Chapter Thirteen The Shape of the Counterstroke #2
The room waited on him. It always did now, and Eilidh saw again what that waiting cost. Every eye another life laid in his hands. Every plan asking not only whether it could be done, but whose blood would pay if it failed.
At length he said, “We strike Birch Gate tomorrow night.”
MacNair grinned like a wolf tasting blood.
Baird looked as though he wanted to object to the use of so much oil and yet could not find the courage to stand between a good plan and the men who liked it.
Donal only nodded, grave and unsurprised, as if the world had already leaned in this direction and all they had done was admit it.
Gavin began assigning pieces at once. Caelan would take the foot party to the shelf.
MacNair would hold the rear strike riders.
Baird would produce lamp oil, dry kindling, and spare bowstrings without whining overly much, a request he immediately failed to honor.
Donal would remain with the reserve at Kincaid.
Then Gavin stopped.
“What of command in the field?”
Silence settled again, but of another kind.
MacNair said at once, “Kenan.”
Baird muttered, “Of course Kenan.”
Caelan looked at the map rather than at any of them. Wise enough perhaps not to preempt what the room already understood.
Kenan was the war chief. The plan had his shape all over it now, though some of its bones were hers. He should lead. Of course he should.
Yet something in Eilidh tightened.
Not because he was unfit. Because she knew too well now what happened when he rode into plans he helped carve. He took the burden into himself too completely. He made its cost personal because he did not know how not to.
And because, if she was honest beneath everything, the thought of him riding again into another narrow pass with fire and arrows waiting somewhere beyond sight made something primal and cold turn in her chest.
Before she could speak, Ross’s voice came from the doorway.
“Not alone.”
Every head turned.
He stood braced against the frame, still pale, still favoring one leg, but dressed and upright and very plainly disobeying Morna. His expression warned anyone tempted to send him back that he had chosen his battle line already.
Gavin’s face darkened. “Have you lost your wits entirely?”
“Possibly,” Ross said. “But not the path to Birch Gate.”
Eilidh turned fully toward him. “You should be in bed.”
“And you should know by now that saying so will not make it true.”
Somehow, in spite of everything, the line sounded like kin. Infuriating, beloved kin.
Ross came into the room more slowly than he would have liked, but under his own power. He stopped beside Eilidh and placed one hand on the table edge. His knuckles went white with the effort of standing there, though he masked it better than any man had a right to.
“The drover’s cut beyond the standing birches narrows near the second shelf,” he said, looking not at her but at Kenan. “There is a washout here. If your foot party uses the wrong side of it in darkness, they will break ankles before ever reaching the shelf.”
He marked the place with one finger.
Caelan’s eyes sharpened. “Useful.”
Ross gave him a cool glance. “I try to be, when not ordered to stay in bed like a sulking child.”
Donal made a sound that might have been amusement. Baird rolled his eyes. Gavin looked ready to reach for patience and a staff in equal measure.
But Kenan watched Ross with a different expression. Measuring, yes. Also respect. Not yet friendship. Perhaps that would ask too much of any of them this soon. But respect had begun to grow there, and Eilidh saw it plain.
“You know the shelf better than any man here,” Kenan said.
“Aye.”
“Can you ride it?”
Ross did not lie. “Poorly. But I can stand long enough to keep fools from marching off the wrong edge.”
MacNair barked out a short laugh.
Gavin rubbed a hand over his brow. “One injured Jardine survivor and one half-mad War Chief. This room grows crowded with bad decisions.”
“Better bad decisions than no decisions,” Ross said.
Eilidh turned to him sharply. “Do not think to impress me with recklessness.”
His eyes met hers and softened just enough to wound. “I do not.”
That answer ended her protest before it fully formed, because she heard what lay beneath it.
Ross was not riding to posture or reclaim pride.
He was riding because Birch Gate lay on Jardine ground once tended by their people, because the old hidden paths were still in his body, and because leaving others to walk them blind would be its own betrayal.
