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Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The Moor
The wind came off the mountains like something alive, pushing and pulling at Henry Dawson's jacket as he walked the sheep track above the farm. He was ten years old, small for his age, with brown hair that never lay flat and a habit of watching his feet when he walked. The track was muddy from last night's rain, and he kept his eyes on his wellies, picking his way between puddles.
Below him, the farm sat in its hollow like a hand cupping something precious. The old stone house with its slate roof. The sheep pens. The barn where Gran kept her tools and her memories. Beyond the farm, the moor stretched away in every direction—miles of heather and peat bog and grey rock, all the way to the ridgeline where the sky began.
Henry didn't much like the moor. It was too big, too open. The wind could knock you sideways if you weren't careful, and the bogs could swallow a boot—or a whole leg—if you stepped wrong. But Gran had asked him to check the fence line along the north pasture, and Henry always did what Gran asked.
His grandmother, June Dawson, was sixty-three years old and as tough as the heather roots that gripped the hillside. She'd run this farm alone for eleven years, ever since Grandad Tom had died. And she'd raised Henry since he was three, after the accident.
Henry didn't remember the accident. He didn't remember his parents at all, really—just a feeling, sometimes, like warm light on his face. Gran kept photos on the mantelpiece. His mum had Gran's sharp blue eyes. His dad had Henry's brown hair. They smiled out of the frames like people from a story, and sometimes that's what they felt like to Henry. Characters in a book he'd read a long time ago.
He reached the fence line and walked along it, checking for gaps where the sheep might push through. The posts were solid. The wire was tight. Everything was fine. He was about to turn back when he heard it.
A sound like tearing paper, but angrier. A hiss.
Henry froze. His first thought was a snake—an adder, maybe, coiled in the heather. His heart began to hammer. He took a step back.
The sound came again, louder. And this time, there was a thrashing to go with it, a violent rustling in the heather about twenty feet to his left.
Every instinct told Henry to run. He was good at running from things. He ran from thunder. He ran from the dark corners of the barn. He ran from the top of the stairs when the old house creaked at night. Running was what Henry Dawson did best.
But something held him. Maybe it was the way the sound changed—from anger to something that might have been pain. Maybe it was curiosity, which was the one brave thing about Henry, the one part of him that sometimes overruled his fear.
He crept forward, parting the heather with his hands.
And there it was.
The bird was enormous—bigger than any bird Henry had ever seen up close. It lay on its side in a shallow dip between two tussocks of heather, one wing spread out at a wrong angle, the other folded tight against its body. Its feathers were dark brown, almost black, with a golden sheen on the back of its neck that caught the weak morning light. Its beak was curved and sharp as a fishhook. Its eyes were bright amber, fierce and furious, and they locked onto Henry with an intensity that made him take a step back.
The eagle hissed again and tried to drag itself away, but the broken wing caught on the heather and it let out a sound—a thin, high cry that didn't match its size at all. It sounded young. Scared.
Henry knew what it was. You couldn't grow up in the Highlands without knowing golden eagles. Gran pointed them out sometimes, distant shapes riding the thermals above the ridge. "Kings of the sky," she called them. But Henry had never seen one this close. He'd never seen one on the ground.
He stood very still, his breath making small clouds in the cold air. The eagle watched him. He watched the eagle. Neither of them moved.
Then Henry turned and ran—but this time, not away. He ran down the hill toward the farm, his wellies slapping the mud, his arms pumping. He ran to get Gran.
