Chapter One
Hamish set a pace that punished.
He did it without temper, as a man does a thing he has already decided. The column rode out of the Murray gates at a trot and never came back down to a walk.
By mid-morning her thighs had gone from burning to a dull wooden ache and her split palms had glued themselves to the reins.
She was glad of all of it. Pain was simple.
It left no room at the back of her mind for a clearing in a Campbell forest, for the grey that had come into her brother’s face, for the sound her own voice made shouting the wrong name at the wrong moment.
Twice her eyes went hot without warning; she turned her face into the wind and let it dry them before anyone saw.
Arran rode a quarter mile back and made no attempt whatsoever to hide.
She had seen him first at the crown of the long rise, a dark shape against a white sky, and her heart had done something so undignified that she turned her face into the wind and let the cold take the color out of it.
Hamish had seen him too, and said nothing at all, which told her how much of a secret this was.
He stayed there six hours. He came no closer and he fell no further behind.
They stopped once.
The trail dropped through birch scrub into a gorge, and the noise arrived before the sight did. Then the trees opened. The falls came down the black cliff in one solid white sheet and threw spray twenty feet into the cold air, and the horses shied and had to be talked to.
“Easy, now. Easy, lad, it’s only water and it’s been there longer than the pair of us.
” Hamish kept his hand along his gelding’s neck and his voice low until the ears came forward, then swung down and blew into his fists.
“Ye ken the way, me lady. Single file, and dinnae dawdle on the ledge—it’s slick as glass in this weather and I’ll nae be fishin’ anyone out. ”
She had come here twice as a girl with her hand in her father’s. Nobody rode into the Lost Valley. There was one road in and it went through the water. That was the whole reason the valley had outlived every man who ever tried to take it.
She dismounted on legs that nearly went from under her, handed Splendor to a McKenzie lad with instructions to walk him until he cooled, and looked back up the trail.
Arran was already down and leading his horse in.
She was moving before she had decided to move, straight across the wet stone with her braid dripping and her fists shut.
“Well?” she demanded. “Have ye nothin’ tae say for yerself at all?”
Arran looped his reins over a branch with tremendous care, which she recognized instantly as a man buying himself a moment.
“Well what?”
“Ye’ve followed me half a day. Are ye plannin’ tae ride intae me father’s courtyard behind me as well, or will ye tell me what it is ye think ye’re doin’?”
“Seein’ ye safe tae yer own land. Is that a crime now?”
“Safe.” She heard her own voice climb and could not stop it.
“I’ve thirty armed men around me, Arran Kincaid.
Thirty! Hamish alone has killed more men than ye’ve been introduced tae.
Do ye think so little of me that ye imagine I cannae cross a country I’ve crossed a hundred times since I could sit a horse? ”
The color came up his neck and went into his face, and he looked at the reins in his hands instead of at her.
“It isnae that.”
“Then what is it?”
“It isnae that,” he said again, and his jaw set, and still he would not lift his eyes. “Would ye have me say it here, with yer captain listenin’ and half yer father’s guard countin’ me words? I couldnae stand on those steps and watch ye go. That’s the whole of it. Ask me somethin’ else.”
She had three more questions loaded and every one of them died on the way to her mouth.
His ears had gone scarlet and his hands were unsteady on the leather.
He was standing in the spray with his shoulders up around them like a lad caught out of his bed at night.
There was nowhere in that she could put a blade.
“Alexandra McKenzie. And Arran Kincaid, of all the faces in the world.”
The voice came off a shelf of rock beside the falls, and Liam was down from it before she saw him move, which at his age had no business being possible.
He was whip-thin, his beard gone white years before it had any right to, the limp in his left leg older than she was.
He had led the rebellion out of this valley when her father was a boy.
He and Errik had held it between them for thirty years, and when Errik died four winters back Liam came out of that season grey to the roots and had not properly stopped moving since.
“Come out of the wet, the pair of ye,” he called. “Bring yer captain. Ye’ve a face on ye, lass, that I’ve worn meself.”
They went through single file with Liam leading.
