Chapter Nine The Ashes of Home
The next morning dawned under a sky the color of old pewter.
No rain fell. No wind troubled the banners above Kincaid Keep. After weeks of weather that seemed determined to mirror the war, the stillness felt unnatural, as if the world had drawn one careful breath and held it.
Eilidh stood at the narrow window of her chamber and watched the inner yard below.
Stable boys crossed with feed buckets swinging from stiff arms. Men moved between the south gate and the storehouse carrying crates of arrows, coils of rope, sacks of grain.
The keep had settled so fully into its war rhythm now that even quiet hours were made of preparation.
She had slept little.
Not because of the battlement conversation alone, though that had stayed with her through the night.
It was the look in Kenan’s face when he admitted he would make the same choice again, and the equal truth that he feared what such choices were shaping inside him.
Loving him had not made the matter simpler. It had sharpened it.
A knock sounded at the door.
“Enter,” she said.
Mairead stepped in carrying a tray with oatcakes, cheese, and a steaming cup that smelled faintly of mint and honey. Her maid took one look at her and frowned.
“You did not sleep.”
“I slept enough.”
“That means no.”
Eilidh managed a tired half smile. “You grow bolder every day.”
“I grow weary of serving a woman who thinks stubbornness is a replacement for strength.” Mairead set the tray on the small table. “Eat before you go to council.”
“I may not go.”
That drew a sharper look. “You may not go?”
Eilidh moved to the basin and dipped a cloth into cool water. “Gavin can manage one council without me. Kenan hardly needs my help to turn roads and rivers into weapons.”
The bitterness in her own voice surprised her enough that she stilled.
Mairead heard it too. “Then the quarrel from yesterday still sits poorly.”
“It was not a quarrel.”
“No?” The maid lifted one brow. “Then what do you call looking as if your heart and pride tried to kill each other in the same hour?”
Eilidh almost laughed. “You have a poet’s gift for ugliness.”
“I have eyes.” Mairead came nearer, her tone gentling. “Whatever sits between you and the War Chief, do not let it become silence. Silence breeds foolishness in frightened people.”
Eilidh knew that was true. She had built her whole life on speaking before silence hardened into resentment or fear. Yet with Kenan, truth came too sharp and clean, often leaving no place to hide from what it showed.
At last she said, “I will go to council.”
Mairead nodded as if she had expected nothing else.
By the time Eilidh entered the great hall, the table had already filled with ledgers, messages, and marked maps. Gavin stood at its head speaking with Baird. Donal sat near the hearth with his staff angled across his knees. Caelan occupied his usual place by the window, half in shadow.
Kenan stood with one hand braced on the table, listening to a scout finish a report.
He looked up when she entered.
For a heartbeat the hall fell away. Not entirely, but enough for her to feel again the dangerous pull she had known in the records chamber and on the battlements. He gave no sign of last night beyond the brief softening in his eyes before he turned back to the scout.
Relief moved through her more strongly than it should have.
“Say it again,” Kenan said.
The scout pointed to the map. “Two riders seen near the old birch ridge, no banner. They did not close enough for a clean count.”
“Nothing is merely thievery now,” Gavin said.
“No,” Kenan agreed. “Double the western watch and move the second signal fire lower. If they circle north, I want warning before dusk.”
The scout bowed and withdrew.
Eilidh took her seat, aware of Kenan’s attention only in fragments now, in the moments between reports.
The council moved quickly. Roderic had not answered yesterday’s trap with immediate retaliation, which no one trusted.
Two allied lairds had sent belated pledges of grain now that the southern road remained closed.
Baird complained that one of those pledges consisted largely of spoiled oats and mules too old to pull a proper cart.
Donal observed dryly that desperation had not improved generosity among the neighboring clans.
The exchange might have amused her on another day. Today it only scraped along her nerves.
After some minutes she realized Kenan had noticed her distraction. He said nothing of it. Once, when Baird and Gavin sank into an argument over stores, Kenan’s hand shifted on the table until the back of his knuckles brushed lightly against her sleeve where no one else would remark on it.
The touch lasted scarcely a second.
Still, it steadied her.
By midday the first wave of business had thinned. Gavin sent Baird to the lower cellars. Caelan left to inspect the returned scouts himself. Donal remained, but only because the old man seemed to have mastered the art of appearing half asleep while missing nothing.
