Grandpa's secret treasure map is on every front page in Scotland, and two hundred cars are racing you into the glen.
You are a Highland drystone waller. Your late grandpa's secret treasure map is on every front page, and only you can read his code. His old partner's grandson wants half. Snow shuts the pass in twenty days.
7 a.m., late October, a week after the funeral. You set the last stone in Grandpa's old wall by the road into Glen Torran, your home valley in the Scottish Highlands. Frost bites your bare hands.
A tall stranger jumps the wall and pushes a newspaper at you. On the front page is Grandpa's secret map, the one he kept in a locked tin for forty years. In the corner: H.B. + I.M. 1979.
Rory MacLeod is a day ahead of the crowd. He says Grandpa owed his grandfather a promise, and he has come to collect. He can't read the old Gaelic names on the map. You can.
Below you, cars sit bumper to bumper on the glen road, and a man with a camera has just shouted that you are the granddaughter. Snow shuts the only pass in twenty days.
You mend drystone walls in Glen Torran, your home valley in the Scottish Highlands. A week ago you buried your grandpa. At sixteen you told a friend about his hunt for gold, and the whole glen laughed at him for a year.
A rival treasure hunter: tall, lean, weathered fair skin, dark wavy hair, copper stubble, a torn green waxed jacket, a brass compass on a cord. He has been out on the hill all night and is wet to the knees.
Someone in your family always offers to drive. Keep reading.
Someone at the inn wipes the same glass dry while she thinks. Keep reading.
Someone from Glasgow writes notes on the back of her hand. Keep reading.
Someone old in the glen says the Gaelic names under his breath. Keep reading.
Frost on the top stones, wet brown ferns down the slope, and cars bumper to bumper below in blue diesel smoke.
Each clue on the map is an old Gaelic place name that no road map carries now. You know them. Every name said out loud can be overheard.
One road leads out of Glen Torran, over one high pass. The first big snow shuts it until spring, about twenty days from now.
The army at your gate flies your family's banner. Relief rides in forty days, if your walls and your people hold that long.
Every monster in the kingdom bows to you. Your guild wants to know why. So do you.
He fights with your secret move. He has the statue's face. He wants to know who broke the vow.
The man who won the last wish hasn't aged a day. That wish drowned your street. Now he wants to hire your boat.
