Rob Bruce could not remember when he had decided that his uncle Nicol was his favourite person in the world, but for as far back as he could recall, no one else had come close to claiming his esteem in the way Nicol MacDuncan had. He had done it effortlessly, too, simply by being the only adult male in the boy’s life who treated him as a person, rather than as a simpering, unformed, half-witted child. Nicol had never spoken down to his nephew and never belittled him. He had always treated him as a real person—not as an equal, certainly, for Rob knew he was no such thing, too young even to lay claim to such consideration. Yet none the less Nicol had always treated him as a thinking being, someone whom he expected to have an opinion on any subject, no matter how ill informed that opinion might be. And not only did he assume that Rob had opinions, he insisted upon hearing them and discussing them. He never scoffed at what he heard, never sneered, never belittled anything his young charge said. Instead, he would fill in the gaps in the boy’s knowledge, enlarge upon the pros and contras of each element of Rob’s opinion and frequently end up leaving several more options in his nephew’s mind for further consideration. Looking at him now, Rob felt a flush of warmth and affection for the man.
Nicol was really his mother’s uncle, her father’s youngest brother by almost twenty years, which meant, in truth, that he could never have really known his eldest brother, Niall, the former Earl of Carrick, at all, and he had never known the father, Nicol MacDuncan, whose name he bore. That Nicol had been the son of Duncan, the first Earl of Carrick, and had not lived long enough to see the boy child of his old age birthed. In fact, Nicol was no more than a year or two older than his favourite niece, Marjorie, Earl Niall’s formidable daughter, and he had taken an active, avuncular interest in the welfare of her eldest son since the first day he saw the boy, when young Robert was only four weeks old and Nicol decided the child looked like the son he had always wanted. Nicol had married young, to a woman who died childless a few years later, and then he had wed a widow with three daughters, but he and she had never had any children of their own, and since the widow had clearly demonstrated her own fertility beforehand, it soon became clear that Nicol, and not his wife, must be at fault. No one thought any the less of him for that; it was simply accepted and ignored.
Nicol’s initial interest in his niece’s firstborn son had never abated, and for the past three years it had resulted in the boy’s being given over into his young great-uncle’s care for several months, from early spring until midsummer, before being returned to the family fold in time for his birthday on the eleventh of July. Those months, from the beginning of March all the way through until mid-July, had become Robert’s favourite and most jealously guarded time of the year, when he would learn more about everything around him than the rest of his brothers and sisters combined would absorb in an entire twelvemonth. He grunted quietly, deep down in his chest, then kneed his horse forward gently until he sat beside Nicol, staring out with him over the wild landscape below.
To say that the lands of the earldom of Carrick were hilly would be a deceptive description; rocky and bleak and inhospitable were far more accurate words. The name Carrick sprang from carraig, the Gaelic word for a rock or a rocky place. The Carrick lands were almost completely lacking in arable areas that might offer sustenance for farmers, but they offered fine grazing for the hardy local sheep, and because of that the people of the Carrick region were mainly wool producers—just like everyone else the length and breadth of Scotland. Young Rob, the seventh consecutive Robert Bruce of his line, had been born here, in his mother’s ancestral home of Turnberry Castle, overlooking the Firth of Clyde and the Isle of Arran and the distant Mull of Kintyre. To the north lay the town of Ayr, and to the east, the earldom’s main town of Maybole. Rob loved Carrick, and he was always excited to be reminded from time to time that it would one day be his. These were his own lands, his inheritance, and the knowledge of that never failed to thrill him. For the time being, though, the lands were his mother’s. Rob’s father, though he held the title Earl of Carrick, held it solely by virtue of his marriage to the countess.
“Are you ready, then?”
Rob glanced at his uncle and nodded, then kicked his mount forward to follow Nicol down from the summit and into the trackless reaches of the moors. There were no roads across the moorlands. In truth there were few real roads in all of Scotland. The boy thought about that as he allowed his horse to make its own way at the heels of Nicol’s mount, for the matter of roads—or rather the lack of them—had been brought to his attention only a few weeks earlier—by his uncle, of course. Roads were something he had never had cause to think about. His people went everywhere on foot, and could travel five miles in a single hour over trackless land. When greater distances had to be travelled, those who had horses used them, but even so they were all inured to dismounting and leading their animals slowly through the treacherous, boggy, and wildly uneven terrain of the moors, where a single misplaced hoof could result in a broken leg and a lost mount.