A family, all with golden red hair, emerged from a house that looked precariously close to the cliff edge.
“Donnan!” called a lass from the family, waving.
“Who’s that?” asked Kaetha.
“It’s Elspet Moray. I sometimes help out on her father’s boat.”
“She seems to like you.” Kaetha smiled at Donnan’s discomfort at this comment. The family came over to greet them.
“I suppose you’re Aedan’s daughter?” said the mother, smiling.
“Kaetha, this is Jean Moray,” said Donnan.
“I’m glad our old friend has returned and even more glad to welcome you to Braddon, lass.”
“Heavens, you look like him,” said a balding man with a tanned face and multitudes of freckles.
“In a feminine way you mean though, Pa.” A tall lad caught Kaetha’s eye.
“This is my son, Rorie,” said Jean, a smile pulling at a corner of her mouth. Kaetha blinked to stop herself staring at Rorie’s broad shoulders, his large eyes which were like the sea. “And the twins, Elspet and Cailean. They’re about your age, almost.”
“Nannie told us you used feverease to help Donnan,” said Elspet, who had leapt towards them, putting Kaetha to mind of a spring lamb. “You must be clever with herbs like Cailean. He learns healing with Nannie, that is, she teaches him. Maybe you’d like to learn with him?”
“And do you like making potions too?” asked Kaetha.
“I prefer to be on the boat with Pa, out fishing. But Ma makes me stay behind often enough.”
Jean Moray rolled her eyes. “Well, now you’ve chattered our new friend’s ears right off, I think it’s time we got down to Cannasay. Thane Macomrag’s not called a gathering like this in years.” Elspet’s twin, Cailean, was clearly more reserved than his sister, saying nothing and mostly looking at his feet.
“Have you been to Cannasay yet, Kaetha?”
She felt herself blush, surprised to hear Rorie addressing her. “No,” she croaked, her throat dry all of a sudden.
“You should see the cairn on the cliff. They say it’s hundreds of years old.”
“I was just taking her,” said Donnan. Rorie shrugged and followed his family as they disappeared down the path to the beach. “It’s an Edonian battle cairn,” said Donnan, resuming his tour, “from the days when they ruled here.”
“My mother was Edonian,” she said, wondering how Donnan would respond to that. So many in Feodail had viewed Morwena and Gwyn’s heritage with suspicion, even hatred.
“Really?” his eyes widened with interest. “There’s some Edonian blood in a number of families around here, though some feel the need to hide the fact. It’s wrong that they should.”
They reached the cairn, hundreds upon hundreds of stones, forming a smooth mound. Before it, facing out to sea, was a standing stone the height of a man, which soared upwards like a jagged tooth.
“It’s a battle cairn, you said?”
“Aye,” said Donnan. “Before a battle, every warrior of the army placed a stone here and each survivor took one away. I sometimes think about how brave those men and women must have been.”
“Brave and scared,” she said.
“Scared?” said Donnan.
“I don’t think it’s possible to be brave if you’re not scared in the first place.”
He squinted, then looked away from her, out to sea.
Kaetha rested her hand on one of the stones. Each one represented a person lost to battle and many more who grieved for them.
“That’s because they stopped here on their way to the battlefield,” came the voice of someone who sounded as though they knew everything.
Donnan froze and Kaetha saw the angered set of his jaw, his hands tightening into fists. She walked around the cairn to see a boy, little older than herself, with coarse sandy hair and a fuzz of soft hair above his lip, leaning against the standing stone, surrounded by other young people, perhaps offspring of lairds, judging by their fine clothes. “And here, you see,” he pointed high up on the stone, “read that. It says ‘Macomrag’. They wouldn’t have immortalised the losing side, so it’s right there in stone – Macomrags have been warriors and victors for hundreds of years.”
“Son of an arsewit,” Kaetha muttered under her breath. “It doesn’t say ‘Macomrag’.” The memory of people fallen in battle shouldn’t be slighted by such mistakes, particularly not by some arrogant boy with no regard for the truth.
“And what would a fisherman’s daughter – or whatever you are – know about it?” the boy sneered.
“I know that the standing stone is hundreds of years old.”
“Obviously.”
She walked up to it, looking closely at the faded images in the rock. “These symbols – the circle within a star, the leaping fish – they’re Edonian. This is an Edonian battle cairn. Macomrags are Dalrathan aren’t they?”
“Of course Macomrags are Dalrathan.” He looked as though she’d spat in his face.
“Kaetha, let’s go,” said Donnan. There was a hardness in his voice and she noticed the cold look he shot at the boy.
“The pictures may be like Edonian ones,” said the stranger, “but Edonians are a race of boggin eejits. They don’t know how to write. It’s a Dalrathan monument,” he asserted.
Walking around the stone, two carved symbols caught her eye. Tracing her fingers over the shapes of a long-necked bird and a flower with pointed petals, she thought of her old guardians’ Edonian tattoos. The idea that their family – her family – could be connected to this monument, rooted in the history of the land she now walked on, sent a thrill through her. However, below the images was a word, its edges eroded, lines interrupted by patches of lichen but it clearly spelled ‘Tarlan’. Tarlan, not Trylenn, she thought. Someone else’s family. Someone else’s roots.
“But the letters could have been engraved by Dalrathans at a later time,”
