Chapter Five #2
The greater mystery, of course, was why it mattered to him what she was or wasn’t, whether she lied or not, how this came to be her life. This, her life: alone in the woods, in a house barely fit for shelter, quiet, narrow, held together by her own two hands, with neither kin nor protection.
“I don’t know how I came to be here,” she finally said, her attention returned to the bannock-like rounds she fried.
Morggán considered this, his scowl returning. A foundling then, was she nae? Or cast loose, then. With nae kin to answer for her.
He asked next, “Are ye waiting on something? Someone?” When only a shrug answered—and though he was a wee bit peeved by his own sharp curiosity, for he’d never asked another soul so many questions in one sitting, had never felt the desire to know more so much as he did now—he pressed, “Would ye have gone already? Elsewhere? If ye could?”
This caught her attention and lifted her blue-eyed gaze to his. “I would go home.”
Verra guid, and now he was getting somewhere. “And where is that?” He could and would make sure she got there, home—he owed her at least that much.
She repeated what seemed to be a standard response. “I don’t know.” She chewed her lip, her gaze fixed on him. “I don’t remember—or I only remember California. I’m not from Scotland.”
That explained quite a bit, but then barely anything at all—and he’d never heard of a place called California.
When he remained quiet now, contemplating her—the mystery of her—she seemed to grow anxious, and was happy then to change the subject, or at least not be the subject.
“Will you change the bandage?” she asked, inclining her head toward his thigh.
“Aye, seems a guid idea,” he replied, distracted for a moment longer before he added, “but I’ll need fresh linen and, have ye salve to spare?”
“There’s still some left,” she answered.
He nodded once, though his thoughts had already strayed from the matter of his injury, returning to her circumstance.
She might live five more years here—or twenty-five.
It would depend on luck, on weather, on whether her hands stayed quick and her back unbroken.
On whether hunger took her first, or fever, or a fall on wet stone with no one around to hear her.
He found himself wondering how she would fare when she was no longer young, when strength came slower in the morning and pain lingered longer in the bones.
Whether she would learn to trade usefulness for knowledge, skill for shelter, or whether she would simply fade, one hard season at a time.
And when she died—because every person did—who would know she had ever been here at all? Who would speak her name? Who, if anyone, would mourn her, or mark the place where she lay, or remember that she had once stood here and drawn breath and mattered?
The thought left him faintly irritated, for he could not recall the last time he had spared so much consideration for the existence of another soul. He set it aside with some effort, annoyed at the depth of his own curiosity, as unwelcome as it was unearned.
***
Sleep did not come easily.
Avery lay on her side in her bed, warm despite the crisp night air because of the plaid draped around her, watching the fire burn low between them.
The man lay on the ground opposite her, on the far side of the fire, no more than six or eight feet away, stretched on his back with an extra fur folded beneath his head like a pillow.
The firelight caught him in uneven flashes, leaving the rest of him to the dark.
She listened to the small sounds of the night—the dog shifting, the low hiss of the fire settling, the weight of another body breathing not far off, guessing that she should be grateful that he did not snore.
His presence was marked only by the steady rise and fall of breath, slow and unhurried, though not smooth enough to suggest he was asleep.
Her thoughts circled back to his questions from earlier, the way they had come one after another, not sharp exactly, but intent. She wondered what answers he expected, and whether she had disappointed him by frequently having none.
Charlie began to run in his sleep, as he sometimes did, whimpering and pawing at the ground, his legs moving jerkily where he lay near the fire.
He did that at least once a week. Avery imagined he was dreaming, running through the forest as he loved to do, tracking some unwitting prey that, to date, he’d not ever caught.
“Chasing a hare?” came the man’s voice through the darkness.
She saw him turn his face slightly toward the fire as he spoke, the light touching his cheek and the line of his jaw before slipping away again.
His voice was low now, stripped of its edge, and the sound of it carried differently—close and quiet, and not demanding a reply, unnerving her far less than it had during the day.
