Chapter 3 What the Cairn Whispered

My brother's coat.

I knelt at that cairn with my hand on the stone and the wind pulling at my hair, and I could not make the words sit still in my head. Mairi was eleven. He had one coat that fit him, a dark blue padded thing with a tear at the elbow that I had mended twice and would have to mend again before the snow. He slept in it when the cottage was cold. He wore it to the village school. He had worn it to the burial and stood at the back of the pack with his hands in the pockets, because I had told him to stay near the back where the adults would not tread on him.

Callum in my brother's coat. It made no sense at all, and the senselessness of it caught me worse than any accusation could have.

"Say it again," I said to the ground. "Slow. Who was in your room?"

The voice did not come at once. When it did it had changed, thinner, as if the wind were going through it. "The one beside you."

"That is not an answer. I have had that answer already."

"He sat with me. He held my hand. He said it would be quick."

I stayed very still. "Who?"

The moon went behind the birches and the cairn went grey, and in the dark under my palm the voice said, quite clearly, "Callum."

Then it said, "No."

Then it said, "Do not make me say it. I have said enough. The girl is listening, and she will carry it to the wrong ear."

I took my hand off the stone as if it had burned me. The wind came round the cairn and the birch tops rattled, and there was no more voice, only the ordinary night, the heather moving, a sheep somewhere down the glen complaining about the dark.

I sat back on my heels and made myself go through it the way I would go through a broken fence. First post, second post, where the strain came from.

The first whisper had come at the burial with the whole pack standing there. The one beside you is not what you think. The second had come when I asked, and it had told me to go home. The third had come just now and named Callum, then taken it back, then refused to say more because the girl was listening. Who was the girl? Me. I was the girl. She had been talking to me and then she had been frightened of me, and that was not the way the dead were supposed to behave.

I have heard the dead maybe a dozen times in my life, always at the edge of sleep, always a fragment. My mother told me once that the gift ran in her line and that it was a thing to keep quiet about, and then she had died before she could tell me anything else about it. The voices I had heard before were thin and far off, like someone calling across a loch. Mhairi's voice was not like that. Mhairi's voice was in the room with me.

And it had lied. Or it had not lied, and it had been made to say a thing it did not want to say. Either way, the whisper was not a witness. That was the first useful thought I had had all night, and I held on to it.

I got up and went round the cairn with my nose down, the way I would track a wounded stag. Cold iron. Wet stone. The dead woman's cloth, faint under the stones, and peat, and the sour green smell of the moss. And there, on the lee side where the wind did not reach, a smell that did not belong to any of it. Something sharp and mineral, like a struck match, and under it a faint trace of silver.

Silver.

I knelt and put my face close to the grass. The smell was strongest by the second stone from the bottom, and when I put my fingers to the join I found a fine grey dust in the moss, the kind you get when someone has been filing a blade and has not swept up after themselves. I did not touch it more than I had to. I wiped my fingers on the heather and sat back.

Someone had been at this cairn before me. Someone had been at it with silver on their hands.

"Isla."

I nearly went over backwards. Rabbie was coming up the path from the birches with a lantern in his hand and his red beard catching the light, and he was alone, and he was not hurrying. He stopped a good ten feet off and held the lantern up so it lit my face.

"You are out late," he said.

"So are you."

"I could not sleep. It is a hard thing, a burial." He looked past me at the cairn, and his voice was gentle, and the gentleness of it made my skin crawl. "I saw a light on the hill and thought it might be the young one wandering. Mairi. He is at the age for wandering."

"Mairi is asleep in the cottage."

"Good. Good." Rabbie came a step closer. "And you are here because?"

I thought about the grey dust in the moss and the voice saying he sat with me and the girl is listening. "I could not sleep either," I said. "She was kind to me when I first came to this estate. I wanted to say a word to her on my own."

"That is decent of you." He set the lantern down on a flat stone, and the light threw his shadow long across the heather. "You know, there is talk in the house already. About the glove. About Callum."

"There is always talk."

"There is. But this talk has a shape to it." He looked at me steadily. "The Alpha is not a well man, Isla. You have seen it. I have seen it. If this pack has to choose between a dying Alpha and a son who cannot say where he was on the night his Luna died, it will not be a long choosing. Somebody sensible needs to be standing at the front of the hall when that happens."

"Somebody sensible," I said. "That would be you."

"I did not say so." He smiled, and it was the easy smile from the burial, warm and open, and I remembered him smiling at the grave with the stones still in his hands. "I am only saying that you are the new keeper of the cairn rites now, and what you say will carry weight. If you were to say the wrong thing, or the right thing, the pack would follow you."

The wind moved through the birches. I looked at the lantern and the grey dust and Rabbie's broad, patient face, and I understood that he had come up this hill to find out what I knew, and that I had to give him something or he would not go down again.

"Callum walked me to the house," I said. "He told me not to come up here alone. That is all I know, Rabbie, and it is not worth a lantern."

"Not worth a lantern," he repeated. Then he picked the lantern up. "Go down and get some sleep, Luna. The Alpha will want to see you in the morning. He has been asking for you since the burial."

I waited until his light was a small yellow dot among the birches. Then I took the last clean corner of my handkerchief and scooped a pinch of the grey dust into it, and I folded it small and put it in my coat pocket, and I went down the hill the long way round so that Rabbie would not hear me on the path.

The kitchen was still warm when I came in. Fiona was sitting at the table with a cup of tea gone cold in front of her and her silver hair loose over her shoulders, and she did not look surprised to see me.

"You went up to her," she said.

"Yes."

"Did she speak to you?"

I stood in the doorway with the dust in my pocket and the cold coming off my coat. "Why do you ask that?"

Fiona pushed the cold tea away and folded her hands. "Because she spoke to me the night she died," she said. "She told me a thing I have not been able to say aloud since. And I think, before this house gets any darker, that you and I need to have a talk about what that cairn is really for."