Guard growled again, an eldritch sound that spoke both challenge and terror. Nessa opened her eyes. There were lights, many lights across the fields around them, coming closer, moving in. Her heart lurched. Somerled’s men. It was finished, then. But there was no sound save a kind of whispering, like a language almost past the edges of human hearing, and the lights were surely not those of torches, for they shone eerie blue, beacons of a kind found in the tales of wrinkled grandmothers, in the songs of ancient shepherds. Bobbing, weaving, they made their progress toward the cairn where Nessa sat staring, knowing the circle kept her safe, knowing the signs marked on her face protected her, but trembling all the same. Guard had moved in close to the mound’s base; he was silent now, standing over the bag that held Nessa’s small store of belongings. The moon caught the wild look in his eyes, the half-bared teeth, but he stood steady, true to the name she had given him.

They came through the circle she had cast, making a ring of their own around the burial mound. Still she could see little of them beyond those wavering blue lights, yet here and there she half-guessed shadow forms, dark opaque eyes, squat bodies marked with ritual scars, faces that might or might not be masked, for there was no telling if they were man or creature. There was no doubt in Nessa’s mind that this was the Hidden Tribe of the tales. Most folk had seen the lights at night in the distance, gathered by some ancient cairn or weaving a pattern through the great stone circle in the south. One or two people claimed to have met them, and were half-believed. Every farmer had lost stored grain, or a bright cloth from a washing line; once, folk said, it had been a babe from the cradle, and nothing but a turnip in its place, with stones for eyes. Every farmer left out bowls of milk at full moon, and small sweet cakes at harvest time.