Chapter 32
The festival had been a triumph not one hour past, and now it was a nightmare, and Ragnall could not for the life of him find the seam where the one had torn into the other.
He climbed up from the riverbank into a churning, dark area lit red by the dying bonfire, and everything he had spent a month and most of his heart building was falling apart before his eyes.
Men he had watched toss the caber together that very afternoon, Cairn and Blythe, with their arms around each other’s shoulders and ale going around, were now at each other’s throats in the flickering firelight.
A trestle lay on its side with the black bun and the broth crushed beneath it.
A piper’s drone wheezed and died somewhere underneath.
A woman was screaming off to his left, high and ragged, and a bairn was screaming somewhere closer, and above both of them rose the old sound, the one his father had taught him to fear more than any noise on God’s earth—the wet and ugly squelch of clansmen driving steel into clansmen.
“Hold!” He waded into the heart of it, roaring, and caught a Cairn man by the back of his plaid and hauled him off a Blythe lad half his size. “Put up yer steel! I said hold!”
A few heard him. A few faltered, blinking, as if waking. But fear had a logic all its own once it took a crowd by the throat, and there were too many already too far gone, swinging at any face that was not their own kin, no longer knowing nor caring who had struck the first blow.
Somebody struck the first blow intentionally, in the dark, hoping to ignite everythin’, while three generations of buried hatred did the rest of the work for him.
I should have seen it comin’. I should have doubled the guards, circled the area, and never let the dark fall on two clans with drink in them and old grudges half-asleep.
I built the powder, laid it out openly, called it peace, and handed the man his spark.
He fought toward the center, and he drew to part them and not to wound, throwing his bulk and his roaring voice and the flat of his blade between man and man, dragging them off one another by collar and hair.
Alastair appeared at his shoulder out of the darkness, bleeding from a gash above his brow, doing the same without a word. A group of the steadier Cairn men gathered around them and began to push back the chaos with their strength, forming a moving wall of sense in a sea that had lost it.
And then the press heaved and broke before him, and Ragnall came through into a clear patch of trodden grass at the very heart of it, and the bottom dropped clean out of the night.
There, in the flickering red light, stood Lucas Arran.
The boy was holding a sword with blood on its blade, and at his feet, a Cairn man lay face down and motionless in the mud.
He stared at the scene with pale, shocked horror spreading across his face.
Then he looked up, and his eyes found Ragnall’s.
Ragnall watched the boy understand all at once exactly how it looked.
“It wasnae…” Lucas trailed off. “Cairn, it isnae the way it looks. He came at me. I swear it on me faither’s grave, he came at me out of the dark, and I only—”
But the men at Ragnall’s back had seen one of their own lying dead with a Blythe blade standing over him, and the growl that tore out of their chests was a sound from somewhere south of reason.
A horn began to blow the muster, low and insistent, off in the dark where he could not reach it. And Ragnall felt the night tip, slow and certain, toward the edge of the cliff.
Olivia had lost him in the first ten seconds.
One moment, Ragnall’s hand had been tightly gripping hers, pulling her up the slippery bank; the next, the crowd had closed around them like dark water swallowing a dropped stone.
She was suddenly alone in a heaving mass of bodies, firelight, and screams, pushed one way and pulled the other, her half-laced bodice clutched to her chest with one fist, her heart pounding painfully against her ribs.
She did the only thing her churning mind could fix upon—she went to find her brother.
She fought toward the center, ducking under a swung arm, shoving past a man who did not so much as see her, calling Lucas’s name into the din until her throat burned. An elbow caught her square across the cheekbone and lit her vision white, and she tasted blood, but she kept moving.
She clambered over the wreck of an overturned trestle. She put a weeping girl behind her into the arms of an older woman without breaking stride. And she came out at last into the open ground before the embers, and what she found there stopped her heart dead in her chest.
Her brother. And her husband. The two of them were facing each other across a dead man, both bloodied, both with bare steel naked in their hands and three hundred years of feud crouched between them like a beast about to be fed.
“He came at me,” Lucas was saying, his voice high-pitched, a boy again and no laird. “Ye have to believe me. I never—”
“Step away from me man.” Ragnall’s voice came low and terrible, the voice she had heard from him exactly once before, on her wedding night, in the breath before he had killed Dougal Ross in the Great Hall.
“Step back from him, lad, and put up yer blade, or God help me there’ll be nay holdin’ back what comes after. ”
Olivia saw, with a clarity that turned the spinning world as slow as cold honey, the muscles bunch and gather in her husband’s sword arm.
She saw the broad blade begin to lift. She saw two clans hang their entire bloody future on the next half-second, and her brother, her last living brother—her solemn, good, brave, foolish brother—stand frozen and white beneath the rising steel with his own sword forgotten in his hand.
“Daenae!”
It tore out of her raw and broke in the middle, then she was running, throwing her whole self across the open ground between the two of them with both bare hands extended in front of her, as if two bare hands had ever in the history of the world held back a war.
“Daenae! Please! Ragnall, please, it’s Lucas. It’s me braither! Daenae. I am beggin’ ye, daenae do this—”
And Ragnall, with his blade at the very top of its terrible arc and his entire clan howling behind him for Blythe blood, went still as a stone cut from the hill.
He looked at her. Only at her. Over the dead man’s body, the cold embers, and the smoking wreck of a month of hard-won peace, he looked at his wife, and the rest of the burning night fell away from both of them, leaving only that.