Page 11 of Fierce Highland Guardian

He lifted his hand to my face. Slow. Cold knuckles against a colder cheek, a question in the motion, everything in him held still and waiting to see if I’d pull away.

I have pulled away my whole life. It’s the one thing I’m good at.

I didn’t pull away.

I stood on that headland with the dawn coming up and a dragon’s warmth still on my skin and I let myself, for one second, want the thing I wanted—and then, down the single track that climbs up to the castle, an engine.

Then a second engine.

Headlights raked across the gatehouse, white and wrong in all that new gold, two sets of them grinding up the road that had no reason to hold anyone at this hour but us.

Craig went still. The kind of stillness that goes all the way to the bone, the way a thing goes when the predator turns out to be something even it should fear.

“Locke,” he said.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Man With the Notebook – Craig

IputFionabehindme and went up through the vault to meet them, and the man at the front of the torchlight was one I’d hoped three hundred years would have buried.

Older. The same. Time had thinned his hair and left the rest—the good coat, the soft hands, the reading glasses pushed up, the leather notebook held to his chest like a hymnal. He’d worn that same untroubled face on a fine afternoon a lifetime ago, asking a fisherman questions about lights on the water.

But I knew him from longer back than that, and the knowing came up through me cold. Not the man — themakeof him. I had met his kind before, once, in a ring of standing stones, and I carry what they did the way you carry a bad-set bone. They had come with kind faces then too, my brothers-in-arms and a woman I’d loved, and they’d let me show them the whole of what I was, and they had smiled the entire time they laid the iron in the ground. When the chains took my wings I’d looked into a face I trusted and watched the smile she’d worn saying she loved me stay fixed exactly as it was while she drew the links tight. The Iron Order, they’d called themselves even then. Men who’ddecided that a wonder was only an inventory they hadn’t taken yet. I’d broken those particular chains, in the end, and it had cost me more than I’ll set down. But the make of the man never dies out. It just learns to wait, and adjust, and comes back with better tools.

“Mr. Mac an Dràgha.” He said my name the way you’d greet a colleague across a hall. “Or is it simply Craig now? Surnames are such recent inventions. You’d remember.”

Behind him, five of them. A hard-faced man with a soldier’s stillness and a tin of mints turning in one hand—Reeve, I’d learn. Three more with lamps and a wheeled thing that pinged at the rock. And salt. I smelled the salt before I saw the sacks of it, and cold iron, and old ink, and my blood froze like winter.

“You’ve learned since last we spoke,” I said.

“I’ve done little else.” He looked past me, down toward the chamber, and his eyes changed into the hunger of a man taking inventory. “Forty years of reading. Do you know how few primary sources survive on binding a guardian to its stone? I had to reconstruct most of it. Your kind were not in the habit of writing things down.” He gave a small, pleased breath. “This is the fourth ward I’ve walked into, you understand. There were others before you, other keepers, other stones. You’re simply the last still holding one. I do like to be thorough at the end of a long project.”

The fourth.Three of my kind’s anchors already broken, then, somewhere out in the dark of the world, and I too buried in my own grief to have felt them go. The long campaign of it opened under me like a pit.

“We had our reasons for the secrecy,” I said. “You’re standing in one of them.”

“You did.” He turned the silver ring on his hand. “Chiefly the one behind you, I imagine.”

I kept my eyes off her. I kept every scrap of me between his people and the stair.

“She’s nothing. A surveyor. She wandered in.”

“Mm.” Locke opened the notebook, unhurried, licked a thumb, turned to a marked page, and held it up into the torchlight so I could see. “Then this is a remarkable coincidence.”

Paper. Ordinary printed paper, a plot of readings, a grid of the coast—and under the castle, marked in red where the density fell away to nothing, a void. Coordinates beside it. A name and a date in the header, small and clear.

Vale, F.Uploaded to an open university archive, the report said. Available to anyone who thought to look.

Something let go at the root of me—the way a mooring lets go, holding one moment and simply gone the next, the whole of me swinging loose on a cold tide.

I placed that survey. I’d stood over her shoulder in spirit the night she flagged it—the anomaly, the void, the deep place her instruments found and mine had hidden for three centuries. She’d sent it out into the world before she’d ever seen my face. Before the wall. Before the sky. She’d drawn Locke a map to my door and posted it where any grave robber with a login could take it down.

The old cold closed over me. I’d felt it once before, exactly this, standing in a ring of stones with iron coming up through the earth and a kind face watching me not understand.

The ones who see you are the ones who use the seeing as the blade.

I’d carried it for three hundred years. I’d let one woman and a night in the sky talk me out of the only law that ever kept me breathing.