Chapter Eleven What Remains #2
The land changed there. Trees thickened, then thinned again over stony shelves cut by wind and poor soil.
The birches stood pale and numerous, their trunks clustered close enough in places to hide a crouching man, open enough in others that horses could pass if urged carefully.
The ground rose harder than it seemed from below.
Twice one of the riders’ horses skidded on shale.
Once Caelan lifted a hand and the entire line froze while two unfamiliar crows burst from a thicket and wheeled away westward.
No scouts followed.
Still, Kenan felt the weight of unseen eyes all afternoon.
Near the standing stones Caelan dismounted. He crouched, fingers brushing a patch of flattened moss between roots. “Fresh enough,” he murmured. “A day, perhaps less.”
Kenan dropped beside him.
Boot prints. Small. Two children, likely. One heavier tread dragging slightly at the left. Another nearly missing at the heel, a split sole tied with cord.
“North,” Caelan said.
They followed on foot after that, leaving two riders with the horses in a screened hollow and taking the rest ahead through the trees.
The air grew colder as they climbed. Once Kenan found a strip of torn wool caught on a low branch, dark green and singed at the edge.
Another time he saw where someone had been sick beside a rock face and then forced onward all the same.
By the time they reached the high shelf above the quarry line, the day had begun to tilt toward dusk.
The cave entrance was not truly a cave, only a deep cut in the stone hidden behind wind-fallen branches and a jut of rock shaped enough like a broken tooth to vanish in shadow unless one knew precisely where to look.
Caelan raised a hand.
Everyone stopped.
For one heartbeat Kenan heard only the rasp of his own breath and the distant complaint of wind moving through bare upper branches.
Then a child coughed from within the dark.
Relief struck so sharply it almost felt like pain.
Kenan stepped forward before anyone could stop him and said, not loudly but clearly enough to carry, “Ross.”
Silence answered.
Then the scrape of someone shifting in the dark. A man’s voice came rough and hoarse from within. “Who names me?”
“Kenan of Kincaid.”
Another silence, thinner this time, stretched between stone and cold air.
At last the answer came. “Then come slow.”
Kenan ducked through the low opening and let his eyes adjust.
The cave held five souls besides Ross. An old woman wrapped in two blankets.
A girl of perhaps nine with a split lip and one hand clamped around a wooden carving gone almost smooth from worry.
A smaller boy asleep against her side. A wounded man with his leg bound in torn shirt linen dark from seepage.
And Ross himself, sitting against the back wall with a sword across his knees and a face gone harsher than grief alone should have made it.
He had Eilidh’s eyes, Kenan saw at once. Not in color, but in the way they held a thing and refused to look aside.
Ross pushed himself upright with visible effort. “You came.”
“Aye.”
He did not say more. There was too much in those two words already. Surprise. Suspicion. Exhaustion. The shadow of old clan distances and new necessities.
Ross’s gaze moved past him toward the cave mouth. “How many?”
“Six riders total. No banners. No scouts on our trail.”
Ross’s shoulders eased by a fraction. “Good.”
The wounded man near the wall stirred and groaned. The girl tightened her grip on the carving and stared at Kenan with the blank watchfulness children learned too quickly in wartime.
“We take them back now,” Kenan said.
Ross’s mouth flattened. “You do.”
The distinction was not lost on either of them.
Kenan let it stand. He knelt beside the wounded man instead.
Arrow crease high in the thigh. Fever coming.
Badly bound, though likely the best Ross could manage in a cave without clean water and linen.
He took the broth skin from his pack and handed it to the old woman first because her face told him she was nearest to falling.
Then he passed the wraps to the children.
Ross watched all of it without speaking.
Only when the first movements toward departure had begun did he say quietly, “Eilidh lives.”
It was not exactly a question. It was a man naming the hope he had ridden half dead to recover ledgers for and then turned back from because the living in his charge needed him more.
“She lives,” Kenan answered.
Ross looked down at the sword across his knees. “And Jardine?”
Kenan chose the truth because nothing else would survive long between them. “Burned. Your uncle dead. Many scattered. Some already found and brought to Kincaid.”
Ross closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, no tears showed. Only a grief so tight it had become a kind of steel.
“And she is with you.”
Again, not a question.
“Aye.”
Ross looked at him fully then. Whatever he had heard in scraps from the fleeing survivors, from Hamish, from frightened women huddled in ruined sheds, was in that gaze now.
Kincaid war chief. The man Eilidh had stayed beside.
The man she now shut from her door. The man standing in the cave where Ross had hidden his last living kin.
Kenan had endured harsher looks. Few cut more keenly.
“She asked to ride after you,” he said. “Gavin refused. So did I.”
Ross let out a breath that might have been a laugh if bitterness had ever learned humor. “Then I should thank you.”
“You may do as you please.”
At that, something unexpected crossed Ross’s face. Not warmth. Not yet. Recognition perhaps, of a man too tired for ceremony. “You look worse than the dead.”
Kenan almost smiled. “Aye. I’ve heard that.”
Ross glanced toward the sleeping children, then back again. “I cannot thank Kincaid yet.”
“I did not ask it.”
“No.” Ross’s mouth tightened. “But you still came.”
The words held more than courtesy. An acknowledgment of the road between refusal and alliance narrowing whether either clan liked it or not.
“We move now,” Kenan said. “Before full dark.”
They wrapped the wounded man to carry him between two poles cut from scrub pine. The old woman insisted on walking. Ross lifted the sleeping boy without ceremony and the girl clung to his side like a shadow. By the time they left the cave, dusk had lowered blue and hard across the birch shelf.
The return was slower. Pain and children and failing light made certain of that.
Kenan rode mostly at the rear once they had regained the horses, watching the tree line and listening to the exhausted rhythm of people who had survived too much to complain of more. Once Ross dropped back to ride beside him while the others managed the narrow descent.
“She asks after me?” he said.
“No.”
Ross gave him a sharp look.
Kenan kept his eyes ahead. “Because no one had news worth bringing.”