Chapter 1: First Light, Wrong Parking Spot

First light did not arrive so much as accumulate. It came up out of the ground before it came down from the sky, a grey that thickened into another grey, until the pines along the ridge stopped being black and started being green, and the heather showed the wet on it, and the whole bowl of the glen lay open to a light that had no source anyone could point to. It fell from everywhere at once. It laid no shadows. It was neither the last of the dark nor the first of the day but the seam between them, held open longer here than it had any business being. The fog sat in the low ground and did not move. It had drained off the ridges in the night, cold air sliding down through the pines and pooling in the hollow where the burn ran, and now it lay there level as milk in a bowl, filling the valley floor to a line partway up the trees and stopping. Above the line the branches. Below it, the white. It did not drift. There was no wind to move it and it looked as if it would not have moved for wind. It held its shape against the base of the slopes with the patience of water that has found the lowest place it can find and means to stay. The burn ran under it somewhere. You could hear the water without seeing it, a small continuous working over stone, down where the peat had stained the pool the colour of strong tea, and the sound came up through the fog changed, softened, as though the white were a hand laid loosely over the mouth of the sound. Otherwise there was the absence of certain sounds. No road note. No…