Chapter Four
The eastern road ran low for the best part of a day, and low ground after a week of rain meant the column moved at the pace of whichever wagon was worst off.
Arran took the left flank, because the left flank had trees on it.
He put riders up that slope twice before noon, had them back both times with nothing to tell him, and sent them a third time regardless.
Hamish brought his gelding alongside to watch them go.
“That’s the fourth lot ye’ve had on that hill,” he said.
“Third.”
“Third, then.” Hamish worked a knuckle into his beard. “And what is it ye’re hopin’ they’ll find up there that wasnae there an hour since?”
“Whatever’s there.”
“Aye. A grand answer, that. I’ll be sure tae give it tae the laird when he asks me what ye’re at.”
“Ye can tell him I like trees.”
Hamish made a sound in his throat that was very nearly a laugh, which was the first one anyone in that column had managed since the ford.
They rode a half mile without talking. The rain had stopped and had not taken the cold with it. The horses put up steam that hung about their heads and would not lift.
“Ye’ve nae asked me about the keep,” Hamish said.
“I’ve nae asked ye about the keep.”
“That’s what I said, lad. Ye’ve been at me elbow since first light and ye’ve nae asked one thing about who ye left standin’ in it.”
“Is the gate mended?”
“The gate is grand.” Hamish let that sit exactly long enough. “She’ll have thrown somethin’ by now.”
“At the door?”
“At whoever was fool enough tae open the door.” Hamish shifted his reins to the other hand.
“I put her first bow intae her hands, lad. I ken the sound she makes when she doesnae get her way, and I heard it through two floors of stone the night we rode out. Are ye goin’ tae ask me how she was, or will I stand here guessin’ at ye all the way tae the ford? ”
“How was she?”
“Furious,” Hamish said, with something close to fondness. “Weepin’ and furious and takin’ neither of them tae anyone. Her mother’s daughter and her father’s, God help the pair of them.”
The land ahead came up in a long slow shoulder and then went down again, and there was a burn at the bottom of it running brown and fast. Arran counted the fords he could see. Two, and one of them no good with wagons.
“She’ll nae forgive ye for standin’ with her father,” Hamish said.
“I ken.”
“Well.” Hamish clicked his tongue at his gelding. “Ye’re a braver man than me, Kincaid, and I’ve been shouted at by three generations of them.”
They smelled it before they saw it.
It came down the shoulder of the hill on the east wind, and it was not woodsmoke.
Woodsmoke is a clean thing. This had wet thatch in it, and hide, and under those a sweetness.
Arran had met that sweetness once before, at a place he did not let himself go back to, and the fear came up his throat now exactly as it had then.
Every horse in the column knew it for what it was before any man did.
Valiant threw his head up and went sideways under him.
Down the line a pack pony started to scream.
Finn McKenzie came out of the middle of the column at a hard canter and did not stop at the crest.
It had been a bigger place than Arran had let himself expect.
This was no huddle of crofts on a hillside. It was a market town. There was a street through the middle wide enough for two carts. There was a kirk with a bell in it, and a mill, and a stone cross in an open square where half the east country came in to trade. All of it burnt in an afternoon.
The kirk roof had fallen in. The mill wheel was still going around, and there was nobody left alive to stop it.
They had left the beasts dead in the pen.
That was the thing he could not get past. He stood in his stirrups looking at it while the column came up behind him and went quiet in stages.
No man drives cattle a day’s ride to kill them and walk away.
Nothing had been carried off here at all.
The grain was in the lofts and the wool was on the racks and every pot in that village was where the woman who owned it had set it down.
“They didnae raid it,” Arran said.
Finn had reined in ahead of him with his back turned and his shoulders up around his ears.
“They didnae raid it,” Arran said again. “Me laird. Look at the pen. They came here tae be seen doin’ this, and then they went away and left the takin’s lyin’ on the ground, and that costs a man coin. Someone paid tae have it done that way.”
Finn got down off his horse without answering. He walked in past the first house and put his hand on the doorpost and stood there, and Arran watched a big man hold a burnt post as though the post were holding him.
Behind them the column was learning it in waves. A McGregor took his cap off. Further back a young Kincaid was sick against a wall and was quietly let alone about it. Nobody was talking. The horses would not stand. Arran’s own hands had started. He shut them on the reins and kept them shut.
