Chapter One
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The camp lay in a shallow fold of ground where the wind passed over them rather than through them, which was something at least. Morggán stood at the edge of it with his hands braced on his belt and watched his men settle in with sluggish movements that came of too many nights spent this way—fires banked low, gear stacked where it could be reached in the dark, horses picketed with more strategy than comfort.
Behind him, Alasdair was arguing with Finlay in a voice that he didn’t bother to keep low.
“If the Earl says we move at dawn, we move at dawn,” Finlay said, with the patient stubbornness of a man who liked rules because they gave him something to adhere to, a path to follow.
He was broad through the shoulders and steady on his feet, a shield man by instinct even when he was not carrying one.
“And if the Earl says we should all jump into the river and see who floats longest?” Alasdair replied. He was leaner, quicker, and had never yet met an idea he could not improve by pointing out exactly how bad it was. “Will ye do that as well, or will ye ask why first?”
Finlay snorted. “I would ask whether ye were jumping before me.”
“That’s because ye’re a coward,” Alasdair said pleasantly.
Morggán turned before it could go further. “Cease,” he said wearily, not bothering to raise his voice.
The two folded the argument away, to be taken out again later when there was more time and less to do.
He walked back toward them, the small knot of men who mattered most to him in a fight: Alasdair and Finlay, Eòin the Younger, and Donnchadh, who rarely spoke unless he decided he had something to say worth hearing.
Eòin was crouched over a map scratched into the dirt with the end of a stick, improving it in small, fussy ways that made it only slightly more accurate but somehow more reassuring.
Donnchadh stood a little apart, arms folded, watching Eòin scratch in the dirt with an expression that said the drawing would do no good, not when the whole thing stunk of disaster waiting.
“So the earl says he’s found a column, coming north,” Morggán said, standing near Eòin’s shoulder. “Where do the scouts put them?”
“Here,” Eòin said without looking up, pointing the stick outside his sketch, toward the south. “English. Moving north with wagons. Supplies, and lightly guarded, he says. Dog-tired, he says, at the end of their line.”
“And ye believe him?” Alasdair asked.
“I believe he believes it,” Eòin said, and glanced up long enough to offer a thin smile. “Which is nae the same thing.”
Donnchadh shifted his weight. “Even if it is true, they will nae be alone for long. The English dinna leave their throats uncovered unless they have teeth somewhere close by.”
Morggán nodded. That had been his thought as well, and it had not grown more comfortable with the passing of the day. “The Earl wants a clean strike,” he said. “Something visible. Something that looks like momentum and strategy rather than some half-cocked plan.”
“Half-cocked plans are nae fashionable,” Alasdair remarked dryly.
Finlay’s mouth twitched. “The men will follow him,” he said, more serious now. “They always do.”
“They will,” Morggán agreed. “And so will we.”
That earned him a look from each of them, in different measures. Eòin’s was thoughtful. Donnchadh’s was resigned. Alasdair’s was openly skeptical.
“Ye dinna like it,” Alasdair said.
“Nae,” Morggán said. “I dinna.”
“Then why will we do it?” Finlay asked.
Because although the Earl of Caerwyll was not a man they would have followed by choice, he was a man whose banner gathered others.
Because his family had held its lands for generations and lost them, and taken them again, and there were men in the camp who had come for that name.
Because Scotland’s need outweighed their own, and because turning away from the earl would not weaken only him, but split what little strength they had left.
Because politics did not stop at the edge of a battlefield, no matter how much soldiers wished it would.
Morggán did not say any of that out loud. They already knew all that.
“Because we dinna get to choose the war we’re in,” he said instead. “Only how we stand in it. And we dinna run from a fight or a chance to strike them.”
Alasdair scraped a line through the dirt with his boot, ruining Eòin’s careful work. “Aye, but he’s moving too fast, counting on what scouts report,” he said, “with nae further investigation.”
“Aye,” Donnchadh said quietly. “And that’s when men get dead.”
For a moment, none of them spoke.
Then Eòin rose from his haunches and said, “If it all goes to hell, ye’ll want us on the left. The ground breaks there. We can hold longer, or break more easily, and hie to the forest.”
