Chapter Two
They took her up the west stairs with a guard in front and a guard behind, which was not how anyone had ever walked her to her own room before, and her face burned the whole way.
Her mother had hold of her arm the whole way and did not stop talking, and none of it was about anything.
The fire had been lit since noon. There was broth.
Mairi had aired the bed and turned it twice because the first turning had not satisfied her.
It was the particular running speech of a woman holding herself together by keeping her mouth busy.
Alexandra let it go over her, grateful, her throat aching with it.
Her father came in behind them and stood at the window with his back to the room, and she watched his shoulders go up and stay there.
“A Campbell dungeon,” he said, to the glass. “Me daughter in a Campbell dungeon, and eight days since, and nae one of us kent whether ye were breathin’ or lyin’ in a ditch till the messenger came. Can ye imagine what that is? Can ye imagine it at all?”
“Finn.”
“I sent forty men north. Forty! And they came back tae me with a burnt cart and a story.”
“Finn.”
Her mother did not raise her voice. She did not have to.
Alexandra had watched that exact syllable stop her father mid-stride her whole life, and it stopped him now.
His shoulders came down. He turned around.
His eyes were red-rimmed and his beard had three days in it, and for a moment he was not a laird with a dead heir and a courtyard full of men waiting on him.
He was a big tired man looking at his daughter.
“Ye’re thin,” he said. “Have they nae been feedin’ ye? Did they feed ye at all in that place?”
“I’m fine, Da…”
“Ye’re thin.” He crossed the room, and his hands came down on her shoulders, and they were shaking.
He held on a moment longer than he meant to.
“Ye’re safe now. That’s all I care about tonight, and ye’ll forgive me if I’m nae fit for anythin’ else.
Ye’re safe, and ye’re behind me own walls, and nothin’ is takin’ ye out of them. ”
She had the note against her ribs; she took it out then, because she had promised, and because she did not trust herself to say anything at all.
“From Liam. He made me swear I’d put it intae yer hands and nae a servant’s.”
Her father turned it over. Something moved across his face at the sight of the writing. He put his thumb on the seal and did not break it.
“He’s alive, then.” Her father’s voice had gone strange. “How is he? Is he walkin’? Is he eatin’?”
“He’s alive. He’s nae well, but he’s alive, and he’s got half the north comin’ tae him with pitchforks!” She heard her own voice thicken and pushed on through it, and her eyes spilled over before she could stop them. “He asked after ye, Ma. He wanted ye tae ken that he did.”
Her mother’s face crumpled and reassembled itself in the space of a breath, and her hand went up to her mouth and stayed there.
“Aye,” Iona said. “Well. He would.”
They left her not long after. Her mother kissed her twice and told her to eat. Her father stopped in the doorway with the note still unopened in his fist and looked back at her as though there were something else he meant to say. He did not say it. He pulled the door to behind him.
She listened to their footsteps go down the stairs. Then she crossed to the window and looked out, and Arran was still there.
He was standing at the bottom of the entrance steps with his horse’s reins over his arm, exactly where her father had left him, in the middle of a courtyard that had emptied around him the way water parts around a stone.
Her heart turned over so hard that she put a hand on the sill to steady herself, and she stood very still with the other flat against the cold glass.
A guard came down off the wall and said something to him; Arran shook his head.
The guard said something else, with more of his shoulders in it this time, and pointed at the gate.
Arran looked at where the man was pointing, and then looked back at him, and said something short.
Whatever it was, the guard stood there a moment with nothing left to do, and then went back to the wall.
He did not leave. Her eyes stung, and there was nobody up here to see it.
The torches burned down in their brackets, and one guttered out, and nobody came to replace it.
She was shaking again by then, and could not have said why.
The kitchen shutters closed. The last of the McKenzie riders led their horses across to the stables and the courtyard went quiet, and Arran Kincaid stood in the middle of it in the cold with his reins over his arm.
