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Stewart, I’m told.” Marjorie turned to walk back in the direction from which I’d just come. With eyes the deep blue of a bottomless loch, she threw a look over her shoulder, beckoning me to follow. By then Boyd was nowhere in sight and Sybilla was almost to the door of the church. A light wind tossed a long golden ringlet across her face, momentarily covering her eyes. She tucked her hair behind her ears and scrunched her small nose. “Father insists I sit next to Walter at the supper table. He’s polite enough, or tries to be when he can get the words out, but a complete bore and dreadfully awkward. Oh,” – she covered her mouth, as if to recapture the words – “ please don’t tell him I said that.”
    When I shook my head, she sighed, smiled and went on as we descended the short hill and joined the path back toward the sheep pen. “Anyway, Father sent Sibylla along with Lord Randolph when they came to fetch us from the English at Jedburgh. I remembered her from Rothesay, but she was a few years older and seemed so grown up to me. We didn’t talk much then, but it’s much different now. We ’re different, older. I’d go insane here without her. I feel so ... confined . Just like those sheep there.”
    A cloud of black faces lifted to appraise us, ears twitching. By then we were standing not far from the sheep pen.
    “I remember your brothers, too,” she said. “Did you ever find them again?”
    “Aye, they fought with me at Bannockburn. Hugh – he was born to fight. There’s not much else he can do.” Hugh was my full brother. His birthing had been so long and difficult that the effort had robbed my mother of her life. When the midwife cut her belly open to pull Hugh out and clean the blood from him, his skin was a deep, purplish shade of blue. That was the first sign of many that he was not right in the head. He was late to take his first steps, slow in speech, shy as a fallow deer – but I looked after him as best I could, even though it frustrated me beyond measure at times. As boys we practiced with our spears in the hills beyond Douglas Castle and he grew big and strong. While his hands were so large that he fumbled to nock an arrow, his arms were stout like the branches of an old oak and he could heave an axe with deadly force. At Bannockburn, he fought bravely, perhaps because he was simple and had no ken of death.
    Between lashes as black and thick as strokes of ink, Marjorie’s eyes narrowed. “There is another, much younger?”
    “Archibald. My father had hopes that he would enter the clergy, but I do not think it was meant to be.” In truth, he had a weakness for women, much as my father had. In the same year that my mother died, my father, Sir William Douglas, caused himself untold troubles when he abducted a young widow, Eleanor Ferrers, from Fa’side Castle. Longshanks, the first Edward of England, ordered my father’s arrest for the incident, but by then they were already wed. It was not the last time my father incurred Longshanks’ wrath. When Longshanks came north to besiege Berwick, Archibald was barely weaned and he wailed whenever another stone from the trebuchet thundered against the castle walls, smashing holes in its thick curtain of stone.
    In time, the walls toppled and eight thousand people were butchered in the streets. Eight thousand . I witnessed it all from the castle’s parapets.
    “Archibald was still very young when I left Scotland to study in Paris. I didn’t see him again until two days before Bannockburn.”
    “I’m told it was the greatest battle ever fought. Someday you shall have to tell me about it –” Her shoulders hunched up as a shiver rippled through her body.
    “Here, my lady ...” – I unclasped my cloak and placed it over her short mantle – “Marjorie,” I added. We had once been as close as brother and sister and even though many years had gone by, the more we spoke, the more the familiarity returned. “It smells of damp wool