The cattle had gone quiet by the time Walter’s grip eased off the sgian-dubh’s hilt.
He’d come up out of sleep in the hedge-fold fast and low, blade already in hand before his mind had finished deciding there was a reason for it, and it had taken him a full ten seconds counted, out of habit, the way he used to count a patient’s breaths to place the sound as grazing, not men.
Just a herd working its way along the far bank of the stream, unbothered, tearing grass in that steady tearing rhythm that had no business sounding as loud as it did at four in the morning.
He’d sheathed the knife, wiped his palm dry on his breeches, and not gone back to sleep.
Now the sun was up properly, and his shoulders ached from a night spent on ground that had opinions about where a spine should bend, and somewhere ahead of him smoke was starting to smudge the sky the color of a bruise gone old.
A woman was pegging washing at the near edge of a croft when he came down off the track, and she looked up at him the way anyone looks up at a stranger on a lonely road not afraid, just cataloguing, the look of somebody who will remember his coat if asked about it later.
“Oatcakes, if ye’ve a ha’penny for them,” she said, before he’d said a word himself.
Direct.
No wasted courtesy.
“Ye’ve the look of a man who’s walked further than he’s eaten.”
“That’s fair,” Walter said, and meant it more than she knew.
He pressed his palm flat against the inside of his boot while she turned for the cakes, and felt the leather answer not warmth exactly, more the sense of a door recognizing his hand and drew two coins up out of somewhere that had no business holding two coins a second ago.
He had them counted into his palm and offered before she’d turned back around, and if there was a man twenty feet off at the fence line watching the whole exchange with a herder’s patient, unhurried attention, he saw nothing but a traveler paying for his breakfast like anyone would.
“English,” the man at the fence said.
Not a question.
He had a crook over one shoulder and the stillness of someone who’d spent a life waiting on animals that didn’t hurry for him.
“London-trained,” Walter said.
“Apothecary’s apprentice.
Bryce, out of a Lowland family, a year now on the road.” He’d said the words to himself enough times over the last two days that they came out steady, unhurried, the vowels rounder than his own.
“Bound south for Cranesmuir, if the road agrees.”
The herder Iain, the woman called him once, without introducing him properly, the way you’d name a fixture looked at him a moment longer than the answer strictly required.
Walter held still under it.
Didn’t fill the silence.
That, he was starting to understand, was its own kind of answer.
“Ye walk queer,” Iain said at last, and turned back to his fence.
Walter said nothing to that either, but he took the words with him down the road, turning them over the way he’d once turned over a lab result that didn’t match the literature not with alarm, just with the flat attention of a man revising a working model.
He watched his own feet for the next half mile.
Heel-first, long-strided, the pavement-and-treadmill gait he had never quite walked off.
He shortened the stride.
Rolled through the ball of the foot instead of striking the heel.
It felt wrong for the first ten minutes, deliberately wrong, like writing with the other hand, and by the time it started to feel less wrong there was a blister rising hot at the back of his left heel where the new gait was asking muscle to do work it hadn’t agreed to.
He ate the oatcakes walking.
They were good dense, a little burnt at one edge, better than anything he’d have paid four dollars for at a coffee shop that put a leaf pattern in the foam and he let himself notice that, deliberately, the way he’d have noticed a good cup of coffee after a bad shift.
Small thing.
Real thing.
He’d take what was on offer.
The patrol came into view a little after midday, two red coats moving along the ridge to the east, small with distance but unmistakable even at half a mile the color alone did the work, a red that didn’t belong to anything else in this whole green country.
Walter stopped where he was, in the lee of a drystone dyke, and watched without watching, the way you learn to watch a fire truck go by when you’re off duty and it isn’t your call.
Forty minutes, near enough, before they turned north along the ridgeline and dropped out of sight behind it.
He let his shoulders come down from wherever they’d climbed to.
Filed it no.
Noted it, the way a man notes a landmark, and kept walking.
Redcoats on a ridge weren’t a crisis.
They were information: this was a country with soldiers in it, moving on schedules of their own, and he’d need to know their rhythms as he’d once needed a patrol car’s route.
Nothing about that required him to lie awake over it.
He’d seen them.
He’d note it if he saw them again in the same place tomorrow.
For now the road kept going south, and so did he.
By late afternoon the ache in his heel had settled into something he could walk around rather than through, and the smoke ahead had resolved into individual threads rising off a scatter of low stone buildings tucked into a fold of hill smaller than a village, bigger than a single croft.
A hostel, if the letter in his pocket and the vague shape of a plan in his head were both worth anything.
Father Niall met him at the door himself, a spare man in black with a face that had settled long ago into an expression of patient forbearance, and Walter three days into a body that still felt borrowed at the edges, in a coat that still didn’t sit right on his shoulders bent from the waist in something he hoped read as a bow and knew, even as he did it, was probably not quite the shape this century used.
Half a beat too formal.
A little too deep.
He straightened up with his ears warm and his dignity mostly intact.
The priest’s mouth twitched not quite a smile, filed away for later use, the way a man files away a stranger’s odd manners to think on privately.
“Ye’ll have travelled far, by the look of ye,” he said.
“Come in before the midges decide ye’re their supper.
We keep Lauds at dawn in this house, so ye’ll want your rest while it’s on offer.”
Walter stepped over the threshold into a room that smelled of tallow and cold stone, and behind him the door closed on the last of the daylight.