Chapter Eleven #3
And thus she found herself wholly unprepared for the sight before her, staring out at a version of her forest she scarcely recognized.
Before today, silence had governed this place.
Even when wind moved through the trees or rain struck the leaves or Charlie crashed carelessly through brush after some scent, the forest had always belonged first to stillness.
The sounds had fit together naturally. Nothing truly had ever intruded, and nothing lingered. Not until this moment, it seemed.
Beyond that narrow open space that immediately surrounded her house, the forest thickened almost immediately, trunks rising close together in deepening shade exactly as they always had—and yet not as it always had, the woods no longer belonged wholly to themselves, and certainly not to her anymore.
Men occupied the entire area that she could see.
Not gathered tightly together in one great noisy camp, but scattered naturally throughout the trees in small clusters and shifting pockets of movement, as though an armed company had quietly threaded itself into the forest and settled there with long practice.
No great blaze burned among the trees. These men clearly knew better than to risk fire in dry woodland.
The forest remained mostly dark beneath the shade of the canopy under a now gray sky.
Yet everywhere Avery looked she discovered signs of the army hidden among the trees.
Horses stood tethered beneath pines and ash trees farther back in the woods, some lowering their heads lazily toward brush and grass while others flicked ears toward the steady murmur of voices drifting through the forest. Small tents made from what looked to Avery like greased canvas or oiled cloth now peppered the woods between the trunks, low and weather-darkened, but not invisible.
Blankets and packs rested against roots and fallen logs.
Shields leaned beside trunks. Men moved quietly between the trees, appearing and disappearing through shadow with surprising softness for people so heavily armed.
Avery was stunned speechless by how quickly and naturally they seemed to inhabit the place.
They weren’t loud, thankfully. There was no shouting or any crashing disorder.
The army hadn’t overtaken the forest so much as settled carefully into it, bending itself around the woods.
For fifty or more armed men, they produced much less noise than expected.
Conversation drifted low and intermittent rather than constant.
A few men laughed now and then, but even that seemed restrained.
To her immediate right, a large fire had been built in the clearing behind the house itself, several broad iron kettles much larger than her own small ones hanging above it while more than a few rough logs and split stumps had already been dragged into a loose circle between the house and the fire, just beyond the garden plot.
Beyond the fire, long boards had been laid across barrels to make crude tables, their surfaces crowded already with dark loaves of bread, large wedges of hard cheese, strips of dried meat, and bundles wrapped in cloth.
Men passed steadily back and forth between the kettles where a stew of some sort was ladled into a bowl or cup of their own before moving onto the ‘boards’ as Morggán had called them, adding bread and cheese to their meal.
To Avery, after years of scraping together meals alone from whatever she could snare, gather, or preserve, the sight looked almost absurdly abundant.
Not luxurious exactly, but sprawling in a way that made her think fleetingly and somewhat incredulously of grand buffets in hotels and conference centers from her old life, endless tables where food simply appeared and people expected to eat their fill.
The comparison struck her as ridiculous almost immediately given the mud and smoke and armed men surrounding it, yet the thought lingered all the same.
On those stumps and seats closer to the house, were men she’d been introduced to, Tormod and Alasdair among them, and several others.
Morggán waited beside her, his presence recalled when he took one step closer to her.
“Avery,” he said quietly, for her ears alone, informing her, “five minutes is all.”
Managing to produce what she hoped was a confident smile, she nodded and waited for Morggán to move before she fell into step beside him.
Several heads lifted at their approach, not all at once and not with enough sharpness to startle her, but she felt the attention gather anyway.
Morggán led her to the fire where his officers sat or crouched in uneven positions around the clearing.
Tormod occupied a fallen log near the flames, broad forearms resting upon his knees while Donnchadh sat beside him on the ground, his back against another well-planted stump, sharpening a knife with slow absent strokes against stone.
Finlay appeared deep into a conversation with Eòin that neither man paused despite their approach, though both glanced up briefly in acknowledgment.
Eòin alone grinned openly the moment he spotted her.
Morggán guided her toward an open place near the fire beside Tormod and sat himself on the empty stump on her left.
Alasdair, seated on Tormod’s right, leaned forward and turned toward her with no small amount of animation. Before he might have said a word, however, Morggán did.
“Dinna frighten her off before she’s fed,” he warned mildly.
Alasdair pressed one hand solemnly to his chest. “I am charm itself tonight.”
“That will be a first,” said Tormod without any inflection at all.
A rough chuckle passed around the fire.
But Morggán’s words lingered unpleasantly in her thoughts all the same, and she disliked immensely the notion that he believed she required shielding, as though she were some delicate thing liable to wilt beneath ordinary conversation.
Though admittedly, she had not exactly inspired confidence earlier.
She had all but fled the circle of his officers this afternoon the moment attention settled too heavily upon her, and only an hour ago had confessed outright that she did not know how to behave among so many people.
Small wonder, then, that Morggán now seemed to think she required handholding.
Still, she had survived alone in these woods for years—years!
—through winters that had nearly frozen her outright, through sickness, hunger, loneliness, and fear so deep at times it seemed to settle bone deep.
She hauled water and chopped wood and skinned rabbits and patched roofs and buried the man with her own two hands.
Surely she could manage five minutes beside a fire with a dozen soldiers without needing Morggán to guard her from being overwhelmed.
Though she had no desire whatsoever to become one of them—loud and easy and talking over one another—she did understand that truly, she had no idea how to interact with people, neither properly nor comfortably.
Perhaps this was good for her, she tried to tell herself, even as she felt—hoped?
—that she’d never find herself in a similar circumstance ever again.
Almost immediately she questioned her own thoughts—good for her?
The justification felt suspiciously like something invented merely to keep herself seated beside the fire instead of retreating immediately back into the safety and quiet of the house.
Truthfully, she would much rather have been alone.
Or, better yet, alone with only Morggán beside her, where conversation had begun to flow a bit easier.
Still, she had come out here now, and pride alone would keep her from bolting back indoors after less than a minute.
So she sat straighter rather than shrinking inward, folding her hands loosely in her lap, refusing to slouch meekly as though frightened by them, even as she did feel entirely out of place.
Nor would she cling silently to Morggán like some timid child merely because he made the world around her feel steadier—although in truth he did.
Certainly, she wouldn’t have ventured beyond her door if he hadn’t come for her.
Five minutes, she reminded herself firmly.
Surely she could manage that.