Gavin must have heard the same truth. At last he exhaled through his nose. “Very well. Ross rides as guide, not hero. If Morna kills me after, I will name you responsible.”
Ross inclined his head. “Fair.”
The council moved again.
Eilidh stood very still while final assignments were made, but inside something had begun to gather its own force.
Not fear alone. Not anger. Partnership sharpened to action.
The plan on the table was daring because it had to be.
The people in the room were frayed because anything less frayed would have broken long ago.
And at the center of it Kenan was no longer trying to carry the whole weight by himself.
Not entirely. He took Ross’s knowledge. He took her map of Birch Gate.
He listened when others knew things he did not.
That mattered more than victory alone.
When the council finally dispersed, the room thinned in fragments.
Baird to his stores. MacNair to pick riders.
Caelan to gather the foot party. Gavin to the yard to prepare the reserve.
Donal paused by Ross long enough to say, “If you collapse before supper, do try to do it somewhere not in Morna’s sight,” then took himself off before answer could find him.
At last only Ross, Eilidh, and Kenan remained.
Ross looked between them and said, “You two should argue out whatever miserable thing is still sitting between you before dusk. I have no wish to be trapped with both of you on a narrow ridge while unsaid truths tumble down the slope.”
Eilidh blinked.
Kenan’s mouth shifted despite himself.
“You are in no condition to be insolent,” Eilidh said.
Ross eased a hand over his bruised side. “That has never stopped me before.”
Then he left, because apparently near death and rescue had not cured him of his worst habits.
For a while neither she nor Kenan moved.
The war room had changed with the men gone. Larger, quieter, the maps suddenly more intimate without an audience around them. The light from the high windows had gone flatter now, the day moving already toward the cold gold of late afternoon.
Kenan rested both hands on the table and said, “He is useful when he is not exasperating.”
Eilidh almost smiled. “You describe half the people I love that way.”
His gaze lifted to hers. “Only half.”
The line held enough warmth to alter the air between them.
She came around the table slowly until she stood on the same side, both of them facing Birch Gate together. The inked pass cut through her home country like a scar she knew too well.
“He should not ride,” she said after a moment.
“No.”
“But he will.”
“Aye.”
She nodded once. “Then keep him alive.”
Kenan turned his head slightly. “That is an order, not a request.”
“It is both.”
He accepted that without argument.
Silence settled, not empty. Working. The kind that had begun over maps and hard choices and had become its own language between them.
At last Eilidh said, “Standing before them yesterday changed more than the council.”
Kenan’s hand stilled on the table. “Aye.”
“I know that now.”
He looked at her fully then. “Do you.”
It was not skepticism. Not exactly. More like a man still wary of reaching too quickly for what had been denied him and then partly restored.
Eilidh held his gaze. “Yes.”
She drew a breath, steadying herself not because the truth was unclear, but because it mattered. “When I stood before them yesterday, I thought I was choosing only for Jardine. That was not all. I was choosing to stop standing apart from what this war asks of us. Of both of us.”
Kenan watched her with such focused stillness that it made the room feel narrower.
“And today?” he asked.
“Today I see what that actually means.” She looked back to the map. “Not safety. Not peace. Work. Blood. Plans made from imperfect ground. Loving someone who may still do things that frighten me and choosing not to turn away for that alone.”
The words left her lighter and more exposed at once.
Kenan’s expression changed, the hard war-chief lines softening only enough to show the man beneath them. “Eilidh.”
This time when he said her name it sounded less like plea than recognition.
She touched the Birch Gate pass with one fingertip. “You asked in the hall yesterday what this was between us. I said resolve. I was right. But I think there is more.”
He waited.
Not pressing. Never easily. That had become one of the things she trusted most in him.
“It is trust,” she said.
The word sat between them, plain and heavy.
His throat worked once before he answered. “That is harder won.”
“Aye.”
“And more easily broken.”