At last Gavin looked from Kenan to Eilidh and said, “The two of you should eat before the next dispatches arrive.”
Kenan gave him a flat look. “You sound like Morna.”
“That is likely why we both keep you alive,” Gavin said.
Eilidh rose. “I will fetch something from the kitchens.”
“I can send a servant,” Gavin said.
“No. I would rather go myself.”
Kenan straightened as if to follow. She gave the smallest shake of her head. Not yet, the gesture meant. Not here.
He understood and let her go.
The passage outside the hall was cooler than the council chamber, the air carrying stone, tallow, and distant woodsmoke.
She walked toward the kitchens with more purpose than she felt.
Something had been pressing at the edges of her thoughts since waking, shapeless and persistent. A wrongness she could not name.
At the turn of the stairwell leading toward the lower ward, she met one of the gate guards coming up at speed.
He almost collided with her, then checked himself. “My lady.”
His face had gone pale beneath the day’s grime.
Eilidh’s stomach turned cold at once. “What is it?”
The guard hesitated. That was answer enough before he spoke.
“A rider has come from Jardine lands.”
The world seemed to narrow around the words.
“How long ago?”
“Just now. He near fell from the horse in the outer yard.”
She did not remember crossing the rest of the corridor. Only that suddenly she was moving fast, skirts gathered in one hand, the guard falling in beside her, stone flashing by in pale bands and shadow.
Kenan met her at the head of the great hall stair, already moving down toward the yard. He had heard. Of course he had.
“Eilidh,” he said, but she did not slow.
They reached the outer yard together.
A knot of men had gathered near the gate. Morna knelt beside a mud-caked rider slumped against the wheel of an empty cart. The horse that had carried him stood nearby, flanks shuddering, foam and sweat dried white along its neck.
The rider lifted his head at the sound of steps.
Eilidh knew him.
“Hamish,” she said.
He stared at her with bloodshot eyes, and she knew before he opened his mouth that whatever came next would split her life into before and after.
“My lady,” he whispered.
Kenan stopped just behind her. Gavin came down the steps a moment later. The yard had gone almost unnaturally quiet.
Eilidh knelt despite the mud soaking through her skirts. “Tell me.”
Hamish swallowed, and his hands shook so badly that Morna steadied one with both of hers.
“Roderic struck east,” he said. “Not at the lines. Not at the stores.” His breath hitched. “At home.”
The word home undid her more cleanly than any cry might have.
“No,” she said, though the denial had no strength in it.
“He had guides,” Hamish forced out. “Men who knew the back paths through the birches and the old ford below the sheep hills. They came before dawn two days past. The watch on the outer rise was cut first. By the time the horn sounded, they were already inside the lower fields.”
Eilidh stared.
“And my uncle?” she asked.
Hamish closed his eyes briefly. “Dead.”
The single word struck harder than any long telling could have.
“He fell at the east gate,” Hamish said.
“They held the inner yard near an hour after the walls were breached. Your cousin Ross got some of the women and children through the old root cellar passage. Not many. The rest…” He swallowed.
“The hall burned, my lady. The stores with it. Those who ran west were hunted. Those who ran north scattered into the hills.”
Morna made a low sound under her breath.
Eilidh did not think at first. She did not feel either.
For one stretched and impossible moment the world simply ceased to arrange itself into meaning.
Her uncle, cautious and maddening and so often wrong, dead at his own gate.
The hall where she had grown from child to woman, burned.
The lower fields trampled. The birch paths she had run with her father as a girl now guiding enemies into the heart of her home.
A spy, she thought dimly. Someone told them. Someone led them.
“Two days ago?” she asked.
Hamish nodded weakly. “Aye.”
Two days. Two days while she sat in council over roads and grain and the shape of Roderic’s next move. Two days while she went to Kenan’s bed and let herself believe, if only for a few hours, that love could exist apart from the ruin gathering elsewhere.
The yard tilted.
Kenan’s hand caught her elbow before she fell.
She jerked away from the touch as if burned. Not because of him exactly. Because if she let that hand anchor her now, she would have to feel the whole catastrophe at once.
She took two unsteady steps back.
“My lady,” Kenan said quietly.
The sound of his voice undid the last of what held her upright.
Her knees gave.
She did not quite strike the ground. Gavin and Morna both moved, but it was Kenan’s arms around her that finally kept her from collapsing fully into the mud.
She should have resisted. She should have stood on her own strength.