The Fog of the Minch

By late afternoon on the eve of the winter solstice, the sky over the Minch had turned the color of bruised iron. The wind howled out of the Arctic north-northeast, driving horizontal barrages of blinding sleet, frozen sea spray, and granular snow across the jagged black ramparts of Morven Keep. Three hundred feet below, the Atlantic was a boiling caldron of twenty-foot swells that detonated against the cliffs with concussive,…