Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The loch was empty.
Magnus stood at the water’s edge long enough to be certain, long enough for Liam and Duncan to pull up behind him and say nothing, which was the right call.
The surface was flat and grey in the early light. No sign of a candle. No footprints in the soft mud at the bank beyond a single set of boot prints, small, coming down from the sheep track above and stopping at the stone she’d sat on before.
She’d been here. She’d sat. She’d left.
He followed the prints back up the track and found where they turned, not back toward the castle, but up and west toward the high ground, toward the standing stones on the ridge.
“Stone circle,” he said, and got back on his horse.
The ribbon was on the second stone in from the east, snagged at hip height on a rough edge of granite, a thin strip of auburn silk catching the morning light.
Magnus dismounted and stood over it for a moment, not touching it yet, reading the ground. Crushed grass where she’d sat, her boot prints coming and going in a small arc, and then a third set of prints, heavier, a man’s boots, coming in from the northern side of the circle.
He picked up the ribbon and put it in his pocket beside the other one.
“Magnus,” Duncan called from the northern edge.
Magnus walked to where Duncan was crouched at the grass line outside the stones, looking at the ground. Two horses, unshod. Same as in the western glen. They’d stood here for a long while, the ground worked soft beneath them, and then they’d moved out, heading west at a pace that tore the turf.
Magnus crouched beside the nearest print and pressed two fingers in.
Fresh. Six hours at most.
He stood up and looked west, where the hills rolled down toward the old drove roads, the abandoned steadings, the long empty ground between here and the coast that a man who knew these hills could move through without being seen.
He found the tree on the way back to the horses. It was a rowan at the edge of the circle, old and crooked. Into the bark at chest height, someone had taken a knife and cut a shape. Rough, quick work, not carved with any care, the lines bright and raw in the grey wood.
A crest.
Three interlocked rings beneath a broken cross. He’d last seen it on a letter his father had kept, years before the fire, a letter from a man claiming old friendship and asking after the clan’s affairs.
He stood looking at it with his hand flat against the bark and his thumb beside the cuts without touching them.
O’Brien.
Duncan stopped at his shoulder. Then Liam. Neither spoke.
Magnus stepped back.
“He wants me to find him,” he said. “He’s laid a road.”
Duncan’s jaw set. “Then we daenae follow it.”
“We follow it.” Magnus turned. “He has Elspeth.”
“Aye, and he kens ye’ll come. That’s the point.” Duncan stepped around to face him, not blocking his path, not quite, but close enough. “Magnus, think.”
“I have thought.” Magnus was already walking back to the horses.
“He picked ground west of the drove roads. He’s heading for the old hunting lodges; there are three within a half day’s ride that have been empty since before the first fire.
He’ll want high ground, a clear view, somewhere he can see who’s coming.
” He checked his saddle without stopping, pulling the strap tight.
“He’s had her for six hours. He’s had time to reach the farthest one. ”
Liam had said nothing yet. He stood with his arms folded and his eyes on the horizon, and then he looked at Magnus. “What do ye need?”
Something in Magnus’s chest shifted, a hard thing that had been lodged there since the stables, since the ribbon, since Becky’s face in the corridor. He looked at Liam and nodded once.
“Ye and Duncan go back to the castle.” He began buckling his sword on, working the buckle from the inside out, fast and certain.
“I’m nae leavin’ it unguarded in case this is half a trap.
He may have men at the walls while I’m riding west.” He looked at Duncan.
“Take Liam’s four men and the six from the night watch.
Nobody goes in or out without yer permission. ”
Duncan’s lips thinned. “And ye?”
“Five men. The ones who ken the drove roads.” Magnus pulled the sword belt tight. “I’ll take the fast route through the lower pass. If he’s at the farthest lodge, I’ll have him by midmorning.”
“Magnus.” Duncan stepped forward and lowered his voice. “He killed yer family last time. He had twenty men and months of planning, and ye are just going to go there with little escort?”
“I buried me family once,” Magnus said. “I willnae bury me wife.”
The wind moved through the standing stones. Nobody answered.
