Chapter Four #2
It was stone one instant and men the next, four of them up and over it at a dead sprint, and two more out of the byre door with the sun at their backs. They were close. They were closer than Arran had any right to let them get, and there was no time to draw and no time to shout.
He went at Finn with everything he had.
He hit him with his shoulder under the arm and drove him bodily off his feet, and the two of them went down together in the wet grass with the first blade going through the air where Finn McKenzie’s neck had been.
She had been watching them walk away for a while before she followed.
Alexandra had her hands in a pot of boiling water and rags to the elbow, because that was the work, and the work was the price of being here.
Then her father came out of the camp with his shoulders up, and Arran went after him at a run, and the pair of them went out past the last house and kept going.
She dried her hands on her skirt and went after them.
It was not a decision. She kept the ruins between herself and their backs and stopped at the gable end of a house with no roof on it. The wind was the wrong way for hearing. She got pieces.
“Ye’re nae plannin’ this. Ye’re grievin’ it.”
Her father’s voice went up. She flinched against the stone. Then Arran’s, lower, saying something she lost, and then one word out of it that arrived whole and went through her like a splinter: her. Not her name. Just her, in Arran Kincaid’s mouth, in the middle of an argument he was losing.
She put her forehead against the cold stone.
Every word of it was true. She hated all of it. Her father had not planned a thing since the messenger came. She had not planned a thing either. The pair of them had spent four days shouting at each other because it was the only thing left that either of them was any good at.
Then the byre wall moved.
She had her head turned to it before she understood what she had seen. Not the wall. Men. Up on top of it and over, low and fast, and two more coming out of the byre door. It was happening behind her father’s back. He stood in the open with his hands out, shouting, and he had no idea at all.
The terror went through her so fast it took her voice with it. She heard herself make a small useless sound, no shout in it at all, the same sound she had made in a Campbell clearing while a boy who could not grow a beard turned his head to look at her.
Not again. Not this time, not while she had legs.
Alexandra came around the gable end at a run. She was drawing before she got there.
“BEHIND YE!”
Arran was already moving. He hit her father with his shoulder and took them both off their feet, and the first blade went through the place where her father had been standing and struck sparks off the wall.
Arran came up onto one knee with his sword out and caught the second on it, and the force of that drove his hand down into the grass. The third man came in under his arm while he was still there. She saw the point go across Arran’s ribs and come out red. Her heart stopped.
He was still watching Arran go down when she reached him. She put her blade through his side.
She never remembered deciding to do it. He had turned to finish Arran and his back was half to her, and she was already moving.
Her father had put a blade in her hand when she was knee-high and made her practise this exact thing ten thousand times in a cold yard.
Her arm knew the work. The rest of her stood off and watched it happen.
The man went down against the byre wall and did not get up.
Arran came off his knee into the space she had bought him and put his sword through the throat of the first one before the man had finished being surprised.
Her father did the rest, and he did it roaring.
She had never watched her father fight. Nothing had prepared her for the noise of it.
He came up off the ground bellowing her brother’s name.
He took the nearest man’s guard apart with two strokes and the man with the third.
He was still shouting when the next one reached him.
It was not skill. It was a father who had been given something to kill at last. The last man turned to run and got four strides.
Then the camp arrived, all of it at once and every man far too late, and the noise was enormous.
Arran stood in the middle of the grass with his sword hanging and his shirt going dark down one side. He was not looking at her father. He was not looking at the dead men, or at his own ribs.
He was looking at her, and he had no more control of his face than the day he had watched her ride out of the Murray gates. His chest was going hard. It had nothing to do with the fight, which had lasted about as long as it takes to cross a room, and both of them knew it.
“Are ye hurt?” she said. It came out of her throat wrong. “Arran. Are ye hurt?”
“No.”
“Ye’re bleedin’ through yer shirt.”
“Aye. But I’m nae hurt.” He looked down at himself then, as though the matter had only that instant been brought to his notice, and she wanted very much to hit him. “It’s a scratch. Are ye…”
Her father turned on him.
“Did ye ken?” Finn’s voice went out across the whole grass and every man on it stopped. “Kincaid. Look at me. Did ye ken she was on this road?”
“No, he didnae.” Alexandra put herself between them. Her hands were shaking. Her sword was still red in one of them. She was far too loud and did not care. “He didnae ken, and neither did ye, and that’s me whole point. Ye’d both be lyin’ in that grass this minute!”
“Ye disobeyed me.”
“Aye. I did.”
“In front of me own men—”
“Yer own men are stood there breathin’ because I did.”
“Who put ye on that road?” Finn came down on her the way he came down on everything. “Ye didnae walk out of me gates. Someone handed ye a horse and someone looked the other way while ye took it, and I’ll have the name.”
She shut her mouth on it and said nothing at all.
She watched her father work it out. She watched him decide not to say the name out loud in front of his own men. He looked, then, more tired than she had ever seen him.
“Ye’ll go home in the mornin’,” he said. “Ten men. Nae argument.”
“Then I’ll be back the night after and ye’ll have wasted ten men.”
“By God, ye’ll do as—”
“I willnae.” Her voice tore in the middle.
She went straight on through the tear. “I’ll follow at half a day like a stray dog if ye make me, and ye ken fine that I will, because ye made me this way!
Ye put the sword in me hand yerself! Ye stood over me in that yard till me arms shook and ye told me the day would come when I’d need it, and the day came, and ye werenae there, and I held on tae a horse!
” She was crying. She did not stop. “I held on tae a horse while it happened. That’s what I did for me brother.
So dinnae ye stand there and tell me tae go home and be safe, Da.
I’ve been safe. It cost me everythin’ I had. ”
All of that village went quiet.
Finn McKenzie looked at his daughter for a long time. There was blood on her sleeve and on the hem of her plain dark cloak, and her hood was down, and his whole army stood in a burnt street watching him decide.
“Get that arm seen tae,” he said at last. “The both of ye.”
The relief went through her so hard that her eyes filled again before she could get hold of them. She was furious with herself about it. Her chin stayed up until he had turned away.
Then he walked back toward the fires, and nobody in all of that army moved to stop her following him.
Alexandra stood where she was until her hands were steady enough to sheathe the sword without help. That took a while. Her throat ached and her eyes would not clear and the shaking went from the shoulders down. None of it was grief. She had no idea yet what it was.
She had killed a man in the time it takes to draw water. She had felt nothing at all going in, and that was the part she would think about later.