22. Scotland, 1824Paul had been searching fruitlessly for three endless hours, all along the banks of the Sruth fuar. His mood, like the leaden sky, was getting bleaker and bleaker.
“And yet it was here,” he repeated to himself for the hundredth time. Three years had passed since his last visit to this place—three years and an entire lifetime. The spot looked sinister, like a cemetery, like the grave of a hated or at least formidable relative, which he had thought he’d never need to see again. Only death had been able to push him to set foot in this cursed place once again.
At the beginning of his search, he’d been surprised by his lack of any recollection of the slightest detail of this landscape. Had his subconscious erased his memory of this place so associated with tragic events? For