Liam unfolded his arms and walked to his horse. “I’ll secure the castle,” he said over his shoulder without looking back, which was the most useful thing anyone had said in the last five minutes.
Duncan looked at Magnus. His jaw worked once. Then his mouth turned up at the corner, hard and narrow, nothing like his usual grin. “I was hoping revenge was getting near,” he said. “I’ve been patient for a long bloody time.”
“Aye.” Magnus put his foot in the stirrup and swung himself up into the saddle. “I’ll bring her home.”
He rode.
The road was empty in the early morning, the hills pale on either side, the track rutted from last week’s cart traffic and then nothing, trailing off into rough ground where the road gave up pretending to be a road.
He kept the horse at a canter, reading the ground ahead rather than the horizon. Hoofprints surfaced in a muddy stretch below the first ridge, two sets, angled southwest. He adjusted and kept moving.
She went out to gaze at the stars.
Now that he thought about it, he’d known she went out.
He’d faintly heard the west door somewhere in the hour after midnight.
He’d heard it and told himself it was the wind, told himself she’d gone no further than the yard, because it was the night before their handfasting and he’d doubled the watches, and nothing was threatening about a woman who couldn’t sleep.
He’d lain there and listened for her footsteps and eventually stopped listening because he’d had three hours of sleep in two days and his body had decided for him.
The mud showed the tracks cutting northeast, away from the first lodge, toward the upper ground.
The second lodge. He’d been right that O’Brien would want a clear view.
He pushed the horse harder.
Elspeth had asked him once early on what O’Brien had taken.
He’d said the castle. He’d said the clan.
He hadn’t said everything that made it worth rebuilding.
He hadn’t said the names. He hadn’t said that his sister Isla had been nine years old, or that his mother had had her hair in a braid the last morning he’d seen her, or that his father had pressed that cup into his hands when he was twelve and said it wasn’t the crest that mattered but the man who carried it.
He hadn’t said any of it because he didn’t say things.
The smoke appeared above the eastern shoulder of the hill, thin and grey against the pale sky, rising from somewhere behind the treeline ahead. Too early for a cooking fire, small enough to be deliberate.
Magnus raised his hand, and the five men behind him stopped.
He looked at the smoke. He looked at the treeline. He looked at the hillside above and found the ridge line where two men could sit with a clear view of the approach and miss nothing.
He turned in the saddle and kept his voice low.
“Circle the perimeter. North and south approaches only, stay below the ridge. Nae a sound and nae a move until I come out that door or ye hear somethin’ that tells ye I willnae.” He looked at each of them once. “Anyone who moves early answers to me.”
He dismounted, tethered his horse to the nearest tree, and walked toward the lodge alone.
* * *
Her wrists had been bound with rope, not leather, which meant whoever had tied them had done it in a hurry or hadn’t expected her to notice the difference.
Elspeth noticed.
She sat with her back against the wall and her hands in her lap and worked at the knot with her thumbnail slowly, without looking down, keeping her eyes on the room because looking down would tell him something she didn’t want him to know.
The lodge was small. One room, a cold hearth with a new fire built badly in it, two men near the door who hadn’t spoken since they’d arrived, and O’Brien himself standing at the narrow window with his back to her, watching the hills.
He was taller than she’d expected. Broader. The kind of man who’d once been formidable and carried the shape of it even now, though there was something worn about him, something that had been grinding against itself for a long time without resolution.
Beyond the window, against the dark of the hills, she could see the fire. Distant. Flickering.
Her thumbnail found a loop in the rope and pressed.
O’Brien turned away from the window and looked at her looking at the fire. He smiled.
“Only distractions,” he said, almost pleasantly, crossing the room and crouching to set another piece of wood on the fire rather than looking at her. “A handful of men at the walls, a few horses loosed from their paddocks, enough confusion to ensure Wallace comes exactly where I want him.”
Elspeth kept her eyes on the window. “Magnus will bring half the Highlands with him.”
O’Brien chuckled and sat back on his heels, brushing his hands together. “Nay. Wallace believes he must carry every burden himself.” He glanced at her sideways. “He’ll come alone.”
