Chapter Fifteen
By the time dusk began thickening properly between the trees, Avery had left the house only once.
She’d fetched water earlier while enough daylight still filtered beneath the forest canopy to see clearly, but even that brief walk to the stream had left her tense beneath what felt like longer glances from the men nearby and the uncomfortable suspicion that at least some of them were whispering about her, speaking about what had happened with Kerr.
Charlie, to her increasing annoyance, was deeply dissatisfied with remaining shut inside the house.
The hound had spent much of the evening pacing between the hearth and the closed door, ears twitching and head cocking constantly toward the sounds outside.
Often enough he had crossed to the entrance and stood there expectantly, tail swaying low behind him as though he fully anticipated being permitted out amongst the soldiers.
The traitor had evidently decided he liked having Morggán’s men nearby.
Avery suspected more than one of them had fed him scraps throughout the day, judging by Charlie’s growing confidence toward strangers and the complete absence of alarm in him now.
Earlier, she’d heard someone laughing outside and Charlie had barked enthusiastically in answer.
“Sorry, Charlie, but we’re in for the night,” she muttered at him as he returned once more to stare hopefully toward the door.
Charlie glanced at her briefly before resuming his vigil.
Avery sat at the short table, repairing a tear along the sleeve of one of her older shirts, something she’d been meaning to do for a week now, but that had somehow gotten lost in the shuffle of the past week’s upheaval.
First she’d found the dead horse and then a half-dead Morggán upon her forest floor, then the English had moved with terrifying numbers within shouting distance of her house, then Morggán’s army had arrived, and today the ugly business with that guy, Kerr—she supposed she should grant herself some grace for things left undone.
Oh, and beyond all that chaos, Morggán had kissed her!
Kissed her. Her!—Avery Mercer.
The thought still struck her with fresh disbelief each time it returned. What was that thing her mother used to say whenever something improbable happened? Wonders never cease.
Earlier, after that startling event, and after Tormod and Donnchadh had finally taken their leave, Morggán had lingered near the doorway long enough to make a dangerous sort of hope unfurl inside her.
For several breathless seconds she had genuinely thought he might cross the space between them and kiss her again.
Instead, he had studied her with such fierce concentration that warmth rose all over again into her face beneath the weight of it. “Avery,” he had said at last, almost gruffly, “ye neednae fear any man crossing this threshold again. And ken that Kerr will answer for what he did.”
Then he had given a short nod and stepped outside.
For quite some time afterward she remained thoroughly convinced the severity of that scrutiny had come from the effort of not kissing her again. What else was she supposed to think when so much of his attention had remained fixed upon her mouth?
She sighed now as the needle passed through the fabric of the cloth again and again with a soft whisper. Outside, somewhere deeper in the forest, a horse whinnied.
Tomorrow morning, she thought, he would leave.
She thought she understood what was coming next. Some man named Lucas Thain approached with several hundred more men, and once their forces joined, Morggán and the others would ride against the English army moving northward.
He would leave. He had responsibilities beyond this forest and this hut and certainly beyond her.
It was for the best, she told herself. Truly.
What possible future could exist between them beyond this strange accidental crossing of lives in the middle of a forest—and apparently during wartime?
Morggán belonged to this brutal, fractured country in a way she never would.
He discussed troop movements and supply wagons and battle positions as naturally as she once might have discussed gym class or the fried chicken made by Maria, her family’s cook.
His life was larger than this place, larger than her quiet existence in the woods. A man like Morggán was never going to belong to a small forest house—or the woman living inside it.
Avery told herself all of this with severe practicality, as though reason alone might blunt the ache already beginning to form beneath her ribs.
Evidently today had been a day of many firsts: the first time she had screamed at a grown man, the first time she had fought one, and the first time she had been kissed.
Yet none of those things disturbed her so profoundly as the thought that Morggán might simply ride away tomorrow morning and vanish from her life as suddenly as he had entered it.
Then, despite knowing it was a miserable direction for her thoughts to take, she began imagining what the house would feel like after he left.
Of course, she wasn’t concerned about the absence of soldiers all around her, or even the return of silence to the forest, but the absence of Morggán within the house itself.
She had some premature fear that she would miss him—and then had to wonder if she would have worried as much if not for the kiss.
She chewed her lip, further torturing herself, trying to imagine what she might miss the most—his large figure ducking beneath the doorway?
His deep voice and absolutely knee-knocking accent when speaking English?
The steadiness of his breathing across the small room from her each night?
Maybe she would simply miss him, and his company, even as half the time he set her on edge.
The realization unsettled her deeply. Before Morggán, she had not considered herself lonely—or she’d not allowed herself to be lonely.
Solitude was simply the shape of her life, familiar enough after so many years that she rarely examined it closely.
Yet now, imagining the house returned entirely to herself again, she felt not relief but a growing hollowness she could neither reason away nor comfortably name.
When the man lived, they had shared their days though more often than not there was silence, but that too had been shared. When the man was gone, Avery had not consciously thought, I am alone now, but she had felt the difference immediately in the way the silence itself went unanswered.
And after only a week of Morggán occupying the house beside her, Avery found herself troubled by the possibility that the silence might no longer fit her as comfortably as it had once he was gone.
Annoyance stirred almost immediately afterward, directed partly at herself and partly at him.
It seemed profoundly unfair that one injured man could stumble bleeding into her carefully contained existence and disrupt it so thoroughly in little more than a week.
He had altered the atmosphere of the house simply by inhabiting it.
She didn’t like that he had done that.
And now, she fervently wished that he hadn’t kissed her.
Outside, voices suddenly rose around her house and deeper into the trees, some sharp enough to pull Avery fully from her thoughts. Charlie sprang to his feet at once, ears high and alert, his tail beginning to strike rapidly against the floorboards.
At first she thought perhaps some disturbance had broken out amongst the men, but then she heard it properly beneath the voices and felt it under her feet: horses. Many horses.
The sound came gradually at first, muffled by the forest and damp ground, but it built with startling speed into something unmistakably larger than the scattered movement of Morggán’s company.
Avery rose immediately from the table, her pulse climbing hard as, for one anxious moment she wondered if the English had turned the tides and were now approaching.
Charlie hurried to the door ahead of her with excitement rather than alarm, whining low in his throat as Avery lifted the latch and stepped cautiously outside, pushing Charlie’s nose back as she tucked him inside and pulled the door shut.
The doorway faced the grasslands and the south, but the sounds were coming instead from deeper amongst the trees to the southeast. Avery crept carefully around the front corner of the house until the forest beyond the clearing came partially into view.
Only then did she begin to relax.
Men moved quickly through the camp, but not with panic.
No one was lunging for weapons or scrambling into saddles.
Instead, she saw soldiers turning expectantly toward the trees, some already grinning or calling greetings toward the approaching riders while others moved to make space amongst the horses and fires.
Relief loosened in her chest.
Lucas Thain and his army had come, she guessed.
The sheer scale of the approaching force flustered her immediately.
Morggán’s men had already altered the feeling of the forest around her home; this sounded larger still.
As the noise continued swelling through the darkening forest, Avery found herself picturing every stretch of familiar ground claimed by strangers—the stream, the game trails, the narrow path toward the hollow, even the quiet spaces between the trees where she had once walked without thought or caution.
As she slipped back inside the house and lowered the latch firmly into place behind her, she told herself she was glad they were all leaving in the morning. The forest would belong to her again. The silence would return. She wanted the silence, the silence returning would be good.
The thought brought much less comfort than she had hoped for.
***