“Yes, you do remember the first one. But I’m sure it will be easier for you—you’ll do it better.”

Grey lay on Nessie’s bed, wineglass in hand, sipping slowly. He stared up at the soot-stained ceiling, but was seeing instead the gray skies over Culloden. It had been easier—to do, at least, if not to recall.

“You’ll go with Windom’s detail,” Hal had said, handing him a long pistol. “Your job is to give the coup de grâce, if you find any still alive. Through one eye is surest, but behind the ear will answer well enough, if you find you can’t bear the eyes.”

His brother’s face was drawn with strain, white under the smudges of powder smoke; Hal was only twenty-five, but looked twice that, uniform plastered to him with rain and filthy with mud from the field. He gave his orders in a calm, clear voice, but Grey felt his brother’s hand tremble as he gave him the gun.

“Hal,” he said, as his brother turned away.

“Yes?” Hal turned back, patient but empty-eyed.

“You all right, Hal?” he asked, lowering his voice lest anyone nearby hear him.

Hal seemed to be looking somewhere far beyond him; it took a visible effort for him to bring his gaze back from that distant place, to fix it on his younger brother’s face.

“Fine,” he said. The edge of his mouth trembled, as though he wanted to smile in reassurance, but it fell back in exhaustion. He clapped a hand on John’s shoulder and squeezed hard; John felt oddly as though he were providing support to his brother, rather than the other way round.

“Just remember, Johnny—it’s a mercy that you give them. A mercy,” he repeated softly, then dropped his hand and left.

It lacked perhaps two hours ’til sunset when Corporal Windom’s detail set out onto the field, slogging through mud and moor plants that clung and grasped at their boots as they passed. The rain had stopped, but a freezing wind plastered his damp cloak to his body. He remembered the mixture of dread and excitement in his belly, superseded by the numbness of his fingers and his fear that he would not be able to prime the pistol again, if he had to use it more than once.

As it was, he had no need to use it at all for some time; all the men they came across were clearly dead. Nearly all Scots, though here and there a red coat burned like flame among the dull moor plants. The fallen of the English were taken away with respect, on stretchers. The enemy were thrown in heaps, the soldiers blue-fingered and mumbling curses in puffs of white breath as they dragged the bodies like so many felled logs, naked limbs like pale branches, stiff and awkward in the handling. He was not sure if he should help with this work, but no one seemed to expect him to; he trailed after the soldiers, gun in hand, growing colder by the moment.