“I’m in rude health, now as then.”
“Fear is a sickness.”
Hardcastle glowered down at her, and Causleen learned in that moment what the strength of his blow would have meant if she had carried a man’s shape.
“It may be. I never had much traffic with it.”
“Until yesterday. We brought the token, and I watched grey fear come to the Master of Logie as he touched it.”
Her rancour was less for herself than for the slight put on Donald, sick and old, who in his prime had known the glow of candlelight on a well-ordered table, the ruby in the wine of life. And now her father lay there, a pensioner on the bounty of this dour host—lay dying, with the Flodden pike sneering at him overhead, and all the room packed with ghosts of men who had boasted through the generations of what they had done aforetime to the Scots.
“Your Highland men have never known fear?” asked Hardcastle.
She faced him, slender and straight, her dark hair like a glory about her tattered pedlar’s clothes. “Only its name,” she said, with the same quiet mockery—“and that they had from the Southrons.”
“Then God help them for no more than beasts of the field. What courage could they learn, unless they came to grips with fear?”
Causleen remembered many journeys, with fortune at its worst and only the pedlar’s voice to rouse her from the depths. “Fear is a good whetstone, child,” he would say. “It breaks poor metal, but sharpens steel.” And now Hardcastle was giving her the same rough gospel.