Arran dismounted and read the ground. There were shod hooves in the mud by the ford, a great many of them, and every print went out to the north with none coming back. Men who rode away in one body and did not scatter. Men who had been told where to go next.
Behind him the army came down off the hill and started doing the work.
Hamish had the wagons off the road and the horse lines set inside the hour.
The Kincaid captains took the rubble house by house.
Arran gave them the order he hated giving: look first for anyone still living under it, and then look for the rest.
They searched until dark and found no one alive. That was worse than finding the dead would have been.
He was at the market cross when Finn walked out of the camp.
Arran saw him go. Nobody else did. A man walking out of a camp alone, in a place where the enemy might still be lying in the rubble, was the last thing Arran meant to allow. He threw his reins at the nearest man and ran.
“Me laird—”
“Away back tae the fires.”
“No.” He got in front of him. It came out too fast and too young. He did not care for the sound of it. He said it again anyway. “No. Ye’ll nae walk out here on yer own. Not today. Not in this place.”
Finn stopped, because there was a man in his road.
“Then stand there and listen.” He didn’t look at him. “There’s all of me strength on that field and every man of it saw what I saw. I’ll split them. The horse goes north with me tonight and the foot comes on behind at its own pace, and I’ll be at his gate in half the time.”
“And what’s guardin’ ye on the way?”
“Hang what’s guardin’ me.”
“Me laird, it’s two days through the hills, and the road is a ditch with a hillside on either hand.
” Arran put his hands out and held the shape of it in the air because he had no map and it was easier to see than to say.
“Ye go up there in the dark with half yer men and the other half a day behind ye. If he’s waitin’, he doesnae need an army.
He needs a handful in the right place tae stopper ye in a narrow bit, and then there’s nobody at all between him and yer wagons.
Ye’d be cut in two before ye kent ye were fightin’. ”
“Ye’ve ridden it.”
“I have. I rode it in the spring and I didnae like it then, and there wasnae a war on.”
Finn turned around then, and there was more grey in his face than there had been at the keep.
“Do ye ken what I hear?” he said. “I hear a lad tellin’ me tae wait.
Four days of it from me own council, and now I’ve tae stand in a burnt village and hear it again with the beasts still lyin’ in the pen.
Wait, and scout, and send tae the Murrays, and keep yer flanks, and set it all down on a map like a game of tables.
Wait for what? Ye’ll tell me that. What is it I’m waitin’ on?
” His voice began to climb. “That man doesnae wait! He burns a barn full of yer horses and he writes ye a note about it! Ye’d have me fight him fair, like a man fights a man, and he’s away around behind me in the dark takin’ the roof off a village that never lifted a hand tae him—”
“Aye, he is.”
“—and ye stand there and say patience tae me!”
“I’m nae sayin’ patience. I’m sayin’ the road!” It came out of him at a shout he had not meant to give. “Call me a coward if it helps ye. It’s easier tae shout at me than at a hillside, and the hillside will still be there in the mornin’.”
Finn’s chin came up.
“Say that again.”
“I’ll say worse, and ye can put me off yer land for it a second time.
” Arran’s hands had started. He shut them.
“Ye’re nae plannin’ this. Ye’re grievin’ it.
Ye lost yer son on a road ye didnae choose, and every hour we’re stood still is an hour ye’ve tae carry him, so ye’d sooner be goin’ north in the dark than sittin’ here bein’ his father.
And I ken what that is, me laird. I’ve been ridin’ with it meself since the mornin’ she went out yer gates—”
“Dinnae ye dare put her name in this.”
“I havenae said her name.”
Finn had come two paces closer without seeming to know he had. His hand was not on his sword. It was open at his side, and that was worse.
“Me son,” Finn said, “could take me left-handed on a good day and he hadnae finished growin’ intae his own hands yet.
And I let him go south tae a weddin’ because I thought it was safe.
Do ye ken what a man is called when he loses a wife?
There’s a word for it. Do ye ken what he’s called when he loses a son?
” His voice went. “There isnae one. Pray ye never learn why.”
Arran had no answer for that and did not insult him by finding one.
He stood in the wet grass with his jaw shut and let a grieving man look north up an empty road.
What he thought about was a chestnut braid coming apart in the dark of a training wing, and how much of this would be asked of her before it was done.
Then the byre wall came apart behind Finn’s shoulder.