Chapter 8
Oliver stood at the edge of the ravine, looking down at the river that churned fifty feet below. The same river they’d crossed in the dark two nights ago, swollen even higher now with mountain runoff, its current swift and pitiless.
“There has to be another way,” Megan said beside him. Her voice was steady. He heard the fear underneath it, anyway.
“There isn’t.” He pointed south to where a plume of smoke rose against the grey sky. “That could be Penharrow’s men. If they’re tracking us, they’re close. We cross here or we’re caught.”
Webb, pale and sweating despite the cold morning air, peered down at the churning water. “That’ll kill us faster than Penharrow will.”
“Not if we’re careful.” Oliver was already assessing the crossing, the width of the river, the speed of the current, the potential handholds on the far bank. “There’s a rope in my saddlebag. We string it across, use it as a guideline.”
“And if the rope doesn’t hold?” Megan asked.
Oliver met her eyes. “Then we swim very fast.”
It took twenty minutes to prepare. He secured one end of the rope around a sturdy tree and tied the other around his waist. Just enough to span the crossing, if his estimate was right.
“If I make it,” he told Webb, “I’ll secure the far end and signal. You bring Megan across. If I don’t—”
“You’ll make it,” Webb said. “You’re too bloody stubborn to drown. Besides, your horse swims well. Sitting atop him, if the horse falls let it go. They’ll find their way across to the bank, but it may be further downstream. We’ll just have to go find them.”
Oliver almost smiled. He turned to Megan, who stood with her arms wrapped around herself, watching the river with barely concealed terror.
“Can you swim?”
“No. There was a pond on the estate. Sometimes, when Penharrow was away, I would paddle—” She stopped. Shook her head. “But not in anything like this.”
“You won’t have to. Just let the horse swim under you, but hold the rope, keep your head above water. Webb will have you across.”
She looked at Webb’s shoulder, at the careful way he was holding it, and then back at Oliver. “His shoulder isn’t strong enough to hold me too. I’ll come across on my own. That way all three horses get across too.” A pause. “You will come for me if I get swept away?”
“Of course.”
Something flickered on her face. She gave a small nod.
Oliver kicked his horse forward, and they waded into the river.
The cold hit him like a physical blow, driving the air from his lungs. The current immediately pulled at his horse’s legs, trying to sweep them downstream. He softly encouraged the frightened animal using the rope to maintain his balance.
Halfway across, the riverbed dropped away.
Suddenly his horse was swimming, fighting the current, the rope around his waist pulling taut. His cavalry boots filled with water and were lead weights making him heavier on his horse.
Then his horse found the ground and cambered up the bank, safely on the other side.
Megan was cheering as he tied his horse to the nearest tree. It was small and barely audible, but it was there. Genuine joy at his survival. Oliver looked back across the river and saw her standing at the edge with one hand pressed to her mouth and her eyes bright.
He secured the rope around a boulder and signaled to Webb.
The former sergeant edged his horse into the torrent, and they came across with grim determination despite his wounded shoulder.
The current caught them twice, nearly sweeping his horse away, but the animal was as determined as Webb as he held onto the rope.
When he reached the far bank Oliver clapped the horse on its rump and turned to encourage Megan.
“Your turn!” Oliver called across to Megan.
She sat frozen at the water’s edge. Even from this distance he could see her trembling.
“Megan! You can do this!”
But she shook her head and her horse got restless. “I can’t!”
Behind her, through the treelined, the dust plume was closer.
Oliver decided. He plunged into the river.
The current fought him every inch of the way, but he had the rope to guide him, pulling himself along hand over hand. When he reached the far bank Megan was staring at him as though he’d lost his mind.
“What are you—”
“No time to argue.” He swung up behind her on the horse. “Hold onto me. The water will make us lighter.”
“Oliver—”
“Trust me.”
He saw the moment she decided to trust him. Saw her jaw set, her fingers tighten on his. Then they were in the water together.
The current hit them like a fist, but the horse was steady. Oliver wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her hard against him as the river tried to tear them off the steed.
“Don’t let go!” he shouted over the roar of water.
“I won’t!”
They went under. The horse gone from beneath them.
The world became cold and dark and chaotic.
