On they rode through the dark.
The mist swirled like deep waters around their horses’ hooves, and scudding wisps of milky cloud veiled the stars above. Faint silver moonlight glimmered on steel helmets, and blasted trees and heather bushes cast long pitch-black shadows over the rolling moors. Over the hills they rode, passing by ancient standing stones upon the bare summits of the Cheviots, occasionally nodding their respects to a distant bastle house of the Armstrongs or Elliots. Ahead, very close now, waited the Esk Water, the wee river – more of a stream, really – that separated the Elliot holdings in the Debatable Lands from the Scott holdings on what everyone agreed was legally Scottish soil. Once the riders crossed the Esk, the foray would be on in earnest, and the Elliots would have passed the point of no return.
It was a quiet ride. Here and there, a man muttered something; once, White Kester waved at a distant bastle house and remarked that his home looked fine in the moonlight. Iron Kenneth grumbled that he wanted to be dead by breakfast, and was rewarded with a low rumble of coarse laughter - but Pale Duncan made the sign of the cross over his breast when he thought that no one was looking. Roger Elliot was hunched in the saddle, his old eyes scanning the moors. Red Duncan clapped Robert on the shoulder with a rattle of steel and leather. “If your brither could see ye the now,” the big warrior replied, “he’d be proud for ta see ye a-riding wi your kin once more, cousin. Ye will do us all proud this night, and your brither’s memory as well.”
Abruptly, Hoary Rory – who was riding out in front of the other Elliots alongside his son, Walker Thom – gave a soft grunt of pain as if he had just been punched in the gut, and reined in. One by one, the other Elliots crested a low rise in the moor, and what Rory had seen came clearly into their view.
Below lay the Esk Water – perhaps twenty feet wide from bank to bank, and five feet deep at the middle of its channel. It ran slowly around rocks and logs and treeroots, gleaming in the moonlight like a river of quicksilver. On the far side, the land sloped up again to a stony crest, where a Scott bastle house stood; candlelight gleamed with a warm glow in the building’s faraway windows.
On the bank of the Esk, kneeling in the shallows, there was a grey figure. It looked like a woman, but only in the way that a corpse resembles the man that his children once knew – some essential, indefinable element is missing, and the result is more unfamiliar than it would have been if there were never any similarity at all.
Such was the old woman who knelt at the ford in the Esk. She wore a shapeless grey dress that dragged, soaked through and heavy with water, in the stream around her knees. Her hair was grey, and hung in limp, lank ropes around her head; it fell down directly over her face, and naught could be seen beneath but shadow. And her grey hands were wrapped around a man’s white linen shirt, dipping it into the river and then wringing it dry. Blood – thick blood, arterial blood, a man’s lifeblood – ran down from the shirt into the Esk in heavy, viscous drops. Black in the moonlight, the blood coated the woman’s hands and stained the sleeves of her dress, and swirled like a dark current in the riverwater around her knees. It seemed like far too much blood for any man’s body to hold.
The woman’s head rose, and turned, and though her face could not be seen, every rider could feel her gaze upon him. The shadows behind her curtain of lank grey hair fixed upon the Elliots with burning attention.
And with a shrill, desperate keening like a dying animal, the Washer at the Ford began to scream.
