Chapter Forty-Four
Finlay remained with Molly and worked her croft as the winter came on, even though his heart longed with a deep and persistent ache to reach home. Since he could not remember where home might be, it seemed best not to stir even after his strength began to return.
He felt he owed her, this old woman who had doubtless saved his life. Strong as she was, she struggled visibly with the chores she faced, doubly difficult in the cold, and those tasks grew easier and easier for him.
She called him Ardahl, or lad, or more frequently laddie. As the days passed, a rare and true affection grew between them.
She sang the old songs for him, all that she could recall.
And like a dam breaking, those songs brought others to him, words and tunes and all, his fingers twitching for want of the strings.
With the songs came pieces of memory. Places he had sung and played.
Grand halls and humble cottages not unlike this one.
The pieces of himself, coming back to him, and with them an increase in his longing.
For the girl with the golden hair who stood in the sunshine.
Sometimes her name whispered in his mind so fleeting he could only just catch it. Liadan. But the love, oh, the love found him in full.
He and Molly sometimes sang together at their work, and then in the evenings to pass the time, his smooth voice blending wondrously with her sweet, fragile one. She clapped her hands like a young girl in delight over their singing.
“So many songs ye do know,” she said one evening after he’d begun recalling more tunes than she knew. “D’ye think ye were a shanachie?”
“Aye, I do think so.”
“Then why the sword? And why awa’ in the battle?”
That refused to come to him. Indeed, he scarce recalled the battle, though he knew full well he had come from there.
One market day when the weather was not too harsh and Molly had some eggs to sell, she persuaded Finlay to accompany her. She gave him her husband’s kilt and plaid to wear, and even his boots, as Finlay’s own were too worn.
“How braw ye look,” she said, smiling. “Everyone will think ye my long-lost son.”
Finlay wondered then if in her heart Molly wanted him to stay. Part of him would not mind. Yet the wheel of his life turned with him upon it, toward what he needed quite desperately but could not quite see.
Folk in the market town of Kintail were curious about him.
Molly was forced to pause and explain his presence again and again.
He gleaned news of the battle, which was being called the Battle of Neville’s Cross, and what a disaster it had been for the Scots.
The king captured and held in chains in far-off London.
Scotsmen killed in their hundreds. Scots lords taken for ransom, or slain.
“It has broken our back, it has,” one old man declared, and Finlay thought of his harp, no doubt shattered against a stone.
When folk in the town asked where he was from, he answered only, “North and west o’ here,” quite certain of that much, though not sure how he knew.
When a woman eyed him up and down and asked Molly outright, “Will he be stayin’ wi’ ye, then?” He and Molly exchanged a look but gave her no answer.
They were quieter on the way home, both with thoughts crowding their minds. Would Molly ask him to stay? To become in truth the son she likely thought him?
The last thing he wanted to do was hurt her feelings. But he felt as if a great wind lay at his back, pushing him toward what he could not see.
They had nearly reached the croft when Molly began to sing softly in time with her footsteps, as one did to make the way shorter.
An instant memory flooded Finlay’s mind. Walking—nay, marching—with a great body of men. Someone walked beside him. A lass, a woman she was, though dressed like any warrior and wearing a sword at her side. Much as Molly had just done, she raised her voice, soft yet clear, in song.
Come all ye who would valiant be
Who would follow the train o’ bright glory.
Where battle brings us gory fates
We follow them both soon and late.
The Gallowglass gang to die!
It hit him like a boulder rushing downhill, did that memory.
Fair shattered him. All at once he was there inside the memory with all the attendant emotions.
Fear and dread for the battle to come, for aye, it was into battle they were bound.
A deep sense of connection with the woman beside him and love, love—
“Ardahl? Ardahl, lad, wha’ is it?”
He had stopped walking. Molly stood on the track in front of him, gazing up into his face with worried eyes.
“Be ye ill? Is it yer head?”
“Nay.” He reached out for something—anything—and clasped her hands. “There is someone. I remember—”
What had happened to her? The woman who had walked beside him so bravely and sung to raise the hearts of those around her? Had she died in the battle?
That thought delivered him a second tremendous blow, one that nearly took him to his knees. So many were said to have died in that fight. A rout, by all accounts.
“Ardahl?” Molly began to look frightened. “Wha’ is it, lad?”
“Memories. Coming back to me.”
“Aye, well, ’twas bound to happen.” But the old woman continued to look concerned. “Let us get ye home.”
Inside, she sat him down and raked up the fire before fetching him a warm drink. Days had now grown short, and a wind rose to play around the stones of the tiny place with a wail like a woman grieving.
“D’ye want to talk about it?” Molly asked, sitting down beside him.
Did he?
“Sometimes it does help. When my man died—surely the worst memory I hold, for he died right out there upon that hillside, working the land. Just dropped down as if stricken by the hand o’ God—I did no’ think I wanted to go on.
