The bishop watched me go with sadness in his eyes and a benign smile on his face. “Haste ye back, Fergus Scott, and the world will be better when you return.”
I waved to him as I rode, but my mind was fixed elsewhere.
Hugh's widow lived in a small croft about half a mile from Dunkeld, not far from the River Braan and near a waterfall that crashed over a smooth lip to splinter in a hundred million particles of seething water far below. All around, trees dipped their heads in submission. I approached with some hesitancy, wondering exactly what sort of riddled old hag this widow might be.
Unusually in this land of community farming and great swathes of run rig cultivation, the fields were small but well tended, already turned over for the winter, and with dry stone walls marking the bounda
