Chapter Thirteen The Long Run Home
The night after Blackwood did not feel like freedom. It felt like running with a blade at the back of the throat, the kind that never quite touched skin but kept every breath shallow.
They left the road as soon as the cart’s wheels faded behind them, cutting into the trees where undergrowth grabbed at wet clothes and low branches snapped if you were careless.
Morna kept Elara close, her palm still sticky with sap and pine, her fingers numb from cold water and strain.
Ewan moved ahead and slightly to the right, scanning the dark in quick, deliberate sweeps.
Ivor drifted at the rear again, quieter than usual, which made Morna uneasy.
Caelan set the pace. Not fast at first, because frantic speed shattered into mistakes, but steady, relentless, the way a river wore stone down. Every few minutes he halted them for a single heartbeat to listen, then pushed them forward again. He did not speak unless he had to.
Morna watched him from the corner of her eye.
His shoulders were held rigid, as if he feared that if he loosened even an inch, the weight inside him would spill out.
The cuts on his forearms had begun to clot.
Mud and soot dried on his face. His eyes stayed forward, focused on trees, on slope, on distance. On survival.
He had tried to die for them, Morna thought, and the memory made her chest ache. Not because she doubted it, but because she had felt how easy it had been for him to accept that ending. A man who believed himself ruined would always find sacrifice simpler than living.
She would not allow it again.
The forest thickened as they moved, spruce and pine on higher ground, tangled hazel in the lower dips.
Smoke from the camp still smeared the sky behind them, a dull orange stain that made Morna’s stomach tighten each time she glanced back.
The fire would not save Fergus. It would not undo the mud.
It had only bought them minutes and scarred their souls.
Elara stumbled on a root and caught herself without a sound. She was shaking from cold, but her chin remained lifted. Morna wanted to wrap the girl in warmth and promise that home was close. She could not promise any such thing.
Ewan slowed beside Morna, voice barely audible. “How far to Kincaid lands.”
Morna swallowed. She did not know. She had never cared for borders the way warriors did. A field was a field, a hill a hill, until blood made it a claim.
Caelan answered without turning. “Two days, if we are not hunted. Three if we must hide.”
Ivor let out a quiet breath that could have been a laugh. “We are hunted.”
Caelan’s head angled slightly. “Aye. Then we make it three.”
His certainty was not arrogance. It was a refusal to consider another outcome.
They crested a small rise and paused beneath a cluster of firs. Caelan raised two fingers, signaling stillness. Morna held her breath and listened.
At first she heard only wind and the faint rush of distant water. Then, far behind, a horn sounded, low and steady. Not the panicked blare from the fire, but a signal meant to coordinate. Valerius was organizing again, efficient as a blade, the sort of man who ran captivity like a ledger.
Ewan’s face tightened. “They will track the cart road.”
“Aye,” Caelan whispered. “Which is why we left it.”
Ivor shifted his weight. “Hounds.”
Morna’s pulse quickened. “The pine and sap will blur scent for a time,” she whispered. “Not forever.”
Caelan nodded. “We will give them other scents to chase.”
He crouched and scooped a handful of damp earth. Then he pressed it into the cuts on his forearm, grimacing as grit ground into raw skin. Morna reached toward him instinctively, then stopped herself, remembering how her touch had once recoiled from him and how it had cut him deeper than any thorn.
“What are you doing,” she whispered.
“Making myself stink of soil,” he replied. “And water. And rot. Anything but man.”
Ivor’s mouth twisted. “All that effort and you could just roll in a ditch.”
Caelan shot him a look, and Ivor lifted his hands in surrender.
Morna crouched too and pulled a small bundle from the fold in her shawl.
The last of her crushed yarrow and a strip of dried bark she had stolen days ago.
Not much, but enough to help. She tore the bark into pieces and chewed, then spat the bitter pulp into her palm. The bitterness made her mouth tighten.
Caelan glanced down. “What is that.”
“Willow,” Morna said. “It dulls pain. It will keep you moving.”
His jaw clenched. “I do not deserve your care.”
Morna met his gaze. “You do not get to decide that alone.”
For a moment his eyes softened, then he looked away and accepted the pulp, rubbing it into his gums with a rough thumb. He did not thank her. He simply took what he needed, like a man learning again how to survive with another person beside him.
They moved on.
Not long after, Ewan froze and lifted his hand, fist closed. Caelan halted instantly. Morna felt Elara’s grip tighten.
Voices drifted through the trees, faint but close.
“Spread out. He’s cunning.”
Another answered, “If he doubles back, cut him off at the ridge.”
