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collected from every period of her life.
    Lady Nairn led me swiftly up four flights of stairs to a bedroom in a high corner. Its walls were covered in watered blue silk; along the northern wall marched three tall windows curtained in more blue silk embroidered with Chinese dragons. “I thought you might like a view,” she’d said, crossing the room to throw open the middle window, so that both the sound and the scent of pines blew through the room. Beyond, the hill was visible mostly as an absence of stars.
     
    Don’t go up the hill alone. The sentence hung on the air between us.
    “I told you I lost my husband,” she said. “I meant it more literally than you perhaps realized.” She looked back toward the hill. “He disappeared up there one night three months ago. We went to the police, of course. They poked around a bit but didn’t find anything. Suggested, in a roundabout way, that maybe he’d gone off for a bit of something on the side. He was not that sort of man.
    “Auld Callie—a woman from the village, someone he’d known from childhood—found him the following week, sitting on the hilltop, dangling his legs like a child over the ramparts. He was rocking back and forth, muttering one phrase over and over: ‘Dunsinnan must go to Birnam Wood.’”
    “Macbeth’s riddle,” I said quietly. “No,” she said with a slight shake of the head. “The witches’ riddle.” She launched into the Shakespeare:
    Macbeth shall never vanquished be, until
    Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinnan Hill Shall
    come against him.
    In the play, King Macbeth assumes the riddle is a metaphor for never, only to learn, when confronted by a forest on the move, that the witches meant it literally. “ The equivocation of the fiend that lies like truth, ” I murmured.
    She gave me a sad smile. “I’m not sure it counts as equivocation if there’s no clear answer at all, rather than too many. And in any case, Angus reversed it: Dunsinnan must go to Birnam Wood. His title, you know, was Nairn of Dunsinnan, so I thought he was referring to himself. And you can see the wood, or what’s left of it, from the hilltop, so it seemed to me that he was saying that he must go to Birnam. I took him there…. He’d known the place since childhood, but he didn’t recognize it. Stood there turning round and round beneath the great oak, looking bewildered.”
    Her voice dipped into bitterness. “He died a fortnight after that. A month ago, that was. Blessing, really. His mind was gone, or mostly so. Just enough left to understand that he wasn’t right. Made him desperate, near the end.”
    Her voice had begun to waver, and she paused to steady it, turning to the window and brushing damp cheeks with the back of one hand. “I’m sorry,” she said, giving herself a little shake and going on. “The doctors said he had a stroke. No doubt they’re right. But that isn’t the whole story. When we found him, he’d been missing for a week, but he was clean-shaven, and his clothes were immaculate.” Her chin went up. “ As if he’d just left. ”
    She pinned me with her gaze. “Do you know Aleister Crowley’s definition of magic? It’s ‘the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.’”
    I frowned. It was a famous—and famously baggy—definition. By its lights, just about everything was magic. Crowley himself had included potato-growing and banking in the list, along with ritual magic and spells. Where was this going?
    She leaned forward. “There were those who wished Angus ill,” she said with quiet intensity. “Mostly, I’m afraid, for my sake.”
    “Wishing doesn’t make it so.”
    “Perhaps not.”
    Beyond her, through the window, I saw something—a weasel or a stoat, maybe—undulating across the corner of the lawn, a furtive shadow in darkness. Almost in rhythm with it, a prickle of foreboding crept across my skin. What was she suggesting? That someone had murdered Sir Angus by