Chapter 1

Chapter1

There are lights around the grave.

I press my face closer to the old farmhouse window and squint through its waves and ripples, willing the lights to resolve into something that makes sense. The lights flicker and jump like fire would, but it must be the distance playing tricks, because they can’t be fire. It’s an archaeological site, for one thing, all damp earth and plastic totes waiting to be filled with the last of the season’s finds tomorrow, and for another thing, I was just there twenty minutes ago. It was utterly deserted then, empty of students and site managers and everything but the wind and the gaping mouth of the chambered cairn.

So. There should not be lights around the grave.

“What the bally hell are you doing?” says a voice from behind me. I turn to see one of my fellow grad students, Alfie, winding a thin caramel-colored scarf around his neck. It looks like it was sold by a company with a royal scarf warrant.

“There are lights by the cairn,” I say, turning back to the window. The lights hover off the ground, surrounding the massive turf-covered mound of the grave and only leaving a gap where its entrance beckons.

“It’s probably the fair, darling,” Alfie says blithely. “Casting reflections or something.”

“It’s not the fair,” I say without looking at him or in the direction of the carnival that appeared on the other side of the hill today.

Two of the other students went to investigate during our lunch break and found the place utterly devoid of people. Only the tattered booths and time-faded tents were there, lights already blinking and music already playing from somewhere unseen. The carousel of horses, peacocks, and rabbits turning in slow, riderless circles.

It looked abandoned and very murdery,one of the students said when they got back. And then they’d promptly enlisted as many of us as they could to return tonight.

“They could be fairy lights,” Alfie says after a minute, looking out the window with me.

“Fairy lights?”

“My grandmother is Scottish,” Alfie explains. “Always sticking silver in a baby’s hand or planting rowan trees in her garden. And she says sometimes you can still see fairy lights at night. If you’re in the right place, of course. Teine-sith.”

Teine-sith.

The words sound familiar—or more so the sound of them. Tyen-uh shee.

Teine for fire. Sith for fairies.

“Gaelic, you know,” Alfie says, with a toss of his floppy hair and the air of someone confiding a great secret. Then he seems to notice my lack of coat. “Are you not coming with us?”

I shift on my feet, torn. I love fairs—and people—and Halloween especially. But tomorrow is the very last day of the dig, and if someone is trampling all over our things, poking where they shouldn’t, it could screw with our chances of keeping our permit for the next digging season.

And we have to come back next season because we still haven’t found what we’re looking for in this narrow, loch-floored valley.

“I think I should go check on the site,” I say finally. And then I sigh a little, looking at the far hill with its ridges outlined by the carnival lights glowing behind it. I can already taste the popcorn, hear the pling of the high-striker bell. There’s even supposed to be a haunted house…

“Look, it’s probably some youths making Halloween mischief at the tomb, like their grandparents before them, and their grandparents before them,” Alfie says, taking my hand and saying youths like we aren’t twenty-three ourselves. “Don’t be a bore. Who else is going to convince Fran?ois that I’m his soul mate and he needs to whisk me away to Provence for a sun-soaked movie montage? This is my time of need!”

“It pains me,” I say as I hold his gloved hand with both of my own, “since I’ve been needing you two to move past the Longing Glances Across the Dig Site phase for months now. But if it is locals down at the cairn, then you know I really dohave to go check it out.”

“Can’t we call Dr. Siska and have her come instead?” Alfie whines.

“She and the site managers are staying twenty minutes away, and that’s by car. I’m a short walk away. I’ll just nip down there, shoo everyone off the site, and then I’ll come to the fair after that and find you all. Deal?”

Alfie pouts. “Fine. But if I’m denied my great French love affair because you care more about some long-dead Spaniard’s missing castle than you do your very best friend, I shall never forgive you.”

I kiss his suntanned forehead through his wavy hair. “I’ll only be a moment. Tell everyone to go on without me.”

“As you wish. And don’t eat the fairy fruit,” Alfie says, cheerful again as he pulls away.

“What?”

“You know, if you’re taken by the fairies,” he explains patiently, straightening his gloves. “You’re not supposed to eat the fairy fruit. It drives us mortals wild with desire. Or did you not read any Victorian poetry at school?”

