Chapter 33
It was her plea that stopped him.
Olivia had been called proud, fierce, a hellion bred of hellions, a witch, and many uglier names besides, muttered in the dark corners of his hall by his own folk. He’d heard her speak up and curse and argue, but never once in their strange marriage had he heard her beg.
And now she was begging him, his unbending wife, on her feet in the churned mud with her hands flung out and her bonnie face wet and ruined and a bruise blooming dark on her cheek, and the sound of it reached down into him past the blood-roar and the muster-horn and the thirty hard years of a warrior’s schooling, and it caught his hand at the top of its swing as surely as if she had laid her soft palm flat against the steel.
He paused for a moment that felt like a year to him, every muscle in his back and shoulders screaming, as if the full weight of his clan’s anger was pressing down on him like a spring tide against a crumbling wall.
Then he lowered his sword.
“Hold!” he bellowed, and there was a raw and broken note in it this time that had not been there before.
It carried where the cold command had not, cutting clean through even the blood-madness.
“Stay yer hands, the lot of ye! Look here! Yer Laird is standing afore ye with his steel pointed at the ground. Will ye shame me, every man of ye, by liftin’ yers when mine is down? ”
It was the thinnest thread he had ever asked to bear a weight in his life.
He could feel it could go the other way, could feel the whole night balanced on the edge of a dirk.
He kept his eyes hard on Lucas and let his blade sink the rest of the way slowly until the tip rested in the mud so that every soul could see it.
“Put it down, lad,” he said, quieter now. “Ye and me both, in the sight of them all. We daenae have to ken yet what had happened on this ground. We only have to be the two men in this glen with the stomach to refuse to make it worse. Can ye do that with me? Now?”
For one long beat, Lucas did not move at all. Then he opened his hand and let his sword fall from it to the trampled grass.
A great shudder ran visibly through both gathered clans at the sight of it, the two lairds standing weaponless over a dead man with the last of the firelight on their faces, and the war drew one ragged breath and held it.
“Now,” Ragnall continued, his voice flat and hard and carrying to both banks. “Somebody tell me what in the name of God happened on this ground. For I will have the whole truth of it laid bare afore another blade is drawn in this glen, and I will have it now.”
“There,” said a voice. “There it is. Look well, the lot of ye, for that’s how it’s done.”
It came out smooth and carried out of the Blythe ranks, terribly calm in the wreckage.
“A dead man on the grass, and yer Laird’s sword in the dirt, and every one of ye standin’ there with yer hearts gone soft in yer chests and yer blades hangin’ at yer sides.
” The voice grew sorrowful. “That is how a clan is taken, lads. Nae with steel. Steel we ken how to answer. It’s taken with a fire, and a fiddle, and a bonnie speech about the widows weepin’ the same on both banks.
It’s taken by a man who walks amongst ye and gets ye to set yer weapons down of yer own free will, and thanks ye kindly for it. ”
Ragnall watched an old man come forward from among them, leaning on a long staff, his white head bare to the night, his deep-lined face arranged with great care into an expression of sorrow and concern.
He wore an elder’s long robe and had an elder’s soft and reasonable voice, the kind of voice men were schooled from the cradle to heed without ever once thinking to question it.
“Laird Blythe.” The old man laid a gentle hand on Lucas’s shoulder, his sad eyes never leaving Ragnall’s face. “Lucas. Lad. Pick up yer sword from the grass. He has bewitched ye the same as he bewitched yer sister afore ye.
“This is the man who cut down yer faither. Who cut down yer braither Magnus in his prime. Who sent a blade through yer sister in her bed in the dark of the night. Who has woven a spell of feasting and dancing over this whole glen so that none of ye would notice his boot settlin’ soft on yer throats.
Strike him now while his blade is in the dirt, and avenge yer murdered kin, and every Elder of Blythe will stand at yer back. I will stand at yer back.”
Gazing into that gentle, sorrowful, and sensible old face, Ragnall finally felt the cold, patient hand he had been searching for in the dark for a month. Finally grasped something solid and real.
“And who are ye?” he asked slowly.
The old man smiled, gentle and grave all at once. “Ye daenae ken me, lad.”
“It’s been a long while,” Ragnall said, “since a livin’ soul dared to call me lad.
” He took one step forward, over his own grounded sword, and left it lying.
“Twice now ye’ve done it. As if ye kent me when I was wee.
As if ye’ve stood close to the heart of this clan a deal longer than any honest Blythe Elder has cause or right to stand. ”
The smile remained unmoving. However, something shifted behind the old man’s pale eyes—ancient, patient, and cold as a winter river—and Ragnall was certain he had finally found the hand.
“Ye’re a clever lad,” the old man said. “Ye always were the clever one. Ye’ve yer grandfaither’s very look about ye, did ye ken that? I have waited a long, long time to stand close enough to tell ye so.”