After a while he began to walk. Six paces one way, turn, six paces back, his head down, as she had seen him walk outside the war room at Murray Keep the night Christopher rode out. He stopped once and put his hand on his horse’s neck and stood like that for a long time.
Alexandra pulled the chair over to the window and sat down in it. Her hands would not settle. She pressed them flat against her thighs and watched him.
She did not know what she was waiting for. She knew that if he looked up she would step back from the glass, and she knew that she was going to keep sitting there anyway, and both of those things were true at once and neither of them made the least sense.
Her chest hurt. Not the way it had hurt for eight days—that was a thing with a shape she was learning to carry. This was different and it was worse for being smaller, a fine steady ache under the breastbone, and it got no better for looking and no better for not looking.
She thought about going down. She got as far as standing up. Then she thought about her father’s face in the courtyard, and thirty men on the walls with nothing to do but watch, and what it would cost Arran to be seen taking her charity at his own humiliation, and she sat back down.
She woke with her cheek against the window frame and a crick in her neck and grey morning light in the courtyard below. The flagstones where he had been standing were empty and wet with dew. No horse. No man. No mark of either of them.
She sat there a long while with her hand flat on the cold glass.
For three days she was a prisoner in her own house, and the whole household was far too polite to say so.
Catriona had her orders and Catriona followed them, which Alexandra could not even find it in herself to resent.
She was outside the bedroom door when Alexandra woke and she was there when Alexandra went to bed, and in between she was two paces behind her at every step, silent, watchful, her hand never far from the hilt.
She was not unkind about it. She was not anything about it, which was somehow worse.
Alexandra tried three times to draw her into talking about Rory and got three courteous, absolutely closed answers.
On the third she saw the girl’s jaw lock, and understood that the silence was not coldness.
It was the only thing keeping Catriona upright. She left it alone after that.
They would not let her train. That was the part that near finished her.
Alexandra stood at the rail above the yard and watched the McKenzie warriors run their drills below, and the smith’s boys running barrows of arrowheads across the mud.
Not once was she permitted to lift a blade in her own father’s castle.
He had decided his daughter was a thing to be kept in a box.
On the third evening her patience went, all at once, like a rope parting.
“Ye’ll let me in that room.”
“I willnae.”
“Why?” Alexandra demanded. “Give me one reason that isnae fear! Da—”
“I’ve said no tae ye four times.” Finn did not look up from the map. Two of his generals had the sense to find somewhere else to be. Her hands had closed into fists without her deciding it. “Will a fifth do it? Or are we tae have this every night till the snow?”
“I was there.” Her voice came out louder than she meant and she did not take it back.
“I was in that man’s hands. I was in his dungeon and his guards talked over me head as though I were a bench, and they said things a man only says where he thinks it costs him nothin’.
I’ve been through his gate and across his yard and I ken how his guard is set on both, and I ken which of his men are frightened of him and which are nae.
And I ken what his face does just before he decides tae hurt someone, because I watched him do it tae me brother! ”
Her father’s head came up.
“And ye’ve been in this room with these men for four days,” she said, quieter.
“Four days, Da. And what have ye got? I can hear ye through the door goin’ round and round the same three roads north.
Ye’re plannin’ a war against a man ye’ve never laid eyes on, and there’s one person under this roof who’s stood in front of that man and watched him smile.
Where is she? Standin’ in a corridor. Does that seem right tae ye? ”
The silence went on long enough to hurt.
Finn put both hands flat on the map. He looked at her as he looked at a ford he was not sure of.
“Ye think I dinnae ken what ye are?” He said it without any heat at all, and his eyes were wet. “I ken exactly what ye are. That’s the whole trouble with ye.” He drew a breath that shook on the way in. “I’ve lost one. What would ye have me do?”
The door went without a knock.
“Me laird.” The captain of the guard had come at a run and had not got his breath back. “The Kincaid heir is at the gate.”
Whatever had been softening in her father’s face went out of it like a candle.
