Daylight blinded him as he unzipped the outer shell and crawled on to the hill. There had been rain during the night, but already the wind had dried the grass. He sat in it, barefoot, pulling on his socks, and screwing up his eyes against the glare of sunlight on the ocean, a burned-out ring of luminescence that flared briefly before the gap in the clouds above it closed, like turning off a light switch. He sat, knees pulled up to his chest, forearms resting on top of them, and breathed the salt air, and smelled peat smoke and damp earth. The wind tugging at his short, fair curls stung his face and sent a wonderful sense surging through him of simply being alive.

He looked back over his left shoulder and saw the ruins of his parents’ crofthouse, an old whitehouse, and beyond it the remains of the blackhouse where his forebears had lived for centuries, and where he had played as a child, happy and secure, never once imagining what life might hold in store for him.

Above that the road wound down the hill through the strung-out collection of disparate dwellings that made up the village of Crobost. Red tin roofs on old loom sheds, houses whitewashed or pink-harled, irregular fenceposts, tufts of wool snagged on barbed wire fluttering in the wind. The narrow strips of land known as crofts ran down the slope towards the cliffs, some cultivated to raise basic crops, grains and root vegetables, others supporting nothing but sheep. The discarded technology of distant decades, rusted tractors and broken harvesters, littered overgrown plots, the rotting symbols of a once hoped-for prosperity.

Beyond the curve of the hill, Fin could see the dark roof of Crobost Church dominating both the skyline and the people over whose lives its shadow fell. Someone had hung out washing at the manse, and white sheets flapped furiously in the wind like demented semaphore flags urging praise and fear of God in equal measures.

Fin loathed the church and all it stood for. But there was comfort in its familiarity. This, after all, was home. And he felt his spirits lifted.

He heard his name carried on the wind as he pulled on his boots, and he turned, scrambling to his feet, to see a young man standing by his car where he had abandoned it at the gate of the crofthouse the night before. He set off, wading through the grass, and as he got closer, saw the ambivalence in his visitor’s smile.

The young man was about eighteen, a little less than half Fin’s age, with fair hair gelled into spikes, and cornflower-blue eyes so piercingly like his mother’s that they raised goosebumps on Fin’s arms. For a moment they stood in awkward silence sizing each other up, before Fin reached out a hand and the boy gave it a brief, firm shake.

“Hello, Fionnlagh.”