Olivia, standing in the mud with her brother pale and trembling beside her, felt the night change shape around her.
The fighting had faded to nothing. Both clans stood ringed in the red gloom, Cairn and Blythe alike, and they were listening now, every one of them, because there was a charge in the air that even men with murder still hot in their hands could feel the weight of.
It was the sense of a great flat stone being lifted at long last upon what had lived too long in the wet dark beneath it.
“Noah,” Lucas said, bewildered. “Noah, what are ye sayin’ to me? This is the Laird who—”
“Wheesht now, lad.” The old man patted his shoulder, fond and dreadful all at once. “Ye’ve done yer part, and done it well. Ye’ve all done yer parts these long years, every soul on both banks of that cursed water, and never once the wiser that ye were doin’ them.”
He turned his soft and sorrowful gaze out across the two silent clans, and his voice carried, rich and ringing with an old grief that Olivia understood, with a sickening feeling, was real, every bitter drop of it.
“Did none of ye ever once wonder why this feud would never die? Why did every truce sour in the cup? Why did every peace some hopeful fool went and brokered turn again to blood within the twelvemonth? Three generations of ye, bleedin’ and buryin’ yer sons over a strip of river mud, and not one of ye ever stopped to ask whose patient hand it was that kept the wound from healin’ over. ”
“Yers,” Ragnall said. Flat. Cold. Certain as a closing door.
“The killings at the ford under the peace flag. The fires in the byres. The cut nets. The whispers poured into me folk’s ears against me wife.
The man ye sent into her room.” He did not raise his voice, and the quiet of it was worse than any shout. “All of it. Ye.”
“All of it. Me.” The old man inclined his white head, and there was pride in the gesture, a terrible quiet pride, the pride of an old craftsman standing back to regard his life’s greatest work.
“For longer than ye have drawn breath upon this earth, Laird Cairn. I was an Elder of Blythe before ever yer faither was weaned from the breast, and an Elder hears every word, and steers every choice, and is never, ever looked at twice for doin’ it.
A wee word in a council here. A wee fire there.
A grievance kept warm by the hearth. A truce quietly poisoned in its very cradle.
” He smiled at them all. “It is truly a wonder how little it takes to keep two proud and stupid clans forever at each other’s throats.
Ye need only first understand that, in the depths of their hearts, they want to be. ”
“Why?” The word ripped itself out of Olivia before she could think to hold it.
“Hundreds dead. Me faither. Me braither. His sister was nearly murdered, his whole clan put in mournin’, bairns on both sides of that water grown to men and women now without ever kennin’ their faithers.
For what? What did a single one of us ever do to ye? What did I do to ye?”
The old man turned his eyes upon her, and the soft grief in his face curdled into a bitterness so old that she fell back a step in the mud without meaning to.
“Nae ye, lass,” he said, soft as falling ash. “Never ye. Ye werenae even born when it began.” His gaze drifted past her shoulder, almost dreamy now, to where the Cairn folk stood gathered close. “It was her.”
Olivia turned to follow his gaze, and the whole glen seemed to turn on its axis with her, and there at the front of the Cairn ranks, wrapped small in a gray shawl with her bright old eyes fixed steadily on him, stood Maisie.
“Thomasina,” the old man breathed. Forty years fell clean off his voice in saying it, and the naked want laid bare beneath was a horror to stand and hear.
“Look at ye yet. Still bonnie. Still the bonniest thing in any room ye ever walked into. I asked for yer hand, Thomasina. Did ye ever ken that? Fifty years gone, by the boundary stone, in the gloamin’ with the light goin’ gold off the water.
I had nothin’ to me name but a heart fit to burst with it, and I asked ye, and ye laughed, kind as a summer day, and ye told me ye’d already promised yerself to a Crawford.
A second son. A nothin’ at all. And ye married away into his clan, and ye bore him children, and ye never, in fifty long years, gave me one more thought. ”
The silence rang in Olivia’s ears like a struck bell.
And Maisie, his Thomasina, the woman at whose feet fifty years of murder had quietly been laid, peered across the firelit dark at the old man with her head tilted to the side, and said into the held and breathless hush in a voice of perfect and devastating bewilderment, “Noah, did ye say the name was? I am sorry, laddie, I daenae believe I ken any Noah at all.”
For the span of a single heartbeat, the old man’s face simply fell apart, fifty years of bottled-up grievances collapsing all at once into the naked face of a boy rejected by the water in the golden light of the gloaming.
Despite every dead soul between them, Olivia almost pitied him.
Then his hand came out from within the folds of his robe with a long, thin blade caught in it, and he lunged, wide of Ragnall and wide of Lucas, straight and quick for the old woman who had forgotten his very name.