The Mosstrooper: A Legend of the Scottish Border

The Scottish borderlands in the turbulent centuries before union were a world where loyalty was fluid and survival meant steel. This is the realm of the mosstrooper: raider, reiver, and relic of a lawless age. Edie Johnston, a young borderer haunted by wrongs done to his name, carries a child through the darkness toward Hawksglen Castle. His plan is cold: abandon the infant as a wound against those who destroyed his world. But the night holds him hostage to doubt. He leaves the boy at the castle gate anyway, seeding a story that will bloom across years into something neither of them can escape. The child becomes Eustace, raised in comfort by noble hands, ignorant of the blood that stains his origins. When identity emerges from shadow, so too does the reckoning. Fittis constructs a dark meditation on vengeance and fate, where old scores demand payment across generations and the border itself becomes a character: rugged, indifferent, unforgiving. For readers who crave historical fiction that doesn't flinch from brutality, who want Scotland's wild frontier history rendered with sinew and grit.