The Scottish Prisoner

“I’d run down a deer and killed it,” Fraser said, also as though this was commonplace. “And I’d sat down by the carcass to catch my breath before the gralloching—that’s the cutting out o’ the bowels, ken. I’d slit the throat, of course, to bleed the meat, but I hadna yet said the prayer for it—I wondered later if it was maybe that that called them.”

Grey wondered whether “that” referred to the hot scent of the pumping blood or the lack of a sanctifying word, but didn’t want to risk stopping the story by asking.

“Them?” he said after a moment, encouraging.

Fraser’s shoulders moved in a shrug. “Perhaps,” he said. “Only all of a sudden, I felt afraid. Nay—worse than afraid. A terrible fear came upon me, and then I heard it. ThenI heard it,” he repeated, for emphasis. “I was afraid before I heard it—them.”

What he had heard was the sound of hooves and voices, half-swallowed by the moaning wind.

“Was it some years before, I should ha’ thought it was the Watch,” he said. “But there wasna any such thing after Culloden. My next thought was that it was English soldiers—but I couldna hear any words in English, and usually I’d hear them easily at a distance. English sounds different, ken, than the Gаidhlig, even when ye di

“I would suppose it does,” Grey murmured.

“The other thing,” Fraser went on, as though Grey hadn’t spoken, “was that I couldna tell which direction the sound came from. And I should have. The wind was strong but steady, from the northwest. And yet the sounds came sometimes out o’ the wind but just as often from the south or the east. And then they would disappear, and then come back.”

By this time he had been standing, hovering near the body of the slain deer, wondering whether to run and, if so, which way?

“And then I heard a woman scream. She … ah.” Fraser’s voice sounded a little odd, suddenly careful. Why? Grey wondered. “It … wasna a scream of fear, or even anger. It … ehm … well, it was the way a woman will scream, sometimes, if she’s … pleased.”

“In bed, you mean.” It wasn’t a question. “So do men. Sometimes.”

You idiot! Of all the things you might have said …

He would have berated himself further for having brought back the echo of his unfortunate remark in the stable at Helwater, that injudicious—that criminally stupid remark—

But Fraser merely made a deep “mmphm” sound in his throat, seeming to acknowledge Grey’s present remark at face value.

“I thought for an instant, perhaps, rape … but there were nay English soldiers in the district—”

“Scots do not commit rapine?” A

“Not often,” Fraser said briefly. “Not Highlanders. But as I say, it didna sound like that. And then I heard other noises—screeching and skellochs, and the screaming of horses, aye, but not the noise of battle. More like folk who are roaring drunk—and the horses, too. And it was coming closer to me.”

It was the notion of drunken horses that at this point had put the vision of the Wild Hunt into Jamie’s mind. It was not a common tale of the Highlands, but he had heard such stories. And heard more, from other mercenaries, when he’d fought in France as a young man.

“The queen, they said, rides a great white horse, white as moonlight,” he said quietly. “Shining in the dark.”

Jamie had spent enough time on the moors and in the high crags to know how much lay hidden in the land, how many ghosts and spirits lingered there, how much unknown to man—and the thought of supernatural creatures was not foreign to him at all. Once the thought of the Wild Hunt had come to him, he spared not a moment in leaving the deer’s carcass, as fast as he could go.

“I thought they smelled the blood, ken,” he explained. “I’d not said the rightful prayer to bless it. They’d think it was their lawful prey.”

The matter-of-fact tone of this statement made the small hairs prickle on John’s nape.

“I see,” he said, rather faintly. He saw all too well, in his mind’s eye: a helter-skelter rush of the unearthly, horses’ coats and faerie faces glowing with a spectral light, spilling down out of the dark, screaming like the wind, howling for blood. The shrieking of the lust-crazed frogs now struck him differently; he heard the blind hunger in it.

“Sidhe,”Fraser said softly. Sheee, the word sounded like, to Grey; much like the sigh of the wind.

“It’s the same word, in the Gаidhligand the Gaeilge. It means the creatures of the other world. But sometimes when they come forth out o’ the stony duns where they live—they di

He had run for a nearby burn, out of some half-heard, half-recollected notion that the sidhecould not cross ru

“Ye di

“Do they kill people?”

Fraser shook his head.

“They take people,” he corrected. “Lure them. Take them back into the rocks, down to their ain world. Sometimes”—he cleared his throat—“sometimes, the stolen ones come back. But they come back two hundred years later. And all—all they knew and loved—are dead.”

“How terrible,” John said quietly. He could hear Fraser’s breathing, heavy, like a man struggling against tears, and wondered why this aspect of the tale should move him so.

Fraser cleared his throat again, explosively.

“Aye, well,” he said, voice steady once more. “So I spent the rest o’ the night in the burn and nearly froze to death. If it hadna been near dawn when I went in, I shouldna have come out again. I could barely move when I did, and had to wait for the sun to rise high enough to warm me, before I could make my way back to where I’d left my deer.”

“Was it still there?” Grey asked with interest. “As you’d left it?”

“Most of it was. Something—someone,” he corrected himself, “had gralloched it neat as a tailor’s seam and taken away the head and the entrails and one of the haunches.”

“The huntsman’s share,” Grey murmured under his breath, but Fraser heard him.

“Aye.”

“And were there tracks around it? Other than your own, I mean.”

“There were not,” Fraser said, the words clipped and precise. And he would know, Grey thought. Anyone who could hunt a deer like that could certainly discern the traces. Despite Grey’s attempt at logic, a brief shiver went over him, visualizing the headless carcass, clean and butchered, the blood-soaked ground left trackless in the mist of dawn, save for the deep-gouged prints of the fleeing deer and the man who had felled it.

“Did you—take the rest?”

Fraser raised one shoulder and let it fall.

“I couldna leave it,” he said simply. “I had a family to feed.”

They walked on then in silence, each alone with his thoughts.

THE MOON HAD BEGUN to sink before they reached Glastuig, and exertion had calmed Grey’s rush of spirits somewhat. These revived abruptly, though, when they found the gate shut but not locked and, passing through, saw a glimmer of light on the distant lawn. It was coming from one of the windows on the right.

“Do you know which room that is?” he murmured to Jamie, nodding toward the lighted window.

“Aye, it’s the library,” Fraser replied, equally low-voiced. “What do ye want to do?”

Grey took a deep breath, considering. Then touched Jamie’s elbow, inclining his head toward the house.

“We’ll go in. Come with me.”

They approached the house cautiously, skirting the lawn and keeping to the shrubberies, but there was no sign of any servants or watchmen being on the premises. At one point, Fraser lifted his head and sniffed the air, taking two or three deep breaths before gesturing toward an outbuilding and whispering, “The stable is that way. The horses are gone.”