Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
The command tent reeked of wet canvas, tallow smoke, and the sour smell of old ale. Sebastian spent nearly an hour cataloging every detail because counting kept his mind from doing anything reckless.
Three lanterns, one flickering low near the entrance flap.
A camp table scattered with maps weighed down at the corners by stones.
A smaller table holding a jug and two cups, only one of which has been used.
Two guards stand just outside, close enough that their shadows shift on the canvas whenever they move.
Kerr had dismissed the rest, confident enough in his victory that he no longer thought he required an army in the room with him.
That confidence was the first mistake, and Sebastian intended to make it his last.
The rope at his wrists had been tied by someone competent, looped twice and knotted hard enough to bite, but competent was not the same as thorough.
Whoever had bound him had checked the knot once and never came back to check it again, certain a man on his knees in the mud an hour earlier had nothing left in him worth watching closely.
Kerr paced in front of him now, hands loose at his sides, boots leaving wet prints across the tent’s dirt floor, savoring the moment the way another man might savor a good meal after a long fast.
“Ye just gave up,” he said, stopping in front of the chair, tilting his head to study Sebastian’s face like he expected to find something new written there.
“For her.” He laughed, soft and delighted, shaking his head slowly.
“The Beast of Blackthorn, on his knees in the mud, sword in the muck, for a lass.”
Sebastian said nothing. Rain hissed steadily against the canvas overhead, and somewhere beneath that sound, he counted his own pulse, slow and even.
Kerr crouched in front of him, elbows braced on his knees, close enough that Sebastian could see the exact shade of satisfaction behind his eyes.
“I only wish yer father were here to watch me end ye. Yer brother too. Whole rotten line of MacGregors, gone in one night.” He tilted his head further, considering.
“Would’ve been tidier that way. All of ye, at once. ”
“Ye burned women and children for revenge.” Sebastian’s voice came out flat, unhurried, each word set down like a stone. “Ye’ve spent twenty years tellin’ yerself that makes ye somethin’ other than what ye are.”
Kerr’s eyes blazed instantly, all the soft amusement burning off at once, his hand twitching toward the knife at his own belt before he caught himself. “They took everythin’ from me!”
“Yer wife dyin’ was a tragedy.” Sebastian held his gaze and did not blink, did not soften a single word of it, even as the guards’ shadows shifted outside the canvas.
“It was war. It was an accident. Ye ken that better than any man alive. Me father would never set fire to a defenseless camp; it was the wind that turned that night, and every man who survived it kens the truth of it. Ye’ve spent two decades pretending otherwise because the truth gave ye nothin’ left to hate. ”
Kerr’s jaw worked once, twice, a muscle jumping hard beneath his beard. For half a heartbeat, something flickered behind his eyes. Not doubt exactly, but the ghost of it, the shape of a thought buried so long ago he no longer recognized it surfacing.
Then it was gone, chased off by something colder and more familiar.
He stood, already shaking his head like a man refusing a gift he had no use for.
“I will burn every MacGregor standin’ before I stop; every last one.
Yer nephew included, when I get around to it.
A boy of six makes a fine enough endin’ to this story. ”
Something behind Sebastian’s ribs went very quiet and very still, and his hands, hidden behind the chair’s back, had already found the seam of his boot.
“Ye’ll nae touch that boy,” he said, and for the first time, something raw slipped through the flatness of his voice.
Kerr smiled at that, clearly pleased to have finally found the crack he had been searching for. “There he is. I wondered how long the ice would hold.”
Screams erupted outside the tent, sudden and violent, slicing through the rain and Kerr’s smug smile. Steel rang against steel nearby, and a horse shrieked high and frightened. A guard at the entrance shouted something that ended with a wet, choking sound.
Kerr’s head snapped toward the tent flap so fast his whole body turned with it. “What in the name of Christ…”
Sebastian drove the small dagger free from his boot and up through the last twist of rope, sawing hard, ignoring the bite of the blade catching skin along with the cord.