Morna’s mouth went dry. It was not the camp guards. The accents were different, sharper, more foreign. Valerius’s men.
Caelan crouched and motioned them down behind a fallen pine.
Its roots had torn the earth up, leaving a hollow beneath, dark and smelling of wet rot.
Morna guided Elara into it first. Ewan slid in beside them, knife low, breathing controlled.
Ivor wriggled in last with the impatience of a man unused to hiding in filth.
Caelan did not join immediately. He stayed outside the hollow, flattening himself along the trunk, eyes fixed on the shadows between trees. Morna watched him through the tangle of roots. He looked like a man made of restraint, muscles coiled, waiting.
Boots crunched in the brush. Torchlight flickered, though dawn was still weak. A pair of mercenaries passed within a dozen paces.
One spoke. “If the quartermaster is smart, he’ll head for Kincaid lines.”
“And if he’s desperate, he’ll head nowhere and hide,” the other replied.
Caelan’s gaze did not shift. He stayed still enough that Morna wondered if he had stopped breathing.
A hound yipped. The sound pierced the hollow like a needle. Elara’s eyes widened. Morna pressed a hand over the girl’s mouth, not to silence her, but to steady her. Elara’s breath warmed Morna’s palm, quick and terrified.
The mercenaries paused.
“Dog’s uncertain,” one muttered. “Too much smoke. Too much water.”
Caelan’s jaw tightened. He reached down and scooped a handful of ash from the ground where an old lightning strike had blackened a stump. He rubbed it into the bark, then flicked it in a small arc away from them, toward a gully that ran north.
The ash drifted, carrying scent with it, a faint suggestion of human sweat and camp smoke.
The hound barked and lunged, pulling its handler a few steps in the wrong direction.
“See,” the mercenary said. “North. Move.”
Their voices faded.
Morna let her breath out in a slow spill. Her heart hammered so hard it made her ribs ache. In the hollow, Ewan’s face was pale, but steady. Ivor’s grin flashed briefly, then vanished again as if he remembered where they were.
Caelan slid into the hollow at last, shoulders scraping roots. He did not look at Morna. He kept his eyes on the treeline.
“That was close,” Ewan whispered.
Caelan nodded once. “It will not be the last.”
As the night deepened into true early morning, the cold sharpened. Morna’s wet clothes stiffened, and her toes went numb. Elara’s lips turned pale. Ewan’s breathing rasped. Even Ivor’s swagger dimmed into grim endurance.
Caelan guided them toward a low hollow where boulders broke the wind. “We rest,” he whispered. “One watch only.”
Ewan’s eyes widened. “Rest.”
“We cannot run blind,” Caelan said. “If we fall asleep on our feet, we die.”
He looked at Morna. “You and Elara sleep. Ewan watches with me. Ivor, you sleep with one eye open, as you always do.”
Ivor gave a thin smile. “Flattering.”
Morna wanted to argue, to insist she could watch too, but her body trembled with exhaustion and the healer in her knew the truth. Sleep was a medicine as necessary as herbs.
She helped Elara into the hollow, then sat with her back to stone. Elara’s eyes were wide, reflecting moonlight.
“Are we going home,” Elara whispered.
Morna’s throat tightened. “We are going toward it.”
Elara’s mouth trembled. “Fergus did not.”
Morna’s chest constricted. The name was a knife. She glanced toward Caelan, who stood a few paces away with Ewan, head tilted to listen to the night. He did not look back. Perhaps he could not bear the name either.
“We will remember him,” Morna whispered. “And we will not let his suffering be wasted.”
Elara blinked hard. “How.”
Morna swallowed. “By living.”
The answer tasted cruel, but it was the only one that held.
Elara’s eyes fluttered, exhaustion winning. Morna wrapped her shawl around her shoulders and let her lean into her side. Soon Elara’s breathing slowed, uneven at first, then steadier.
Morna tried to sleep too. She closed her eyes, but the darkness inside her head filled with flashes. Fergus in mud. Valerius’s boot on the cart. Caelan’s eyes when he asked her to run. Her own hand snapping around his.
She opened her eyes again and stared at the sliver of sky between branches.
She had believed love cost reason, that it was an unpredictable variable that interfered with survival.
Now she knew it was also a blade. It could cut you open.
It could make you do things you would never have done alone.
It could make you choose thorns and call them vows.
A soft sound made her tense, but it was only Caelan shifting in the shadows, moving farther out to watch. She heard him murmur to Ewan, too low to catch words. Then silence again.
At some point, Morna drifted into sleep.