Chapter Nine
The village was called Fintry and it had been burning for an hour when they came over the rise.
“East side,” Elsie said. “Rolland! The east side, they’re breakin’ east!”
He had seen it the same moment she had. He put his arm up and the Murray riders went with him. Elsie took the archers along the top of the ridge at a canter and had them off and strung before the Campbells reached the trees.
She had learnt this trade the hard way, and learnt it well. Put your bows where the ground makes a man choose. Give him two roads and make one of them cost.
They cost him, and Elsie felt no gladness about it at all.
The Campbells came out of Fintry with the smoke behind them.
They found Rolland Murray’s riders across the low road and arrows coming down the brae, and they did what these ones always did.
They did not form and they did not stand.
They broke apart like water off a stone and went four ways at once, and by the time Rolland had turned his line the last of them were into the birch scrub with the light going.
“Do we follow them, me lady?” one of the archers asked.
“Into that? At this hour?” Elsie was already easing her string off. “No. Get down there and see who’s still alive.”
Most of the village was gone. What was left of it was still standing only because the burn ran behind it.
The people came up out of the burn where they had been lying in the water.
They had been given some warning, then. The Campbells had wanted them out of the way rather than dead, and Elsie was grateful for that and hated being grateful for it.
A woman came up the bank with a child on her hip and her skirts black to the knee, shaking so hard she could not speak.
Elsie had her own cloak off and around her before the woman had got two words out.
“Ye’re all right,” Elsie told her. “Ye’re all right. Ye’ve got him and he’s got ye, and that’s all that matters this night.”
Rolland came back up the road on foot leading his horse. She knew from his shoulders before he was near enough to speak.
“Nae one,” he said.
“Nae one at all?”
“We had two down in the road and the both of them were dead before we got tae them. Their own men did it.” He said it the way he said everything now, level and tired. “Cut their own wounded and rode on. That’s the third time.”
“Then they’ve been told tae.”
“Aye. And a man that gives that order kens fine what a prisoner is worth tae us.”
Elsie went to him. She did not say anything at first. She stood in the road beside her husband and put her shoulder against his arm, and after a moment he let some of his weight come onto her, which he would not have done in front of the men on any other night.
“We saved the village,” she said.
“We saved half of it and lost him again.”
“Then we’ll save the next one!”
Rolland let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “Ye’re a hard woman tae be gloomy beside, do ye ken that?”
“I’ve been told.”
They rode for Murray Keep in the dark, and the whole way back Elsie was turning over the same question she had turned over for a fortnight, and getting the same answer.
Every road they rode, he was not on. Every village they saved, he had already finished with.
It was like fighting the weather, and she was so tired of it that her eyes stung in the wind.
Christopher had not been out of the war room in two days and it had stopped being a room to him. His eyes ached. His jaw ached from the way he had been holding it. It was a table with a map on it and a window that went light and then dark.
“Say it again tae me,” Morag said.
“Fintry, Ardochy, the farms on the Kinloch road, the toll bridge.” He walked his finger over them in order. “And Balnain the week before.”
“And?”
“And they run west tae east and they’re four days apart, every one of them, except Ardochy.” He stopped. “Ardochy is wrong.”
“Ardochy is two days after Fintry.”
“Ardochy is two days after Fintry and it’s away back the way he came.” Christopher put both hands on the table. “So either he’s got a second body of men workin’ the same line, which I dinnae believe, or Ardochy wasnae his at all.”
Morag Caindach looked at the map for a while. She had a way of going completely still when she was thinking that made people assume she had stopped listening, which had been very useful to her over the years.
“Or Ardochy is the one that matters,” she said, “and the rest is him makin’ sure we look at the rest.”
“Aye. That’s the other one.”
“Ye’ve had that thought already.”
“I’ve had it three days.”
“And ye didnae say it.”
“I didnae say it because I cannae prove one word of it,” Christopher said, “and I’m the last man in this house that should be tellin’ Seamus Murray where tae send his warriors on a feelin’. Ye ken that as well as I do.”
Morag did not tell him that was untrue.
She put her hand over his on the table instead and left it there, which from Morag Caindach was a great deal more than a kind word would have been. She had never once in her life told him a comfortable thing. That was most of why he had married her.
