The pony picked its own line through the heather without waiting on him to choose it, and Walter let the reins go slack over its neck, trusting the animal’s sense of the ground more than his own just now.
Peat-smoke smudged low against the western hills, some crofter’s evening fire burning where a fire had probably burned every evening for two hundred years before this one, and the sky beyond it had gone the particular bruised grey that meant rain within the hour rather than rain within the day.
He’d learned to read that difference somewhere in his first weeks on this road, the same way he’d once learned to read a patient’s color for the ten minutes before a crisis actually declared itself.
Ride through it, Margaret said, quiet, and there was nothing in the instruction beyond the instruction itself no comfort offered alongside it, no attempt to fill the particular silence that had settled over both of them since Castle Leoch’s gate had closed at his back.
The inn at the crossroads keeps a dry room.
You’ll want it before full dark.
“I know.” He kept his heels loose, his seat easy, the posture of enough miles on enough ponies that his body did the work without asking his mind to supervise it.
An old shepherd stood at the track’s next junction, working two dogs around a scatter of ewes with whistled commands too quiet for Walter to make proper sense of, and the man’s eyes found him for exactly as long as it took to confirm he was no threat to the flock before returning to his work entirely.
Walter nodded once, the courtesy owed between two strangers on an empty road, and the shepherd returned it without breaking his rhythm a whole conversation conducted, start to finish, in under three seconds, and Walter found himself grateful for it in a way that had nothing to do with the shepherd and everything to do with how badly he’d wanted, for one entire day now, not to be looked at too closely by anyone.
The ache sat where it had sat since the great hall not sharp, not the kind of grief that announced itself with tears or shaking hands, but a low, patient weight settled somewhere under his sternum, the specific shape of a door he’d closed himself and had no business resenting for staying shut.
He thought, with the dry, unkind humor that surfaced at exactly the moments he had the least right to it, that grieving a woman he’d never once spoken to was possibly the single most absurd item on the very long list of absurd things this century had asked of him so far. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
He almost laughed at that, out loud, alone on an empty Highland track with rain coming and the almost-laugh did more work than an actual one would have, loosening something in his chest by half a degree before the weight settled back into place behind it.
The rain found him twenty minutes later, first as a fine mist that beaded harmless on his oilskin, then as a proper Highland downpour that turned the track’s soft turf to something closer to slurry within a quarter hour, exactly as the sky had promised it would.
He didn’t curse it.
There was no version of cursing that would have dried him faster, and he’d learned, somewhere in the last four months, that the energy spent resenting weather was energy better spent simply enduring it.
The dusk inn was a low, smoke-dark building at a crossroads he’d passed once before without stopping, and the innkeeper a heavyset man with a face that had made its peace with strangers arriving wet and wanting little conversation took his pennies without comment and pointed him toward a room barely large enough for the narrow bed inside it.
He lit the candle stub with hands that had gone stiff from the cold ride, three strikes of the flint before it caught properly, and sat on the bed’s edge with his notebook open and the disguised script waiting under his pen the way it always waited a formulation, to any curious eye, of some tincture nobody but himself would ever try to brew.
Saw her.
Did nothing.
The standing order is a stone in the chest.
He wrote it slow, closed the book before the ink could smear against the damp still clinging to his fingers, and sat a moment in the candle’s small circle of light with the rain working steady against the shutter. Find the original chapter at g.com.
Something small and specific tugged at him then, the way it had once before, reaching for a detail that should have been there and wasn’t a street name, this time, some cross-street near his old apartment he’d walked a hundred times and couldn’t now place on the map his own memory was supposed to keep.
He held the gap a moment, the same careful pressing he’d once used testing a highway song’s missing words, confirming the shape of what was gone without trying to force it back.
Cost of the day, he thought, flat, and didn’t reach for the notebook again to record it.
Some losses were worth writing down.
This one, small and clean, he simply let sit where it had landed.
He didn’t write to Geillis tonight.
One line, when he reached Cranesmuir that was the promise he’d made himself somewhere around the second hour of rain, and a wet inn room at a crossroads wasn’t the place to break it.
He pulled off his boots, left everything else exactly as it was, and lay down in his damp clothes with the candle guttering low and the rain still working at the shutter like something patient that intended to keep working at it all night.
Sleep came slower than he wanted it to, and when it came, it came without dreams he could remember in the morning only the low, steady weight still sitting under his ribs where he’d left it, waiting for whatever version of tomorrow was going to ask him to carry it further south.