“Send him away.”
“Me laird—”
“Are ye deaf, man? Send him away! And if he doesnae go, put him on his horse and make him go.”
“Me laird, I’m afraid that willnae be possible.” The captain swallowed, and his face had gone the colour of paper. “He hasnae come alone!”
Her father was out of the room before the man had finished the sentence, and Alexandra was one step behind him, and Catriona was one step behind her, and none of the three of them said a word going down the stairs.
The doors came open onto the top of the entrance steps and the cold hit her in the face, and her heart was going so hard she could feel it in her ears.
The courtyard was full of her father’s men, and every one of them was standing still and facing the gate, and beyond the gate the road was not a road anymore.
They were drawn up in ranks that went back past the village and up the hill and out of sight in the dark, rank on rank of mounted men with torches, and the torchlight ran along a great deal of iron.
She saw Kincaid green at the front of them.
Behind that the grey and white of McGregor, and further back, half in the dark, the deep blue of Blackwood’s own soldiers, which she had not seen this side of the border in her lifetime and had frankly wondered whether anyone ever would again.
At the head of it, on the near side of the gate, Arran Kincaid swung down off his horse, handed his reins to the man beside him, and came forward on foot alone. Alexandra’s eyes filled so fast she had to look at the flagstones.
He looked as though he had not slept since he left. He had three days of beard on him and his cloak was filthy to the shoulder. He came up the flagstones and stopped at the foot of the steps, in exactly the place he had stood for six hours in the cold. He did not kneel this time.
“Me laird.”
Her father came down two steps and stopped. Alexandra watched the side of his face and knew he was working something out.
“I told ye tae get off me land.”
“Ye did.” Arran’s voice carried the whole yard. “I went and got these, and then I came back on tae it.”
“How many?” her father demanded. “How many have ye brought tae me gate?”
“Six hundred and forty, and there’s two hundred more of Blackwood’s comin’ behind me that couldnae keep the pace.
” He said it as a man reads off a list. “Kincaid and McGregor, and Blackwood’s soldiers at their backs, horse and foot, victualled for a month in the field.
They’re nae mine tae give, me laird. They came because I asked, and I asked because of yer son. ”
Something went through the courtyard then. Not a sound exactly. A movement, such as goes through a field, and Alexandra felt the hair rise on her arms with it.
“I’ll make ye the same offer I made ye three nights ago,” Arran said.
“Me sword, me men, meself, under yer command and nae under mine. And I’ll add one thing tae it that I didnae say before, because I hadnae the right tae say it then and I’ve bought the right since.
” He lifted his chin. “We willnae stop. Nae at the border, nae at the first snow, nae when it gets expensive. Nae until Ian Campbell is in the ground and yer son is answered for. That’s nae a courtesy, me laird.
That’s a vow, and ye can hold me tae it in front of every man standin’ here. ”
For one heartbeat his eyes came off her father and found her across the courtyard.
It was nothing. It could not have lasted the length of a breath. But she saw what was in it, and it went through her like cold water. For eight days people who loved her had been telling her things, and not one of them had been true as this was true. She believed every single word he had said.
Her father was quiet for a long moment, and she watched his throat work twice before he trusted himself.
Then he came down the last of the steps and stood in front of Arran Kincaid, and he was the bigger man by a hand’s breadth, and he did not offer his hand.
“Bring them in,” he said.
“Me laird.”
“Bring them in, and feed them, and I’ll have yer captains in me hall within the hour.
” Finn’s voice dropped so that it went no further than the three feet between them, though Alexandra was close enough on the steps to catch every word of it.
“And ye’ll hear this from me once, and then we’ll neither of us speak of it again.
I trusted a Murray and a Kincaid with me children, and I’ve one child left.
If ye fail me twice, lad, there’ll nae be a third conversation. ”
“I’d nae expect one.”
“Good.” Her father turned and went up his own steps without waiting. “Then we understand one another.”