbed in his travels. Not unlike his riddles and the numbers of things that came to him, he felt as if he was chasing after its meaning until it was framed and built, and he stood inside the low stone walls and low-hanging thatch, marveling at its assembly as much as anyone else did, though it came from his imaginings. Lusk and other neighbors came and admired the construction, asked him where he had learned such a frame. All he could do was reply, “Abroad.”

“A visionary,” one of them called him.

As Cardden’s son-in-law he now oversaw all of the family’s holdings and all of the other tenant farmers. The tenant-in-chief could not understand why young Tàmhas Lynn did not abandon work on this new house, however cleverly made, and live under his roof. There was certainly enough space in his hall, with two fire pits and plenty of beds behind screens and curtains.

Janet of course understood perfectly: Too many people lived at the castle, family and servants, baker and blacksmith, cooks, brewers, laundresses—a multitude who rendered it difficult to speak of too many critical things, and absolutely impossible to make nocturnal trips to and from Old Melrose unobserved. So constrained there, he would shortly give himself away.

That first winter, with his new duties and the house to enlarge, Thomas resigned himself to learning nothing more of the Yvag skinwalkers. Certainly, he could not investigate the crypts of the Abbey of St. Mary to discover whether he’d been right in interpreting his riddle. Moreover, being Cardden’s son-in-law meant that he moved within a stratum of society surrounding Roxburgh that had been closed to him before. He didn’t appreciate what this meant nor the danger it posed until the night Cardden held a celebration of the Epiphany in his great hall.

He spent much of the day at work on the rear wall of his house, and by the time he walked back to Cardden’s, his bag of mason’s tools hanging by his hip, it was late afternoon, the clouds glowing pink behind him. He was looking forward to a light meal and then tumbling into bed with Janet.

As he approached the main gate, a wagon with an arched frame covered in red cut across his path and rolled ahead, into the yard. The yard, it turned out, was full of wagons, carts, and horses.

Confused, he walked on toward the great hall. He was so dirty and ragged that Cardden’s servant Rab, with his peregrine-sharp face, blocked his way at first. Then realizing it was Thomas, he blanched and stepped aside, saying, “Beg pardon, master.”

“What is all this, Rab?” Thomas asked.

“The Christes Maesse,” said Rab. “Did they not tell ye?”

Surely Janet would have, must have. What day was this? The work of enlarging the house had become so much part of his routine that all days had melted together like a string of tallow candles.

Before he could decide upon a course of action, Janet emerged from the brightly lit hall. “Oh, Tàm, you did forget.” She wore a green gown, girdled with a long sash at the hips, and with wide, flared sleeves. Her hair was plaited in a ridge around her head, and one thick braid swept down over her left shoulder.

He tried to smile. “Only what day today is. I remember everything else, I think.”

“We must get you clean, and right away.” She took him by the hand and led him across the yard, between the wagons and their attendants, to the small ancient well. He drew off his shirt, watching his breath on the air, his skin rising in bumps like a plucked goose. While he drew up a bucket of water, she went into the stable and returned with a block of castile soap. “You wash. I’ll bring you some thyme oil.”

“And clothes might be helpful.” He grinned. She flung the bucketful of water over him and he howled. She offered him the soap, and he snatched it and began rubbing it hard over himself as he hissed against the chill.

Janet said, “The stables,” then hurried off.

He drew another bucket of water, then stripped off his braies and boots, and poured it over himself. As tired as he had been coming home, he was wide awake now. “Fourteen wagons, eleven carts,” he muttered, “sixteen attendants, seventy-eight wheels, thirty-nine horses. And Rab.” He poured a third bucket over himself before he was done.

Retreating to the stables, he paced, shivering. His own horse eyed him as if he were mad or dangerous. He huffed, told the horse, “Be in your own stable soon enough,” then slapped at himself for warmth as he walked in circles. Wagons and horses—how many people was his father-in-law hosting, and from how far away? The wagons with their framed covers did not belong to the likes of his neighbors, the other tenants of Cardden’s land. Besides, then Lusk would have known of it, mentioned it. Who attended a Christes Maesse? Prior to this, his every one had been spent sleeping on the ground, near an abbey or a castle or on a battlefield.

Janet returned with a pair of short pointed leather boots, striped hose, a linen shirt, and thick red V-necked outer tunic. She also had a small phial of oil, which she dabbed on him, and combed into his short beard and wet hair with her fingers. She parted the hair, smoothed it.

He belted his tunic.

“There,” she said, “you look handsome.”

“I look as if I swam across the Teviot to get here.” He pushed his hair back above his ears. “I’m sorry I lose track of days.”

She kissed him. “So long as you don’t lose track of me.”

“That will never happen.”

Are sens

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