Elspaith had been twenty-seven when she died. Horribly young. The same age as Cam. But that wasn’t what had trapped his attention.
‘You’re thinking about the date,’ Lachlan said quietly.
Cam exhaled slowly. ‘When did you say you…?’
‘1712. That’s the year I traded places with the loch monster. The witch.’
It was a good number of years apart. But the coincidence of it felt like far more than just chance.
‘There are no other witches in the Highlands,’ Cam murmured to himself.
Lachlan’s palm ghosted over his fingers where they held down the page. ‘I’m sure it has already crossed both of our minds. That the man who cursed me might have been an ancestor of yours.’
Cam flinched back. The book remained accusingly open in front of him.
‘It was certainly a man. Or appeared to be,’ Lachlan continued. He regarded Cam calmly, with neither anger nor accusation in his tone. ‘The witch I met.’
Cam stared at the family tree looming over him. It was a hideous implication, yet Lachlan was right—it had already crossed his mind. He’d never met a witch from another family, but he’d grown up hearing that all witches were fiercely territorial. In an age of internet and smartphones he didn’t quite see why they should need to be: wouldn’t it be better to communicate with each other? Share the knowledge? Cam didn’t feel as territorial as he supposedly should.
He wondered what witch relations were like three hundred years ago. Could a solitary witch trespass outside of their domain without detection? What if one had… and Elspaith had run into them?
Lachlan gently interrupted his train of thought. ‘What about the names around Elspaith? Is that a brother?’
‘Yes. Twin brother, but he wasn’t a witch.’ Cam stood up, stretching to point under Elspaith’s name. ‘Witch Incumbent. We use that to denote who holds magic within the family. It doesn’t pass to everyone. Her brother’s name was…’ He squinted closer. ‘… Bróccin. I don’t think we know much about him at all. He doesn’t even have a date of death here.’
He followed the other lines connecting to Elspaith’s. ‘It looks like she had a cousin in the trade around that time. We could start there.’
Lachlan glanced at the crowded bookshelf. ‘Will they be in there?’
Cam nodded and grabbed a stool to reach the highest shelf. He donned a pair of white cotton gloves first. The first five or so generations of Walkers were crammed into one ancient ledger, which had been compiled by one of Elspaith’s children from the loose written scraps passed around the family. It contained copies of notes, daily journals, and even mundane local gossip that each Incumbent Walker had apparently found important enough to record.
Cam handled its cracking leather cover delicately as he lifted it down. Some of the pages were so thin they’d become translucent. He nodded to the red book in front of Lachlan. ‘Do you want to keep looking through that, and I’ll check this one?’
‘Good idea.’
They got comfy in their respective seats, exchanged companionable glances, and began to read.
* * *
The afternoon was beginning to wane when Cam finally stood to stretch out his back. Meredith had appeared briefly with a delivery of tea, and by her thunderous expression he’d gauged that she was having no luck getting hold of Bryce.
Lachlan was near the end of the red notebook, diligently becoming acquainted with the long, long list of Scorch deaths recorded there. Cam didn’t feel that he’d added to his own knowledge in any significant way. He’d read through all of Elspaith’s notes in the ledger, which had shed little light on how or why she died.
Despite having been written by one of her children, there was little information that had come directly from Elspaith herself. Much of what they’d transcribed were recollections of her oral teachings: the medicinal lore of various plants associated with pregnancy and childbirth.
There were just two pages with notes copied from Elspaith’s hand. One was a long list of mothers and children she’d attended, some with causes of death attached. The other was a strange mishmash of comments, often in an undecipherable shorthand. Not helped by the fact that it was also in an archaic form of Gaelic.
As for Elspaith’s cousin, all Cam had really learned about him was his name: Hendrie. This Walker Witch Incumbent was older than Elspaith and roamed between the Shetland and Orkney Islands, the two remote archipelagos off the far north coast of Scotland. He appeared to be more literate than Elspaith and had left many more notes about his activities… also in the same old Gaelic that Cam could only recognise odd words from.
He told Lachlan his limited findings anyway. Lachlan nodded along to what he recounted from Elspaith’s section, but then abruptly flipped back to the front of the red book and glanced over at Cam’s ledger. ‘What does she say about fire?’
‘What do you mean?’
Lachlan hummed over his open page. ‘In here it says she wrote about… following the fire? There are lots of question marks over it, and different versions of the same sentences.’
Cam carefully turned back the pages and peered at Elspaith’s crabby handwriting in the ledger, scrunching his nose in frustration. ‘I think I see the word for fire in here. I’m way too rusty on the language, though.’
‘What language is it?’