Her thumbnail found the second loop. She pressed harder.
“He has people who stand beside him.”
“He has people who follow him.” O’Brien stood up and moved toward her. She held herself still as he crouched in front of her, close enough that she could see the deep lines around his eyes. Not a young man’s fury, but something older. “Do ye ken what his father did?”
“I ken what ye did,” Elspeth said. “Ye burned a home with a family inside it.”
Something crossed his face and was gone. He tilted his head.
“Useless man. Weak. Made me father lose our lands. Stood by while me family starved and scattered. The Wallaces kept their hills, and we buried our name.” He said it the way a man recited a thing he’d said to himself every morning for years.
“I took me revenge. Left nae a thing of them standing. The boy…” He paused, something shifting behind his eyes. “I didnae expect him to live. He was away training. He was supposed to return to ash and give up.” His jaw tightened. “He didnae give up.”
“Nay,” Elspeth said. “He didnae.”
“Thirteen years.” O’Brien stood up abruptly and moved back to the window, hands folded behind his back. “I watched him rebuild it stone by stone. Fence by fence. I watched him bring his people back, plant his fields, fill his hall. Smile as though they deserved another chance.”
He turned. “They didnae. I will never forgive them. I will never stop until Wallace means nothing. Until Ben Cruachan burns to the ground. Until he understands what it feels like to lose everyone.” His voice had gone flat, devoid of everything except the thing that had been driving him for thirteen years.
He crossed the room in three strides and crouched in front of her again, and his eyes were not the eyes of an angry man. They were the eyes of a man who had already decided.
“And now he’s given me exactly what I need.”
Elspeth met his gaze squarely. “Then ye ken nothing about Magnus.”
“I ken everything about him.” O’Brien reached out and lifted her chin with two fingers, studying her face. She pulled back. He let her. “I watched him these weeks. The way he watches ye when he thinks no one else is watching him.”
He stood up and moved to the window again, adjusting his gloves one finger at a time. “He allowed himself a weakness. He always was going to. Men like him always do, in the end, and then I have to find it and press.” He glanced back at her. “And here ye are.”
Elspeth’s thumbnail hit the third loop and felt it give, just slightly.
“Ye’ve made one mistake,” she said.
O’Brien paused at the window, not turning fully. “Have I?”
“Ye think Magnus is the same man he was thirteen years ago.” She kept her voice even, her hands in her lap.
“Ye think because ye broke him once, he’ll break again.
” She watched his shoulders. “He rebuilt a clan from nothing. He survived grief and loneliness and thirteen years of a debt he could have spent in fury but didnae, because his people needed a laird more than he needed revenge.”
She let that sink in. “And now he has people who will stand beside him, whether he asks them to or nae. A cousin who has never left his side. A laird who rode three days to be at his handfasting. A household that would walk into fire for him.”
O’Brien turned then, and his expression had gone flat in a different way than before. Not the settled flatness of the speech he’d given himself every morning, but something tighter.
“We’ll see,” he said.
Elspeth looked back at the window. The fires on the hills were small from here, small enough that she could tell they were doing exactly what he’d said—creating noise, drawing eyes, pulling people toward walls rather than toward her. He’d planned it carefully. She understood that.
She also understood that she’d been working at the rope for twenty minutes and had found three loops and a fraying edge near the knot, and that the two men by the door had stopped watching her sometime in the last five minutes in favor of watching O’Brien.
She looked at the fire he’d built badly in the hearth. It had caught now, low and uneven, the wood stacked wrong, the embers spreading outward across the stone rather than drawing up. She looked at the distance between where she was sitting and the hearth.
She looked at her hands.
Magnus is coming.
She knew it the way she knew the sound of his boots in the corridor, the creak of the third step, the way he cleared his throat when he’d said something softer than he’d meant to.
He was coming because he was Magnus Wallace and she was his, and he had buried his family once already and would not do it again.
That thought, which should have steadied her, lodged somewhere beneath her ribs and pressed.
He was going to walk through that door alone.
Then I had better be ready when he does.