A stirring came through the darkness, and then the keening, droning wail of the pipes with a thuttering roar of drums beneath it. Rudi grinned to himself; his mother had composed that tune, too, when someone insisted. He thought it had been Dennie, a friend of hers who’d had a big role in establishing Clan customs in the early days.

Officially the title was It’s a Clan We Must Be, from the first speech she’d given to the little band of fugitives meeting at the old hunting lodge that had become the core of Dun Juniper. She herself had been known to refer to it as Hail to the Chief, which oldsters considered a great joke; some obscure reference to the ancient world.

His eyes sought her eagerly. After Matti, the one I love most in all the world, he thought. And Sir Nigel. I need their wisdom. And Maude and Fiorbhinn, so grown while I was away!

Juniper Mackenzie listened to the pipers and the hammering rattle of the Lambegs and the dunting snarl of war-horns calling the assembly and smiled to herself. Beside her Nigel Loring, her man, leaned his head towards her.

“That’s your ironic smile, my dear,” he said.

The smooth cultured drawl of the grandmother who’d raised him was still strong in his voice. His parents had both died within a few years of his birth, and his grandfather Eustace had stood too close to a German howitzer shell during the retreat from Mons in 1914, leaving a young widow and a posthumous son. He’d been in middle age when he arrived a fugitive from Mad King Charles in England, fifteen years ago, during the War of the Eye. Now he was unambiguously old, his head egg-bald, the last yellow gone from the clipped white mustache. He was still slim and erect in the Clan’s formal garb of tight green jacket with lace at throat and cuffs and double row of silver buttons, badger-skin sporran, kilt and plaid, flat Scots bonnet with silver clasp.

“I was thinking that I should never have let Dennis at my Gaelic dictionary and Myths and Customs of the Ancient Celts; the illustrated one, at that. The glee the man had in him when he persuaded people to take up some bit of Victorian-fantasy folderol that drove me wild, back in the early years! In the end the only way to stop him tormenting me with it was to go along, so . . . and I couldn’t bear to quash folk when they needed something to catch their fancy when all else was so bleak. And he thought it the cream of the jest that he was nine-tenths English by blood himself, and the rest everything under the sun but Irish, or even Scots. Whereas I had my mother speaking the Gaelic to me in my cradle.”