Epilogue
They rode north through the middle of the day, when the autumn light was at its fullest and most honest, laying itself across the hills without flattery or shadow.
The track they followed was little more than a suggestion pressed into the heather by years of use, wide enough for one horse comfortably and two only if both riders were willing to let the bracken brush their legs on either side.
Lucas and the others had taken the broader road to the east, which would rejoin their route before nightfall, leaving Merith and Locke to a quieter path that wound through a shallow valley between two long ridges before climbing toward the higher ground to the north.
Merith’s horse, a steady grey mare that one of the Society’s men had produced from somewhere, moved at a comfortable walk that required very little of her attention, which left her free to watch the landscape unfold and think, which she had been doing in varying degrees of intensity for most of the past several days.
She was not unhappy.
The realization arrived with a quietness that surprised her, because she had expected it to feel more complicated than it did.
There was grief in her still from the years behind her that would not be returned simply because the man responsible had been brought to account.
There was uncertainty too, the unglamorous variety that attached itself to questions like where will we live and what happens next and what does a woman do when the life she was raised toward has been replaced by something she did not anticipate and cannot entirely map.
These things were real and would need attending to in their own time.
But underneath them was something she had not felt in years. Possibly ever.
She was free. She had chosen this.
Both of those things were true simultaneously, and the combination of them was so unfamiliar that she kept returning to it not because it hurt but because the space was interesting and entirely her own.
Locke rode beside her on a dark bay horse that suited him in some way she could not have articulated precisely.
He had been quiet since the moorland road where they had left Shona, a thoughtful rather than withdrawn quiet. He wore a heavy wool coat the color of dark moss and a plain linen shirt beneath it, and his dark auburn hair moved in the wind with the same disregard for order it always had.
She watched him from the corner of her eye and waited.
She had learned, in the past days, that Locke arrived at things in his own time and that pressing him generally produced deflection rather than disclosure.
What produced genuine honesty was simply remaining present and undemanding until the silence became comfortable enough that filling it stopped feeling like a risk.
It took another mile or so. The valley floor spread out beside them, the hills rising on either side in long sweeping lines of amber and brown and the deep reddish-purple of the heather.
A pair of red grouse broke from the bracken ahead of them with an explosive clatter of wings that made both horses flinch briefly before settling.
“I grew up near Inverness,” Locke said. “In the loosest possible sense of growing up.”
Merith said nothing, which was the correct response.
He looked ahead down the track. “My father was a tinker. Traveled with the season, mended what people brought him, moved on. He wasnae a bad man, I dinnae think, so much as a man who had decided that staying in one place was a kind of death, and so he kept moving and left everyone behind who couldnae keep pace. My mother couldnae keep pace. I was aboot four when he went for the last time. I dinnae remember him clearly enough tae have an opinion aboot him.”
“And yer mother?” Merith asked carefully.
“She managed for a while,” he replied. “She was clever and she wasnae afraid of work, and we had the use of a room above a tanner’s workshop that smelled remarkable in the summer.
She took in mending… did laundry. Whatever was needed.
But Inverness is nae a kind city tae a woman on her own with a bairn, and by the time I was seven she had found a man who offered tae take her in, and he made it plain that he was offering tae take her in and not me. ”
He said it without particular bitterness, with the evenness of someone who has had a long time to arrive at something resembling acceptance.
“She was sorry,” he added. “I believe that. But she went.”
The burn beside the track turned and widened briefly, catching the light in a way that scattered it across the stones in fragments. Merith watched it without speaking because she understood that this was not a place that required consolation. It required only listening.
“I was on my own after that,” Locke continued.
“In the city at first. Then on the road, which turned out tae suit me considerably better than the city. Ye learn things on the road. How tae read people quickly. How tae be whatever a situation requires. How tae take what ye need without leaving enough of a trace that anyone comes after ye.” He glanced at her briefly.
“The quick hands were nae a natural gift. They were a survival skill.”
“How old were ye when ye first stole something?” she asked.
He considered this. “Eight. A loaf of bread from a baker’s stall in the market at Beauly.
The baker saw me and I ran for aboot a mile and a half before I was certain he wasnae following.
” A genuine smile crossed his face at the memory.
“I ate the whole thing behind a wall near the river. It was the best bread I have ever tasted in my life.”
“Because ye were hungry,” Merith said.
“And because I earned it.” He paused. “So both I suppose.”
Merith thought about that. She thought about the boy behind the wall eating stolen bread. Then, she thought about the man riding beside her now, and she found that she could see the line between the two of them more clearly than she had expected.
“When did ye find the Society?” she asked.
“They found me, more or less.” He shifted in the saddle, adjusting his weight as the track began its first gentle climb toward the higher ground.
“I was nineteen. I had been making a living in various inadvisable ways for the better part of a decade, and I had developed a particular interest in the houses of wealthy men who had acquired their wealth through means that didnae bear close examination.”
Merith nodded along as she listened, leaning back in her saddle slightly.
“I had a theory that such men tended tae keep interesting documents, and that interesting documents occasionally had value tae the right people,” he said.
“Lucas found me in the process of leaving a magistrate’s house in Perth with a set of correspondence that would have been verra embarrassing tae the magistrate had it become public, and rather than turn me in he offered me a drink and explained that there were people who did what I did with considerably more purpose and considerably better results. ”
“And that was enough tae convince ye?”
“The drink was good,” he said. “And Lucas has a persuasive manner when he chooses tae use it.”
Something in his expression settled into something more serious.
“And the work mattered,” he went on. “That was the part I hadnae had before. Stealing tae eat is a necessity. Stealing tae survive is a habit. But taking something from a man who has used it tae ruin people who had nae defense against him, and using it tae expose him… that was something different.” He looked at the hills ahead. “That felt like it meant something.”
“It does mean something,” Merith said.
He glanced at her. “Aye. It took me longer than it should have tae stop waiting for that tae be taken away as well.”
The track crested a small rise and the view opened ahead of them with the sudden, breathtaking generosity that Highland landscapes produce without warning.
A wide glen spread below, its floor covered in the deep gold of dying grass, a loch at its center reflecting the sky in a mirror of still grey water, and beyond it the hills climbing in long waves to a horizon that seemed to extend forever.
The autumn colors ran across the whole of it in every shade between amber and rust and the dark green of the pine stands that clung to the lower slopes. The afternoon light lay across everything with the warm slant of a sun that was already thinking about setting.
Merith pulled her horse to a stop without thinking about it, because some views required stopping.
Locke halted beside her. For a few seconds, they simply looked.
“I have lived in the Highlands my entire life,” she said finally, “and it still does this tae me.”
“Does what?” he asked.
She gestured, inadequately, at the glen below. “Makes everything else feel very small and very temporary.”
“Aye.” He was quiet for a moment. “That is either deeply comforting or deeply alarming, depending on the day.”
“Which is it today?”
He considered this with apparent seriousness, looking out over the glen with the wind pressing against his coat and the last of the afternoon light catching the auburn in his hair.
“Comforting,” he said. “Today it’s comforting.”
She looked at him rather than the view. She looked at him the way she had been learning to do in the past days, and she thought about everything that had happened and all he’d come to mean to her.
Later that evening deep in the Black Ledger’s refuge, Merith sat beside the hearth and watched the embers.
She heard Locke settle on the bench beside her. Close enough that she could feel the warmth of him, the particular steadiness of his presence that she had spent days alternately resenting and relying on without admitting to either.
“I have been thinking,” she said.
“That sounds ominous.”