“I know about fairy fruit!” I say, wounded. I’m practically a fairy pomologist. Or at least I should be, after all the fan fiction I read as a teenager. “But I don’t think it’s going to be a problem tonight. Or any night, given that fairies aren’t real.”

“How someone digging for a long-lost castle can be such a cynic is beyond me.” Alfie sighs, and with a final pitying look, he goes downstairs to join the carnival sortie.

Sometimes it’s beyond me too, Alfie.

With my own sigh, I find my jacket and a scarf, grab my phone and my headlamp, and shove on my muddy dig boots. Just before I leave, however, I stop by the bound photocopy sitting on my end table.

Hugo de Segovia was a captain of the 1588 Spanish Armada—or at least he was until he was shipwrecked on the shore just a mile away. His record of his time in the armada was rediscovered moldering in some archives just a few years ago, and from there, it had found its way to Dr. Siska, a specialist in Iron Age and medieval fortifications. She’s been using de Segovia writing to search for a missing castle ever since. Thus why we’re all here sifting through the cold Scottish mud, finding neolithic settlements instead of castle foundations, despite the initially promising ground surveys.

I pause—Alfie’s words echoing in my mind—and I pick up the photocopy before flipping quickly through the densely typewritten pages, scanning between the original Spanish and the English translation.

Teine-sith.

I knew the word sith the minute Alfie had spoken it. Sith—or sidhe—is the Gaelic word for fairy, and fan fiction aside, my undergraduate thesis was centered on the archaeological remnants of ritual and superstition in medieval Scotland…and medieval written references to fairies were often rendered in Gaelic—when they weren’t rendered as daemones in Latin or as elves in English.

But it wasn’t until Alfie spoke the word aloud that something clicked for me. Hugo de Segovia hadn’t spoken Scottish Gaelic—not a word of it—and so he’d spelled out the words as he’d heard them.

Tyenha xii.

The Lord, in his good pleasure, had not delivered our ship from the storm, even as we saw the others blown over the horizon. But we were cast upon the shore of a wild place, and there we cried to the Virgin for help, but no help came.

A priest did come upon us, and in Latin he said he could do nothing for us, because it was the equinox and the lights would be on the hill, and it was safe for no man, woman, or child to see the lights. When we asked what manner of lights should be dangerous, he could only name them in his own tongue, tyenha xii, and then exhorted us to go south along the beach until we reached the next village, where we could perhaps smuggle ourselves back to Flanders or home to Spain. But the mist came, and with it the dark, and when we came upon lights at last, they belonged not to a village but to a castle of such luxury, presided over by a great lord, who welcomed us with food and wine and also spoke in Latin to us, and spoke a great many other languages besides, including our own tongue…

Dr. Siska ledthis dig hoping to find evidence of Hugo de Segovia’s lost castle, and so we focused on the geographically relevant details of his writing—the heading of his ship during the storm and descriptions of the beach and the castle. It’s known from his account that he finally made it to Oban—alone—dazed and telling stories of his men imprisoned inside a castle made of silver and mist, and so from Oban and the beach, Dr. Siska had triangulated the identifying details to this lonesome spot in the Highlands, a valley near the coast, freckled with neolithic tombs and standing stones.

But she had not—nor had any of us—paid much mind to the priest’s warning about lights on the hill. That a sixteenth-century Scottish priest would be superstitious is hardly surprising, and anyway, it seemed evident the lights must have belonged to the castle and not any supernatural powers tied to the equinox.

But now, as I’m looking at the lights flickering around the grave outside, the dead priest’s words seem very relevant. Perhaps Alfie was right and the lights tonight are from some local tradition—even if that tradition is half-drunk young people daring themselves to get close to the local haunted hill. A folk memory preserved as fun and games. Perhaps it was a folk memory even in de Segovia’s time.

Either way, I can’t have people tramping around our dig site, no matter what Halloween customs they have around here. Several of the totes are filled with unfired sherds begging for a chance to crumble back into clay; half the grids still need photographed so we know where we’ve been when we come back next year. And above all else, we have to leave Historic Environment Scotland a pristine, well-conserved site, without even a rogue stake or Maltesers wrapper, so they won’t revoke our permission to dig next year.

I toss de Segovia’s account onto my bed, zip up my coat, and step out into the velvet-dark night to walk to the ancient grave. It’ll be quick work, and then I’ll be at the fair having fun: exactly the kind of Halloween night I deserve.