Morggán looked at him, and then at the others, and felt the familiar, unwelcome tightening in his chest that came when men began planning for ways to improve another man’s bad idea.
God, what he wouldn’t give to be embedded with the Nicholson or the Thains instead of Caerwyll.
“Aye,” he said at last. “And give ?em hell as best we can.”
Alasdair’s grin returned, crooked and unrepentant. “Och,” he said, “and if we’re to be scattered to the winds or to the heavens, I’d rather it be in guid company.”
Finlay snorted again and glared at Alasdair. “I’m nae dying next to ye—Jesu, and living all eternity with yer blathering in my ear?” He shook his head, his lips forming a thin, unhappy line.
Alasdair’s cocky grin improved, and he pointed a scolding finger at Finlay. “And dinna be seeking death on yer own, trying to escape me.”
Morggán let himself smile at that, just a little. But Alasdair’s fun did not make the plan better. Certainly, it didn’t make the morning safer. But it reminded him why he trusted these men to stand where he stood, and why, when the blood started spurting, they would know to look for one another.
“Get some rest,” he said. “Whatever tomorrow brings, we canna expect it will go as easily as Caerwyll predicts.”
They broke away then, one by one, back into the necessary, familiar business of making themselves ready.
Morggán remained where he was for a moment longer, looking out toward the dark beyond the fires, and wondered—not for the first time—how many decisions were made by men who would not be the ones to pay for them.
***
Morggán knew before they reached the bottom of the slope that the day was going to be shite.
The valley ahead of them should have held a thin line of wagons and a light escort, something that could be struck hard and broken apart before the English had time to gather themselves properly.
Instead, as the Scots came down out of the higher ground, he saw banners where there should not have been banners, and lines forming where there should have been confusion.
The sound carried upward to them, not the loose noise of a camp caught unaware, but the heavier, steadier din of men who had already taken their places and were waiting.
He reined in and looked again, counting by tens, taking in the spacing, the way the ground was being used.
There were more of them than there should have been.
Worse, there was movement to the left, where the trees thinned and the land opened, and a moment later he understood why the air had begun to tremble beneath the hooves.
Cavalry was coming in where there shouldn’t have been any at all.
Someone had been wrong. Or someone had lied.
Orders were already moving down the line, and there was no clean way to stop what had begun. The front ranks were too far forward, the banners too visible, the moment for doubt already behind them. They went in because there was nothing else to do that didn’t promise something worse.
The first clash was hard and brief and did nothing to change the shape of what lay ahead of them. The English line didn’t buckle. It held, and then it pressed back, and when the horsemen struck from the flank the fight broke open into something that wasn’t going to be easily mended.
Then the horsemen came in from the left.
He saw them only in pieces at first—the movement between trunks, the flash of steel, the sudden rise of sound—and then they were on them, driving into the flank with weight and speed, splitting what little shape the Scots still had.
The fight stopped being a push and became a crush, and then it became a scramble for any ground that was not already taken.
Someone shouted to fall back. Someone else shouted something different. It didn’t matter as the line was already coming apart.
Morggán stayed mounted, forcing his way through the press, keeping his blade up and his eyes forward, trying to take as many English with him as he became certain he wasn’t making it out of this melee.
His horse took a blow meant for him, the impact shuddering through the saddle, and a moment later he felt a strike at his thigh, a hot, tearing pain that stole his breath.
Then, in the tight fighting, the hilt of a sword thwacked against his ribs.
The horse’s stride went uneven beneath him, its head tossing, foam flying back along its neck. Around him, men were breaking away in ones and twos, then in larger, looser knots, the field dissolving into flight as the English pressed forward.
The trees came up fast, swallowing sound and men alike.
Morggán rode into them with the rest, bent low over the horse’s neck, his hands locked in the mane after he’d lost his grip on the reins in an evasive maneuver.
The forest floor was torn up with hooves and boots, and more than once his horse stumbled and nearly went down.
The further they went from the doomed skirmish, the more scattered they became. Morggán’s horse, wild with fright from his own injury, ran as if possessed, while Morggán struggled to keep his seat, his own pain greatly intensified.