Bells first, thin and uneven, carried up the rise on wind that smelled of woodsmoke and something frying.
Then the noise underneath them cattle lowing, voices layered on voices, a cart’s ungreased axle complaining somewhere below.
Walter crested the last stretch of track and stopped, letting the sound resolve into pieces.
Market-day noise.
More people gathered in one place than he’d seen since the stones, and every one of them a stranger who’d never once heard his name.
Cranesmuir sat in its fold of hill the way a held breath sits in a chest thatched roofs clustered close, a stone kirk with its squat tower watching the green like a bailiff, a set of wooden stocks standing empty at the market’s edge.
Past the cottages, near the far treeline, one roof caught the noon light differently than the rest: slate, not thatch, sitting over a house with a walled garden he could just make out the shape of from here.
It held his eye a beat longer than it should have a detail worth remembering, though he couldn’t have said why yet.
He touched the letter through his coat, out of habit more than need, and started down.
The village swallowed him the way villages did nobody looked twice at first, then everybody did, in the particular sideways way of people too polite to stare outright and too curious not to try.
A woman selling eggs from a basket tracked him past her stall.
Two boys chasing a dog stopped chasing it long enough to watch him instead.
By the time he reached the inn’s low door, he understood with total clarity that he had already stopped being invisible, and there was no version of this walk that could have prevented it.
The inn smelled of tallow smoke and spilled ale gone sour in the floorboards, and the woman behind the counter looked up at him with an expression that had clearly assessed a thousand travelers and found most of them wanting.
“Mistress Gillis,” she said, before he’d asked.
“And ye’ll be wanting a room, by the state of your boots.”
“If you have one.” He set the letter on the counter, folded soft at its creases from three days in his coat.
“I carry an introduction, if it’s of use to you.”
She read it without hurrying, lips moving slightly over the harder words, and when she looked up again her face hadn’t changed so much as recalibrated.
“This name means naught to me, laddie.
Might mean something to somebody grander than an innkeeper.” She set the letter down and named a price that made Walter’s eyebrows want to move on their own.
“That’s double the going rate,” he said, mild, because he’d priced enough rooms on this road by now to know it.
“Aye.
And ye’ll pay it, because ye’re a stranger with a letter nobody kens, arriving on a market day when I could let that room three times over to men whose fathers I’ve buried.” She didn’t smile exactly, but something in her eyes did the work of one.
“Four shillings, the week.
Take it or walk on.”
He counted the coin out of the purse at his belt, mixed silver and copper, and set it on the counter one piece at a time while she watched his hands the whole way down not suspicious, just thorough, the way a woman counts eggs before she pays for them.
He thought, uncharitably and only to himself, that she’d have made a formidable parking attendant in another life, the kind who wrote the ticket before your meter had properly expired.
“There’s a herb-shop in the village,” he said, once the coin was hers.
“I’ve some training in it.
Might I ask after the keeper?”
Something sharpened in her face not suspicion, interest a landlady’s alertness, and her trade ran well past rooms.
“Mistress Una.
North side of the green, past the well.
Ye’ll ken the shop by the smell of it before ye see the sign.” A pause, weighted.
“Apothecary’s apprentice, are ye.
Long way from London for a trade ye could ply closer to home.”
“Long way from most things,” Walter said, and let that be the whole answer, because he’d learned already three days on the road had taught him this much that the men who explained themselves too fully were the ones people remembered longest.
She didn’t push.
She didn’t need to.
He could see the shape of the story already forming behind her eyes, ready to be told at whatever gathering came next, true in its bones and embroidered everywhere else.
His room was small, one shuttered window looking out over the green, a straw mattress that had known better decades.
He set his boots by the door and sat a moment on the edge of the bed, letting his shoulders come down from wherever the walk had put them, before curiosity got the better of stillness and he crossed to the window.
The green was thick with market traffic carts, penned sheep, a knot of women comparing cloth at a stall and past all of it, on the far side near a low stone building with drying-racks visible through an open door, a woman in a dark apron was sorting something pale and dried across a wide table.
She worked without looking up, hands moving in the economical rhythm of someone who’d done the task ten thousand times before, and Walter watched her a moment with the sharp attention of someone clocking a future colleague before he had ever spoken a word to her.
She looked up.
Not at him not exactly but toward the inn, toward the window, in the unhurried way of someone who’d simply felt eyes and gone looking for their owner.
Walter didn’t step back.
There was no version of that move that wouldn’t have looked worse than standing still.
He held the look for one full breath, gave the smallest incline of his head that a stranger owed a stranger, and watched her go back to her sorting without any change he could read from this distance.
Somewhere below, the kirk bell tolled the hour, and a black-coated figure crossed the green from the direction of the church with the unhurried gait of one with nowhere urgent to be and every intention of noticing who did.
Walter let the shutter fall half-closed and stood a moment longer in the thin bar of daylight it left him, doing the arithmetic he’d been doing since Craigh na Dun how many eyes had found him today, and how many of those eyes talked to each other before nightfall.
By his count, it wasn’t a small number.
It wasn’t going to get smaller either.
He’d have to make that work for him instead of against him, starting tomorrow, at a herb-shop on the north side of the green that smelled Mistress Gillis had been right about that much already long before he’d see the sign.
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