And I could no’ speak o’ it, no’ at all.
My neighbor, Esmie, a wise woman who’s since died also, forced me to.
She sat me down right where ye be and told me to let it all out.
” Molly’s faded eyes were kind. “It did help.”
“There was a woman. Marching beside me on the way into the battle.”
“A woman!”
“Och, so, how could that be? Indeed, she dressed hersel’ like a man and carried—carried a sword. She raised her voice as we went, just the way ye did outside, to sing.”
“Ah, then. Is that a memory or fancy?”
“A memory, I think.” A memory. “I loved her. So very much. I love her still.”
“Her name?”
“I canna recall. Her face—’tis a strong face and a beautiful one. Fair hair, ashen brown. And the smile in her eyes—” Longing struck him, so powerful it near doubled him over where he sat.
“Och, lad.” Molly’s eyes grew round. “And ye do no’ ken wha’ happened to her?”
“Nay. Nay. When I came to mysel’ after the battle, I was alone.” Save for the dead men. “She never would ha’ left me, nor I her, unless—”
Sympathy flooded Molly’s eyes. “’Tis a terrible torment, no’ knowing. If she did survive—where would she be?”
“I know not. But how could she survive so terrible a battle, and she a woman?”
“Did ye no’ survive? And ye a harper!” Molly gave him a wobbly smile. “Ye never know.”
That was the trouble, was it not? Among all the other questions that beset him, Finlay might never know what had become of the woman who’d walked beside him.
The one who held his heart.
*
The winter came down swift and hard, and Finlay stayed in the little stone cottage with Molly.
At first he told himself he would linger only till the weather eased and he might be away.
Then he reckoned he stayed to help the old woman with all the difficult chores she performed so arduously.
Hauling water up the snowy slope from the burn.
Tending the beasts and guarding the roof against the wind.
His body mended and his strength came back. The gouge to his cheek was an ugly thing, but his wild red beard covered most of it. He worked hard through the days and slept well at night, though when the dreams came, they consumed him.
A bright confusion of scenes they were, all jumbled and twisted so he could scarce make sense of them.
If they were meant to make sense. And no ordinary dreams, for he inhabited them, walked, breathed, and sang in them.
It was as if the wheel of his life spun, giving him random glimpses, and him not knowing where the pieces fit into place.
It came to him slowly over the long months of that winter, came with an otherworldly kind of knowing—that the women he was seeing were all aspects of one. The woman that he loved.
She who stood in the bright sunlight outside the roundhouse. She with the great deerhound at her side and she with the defiant, silver eyes. She who sailed a dragon boat, and she who had walked, bravely, into battle at his side, singing.
The one thing he did not doubt was that he loved her, with a deep and unwavering devotion as fundamental to him as his breath. Where she was, he could not say. Nor did he know if he would ever be with her again in this life. Whether she be alive or dead.
But och, each time he woke from a dream or even when he recalled one—cherishing the thought of her—his heart ached to be at home. At home in her.
Old Mol watched him throughout that winter, glad that he stayed and at the same time worried for him.
She proved patient with his silences and willing when he sought to talk the pieces through, weaving the threads of them into something resembling a pattern.
She sang with him and laughed with him, and he knew it would be hard to leave her, just as he knew that time would come.
So it must.
It came on a day late in winter when a watery sunshine bloomed, arguing that against all odds spring would arrive.
They sat by the fire together, sharing a scant breakfast of oatcakes and weak herb tea, and he recounting a dream he’d had wherein he sailed in a tiny boat far out on the ocean in company with the woman he loved, and a great gray deerhound.
“D’ye think she was yer wife then?” Molly asked.
“Aye, so she must ha’ been.”
“And she is the same woman, ye say, as strode into yon English battle at yer side?”
He smiled at Molly. “I ken it makes nay sense, but aye, ’tis so.”
Molly hesitated. “Ye ken, lad, ye are welcome to stay wi’ me. For good if ye choose.”
“Aye, I do ken that, Mol.” When her name came from his lips, it near sounded like Ma.
“But I ha’ watched ye all this while and I feel there is a place ye need to be. This dream ye keep having”—for he’d had it more than once—“o’ yer lass marching to battle at yer side.”
“Aye?”
“Wha’ is she wearing? Besides the sword, I mean.”
“Why, as I ha’ told, she is dressed like a man entirely. Leggings and a leather jerkin for armor and a cloak over all—”
“A kilt?”
“Aye, so.”
“All the troops among whom ye be walking in this dream—they are kilted also?”
Finlay narrowed his eyes.
“Wha’ color the plaid? Wha’ pattern, lad?”
He gazed at her, arrested.
Molly leaned forward and laid her hand on his arm. “Find the plaid, and ye may find her.”
So he would. If yet she survived.