The rope gave in a single motion. He kept his wrists tucked behind his back, kept his shoulders slack, kept every muscle in his body perfectly still while Kerr’s attention stayed fixed on the tent flap, on the chaos rising outside, on anything but the man he’d tied to a chair and stopped watching the moment he’d decided he’d already won.
More shouting. A body hit the ground somewhere nearby with a final, wet thud.
Kerr took two steps toward the entrance, hand dropping to his sword, his face twisting from triumph into something much less certain, something closer to the fear he’d spent twenty years handing out to other men instead of feeling himself.
By the time he turned back, Sebastian was already standing.
Kerr’s face shifted through three things at once: confusion, then understanding, then a fury so intense it seemed to age him ten years in a single breath.
“Ye threatenin’ bastard.” He wrenched his sword free of its scabbard, but Sebastian was already inside the arc of it, closing the distance before Kerr’s boots had fully planted in the mud.
The first blow caught Kerr across the jaw, Sebastian’s fist driving with the full weight of the days of forced patience behind it.
Kerr’s head snapped sideways, his sword clattering from his grip, and the force of it sent him crashing backward across the map table; candles, torn parchment and a clay cup shattered against the dirt floor.
Kerr came up off the wreckage with blood already running from his split lip, snarling like someone not quite human anymore.
He lunged sideways for his fallen sword, fingers closing around the hilt.
Sebastian was already there, his boot coming down hard on Kerr’s wrist, pinning it to the ground with enough weight to hear the small bones grind beneath his heel.
Kerr screamed, his voice filled with rage rather than pain, and clawed at Sebastian’s leg with his free hand, nails tearing through wet fabric and the skin beneath it. Sebastian did not move, did not so much as look down.
“I will slaughter everyone ye love!” Kerr spat up at him, blood running pink down his chin, eyes wild with rage and madness. “Startin’ with the feisty little lass ye kissed goodbye out there. I will make certain ye watch every moment of it!”
Something in Sebastian’s chest went icy cold.
He crouched, dragging Kerr up by the collar of his tunic with one hand, the dagger from his boot already turned in the other. The tent’s chaos, the storm raging outside and every scream still ringing across the camp, all narrowed down to nothing but the man in front of him.
“Nay,” Sebastian said, low and level, the way he might have corrected a soldier’s poor aim on the training field. “Ye willnae.”
He drove the dagger clean into him and held on until Kerr stopped fighting entirely.
Sebastian burst from the tent with Kerr’s blood still slick and cooling on his hand, his own sword already drawn. The camp beyond the tent flap had descended into complete chaos in the few minutes he had spent inside.
Fire had ignited somewhere along the supply line, casting an orange glow that created long, broken shapes across the mud. Through the smoke and driving rain, MacGregor plaid clashed against Kerr’s remaining men in a dozen scattered knots of violence across the clearing.
Steel rang against steel everywhere at once, a sound with no rhythm, no mercy; just the flat grinding clatter of men trying to kill each other before the rain finished putting out the fires that lit their way to the deed.
A Kerr man charged at him out of the smoke without warning, his blade already swinging low for his gut. Sebastian turned the strike aside, and took the man down with a single cut.
He did not slow down to look at the body. There was no time to spend on the dead.
Fergus cut through the center of the fighting like a feral beast, his blade rising and falling in short, brutal arcs, dropping one man and pivoting into the next before the first hit the mud beneath their feet.
“Hold the left flank!” he bellowed, catching a blow on his own blade hard enough to stagger the man delivering it, then driving his elbow into the man’s throat before finishing him with a downward cut.
“Daenae let them fall back toward the horses! If they remount, we’re chasin’ them clear to the coast! ”
Beside him, Alasdair MacRae fought with the cold, economical precision of a man twice his years, parrying a strike from a Kerr soldier twice his size and stepping past it, letting the man’s own momentum carry him straight onto the point of his sword.
“MacRae, on yer right!” Fergus shouted, already turning to meet a second attacker of his own, sword already rising.
