Read Chapter 10: The Vanished Shepherd

The morning after her discovery in the accounts room, Iona woke with the names burning in her mind. D. MacAllister. Regular payments. A letter G scratched in the margin like a brand. She had copied the figures onto a scrap of paper now folded tight against her breast, and she could feel it there, a tiny weight pressing over her heart as she dressed.

Elspeth was nowhere to be seen at breakfast—a small mercy—and the servants moved about the hall in that tight-lipped way they had adopted since Iona's arrival, as if the very walls were listening. She ate her porridge standing at the window, watching the morning mist crawl down the slopes of Ben Vrackie, and thought of her mother.

Morag had refused to say more than the official story. The village was a sealed drum of old loyalties. But there was one name Iona had not yet tried, one thread her mother had spoken of in whispers when she thought no one was listening.

Tam. Old Tam the shepherd, who had walked the high pastures beside her mother's own flock before the MacTavish marriage. Tam, who had vanished in the chaos of the '45 and never been heard from again.

Iona had been a child then, but she remembered his hands—leather and gnarled, gentler than her father's. He had taught her to read the sky for weather, to find a ewe's lamb before the crows did. When he disappeared, her mother had wept in private, and no one had ever spoken his name aloud again.

She left the castle by the kitchen door, pulling a shawl over her shoulders against the damp. The village of Braemore sat a quarter mile down the track, a huddle of stone roofs and smoke columns. She had walked it twice before, always with a maid. Today she walked alone, her boots sucking at the mud, and the freedom of it made her breath come faster.

The village knew her now. The Campbell bride. They looked at her sideways, some touching their caps, others turning away too quickly. She made her way to the smithy first, where a broad man named Angus was working a shoe over the fire.

"Tam the shepherd," she said, keeping her voice light. "An old man who used to work for my mother's family. He would be near seventy now. I thought perhaps he had kin here."

Angus did not look up from his hammer. "Tam MacKinnon? Aye, he was a MacTavish man, not a Campbell one. Went off to France after the raid, I heard. Got a letter from him once, years back. Said he was tending sheep in the Loire Valley."

France. The word landed like a stone. Iona had hoped, perhaps foolishly, that the old shepherd had simply moved to another glen, another life. France might as well have been the moon.

"The Loire," she repeated. "That is far."

"Aye." Angus finally looked at her, his face unreadable. "War and ruin scatter a man, my lady. Your own father will have told you that."

My father has told me nothing, she thought, but she thanked him and moved on.

She tried the baker, the weaver, the man who kept the ferry at the river bend. Each gave her the same story with small variations. France. Gone. A letter, perhaps. Some said he had died there, a fever in the south. Others said he had married a Frenchwoman and grown fat on wine. The consistency of it should have satisfied her. It did not.

She was turning back toward the castle, frustrated and cold, when a voice called out from the doorway of the Crooked Stag inn.

"You're the MacTavish lass, aren't you? The one who married the Campbell boy."

Iona stopped. A woman stood in the doorway, arms folded, a stained apron tied over her dress. Her face was weathered but sharp-eyed, and she looked at Iona the way one might look at a stray dog—curious, wary, but not unkind.

"I am Iona Campbell," Iona said. "MacTavish by birth."

"Aye, I know." The woman beckoned her inside. "Name's Bess. I keep this place. You've been asking about old Tam."

The inn was dark and smelled of peat smoke and stale ale. Bess gestured to a stool by the fire and poured two cups of something hot from a kettle. Iona sat, grateful for the warmth.

"You've heard the France story too, I take it," Bess said.

"From everyone."

"Everyone except the ones who know better." Bess sat opposite her, the cup cradled in her hands. "I've been keeping this inn for thirty years, my lady. I see letters go out and come in. I see who visits who, and when. Tam MacKinnon never went to France. He went to Bendarroch."

Iona's heart stuttered. "Bendarroch. That is—"

"Eight miles west, a wee village no one pays mind to. He lives there under a different name. Jamie, he calls himself now. Jamie Ross." Bess took a long drink of her ale. "He comes here twice a year to sell wool to the traders. He works the same hills he always did, only on the other side of the ridge. Not a soul who doesn't need to know has been told. I'm telling you because your mother was good to me, and because I saw the way you looked at Angus when he gave you the France story. You've got the same stubborn set to your jaw she had."

Iona's throat tightened. "My mother."

"Meg MacTavish was a fine woman. She helped me when my first husband died, gave me coin to keep this place. I never forgot it." Bess set her cup down. "If you want to find Tam, you'll find him. He's got a cottage at the north end of Bendarroch, beyond the mill. White door, blue shutters. He answers to Jamie now, and he'll not thank you for the old name. But if you're looking for the truth about the rain that fell that night, he's the only man left who saw it up close."

Iona's hands were trembling. She set her cup down carefully. "How do you know what he saw?"

Bess's eyes were old and flat, seeing something far away. "Because he told me, girl. One night when he'd had too much ale and thought he was alone. He said he watched a man in Campbell tartan fire the first shot of the raid, and that man wasn't on the Campbell side of the glen. He was standing among the MacTavish cattle, too close to the fray to be a bystander. Tam saw his face, but he were too close to the MacTavish side himself to speak out without getting both families after him. So he ran. He's been running ever since."

Iona sat very still. The fire crackled. Somewhere in the rafters, a bird rustled.

"A man in Campbell tartan," she said slowly. "Setting fire to the raid that started the feud."

"That's what he said. I never asked more." Bess leaned forward. "Now, I'll tell you one more thing, and then you can decide what to do with it. That man—the one Tam saw—he didn't move like a common thief. He moved like a soldier. Like someone who knew the glen, someone who had a reason to see the MacTavish and Campbell names at each other's throats. And Tam said he'd seen that man's face before, in the great hall at Braemore, years before the raid."

Braemore. The word hit Iona like a slap. The great hall. A soldier. A man who had walked these floors before the raid, before the feud, before her own mother married a MacTavish and died of a fever that no one quite believed in.

"Is Tam still willing to talk?" Iona asked.

Bess shrugged. "He's an old man with a guilty conscience and a bottle of whisky. If you go to him with the right questions, he'll likely tell you everything he's buried for thirty years. But you'll have to go careful. He's scared. There's a reason he's been Jamie Ross for all this time. He's been waiting for someone to ask." She stood, gathering the cups. "You're that someone, my lady. Maybe the only one who'll ever come."

Iona rose, her legs unsteady. She thought of Lachlan, riding the border lands somewhere to the north, unaware that his new bride was digging toward the heart of his family's oldest lie. She thought of the brooch hidden in her valise, the letter she had never been able to bring herself to read. She thought of Elspeth's warning, sharp as a blade: *buried truths could destroy you.*

But she also thought of Tam's hands, teaching her to find lambs in the mist, and of her mother's quiet tears, and of the word *France* repeated like a prayer to keep the truth buried.

"Thank you," she said to Bess. "If anyone asks, I was here for a drink and left."

"Course you did." Bess smiled a thin smile. "And if you find what you're looking for, you'll come back and tell me. A woman likes to know her secrets weren't wasted."

Iona stepped out into the cold air, her head spinning. Bendarroch. Eight miles west. A white door with blue shutters. A man named Jamie who had once been Tam, who had seen a soldier in Campbell tartan fire the first shot of the war that had defined her life.

She would need a horse. She would need to slip away without Elspeth noticing. And she would need to decide whether she was brave enough to learn what her own father had known—and what he had hidden.

As she walked back up the track toward the castle, the mist parted briefly, and she saw the high hills beyond Bendarroch, dark and patient, waiting for her.