Chapter Eleven What Remains #3
That seemed to satisfy something. Or at least not worsen it.
After a while Ross said, “Did she grieve hard?”
The question carried no softness. Not because Ross lacked it, Kenan thought, but because men raised to guard a clan learned young how not to shape their deepest fears like fragile things.
“Aye,” Kenan said.
Ross stared ahead. “Good.”
Kenan turned his head slightly. “Good.”
“If she had not,” Ross said, voice gone rougher now, “I would fear the fire took more than walls.”
The answer lived in him longer than it should have.
Night had fully fallen by the time Kincaid’s torches appeared through the trees below. The sight changed the whole line at once. The old woman straightened. The girl lifted her face from Ross’s saddle cloak. Even the wounded man groaned as if the body recognized sanctuary before the mind did.
At the gate, Gavin waited with Morna and two healers. Word must have outrun them through some scout sent ahead from the lower rise, or perhaps Kincaid had simply learned to listen for the shape of hope returning over stone.
Ross handed the boy down without flourish. Morna took charge of the wounded at once. Gavin stepped forward, and for a tense heartbeat Kenan thought old clan pride might sharpen the moment into something brittle.
Instead Ross said only, “My people before courtesy.”
Gavin nodded once. “As it should be.”
That was enough.
And then, before Kenan could think whether he wanted it or feared it, the guest wing door at the upper passage opened.
Eilidh stood there.
She had no cloak on, only a dark gown hastily belted and a shawl half fallen from one shoulder, as though she had come the instant some servant breathed Ross’s name in her hearing.
The torchlight caught her face and made it at once more alive and more wrecked than he had seen it since Hamish rode through the gate.
Ross looked up.
For one impossible heartbeat they simply stared at one another across the yard, two survivors standing on opposite edges of the same wound.
Then Eilidh moved.
She came down the steps faster than any daughter of Jardine propriety ought to have done, and Ross met her halfway, almost stumbling in his hurry to reach her.
When she struck his chest, the sound that tore from her was not elegant grief or careful relief.
It was raw. Familial. The sound of a woman finding one piece of home still breathing.
Ross held her so hard Kenan looked away.
He should not witness that. It was not for him.
Yet some part of him stayed fixed where he stood beside his horse, the cold soaking through his boots, his hands gone strangely numb at his sides.
He had brought Ross back. The fact should have felt like victory.
Instead it felt like standing at the edge of something sacred and ruined both, knowing he belonged partly to the reason for the ruin and not at all to the sanctity.
Eilidh lifted her head after a long moment and turned.
Not to Gavin. Not to Morna. To Kenan.
Their eyes met across the torchlit yard while Ross still held one of her hands in both of his.
No smile crossed her face. The wound in her was far too fresh for that. But something there had shifted. Not healed. Not forgiven. Only shifted enough that he could breathe through the next moment without feeling the whole of her sorrow turned away from him.
She did not speak. Neither did he.
Ross followed her gaze and looked back to Kenan with a different expression than before, as if seeing now not only the War Chief or the Kincaid man, but the one who had chosen the birch shelf before full dark and come himself.
That, too, was not gratitude. Not yet.
But it was not refusal.
Gavin’s voice carried then, practical and weary and mercifully ordinary. “Get the living inside. We can mourn and argue after they have eaten.”
The yard moved again.
Morna claimed the wounded. The old woman was led inward.
The little girl with the carving vanished under Mairead’s stern care before she could bolt.
Ross remained beside Eilidh, his face carved from smoke and exhaustion.
Kenan handed off his horse reins and finally forced his own boots toward motion.
As he passed Eilidh, close enough now that her sleeve brushed his arm, she said very quietly, “You went yourself.”
Three words. No more.
“Aye,” he answered.
She looked at Ross once, then back at Kenan. In the torchlight her eyes held grief still, and shock, and the dazed relief of finding blood kin alive. But beneath all of it lay something he had not seen there for days.
Not peace.
Trust, perhaps. Fragile as first ice.
He did not reach for it.
Neither did she.
Not yet.
But when the survivors were led into the hall and the doors shut against the dark, Eilidh did not turn away from him as she had in the corridor or the doorway of her chamber.
She stood beside Ross, shoulders still shaking from the force of reunion, and looked at Kenan as if, for this one night at least, the silence between ruins had lessened by a step.
That was enough.
It had to be.