Chapter Eight #2
He touched Avery’s arm and drew her further into the recess without speaking, shifting himself backward as well, angling so that he was in front of her.
He didn’t block her view entirely, but he placed himself between her and the open forest. His hand remained around her forearm, and through that contact he felt the change in her.
She hadn’t trembled before, not that he’d been aware, and she didn’t now, and yet the muscle beneath his palm had gone rigid, held in deliberate control.
The column emerged from behind them, above and behind the overhang.
At first, he saw only movement between trunks—dark shapes coming into view on his left and right.
He saw the backs of men, cloaks drawn close, helms catching what little moonlight filtered through the canopy.
Five, ten, and more, then dozens and more still.
They kept coming. The line did not thin, but thickened all around them, coming upon the hollow from the south, and skirting around the rise in the terrain, not sparing a glance at the depression in the earth as they passed.
It was quiet, not nearly as loud as the thunder in his ears. Leather creaked. A horse snorted. One shook its head sharply, its bridle ringing in brief protest before settling again.
The hound shifted beside them and Morggán jerked his head to the right, hearing the barely discernable gathering vibration in the animal’s chest. Avery moved at once.
Morggán released her arm as she crouched slightly and laid her fingers along the hound’s muzzle, not harshly but firmly.
She whispered against the hound’s ear, soothing him.
The growl diminished to a tremor beneath her palm and under the spell of her voice.
Morggán watched the slow progression of figures dulled to black by the night.
One horse slowed as it passed the mouth of the hollow, no more than three or four yards away, its head angling toward the rock as if catching some stray scent.
Morggán stilled entirely, breath suspended, every inch of him becoming as stone.
The rider never glanced down. After a brief hesitation, the horse was pressed forward with the slightest shift of heel, and the column resumed its unbroken rhythm.
Only then did he feel it—fingers closing lightly in the fabric of his tunic, at his lower back.
Not a desperate grip, but a small tightening, as though Avery had reached for him without thought.
The contact was soft and deliberate at once, a quiet claim on something solid in the midst of a passing threat.
The procession continued, rank following rank, the line stretching farther than he could mark, and their progress was slow enough that it required patience simply to endure their nearness all around them.
Yet for all their number, they moved with an unsettling quiet, the sound of them so subdued so that it seemed the forest absorbed their presence rather than protested it.
This was no wandering patrol, Morggán decided.
It was the movement of men with purpose, repositioning in numbers large enough to swallow entire villages or smaller armies, and marching through—not around as he’d supposed they would—the forest, as if they wanted to be somewhere in a hurry, or move entirely unseen.
Still, it was too dark to say for certain that this was the army they’d met so disastrously a few days ago.
Only after the last horse and rider had passed out of sight and the sound began to recede did Morggán allow himself to draw a full breath. Still, neither he nor Avery moved for another full minute.
“Who were they?” she asked at length, withdrawing her hand from his back. As ever, her voice was soft, quiet.
“English,” he replied thoughtfully, wondering about the implications of so large a force, and what he might do to get word to men who needed to know about this.
Finding his own army, or being found by them, was a start, he realized.
He could delay no more his leavetaking, could not only wait for his men to find him, coddling his wounds—he needed to go.
“I don’t understand any of this,” she said, the barest hint of a whinge heard in her tone. “English and Scotland at war, and not with guns and planes and bombs, but with horses and swords.”
He turned to look at her fully then, a hard line settling across his expression, though likely she could not see it.
“I dinna ken why ye are confused,” he said, with more heat than volume, and which he didn’t try to conceal.
“Aye, ye’ve set yourself apart in the forest, but war dinna keep to roads alone.
It burns villages and empties fields. It takes sons and fathers and leaves the rest to reckon with it.
” Deeming it safe beyond the hollow, he rose to his feet.
“Nae man or woman in Scotland—even if from here ye nae be—can claim nae to feel it.”