The ledge ran three feet wide and streaming, the noise filled her skull until there was nothing else in it, and then the tunnel took them into black stone and the drip of the roof.
It let them out where it always did, into the green bowl of the valley.
The old war council building stood where it had always stood, roof patched and patched again, smoke going up.
There were far more men here than there should have been.
“Aye.” Liam watched her working it out. “Ye’ve seen it.”
He lowered himself onto the bench by the fire with a grunt, his hand shaking on the arm of it until he got himself settled, and waved them to the rest.
“Three weeks they’ve been comin’ in. Farmers, mostly, and their sons.
Two smiths. A woman out of the east villages who can put an arrow through a coin at forty paces.
” He laughed, and it turned into a cough.
“Campbell burns a village, and the next mornin’ I’ve six more at me door askin’ what they can carry.
What am I tae tell them? Go home? Sit by yer fire and wait for him tae come tae ye? ”
“Me father should hear this,” Alexandra told him. “How many have ye got? Can ye put a number on it?”
“Yer father is goin’ tae hear all of it.
” Liam leaned in, and the humor went out of his face as light goes out of a room.
“We’ve patrols runnin’ the whole northern line now, from the Murray high ground clear across tae yer own border.
Scoutin’ parties out in threes, relays back tae me every second day.
Anythin’ that moves up there, I’ll ken about it inside two days.
That’s what I’ve got tae give ye. It isnae an army. ”
“It’s better than an army,” Arran said. “An army only kens where it’s standin’.”
Liam looked at him with something close to approval, then turned back to her, and his voice came down.
“Lass.”
“Dinnae.” Her eyes had already begun to sting. “Liam. I’m askin’ ye…”
“I’ll say it the once and then I’ll leave ye be.
” He reached over and took her wrist, and his hand was all bone and forty years of callus.
“Ye and Rory and Rolland were family tae me. Errik doted on the three of ye somethin’ shameful.
He’d have ye down at the water catchin’ frogs while I was tryin’ tae hold a war council, and he’d nae hear one word against it.
” His thumb went across the back of her hand, once.
“I’ve buried more people than ye’ve met.
I’ll tell ye the one true thing I ken about it.
It doesnae get lighter. Ye get stronger.
That’s the whole of it, and it’s enough. ”
She could not answer him. Her face had gone hot and tight, her throat closed to a pinhole. She nodded, because nodding was the only thing left she could do without breaking.
Liam let her go. He reached inside his cloak.
What came out was a single sheet folded three times and sealed with a smear of dull wax. He held it a moment before he gave it over.
“For yer father and yer mother,” Liam said. “Ye’ll put it intae their hands yerself, nae a servant’s. Will ye promise me?”
“Aye. I promise.”
“Good lass.” His eyes had gone wet and he did not trouble himself to hide it. “And ye’ll tell Finn from me that I’m nae the man I was, but what’s left of me is his. Every inch of it.”
She got the note into her breast pocket with fingers that would not behave and pressed her palm flat over the outside of her cloak. Rory’s cloak was in the saddlebag not thirty feet away, folded as it had been for eight days, because there was still nowhere on this earth to lay it down.
They were back in the saddle within the hour.
The light was going when the road came down out of the hills and the McKenzie village opened below them; she knew before they reached the first house that the word had run ahead of her.
Every door stood open and every soul in the village stood in front of it, silent, and they did not wave. The cooper had come out with his apron on and his cap wrung up in both fists. An old man she could not name went down on his knees in the mud as Splendor passed and stayed there.
It was not grief the way the Murrays had done grief, all soft voices and food carried quietly to her door.
These were her own people and her own people were furious.
The forge was lit and roaring at an hour it had no business being lit, and stacked outside it were spear-heads, dozens of them, raw and unhafted and waiting.
Their heir was dead. They were going to war, and they had started without waiting to be told. Alexandra sat very straight and looked into the face of every one of them she could, because it was the only thing she had left to hand out.
The castle gates stood open with torches lit on either side, and her mother was through them and running before the column had halted.