Chapter Six
The healers’ tents stood in a row on the south side of the camp with the wagons behind them and open grass in front. Arran walked the line of them twice after the fires went down and did not like it either time.
Hers was the third from the end.
He built up the fire nearest it, sat down with his back against a wagon wheel and his sword across his knees, and told himself he would give it an hour.
The grass beyond the tents went silver when the moon came up.
Every root and stone in it threw a shadow.
A man could have crawled that whole ground and Arran would have seen him coming.
That was the point of sitting there. He needed to make sure she was alright.
He had already failed her once, and he refused to do it again, even if it cost him his own life.
An hour went. He gave it another.
Hamish came past on his rounds, looked at Arran, looked at the third tent from the end, and went on without saying one word.
He did not remember lying down.
He came awake with a hand on his shoulder and his sword half out of its sheath before his eyes were open.
“’Tis just me, Arran. ‘Tis me.”
Alexandra had a hold of his wrist. His heart was going like a hammer and it took him a moment to get his hand off the hilt. He sat up too fast, and the whole left side of him told him what it thought of the wagon wheel.
“What’s happened?”
“Nothing has happened.”
“Then why are ye—”
“It’s near dawn and ye’re lyin’ in the wet with yer mouth open.” Alexandra let go of his wrist and sat back on her heels, and there was enough grey light to see that she was thoroughly enjoying herself. “The whole camp’s walked past ye.”
She tipped her head. “Ye’ve a tent, Arran Kincaid. I’ve seen it. It’s a grand tent with a pole and everythin’.”
“I like the air.”
“Ye like the air, do ye?”
“It’s healthy. Ask any physician,” Arran said.
“Shall I fetch one? There’s a tentful of them just there and they’ve nae had a laugh all week.
” Alexandra folded her arms. “Ye’ve been sleepin’ at me door with a sword on yer knees like a dog outside a butcher’s, and ye’re tellin’ me it’s for yer chest.” She was not shouting.
That was the trouble. She said it in the pleasantest voice he had ever heard out of her, and it took the skin off him. “Say the true thing tae me.”
He could have said three or four things. He discarded all of them.
“If someone came out of that grass I wanted tae be between them and this tent,” he said. “That’s the true thing. And before ye start—it isnae because I think ye couldnae handle it. I watched ye handle it. It’s because I’d rather ye didnae have tae.”
He waited to be shouted at, braced for it before he could stop himself.
She was quiet. When he risked looking at her, her face had gone soft, and that was a great deal harder to bear than the shouting would have been. Something turned over under his ribs, and he set about ignoring it.
She stood up, put a hand down and hauled him to his feet, and she was stronger than she looked, always had been. “Get up. I’m goin’ tae the river tae train, and ye’ve slept in yer boots, so ye’re comin’ with me and ye can be useful.”
“Is that an invitation, or am I bein’ pressed?”
“It’s an order. Ye said ye were under me father’s command, and me father’s asleep, so it comes tae me.”
“That’s nae how any of that works.”
“Isn’t it? Ye can raise it with him at breakfast,” she said, and gave him a cheeky wink. She knew fine he would never dare admit to Finn McKenzie that he and the man’s daughter had gone off from the camp to train alone.
The path to the water went through the willows below the horse lines, and the ground was bad the whole way.
He went first without discussing it, and she let him, which he counted a considerable victory.
The river ran wide and brown and shallow over stones, and there was a bank of turf beside it flat enough to work on, and the light was coming up grey and clean behind the hills.
They squared up with the flats of two practice blades from the wagons.
She was quick. He had known she was quick since she was a girl in her father’s yard, but he had never had to stand in front of it, and inside a minute he had stopped being polite about it because being polite was getting him hit.
“Ye drop yer left when ye come forward,” he said.
“I do not.”
“Ye do. There.” He tapped her shoulder with the flat of his sword. “And there. Do ye want me tae keep count for ye?”
“That’s because ye’re a foot taller than me and ye stand there like a gate. There’s nowhere else tae go.”
“Then go under.”
“Is that yer advice? Go under? Have ye any more of it?”
“Go under, and stop tellin’ me what ye’re about tae do before ye do it.”
“I’ll go under ye in a minute!”
