The Fourth Crow

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She was quite certainly dead.

Without realising it, he had taken a great leap backwards, away from that hideous face where it lay at the edge of the shadows. Now he stood as if his feet had taken root, staring at the moonlit horror. A great trembling overtook him.

Nothing else seemed to move in the night. A cloud slid over the moon, shrouding all in darkness, and then passed, and with the returning light it was as if she raised her head a little to look at him. With a muffled yelp of terror he turned and fled, down the hill, towards safety.

‘There’s someone bound to St Mungo’s Cross,’ observed Gil Cunningham’s new assistant as they rode back into Glasgow through the August evening, rounding the high red sandstone walls of the Archbishop’s castle.

‘Now what would anyone be doing that for?’ wondered Euan Campbell, from behind them. ‘Surely somebody would set them free?’

Gil turned in the saddle to look at his two very dissimilar henchmen. Lowrie Livingstone, aged nineteen, recent graduate of the University here in Glasgow, was fair and good-looking, with an easy cultured charm which would stand him in good stead in any occupation, particularly that of notary in which Gil had contracted to train him, although just now, with his face, his broad straw hat and the narrow sleeves of his blue woollen gown powdered with reddish dust from the roads, he looked nearly as disreputable as the gallowglass at his back. Euan on the other hand, dark haired and black browed with the crooked Campbell mouth in a long narrow face, simply looked what he was: a man who hired his sword arm for a living.

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