“I guess,” she said after a moment, surprised by how easily the words came. “Either that or a squirrel.” She often paused to watch when Charlie hunted squirrels, enjoying the fleeting chaos of that chase almost as much as Charlie did, she sometimes thought.
Eventually, Charlie stopped dreaming and chasing, his body going slack once more, and the house settled into near total silence.
Avery didn’t feel the least bit tired, which she thought was odd.
She felt on edge—more so than even the night before, when she had worried over the man’s condition.
And as much as his questions and inexplicable curiosity about her had riled her—mostly because she’d sensed judgment in his reactions—she found herself suddenly curious about him.
A question of her own rose to the surface, but she held it there for more than a minute before she dared give it voice. Simple as it was, it felt strangely intimate for being so long overlooked.
“I don’t know your name.”
“Morggán mac Ruaidhrí of Ardven,” he replied, “mormaer of Ard Cael.”
Morgan.
When he said it, the name came out rougher and broader than as she repeated it in her mind—MOR-gahn, the weight heavy on the first syllable. From where she lay, half in shadow, she watched his chest rise beneath the furs as though the name itself carried weight.
“And... you were fighting?” she asked. “At war?”
“Aye. Though the peace carries, we battle yet,” he said. “Plenty of English hereabouts to harass—they’ve nae right to be here.”
She wasn’t sure what that meant, peace and battle spoken in the same breath. But her greater attention was reserved for what followed. “What... what has happened in the last ten years that Scotland is at war with England?” What had become of the world since she’d come here?
“Do ye jest?”
He turned his head more fully then, his face angling toward the fire—and toward her—so that she could see his expression clearly for the first time since he’d spoken.
Before she might have replied, which would have meant revealing the full extent of her ignorance, he made a sound that was neither so mild as hmm nor so sharp as a scoff.
“Ye did say ye were nae Scottish,” he went on, settling back again, his gaze returning to the darkened rafters above.
“So mayhap ye dinna ken.” He exhaled slowly, as though choosing where to begin.
“They took our king first,” he said. “Called it justice. Then they took our laws, said we were nae fit to keep them ourselves. They set their own upon our land, demanded fealty where none was owed, and punished those who would nae bow.”
His gaze stayed on the dark, not on her, though she could still see the firelight shift along the planes of his face.
“They broke oaths when it suited them, starved villages to make a point, burned keeps to frighten the rest. When men rose to stop it, England named them rebels, as if defending one’s home were a crime.
” He paused, jaw tightening. “For years, they’ve taken and taken—grain, sons, land—and called it peace when we lay still enough to endure it.
That is what’s happened. That is why we fight. ”
Avery said nothing for a long time. She lay on her side, watching the fire sink lower, trying to sort through the uneasy feeling his words had left behind.
What he described sounded... familiar.
A memory stirred, sharper now than it had been in years.
She could see it clearly now: her father pacing, his voice brisk and distracted, talking on a hotel phone while her mother marveled over the gown that had been delivered for her to wear to a red carpet event.
They’d been in Scotland because of her father’s work—because of a film her father’s marketing company had been promoting.
It had been 1995, and she’d been eleven, too young to attend the premieres her parents went to, but old enough to be dragged from city to city while they followed the promotion—Edinburgh, Glasgow, places whose names she recalled now simply because adults kept repeating them then.
Everywhere they went, people talked about the same things.
William Wallace, England, Scotland. War, and how it had been fought, and how it had been remembered.
She recalled museums and monuments they’d visited in between events, her parents pausing to read plaques while she wandered ahead or lagged behind, half bored, half listening.
She remembered discussions in cars and restaurants about the accuracy of the film, about history versus story, about what had been changed and why.
Now, listening to Morggán speak, she realized with a faint jolt that what he described sounded very much like those conversations—only without the distance of time, certainly not as something that belonged safely in the past.
She stayed quiet now, not because she doubted him, but because the history she remembered as something talked about, debated, and promoted seemed to be lying wounded across the fire from her.