Chapter Ten The Silence Between Ruins #2
“I think everything becomes one to you in the end.”
The words fell between them like stones dropped in water too still.
Kenan stared.
She wished at once she could take them back. Not because they were wholly false, but because they were not wholly true.
He spoke at last, his voice low. “That is not fair.”
“Fair.” The word came out jagged. “Nothing has been fair since Hamish rode through the gate.”
“No,” he said. “It has not.”
For a moment he looked as if he might step aside and let her carry all of it unchallenged. Then something in him hardened.
“You want the truth?” he said. “Aye, I think in routes and riders and what can still be saved, because if I stop doing that, then Ross dies on a hill for want of speed while we spend an hour naming feelings.”
The answer landed clean and brutal.
Eilidh flinched, not from the force of his voice, for he had barely raised it, but from the accuracy of the image. Ross. Alone or hunted or trying to lead women and children across ground no longer safe. Ross did not need her tears. He needed horses.
Kenan saw the flinch and seemed to regret the sharpness at once. “I am not saying this to wound you.”
“You are very gifted at wounding me while trying to help.”
At that, something almost like exhaustion crossed his face. “Aye. I know.”
The simple acceptance stripped some of the heat from her anger, leaving grief bare beneath it.
She turned away and pressed a hand to the cold stone wall. “I should have seen it sooner.”
“What?”
“That Jardine was exposed. That my uncle’s caution would not save us. That I was here spending myself on councils while my home…” Her throat closed briefly. “While my home stood open.”
Kenan’s answer came after a beat, quiet and fierce. “You were trying to keep your home from needing saving.”
“No. I was proving myself useful to another clan’s war.”
He stepped closer, not touching. “That is not the same thing.”
“It is when my people burn for it.”
She heard how unreasonable it sounded and could not stop. That was grief too, not merely sorrow but the need to lay blame somewhere the hand could reach.
“If I had not stayed,” she said, “if I had forced my uncle’s hand sooner, if I had gone back after the first stalled letters…”
Kenan interrupted, sharper now. “If you build your house from if, you will never leave its ruin.”
The line was too wise. Too measured. She detested it for being what she needed and not what she wanted.
“I do not want wisdom from you,” she snapped.
“What then?”
She turned on him fully. The answer came before she knew she meant to speak it. “I want one thing to be your fault.”
The silence after that felt immense.
Kenan did not move.
At last he said, with such raw honesty she nearly staggered beneath it, “I know.”
There was no self-defense in it. No denial. Only the terrible recognition that grief sought a place to strike and that he, loving her as he did, would let himself stand there if it gave her anything like relief.
That broke something in her more completely than any argument could have done.
Tears rose, hot and humiliating. “Do not.”
He held her gaze. “Do not what?”
“Do not be kind when I am trying to despise you.”
For one heartbeat his face changed utterly, the war chief stripped away, the man beneath him laid open with all the weariness and feeling he usually kept braced shut. “I am not kind,” he said. “I am only here.”
The words should not have been enough to undo her.
They were.
Eilidh covered her mouth with one hand and looked away.
She could feel herself slipping toward him again, not in body but in instinct, and panic rose sharp at the edge of it.
If she let him comfort her now, if she let the old refuge of his presence take shape again, then some part of the anger keeping her upright would collapse.
Beneath it lay only loss, and loss had no floor.
He saw the panic too.
Slowly, carefully, Kenan stepped back a pace.
“I will not touch you,” he said.
The promise hurt more than if he had ignored her fear.
Eilidh lowered her hand. “I do not know what to do with this.”
“With what?”
“With loving you while hating that you were the place I chose to stand while Jardine fell.”
The confession hung there, ugly and true and impossible to refine.
Kenan closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them again, grief had etched his features with a depth that seemed far beyond his years.
“Then do not do anything with it. Not yet.”
She stared.
He went on, voice low. “You do not owe me clarity because I want it. You do not owe me forgiveness because I stayed outside your door. If all you can give today is anger, then give it. I will live.”
No grand claim. No plea. Just the steady offering of himself as the one thing in this disaster that did not demand immediate resolution.
That, somehow, made breathing harder.
Eilidh leaned back against the wall and shut her eyes. For a moment there was only the cold stone at her spine and the knowledge of him a pace away, close enough to feel, too far to lean into.
When she finally spoke, her voice had gone dull with exhaustion. “I want the reports first.”
“You shall have them.”
“Not filtered.”
“No.”
She looked at him then, really looked, and saw that whatever else had broken between them, one thing remained intact. He would not lie to her. Not to spare her. Not to keep her.
That truth mattered more than she wished it did.
She drew in a slow breath. “Very well.”
It was not forgiveness. Barely even peace. Only a temporary arrangement made in the narrow corridor between grief and duty.
Kenan inclined his head. “Very well.”
He stepped aside then, offering her the stair.
Eilidh passed him without touching.
Yet as she descended toward the yard and the next terrible piece of news the day might hold, she felt him fall in a measured step behind her, not close enough to claim, not far enough to abandon.
By evening no word had come from Ross.
The search party returned only once before dusk, with a half-burned ledger recovered from the lower accounting house and news that fresh hoofmarks led north toward the high sheep fields.
One of the scouts believed three or four fugitives had crossed there in haste, at least one limping badly.
Another thought the tracks too muddled by weather and ash to trust.
Useful, useless, hopeful, ruinous. Every report now managed to be all of those at once.