Alasdair pivoted without so much as glancing over, catching the blade meant for his back on the flat of his own, twisting his wrist hard until the attacker’s sword tore free of his grip entirely and spun off into the dark. “I saw him.”
“Ye always say that after I have already shouted at ye.”
“And I am always right regardless of when ye shout.” Alasdair drove his pommel into the man’s temple and moved on without breaking stride, already scanning for the next threat.
Sebastian pushed deeper into the melee, cutting down a second man who lunged at him from behind a plume of smoke, and that was when he saw her.
Alba rode straight through the center of the chaos, dark curls torn loose from whatever had once bound them, streaming wet and wild behind her, sword raised high and catching what little firelight survived the rain.
Water sheeted off her shoulders and hair in the torchlight. She was the very essence of a ballad, the type men would sing decades from now, though nothing about the fury carved into her face looked staged in the slightest.
She looked every bit the warrior woman old stories told, the ones old men had invented. Except, she was staggeringly real, cutting a path through Kerr’s ranks like she’d been born to a saddle and a blade instead of a Lady’s chair by a fire.
A rider charged at her, his blade already swinging toward her unprotected side before she had time to turn her head and look.
She leaned low along her horse’s neck, letting the strike whistle through the air where her head had been a heartbeat earlier, before rising back up with her own sword already swinging, striking the man across the ribs hard enough to knock him out of his saddle.
He hit the mud in a heap and did not get up again.
“Fergus!” Her voice cut clear across the din, sharp enough to carry over the thunder of steel and rain. “Behind ye, the one in the gray plaid, he’s circlin’ wide around the fire!”
Fergus spun half a step, sword already coming up, and caught the man’s blade an inch shy of his own spine. “Bloody hell, woman, a man likes a bit more warnin’ than that!”
She wheeled her horse hard to the left, driving it straight into the flank of another attacker, close enough that the animal’s shoulder sent the man staggering before her blade finished what the horse had started.
Near the supply carts, one of Fergus’s own men-clearly still green enough to a real battlefield that his hands shook around his sword hilt—stood frozen in place as a Kerr man bore down on him with his blade raised for a killing stroke the boy had not even registered was coming.
“Behind ye!” Alba’s voice tore across the space between them, high and furious, cutting through the din. “Turn, now!”
The young guard reacted purely on instinct a split second before the strike found him, awkwardly catching the blow on his blade and staggering back two full steps under its force.
He lacked the skill to finish the fight.
Alba was already there, forcing her horse between them, her blade striking the attacker across the shoulder with enough strength to knock him down where he stood.
“Run, save yerself,” she called over her shoulder, already wheeling away toward the next threat before the boy had finished catching his breath, one hand pressed flat to his own chest as if he could hardly believe he still had one.
Elsewhere in the midst of chaos, Hamish waded through a knot of three men at once, his massive frame absorbing blows that would have felled a smaller man, his own sword doing brutal, unhurried work.
“Someone tell the lass she’s meant to be behind the line!” he roared toward no one in particular, ducking a wild swing and answering it with a strike that ended the exchange entirely.
“Try tellin’ her yerself!” Fergus shouted back, not even looking over. “See how far that gets ye!”
Sebastian moved through the mayhem toward her, cutting down anything that stood between them, his whole body focused on the single point that was her. Just as she had been the only fixed point in Kerr’s clearing an hour earlier, kneeling in the mud with her hands bound and her eyes locked on his.
A Kerr man lunged at her from the side, close enough that Sebastian’s heart froze solid in his chest before he had even registered the threat.
Alba had already seen him coming, twisting in the saddle with a speed three years of running a Keep and swaying a sword had made her second nature; she drove her blade into the gap beneath his raised arm before he had closed half the distance between them.
Scanning through the uproar for the next threat, for Fergus, for anyone still standing against her, across the fire, the rain and the wreckage of a battlefield her eyes found Sebastian.
Relief swept across her face.