It was mid-morning, but the brightness of the day was filtered through the ivy that framed the window, entering the room in spangles of colour that shimmered and danced as if inviting her to join them. She sat up, jolted back to her senses. She was in a stranger’s fortress, in a part of the country so unknown and wild, it might have been a foreign land. The name Teviotdale came with the ring of swords and war cries. This fertile, gentle shire, twinned with its bleak and fearsome neighbour Liddesdale, was well known as the crucible of the Borders, a place where trouble bubbled and brewed as if on a bed of coals. After their initial assault, the clansmen had been, she admitted, unexpectedly civil and even kindly, but as Benoit had often told her, subterfuge and deception were a Borderer’s prime arts. For all she knew, she and her companions were being held prisoner. No-one would ever know where they had gone. She recalled the story of a madwoman found wandering the streets of Leith, claiming that day to have found her way back, after an abduction twenty years before, by an apothecary who had needed a living creature on whom to experiment.
