Chapter 19
The farmstead sat at the end of a track so overgrown that the horses had to be led the final quarter mile on foot, picking through wet bracken in the dark while the clouds above occasionally permitted a thin wash of moonlight across the hills.
It had been abandoned long enough that the roof of the smaller outbuilding had partially collapsed, and the larger one smelled of damp earth.
Soon a fire was built. Bedrolls were laid out.
Food was produced from somewhere. Lucas accepted the hard oatcakes and a bottle of whiskey with an expression of profound relief and distributed them with considerably more generosity than was probably advisable given that several of the men were still carrying injuries from the chapel.
The others settled gradually into sleep, one by one, the way exhausted people do when the necessity of staying upright has finally been removed. Lucas was first, his chin dropping toward his chest within minutes of finishing his portion of the cheese, his breathing evening out. The others followed.
The fire burned lower and Locke had not yet slept.
She was aware of him the way she had been aware of him since the beginning.
He sat on the opposite side of the fire with his forearms resting on his knees, looking into the flames with an expression that was not quite distant and not quite present.
His cloak was still dusty from the road.
The cut on his knuckles had dried and darkened.
The bruise along his jaw had deepened to the color of a storm coming in from the north.
He looked up and found her watching him, and neither of them looked away.
After a moment, she said, “Come and sit over here.”
He studied her briefly, as though assessing whether this was an invitation or an instruction. Then he rose and came around the fire, lowering himself onto the ground beside her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him against her side.
They sat in silence for a while.
Merith began first because she had always found that waiting for difficult things made them heavier rather than lighter.
“Tell me about the ambush,” she said. “Not what ye did. Why.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Ye already know why. Carnegie was the target. We needed access. Ye were the access.”
“I know that part.” She kept her gaze on the fire. “I mean why that way. Why the carriage, the staged attack. Why go through me at all instead of simply breaking in directly?”
He considered this with a seriousness that told her it was a question he had asked himself.
“Carnegie’s castle wasnae a simple matter tae enter uninvited,” he said.
“He kept a careful household. Guards who know each other by name, who notice strangers, who dinnae let people wander where they shouldnae be. But a man who rescues the laird’s betrothed and is invited in as a guest…
that man can walk almost anywhere. He has reason tae be in every corridor. Nobody questions him.”
“And I was simply the most convenient means of obtaining that invitation?”
The word simply landed in the space between them with a weight that made him turn his head to look at her.
“Aye,” he said. “At the start, aye.”
“And then?” She did not flinch from that and yet her heart fluttered as she waited for his answer.
Locke exhaled slowly. He looked back at the fire, and in the gold light she could see the particular quality of stillness that came over him when he was about to say something he had not planned to say.
“I dinnae let people matter tae me,” he said. “As a general rule. It isnae pride, or coldness, or any of the things it might look like from the outside.”
He turned the thought over carefully, as though finding the right shape for it.
“I was left early. My father simply wasnae the kind of man who stayed, and my mother wasnae the kind of woman who could manage on her own, and so I learned verra young that depending on a person was a way of building something that would eventually be taken away. It was an efficient lesson.” The faintest shadow of something that was not quite humor moved across his face. “I’ve been efficient ever since.”
Merith listened without interrupting, which she knew was not always easy for her to do.
“The Society is different,” he continued.
“Lucas, the others. That’s… a purpose shared, nae a person depended on.
There’s a distinction.” He was quiet for a moment.
“And then I met ye on a road in the rain, and ye looked at me like ye already suspected I wasnae telling ye the truth, and something in the way ye held yerself… like a woman ready tae argue with anyone who said a wrong word and verra much hoping someone would… was the most unexpectedly interesting thing I had seen in years.”
Merith looked at him. “And ye still used me.”
“Aye.” He met her gaze directly. “I did. Because by the time I understood it was becoming something else, I had already lied tae ye, and the mission was in motion, and I told myself the work was more important than what I was beginning tae feel… which was cowardice. A different kind than I’m accustomed tae, but cowardice nonetheless. ”
She turned back to the fire and thought about it, turning it over. “I am not forgiving ye because I love ye.” She felt him go still beside her. “What I’m doing is choosing ye… with a full understanding of what ye are and what ye did and what it cost me.”
Locke said nothing for a moment. When she glanced at him she found him watching her with an expression that was the most unguarded thing she had ever seen on his face.
“Merith… I have never in my life had a person choose me with full knowledge of what I am. I dinnae know what tae do with it.” He looked at the fire. “It terrifies me a great deal more than anything that happened in that chapel today.”
“I know,” she said. “That isnae a reason tae run from it.”
“Nay.” His jaw tightened briefly, and then deliberately relaxed. “Nay, it isnae.”
They sat together in silence for a while after that. His hand had moved to cover hers where it rested on the ground between them. She turned her hand over beneath his.
He looked down at their joined hands and then up at her face, and the question in his expression was plain and unhurried.
She answered it by leaning into him, her head coming to rest against his shoulder.
Then, she felt him exhale slowly and rest his cheek against the top of her head and remain entirely still, as though afraid that moving might break something he had only just been given permission to hold.
“I am going tae be terrible at this,” he said quietly, above her. “I want tae warn ye in advance.”
“I know.” She closed her eyes. “So will I, in different ways… but we will manage.”
“Aye.” He said it quietly, and she felt it in his chest rather than heard it. “We will.”
The days that followed moved with a momentum that felt less like events unfolding and more like a current carrying them. Unhurried but inexorable, as though the world had made up its mind and was simply completing what had been decided.
The steward was delivered first.