Whatever her reaction was, he could not say, the hollow being consumed by darkness. But he felt irritation rise again, offended by the very idea that one might live within these hills and trees and not know what happened outside their narrow view, or worse, not care.
“For more years than I would have imagined, we have fought to keep the English from swallowing this land entirely,” he went on, more controlled now, but no less firm, even as he reached down his hand and helped her to her feet.
“King Edward would see Scotland bent to his will. Do ye mean to say ye’ve heard naught of it?
Nae talk in market? Nae rumor carried by a traveler?
Nae tale told by the man with whom ye shared a home? ”
“I didn’t know there was a war,” she said, striking a defensive chord, rising to her full height beside him, which only reached to about his shoulder. “I don’t see people. You are the only person aside from the man that I’ve ever met since I came here.”
“Every household has been touched by it,” he persisted, his frown still in action. “Every clan has bled for it. There is nae corner so deep that it lies beyond the reach of what is happening.”
“Apparently, there is,” she stated, matter-of-factly enough to rile him. She stepped past him and eased herself through the opening in the stone. The hound, being tethered and thus having no choice, followed behind her, his movement unhindered by the narrowness of the passage.
Morggán followed, scraping his shoulder against rock. He ignored the pull along his ribs and the ache in his thigh, lengthening his stride once they reached open ground, wanting to keep pace with her. His longer stride meant he didn’t have to expend too much energy to do so.
“And what is it that ye said? Ye hoped at one time that yer parents searched for ye—and what? Ye dinna hope for that now? Were ye stolen? Lost?”
To his surprise, she stopped and faced him as he caught up. They stood face to face while a strand of moonlight sat directly on her face, lending her blue eyes a pale, almost silver cast.
“I don’t know,” she said, and the phrase carried the weight of repetition—she used it often enough.
“I don’t know how I got here. I was with my parents in some town—I can’t remember the name of it now—and then everything...
changed. And I was here, with the man.” She gave a small, unsteady shrug and shifted her gaze to the hollow at his throat rather than meeting his eyes.
“The man was...kind, in his way. He taught me things—everything. But yes, I wanted my parents to come for me. I wondered why they never did. But that was years ago. I...” Her voice faltered, and she shook her head, abandoning the rest.
“What?” he asked, more quietly.
“I don’t hope for anything anymore,” she said, and when she lifted her chin again, she held his gaze without wavering.
“I’ve lived here more than ten years by my count.
Only once have I ever stepped beyond an imaginary line in the forest, where the man told me to go no farther.
Before you, I hadn’t seen another person since he died five years ago.
So no, I don’t know anything about a war.
But now it feels as though the world was—or is—ending all around me and I’ve been standing in the middle of it and never knew. ”
Morggán regarded her in silence.
Her account was disjointed, yet she spoke it without embellishment. There was no plea in it, no attempt to soften him or to win sympathy. Only the plain recitation of what she believed to be true.
At times, he’d thought her almost unreal—too self-contained, too otherworldly, too adept at shaping a life from isolation.
But standing before him now, her composure intact yet threaded with something like exhaustion, she seemed not otherworldly at all, but very much a woman who had endured more solitude than any should.
His irritation ebbed.
“Did ye never try to seek yer kin?” he asked.
“I did once,” she said. “It... didn’t go well. And now it has been so long and they didn’t... well, I still wouldn’t know where or how to find them.”
They didn’t look for me, she’d been about to say, he was certain.
I don’t hope for anything anymore.
The words—those said and those not said—lingered.
She was not a fragile creature, nor one given to self-pity.
There was too much resolve in her, too much quiet defiance beneath the softness of her speech.
She had built shelter, kept stores, trained a hound, and held herself steady while an army passed within yards of her hiding place. Iron ran beneath that composure.
But even iron could be bent if struck long enough in the same place.
He had no taste for indulging sorrow. Life did not spare men or women for the sake of fairness; he had learned that early and often. Yet something in her matter-of-fact abandonment of hope disturbed him more than tears would have done.