Colban makes a harmless-crazy friend

The King of Scotland proved to be a very big man. A Highland bull brought to graze on lush pastures, his whopping frame was packed with muscle and sleeked over with fat. He looked the part of a legend — of a man whose name, like the secret names of fairies, was rarely pronounced above a whisper in Colban’s clan.

This was the man who had whacked off King Macbeth’s head with a single stroke of his sword and strangled King Lulach in the crook of his beefy arm. And worse: this was the man who had ordered Old Aed’s father beheaded before the eyes of his son, the lords of Scotland, and the clergy; and walked out spinning the bloody crown of Strathclyde around his hand like a toy.

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