He made a poor prisoner, alternating between sullen silence and bursts of anxious cooperation that Lucas regarded with patient skepticism. By the time the Society’s men had escorted him to the nearest Crown outpost, the man had offered enough detail to make the ledger’s contents largely redundant.
He was the kind of person who believed that confessing thoroughly might somehow abbreviate the consequences. It would not.
But his cooperation made the transfer considerably more straightforward, and the King’s men who received them looked at the ledger with an expression Merith recognized as the satisfaction of people who had suspected a great deal for a long time and were finally holding the evidence in their hands.
The officer in charge was a lean, grey-haired man with careful eyes who read the first three pages of the ledger in silence and then set it down on the table between them with deliberate care.
“Carnegie,” he said.
“Aye,” Locke replied.
“How long have ye had this, lad?” he asked.
“Long enough.”
The officer looked at him for a moment. Then he looked at Merith, taking in the ivory gown she was still wearing, travel-stained now at the hem, a small tear at the sleeve from the edge of the chapel pew, with an expression that required no translation. “And ye are?”
“Merith Donalson, sir,” she said. “Of the Donalson lands, which appear on page fourteen.”
Another pause. Then the officer nodded once, with a gravity that felt like the first genuinely appropriate response she had received from anyone in authority since this entire ordeal had begun.
“Aye,” he said quietly. “We’ll see tae it.”
She believed him. She was not entirely certain why, except that the alternative was to stop believing in anything at all, and she found she was not prepared to do that.
The news about Murdoch came three days later, passed along a chain of messengers that the Society maintained.
Murdoch had been found. Not by Carnegie men or Crown soldiers but simply by the logic of his own situation, which had contracted around him like water finding the lowest point.
Without the castle, without his guards, without the careful architecture of alliances and fear that had sustained him, Murdoch Carnegie turned out to be a considerably smaller thing than he had appeared.
He was taken quietly, in a village two days’ ride from his own lands, and brought before a magistrate who had, as it happened, been informed of his charges the previous morning.
A new Laird would be appointed to the Carnegie Clan. The stolen lands would be restored, or compensated, as much as such things could be. Merith did not learn the details all at once. They arrived in pieces.
Her family’s land was among those to be reviewed. She did not allow herself to think too much about that yet. There would be time.
It was on the fourth morning, at the junction of two roads that met in a wide, flat stretch of moorland where the heather had just begun to bloom purple against the grey of the stones, that they said goodbye to Shona who had rejoined them briefly along with the King’s magistrates.
Merith had known it was coming. She had known it since the chapel, since before the chapel if she was honest, since the moment she had understood what Shona had done, carrying the ledger out of the castle in the dark hours before dawn with the composure of a woman who had calculated the risk and decided it was worth taking.
There were things you could ask of loyalty and things you could not, and a life spent following Merith down whatever road she chose next fell firmly in the latter category.
Locke had arranged it quietly. The bag of coin was substantial, not the modest purse of a dismissed servant but enough to matter, tied at the top with a piece of cord and handed to Shona by Lucas himself with a formality that was almost comical given that Lucas was still visibly bruised from the chapel and had not yet found a cloak that fit him properly.
Shona received it with a straight back and dry eyes.
Merith had written the letter the evening before, sitting beside a fire while Locke slept and the wind moved through the grass outside with the low, constant sound of the Highlands simply being themselves.
She had written several versions. The final one was shorter than the others. She had said what needed saying and trusted that Shona would understand the rest, because her trusted maid and friend always had.
They stood facing each other on the moorland road while the others waited at a respectful distance, and for a moment neither of them spoke.
“Ye dinnae have tae thank me, my lady,” Shona said finally.
“I know.” Merith looked at her steadily. “But I want tae.”
Shona’s expression shifted slightly. Not quite a smile, but the thing that lived adjacent to it in Shona’s face. “Ye’d have done the same fer me.”
“Aye.” Merith did not hesitate. “I would.”
They embraced briefly and tightly. Merith pressed her cheek against Shona’s and closed her eyes and felt the ache of it.
When they separated, Shona straightened her shawl with a crisp, habitual motion and looked at her one last time.
“Dinnae get killed, my lady,” she said.
“I’ll do my best.”
“And eat properly. Ye havenae been eating properly.”
“I’ll—”
“Dinnae argue with me aboot this.” Shona’s eyes moved briefly to Locke, who was standing a polite twenty feet away examining the horizon with a studiously neutral expression. “Make sure he eats properly too. He looks like he survives on stubbornness alone.”
Merith laughed. It came out unexpectedly, and it felt like something releasing in her chest that had been held very tightly for a very long time. Shona’s expression broke open into a proper smile at the sound of it, brief and genuine.
Then she picked up her bag, turned, and walked away down the other road without looking back. Merith watched her until the moorland absorbed her entirely, one figure becoming a shape becoming a point becoming nothing, and the heather continued blooming indifferently all around.
She became aware of Locke standing beside her. She had not heard him approach, which she was no longer surprised by.
“Thank ye,” she said, without turning.
“For what?”
“For the coin.” She kept her gaze on the empty road. “For thinking of it before I had tae ask.”
A brief silence. “She earned it.”
“She did.” Merith finally turned to look at him. He was watching the same empty road, his hands in his coat pockets, the Highland wind pulling at his dark auburn curls with its usual disregard for anything as deliberate as appearance.
The bruise on his jaw had faded to yellow at the edges. He looked tired and more like himself than she had seen him since she had first encountered him on a different road entirely. “Ye’re a complicated man, Lachlan Reid.”
He glanced at her. “Aye. I’ve heard that.”
“Was it ever untrue?”
“Nay.” The corner of his mouth moved. “But I find I mind it less than I used tae.”