Cormac: The Wolf of The Cairngorms

Chapter 1:

He woke to warmth.

Not the warmth of the Highland morning — that came later, grey and thin through the hall’s small windows, carrying the particular cold that the Highlands kept even in its gentler seasons, the kind that found the gaps in stone and wool and reminded you without apology that comfort here was something you built and maintained rather than something the land provided.

That cold was still outside. In here there was fire and skin and the slow heavy warmth of a night that had gone exactly as a night should go.

Cormac mac Fearghus lay still for a moment and let himself come up out of sleep properly.

On his left, Catriona slept with her dark hair spread across the pillow and one arm thrown over her head in the careless way she always slept, deeply and without concern for what she looked like doing it.

On his right, Fiona was curled against his side with the focused determination of someone who had decided that this particular position was where she intended to remain and had committed to it fully.

He could feel the warmth of both of them against his skin and the weight of the night before in his muscles — the good weight, the satisfying heaviness of a body that had been used well and knew it.

He lay still and listened to the hall around him.

The fire had burned down to coals but was still putting out heat — he had built it high enough before they slept that it would hold through the night and into the morning, which was the kind of practical calculation a man made when he had been living in Highland winters his entire life and had learned early that comfort required forethought.

Beyond the fire he could hear the settlement beginning to stir — the first sounds of the morning, distant and muffled through the thick stone walls.

Donnach’s forge was not yet going.

The children were not yet up. It was the very earliest part of the morning, the part that belonged only to the watch and to whatever could not sleep.

He had always been one of the things that could not sleep past a certain hour.

The knock at the hall door was quiet but specific — the knock of someone who knew the door and knew what was likely behind it and had decided that the information he was carrying was worth the discomfort of delivering it.

Cormac was already half-sitting up before the second knock.

“Come,” he said.

The door opened enough to admit a face — young, one of the newer watch members, a boy named Fearchar who was seventeen and took his responsibilities with the seriousness of someone who had not yet learned that seriousness and effectiveness were not always the same thing.

He looked at Cormac and then at the two women and then back at Cormac with the particular fixed focus of someone who had decided that looking only at the Alpha was the correct approach to this situation and was committed to maintaining it.

“The ravens,” Fearchar said.

“The migration is beginning.

First birds on the eastern peak — maybe a dozen, maybe more. Came in before dawn.”

Cormac looked at the window.

The light coming through it was the flat grey of very early morning, the sun not yet properly up, the sky the colour of old pewter.

“Thank you,” he said. “Go.”

Fearchar went. The door closed behind him with the care of someone who had decided that closing it quietly was also part of his responsibilities.

On Cormac’s right Fiona stirred — not fully waking, just shifting, the small movements of someone registering that something had changed in the room without being willing to surface from sleep to find out what.

On his left Catriona was already awake.

She had been awake since the knock, he suspected, because Catriona slept deeply but came up fast — one of the things about her that he had noticed early and that had turned out to be accurate consistently.

Her dark eyes were open and watching him with the particular attention she brought to things she was assessing.

“Ravens,” she said.

“Aye.”

“The migration.”

“Aye.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then:

“You are going to go look at them.”

“Aye.”

She made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite resignation and was something that lived between the two — the sound of a woman who had arrived at a conclusion about the man beside her and found the conclusion more amusing than frustrating.

She stretched, slow and unhurried, the movement pulling the blanket away from her shoulder.

Cormac rose.

He moved without hurry, the way he moved through everything — not slowly, not performing slowness, but with the particular economy of a man for whom every movement was deliberate and nothing was wasted.

He found his leine on the floor where it had ended up and pulled it on.

His plaid next, pinned at the shoulder.

His boots, which he laced standing up without sitting back down to do it, which was the kind of thing a body learned to do when it had been large enough that crouching in small spaces was consistently inconvenient.

Behind him Fiona had surfaced from sleep properly now and was watching him with the warm unfocused look of someone not yet fully certain of the morning.

“Come back to bed,” she said.

Her voice was still thick with sleep, the words carrying the particular weight of someone who had not yet decided to be fully awake and was making a case for remaining horizontal.

“Go back to sleep,” he said.

“Come back first.”

He looked at her.

She looked back at him with the expression of a woman making an argument she knew the outcome of and was making anyway because the making of it was its own pleasure.

“Sleep,” he said. Not unkindly.

Catriona laughed — properly this time, the sound warm and specific in the quiet of the hall.

She said something to Fiona in the low voice she used when she was not speaking for anyone else’s benefit, and Fiona’s expression shifted from persuasive to something considerably more interested and she turned toward Catriona with the focused attention of a woman who had just received a suggestion she found preferable to the original plan.

Cormac pulled open the hall door and went outside.

The cold came for him immediately.

He breathed it in and let it do what it did — the full Highland morning cold, the kind that had teeth, that cleared everything unnecessary from a man’s head in the first three breaths and left only what was actually there.

He had always privately loved this moment.

The step from warmth into cold, the body recalibrating, the morning arriving in full.

Cnoc Fearghus was just beginning to stir around him. Smoke thin from the longhouse hearths — the fires recently rebuilt, not yet going strong. No sound from the forge.

The watch moving their routes at the settlement’s edges, visible as shapes in the grey morning light.

A dog somewhere at the southern end raising one brief complaint and then going quiet.

He looked east.

The peak was visible above the treeline — the settlement sat low enough in the valley that the high ground was always present above it, a reminder of what surrounded them, what they lived inside of. And on the peak, circling in the early light with the unhurried patience of things that had been doing this for centuries and saw no reason to change their approach, the ravens.

More than a dozen. Perhaps twenty.

Moving in the loose spiral of a migration in progress, not the tight circle of birds over something dead, not the erratic scatter of birds disturbed from a roost.

Migration.

The annual movement of them through these mountains, using the peaks as navigation points, pausing briefly and moving on.

He watched them.

Something was not right.

He could not name it. He stood in the cold of the early morning with the settlement beginning to wake around him and watched the ravens circling the eastern peak and tried to name what was wrong with what he was seeing and could not find the words for it.

The pattern was migration. The numbers were migration. The timing was migration.

But something underneath all of that was not.

“They came early this year.”

Fergal.

At his left shoulder, because Fergal was always at his left shoulder, appearing with the particular quiet of a man who had spent eleven years learning to move in the Alpha’s proximity without disrupting whatever the Alpha was doing.

“Aye,” Cormac said.

“Two weeks early, by my count.”

Cormac said nothing.

“That is unusual,” Fergal said, which was Fergal’s way of saying he had noticed the same thing Cormac was noticing and had already decided it was worth noting.

“Aye,” Cormac said.

They stood together in the cold and watched the ravens circle the eastern peak in the grey morning light and neither of them said what they were both thinking, which was that two weeks early was not migration behaviour and the pattern was wrong in a way that neither of them could name and both of them had already filed.

He looked at the ravens for one more moment — twenty of them now, perhaps more, circling in the still air above the peak with the patient certainty of things that knew something the valley below them did not know yet.

Then he turned and went to meet his day.