His lungs burned. The current was enormous, indifferent, and it had her, it had both of them, and he locked his arm tighter and kept pulling along the rope with his free hand.
He could feel her nails through his coat.
He could feel the river trying to take her from him.
And there, in the cold dark, in the half-second between one pull and the next, when he didn’t know which way was up, the thought arrived.
If she dies, this was all for nothing.
He meant the mission. He meant James and the testimony and the months of careful work that had brought him to this freezing river. That was what he meant.
Except it wasn’t.
He knew it wasn’t, in the same moment the thought arrived, with the terrible clarity of a man who can’t lie to himself while he’s drowning.
He didn’t mean the mission. He meant her.
He meant the specific and irreplaceable fact of her, the green eyes and the steady hands and the voice that quietened when she was frightened.
He meant the woman who had survived fourteen years of the unsurvivable and still, somehow, still, had the capacity to cheer from a riverbank.
That was what he meant by nothing. Her absence. Her specifically.
The realization didn’t feel like a revelation. It felt like something he’d already known being confirmed.
He pulled them both toward the surface.
They broke the water, gasping. Megan’s weight was against his side, and she was alive, coughing and gulping air, her grip on his arm fierce enough to bruise. Webb’s hands appeared at the bank, grabbing Oliver’s coat, hauling them both up out of the current and onto solid ground.
They collapsed in a tangle of limbs. Oliver lay on his back, staring up at the gray sky, his chest heaving, the sound of the river filling everything. He was aware of Megan against his side. He was aware of her breathing.
He lay there and let himself be aware of it.
When he could manage more than one breath at a time, he turned his head to look at her.
She was already looking at him. With her hair plastered to her face, and her lips blue with cold, she should have looked wretched. She looked fierce. Alive in a way that struck him somewhere beneath his ribs.
“You came back for me,” she said. Wonder in her voice, as though she still couldn’t quite account for it. “You came back into the river.”
“Of course.”
“You could have died.”
Oliver sat up slowly, helping her do the same. Across the river, riders appeared through the treeline: Penharrow’s men. Too late. He reached for the rope and cut it, watched it unravel and float away in the current.
“Yes,” he said. “I could have.”
“Why?” The question was barely a whisper. “Why would you risk your life for me?”
He looked at her. The honest answer still sat in his chest, exactly where it had arrived in the cold dark under the water. He was not ready to say it, and she was not ready to hear it, and they had Penharrow’s men fifty yards away across a river and Webb already struggling to his feet.
“Because you deserve someone to risk things for you,” he said.
Megan’s eyes filled. She looked away quickly, but not before he saw gratitude, and disbelief, and underneath both of them something newer and more fragile that he didn’t want to name too early and damage.
Across the river, one of Penharrow’s men was shouting, gesturing toward them, but the river was impassable and would be for days. By then they would be long gone.
“We need to move,” Webb said, already gathering the horses with the efficient resignation of a man who has learned not to waste time on situations he cannot change.
“They’ll look for another crossing. Look,” he pointed downstream to see Megan’s horse clambering out of the river. “I’ll fetch the gelding.”
Oliver nodded. He got to his feet and offered Megan his hand. She looked at it for a moment, then took it, and he pulled her upright. She swayed slightly and he kept hold of her until she found her balance.
“Can you ride?”
She looked at him. Really looked at him, the way she had in the cave the night before, as though taking stock of something she hadn’t finished deciding about.
“Yes,” she said. “I can ride. You’re a good teacher. Plus fear of falling off helps.”
Webb was back with her horse, and Oliver helped her mount. They were all freezing cold, but they had to move on.
They mounted and pushed deeper into the mountains, leaving Penharrow’s men to their frustrated shouting on the far bank. Oliver didn’t look back.
He was thinking about the moment under the water. The cold and the dark and the current and the thought that had arrived without his permission and settled in him like something that had always been there, just waiting for the right conditions to become visible.
She was not the mission. She had not been the mission for some time. He understood that now with the same bone-deep certainty with which he understood distances and terrain and the weight of a pistol in his hand.
What he was going to do about it was a problem for a man who had finished being hunted through the mountains of Wales. For now, he rode, and she rode beside him, and the morning light caught in her wet hair, and he did not look at her more than was necessary.
He didn’t entirely succeed.