They broke through the fog on their way up, the two of them, and their torches bit into a cold black sky above the blanket of white.  The fog shielded the crest of the old hill fort from the camp below with all of its clatter and bang and boasts of deeds past.  The top was a sacred place, as they remembered from their grandfather’s stories, a place of loyalty and honor in the days of the ancestors of DalRiada, and these cousins from Morpeth had been waiting a long time to stand in the footsteps of the kings on Dunadd, to place their own boot in the Footprint of Fealty.

Baldwine led the way, the weight of his blades and fighting armor slowing him none while Thomas, older by three years and wearing the much less weighty cloth befitting his position as a man of letters and law, followed h...

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