“Ye’ve been sayin’ that since ye were wee.”
She came at him laughing, and for the next while he had to work for everything he got.
It went on. She got him twice on the arm.
Then she caught him across the ribs that had already been opened for him.
She stopped dead and went white to the mouth.
He had to tell her twice that it was the wrong side before she would lift the blade again.
After that she went at him harder, as though the fright had annoyed her.
“Ye’re holdin’ back,” she said.
“I’m nae holdin’ back.”
“Ye are. Ye’ve a whole arm’s reach ye’re nae usin’ and I can see ye deciding nae tae use it.”
“If I use it, ye’ll be on yer back in the grass.”
“Then put me on me back in the grass!”
He laughed. It was out of him before he could stop it, and he was glad of it anyway.
He came in properly then. She gave ground the way she was meant to, back and back toward the turf edge with the water behind her.
He was two moves from having her, and enjoying it far too much to be careful.
She let him come. She had that look on her face that he had spent his whole life failing to read in time.
Her foot went behind his ankle.
It was beautifully done. Before he knew it, his weight went forward, and there was nothing to be done about it. She was directly in front of him.
He could have taken her down with him. It would have been the easiest thing in the world. She would have gone into that river under him.
He threw his shoulder the other way instead.
The bank went out from under him and the sky turned over, and Arran Kincaid went into the river flat on his back with a noise that startled the birds out of three trees.
The cold was extraordinary. It came up through him in one great grip and locked his chest. He got onto his elbows in a foot of freezing water, soaked from his hair to his boots.
Before he could even act on being frustrated, Alexandra was laughing. And his breath hitched for a moment.
Not the small careful laugh she had let out at the fire two nights ago and taken straight back. She had both hands over her mouth and had gone helpless with it, bent double, making a noise he had not heard since before her brother died. She could not stop.
Arran sat in the freezing river and looked up at her and forgot to be cold.
He waited to feel ashamed, out of habit.
What came instead went through his chest and closed his throat.
He had to look at the water until he had hold of it.
She was laughing. He had watched grief take her face apart for days.
He had put that sound back into the world, and it had cost him a wet shirt.
He would have gone in ten more times for it.
“That doesnae count as a win. I did that on purpose,” Arran said, and pretended to scowl at her.
“Ye did nae! Naebody falls like that on purpose!”
He shook the hair out of his eyes. “Ye ken ye’d have gone in under me, if I’d wanted it.”
She stopped laughing. Something went across her face that he could not read. Her blue eyes went brighter than the sky, and she covered all of it by pointing at him.
“Ye look like a drowned—”
He put his hand flat and sent the river at her.
She stood there with her mouth open and her plait dripping, and the noise she made was outraged and delighted at once, and then she was in the water after him and there was no more conversation for a while.
She had the advantage of dry footing for about two seconds.
He took her ankle. She took his shoulder.
The pair of them went down together in a foot of brown water and a great deal of shouting.
They came to a stop sitting in the shallows, both of them soaked through, both of them still laughing, and her hand was flat on his chest where she had shoved him and had not taken it away.
The laughing stopped. His heart did not.
She was close. Her plait had come undone at the end.
A chestnut strand of it was stuck to her cheek.
Her eyes had gone very dark, like the blue of the wild sea.
Her hand was still on him, and he felt every finger of it through the wet shirt.
The water went past them both and made a sound around the stones.
The birds started up again in the willows.
She looked at his mouth, and his throat shut.
Arran did not move. He had a fair idea what would happen if he did. If he ever kissed Alexandra McKenzie it would not be because she had nobody else to hold on to, though. He held still and let her decide.
She took her hand off his chest, and the cold came back all at once.
“We should go up,” she said. “They’ll be strikin’ the tents.”
“Aye.”
“Are ye comin’?”
“In a minute.”
She got up out of the water fast and didn’t look at him.
They scrambled up the bank. His boots were full and his shirt had gone the colour of the river, and there was a wind coming down the water with ice somewhere behind it. He did what any man would have done. He hauled the shirt off over his head, wrung it out, and spread it on the turf.
Then he heard her stop walking.
He turned around. She was standing a few paces off with her hair dripping and her arms full of the practice blades. She was looking at him. She had gone still in a way he did not like at all.