“Then get it tae where ye can prove it,” she said, and went back to Liam’s reports.
They came in three times a week, those reports, in the old man’s hard hand, and Christopher had come to depend on them more than he liked.
Everything they knew about the north came down that one road, and the thought of what would happen if it stopped coming was one he had learnt not to have at three in the morning.
Rolland and Elsie got in after midnight, and by morning the room was full.
Seamus Murray had aged in a fortnight in a way that hurt to look at.
Flora sat beside him with the household accounts in front of her because there were now more people inside the Murray walls than there was food for, and she had stopped pretending that was a separate problem from the war.
Connor stood at the window. Brid had brought bread up and stayed.
Elsie told them what had happened. Fintry was saved, or the half of it that could be saved.
The Campbells had broken east and got away into the scrub before Rolland could turn his line.
And there were no prisoners, because two Campbell men had gone down wounded in the road and their own people had cut their throats before riding off.
That last part stopped the room.
“Their own?” Flora said. “Their own wounded?”
“Aye.”
“Elsie, that isnae a thing men do.”
“It’s a thing men do when they’ve been told what happens if one of them is taken alive,” Rolland said. “It’s the third time we’ve seen it.”
“That’s four,” Connor said.
“It’s five,” said Christopher.
The talk went around the table twice and got nowhere, the way it had every morning that week.
Seamus wanted the southern road held. Connor wanted a strike at the Caindach lands.
Flora wanted to know where she was to put the people still arriving.
Rolland was saying, for the third day, that sitting behind walls waiting to be hit was not a plan but a habit.
Christopher listened and watched the map and said very little.
That was when the doors opened.
Two men came through them and the whole room turned. The guard behind them had his hands out, in the way of a man who has failed to stop something and wants that noted. They were filthy to the waist and one of them was walking badly. Kincaid green under the mud.
The taller one looked around the room, found Elsie, and went straight to her.
“Me lady.” He got it out of his shirt. “Intae yer hand and nae other. Those were his words.”
Elsie was on her feet. “Where’s me brother?”
“North of the Campbell border by now, me lady.” He swayed a little. “We’ve been three days at it.”
“Brid, get them fed and get a woman tae that leg.” Flora gave the orders as Elsie broke the seal of the letter. “Sit down before ye fall down, the pair of ye.”
Christopher watched her read it, and his chest had already started before he knew why.
He had known his sister since she was small enough to carry and had spent most of his life reading her face across rooms. He saw the exact line where it stopped being news and became something else. She read it twice. The second time she read it slower.
“Elsie,” Seamus said.
“Finn McKenzie is takin’ his army north,” she said. “All of it. Him and Arran and every man they have, straight at the Campbell stronghold. They’ll be at the gate by now.”
The room came apart. Flora made a sound Christopher had never heard from her.
Seamus was up out of his chair. “At the gate? Finn McKenzie has as fine an army as any laird in this country and he has taken it intae Campbell’s own ground, tae stand under a curtain wall with archers on it. It doesnae matter how good his men are. Nae army wins that.”
“It’s suicide!” Connor said. “That’s what that is!”
“Why would he nae send tae us?” Flora had both hands flat on her accounts and her voice was shaking. “Why would Finn McKenzie march past our border and nae send one rider tae this house? Seamus, we’d have gone! Ye’d have gone this mornin’ and ye ken it!”
“It’s the grief,” Connor said. “Or it’s pride. With that family ye’d never get a—”
“It isnae grief and it isnae pride,” Christopher said.
He had not raised his voice. The room went quiet anyway, and he was ashamed of what he was about to say before he had finished saying it.
“It’s me.”
“Christopher—”
“He thinks there’s a traitor in this house and he thinks it’s me, and he’s nae wrong tae wonder.
” He put it out flat on the table like everything else he had put there that week.
“Alistair Campbell’s son sittin’ at yer table readin’ yer letters.
Ian’s own brother. If I were Finn McKenzie and me boy was dead in a Campbell field, I’d nae send me road tae this house either. ”
“That,” said Rolland, “is the stupidest thing anyone has said in this room in a fortnight, and I’ve been in here for all of it.”
“Rolland.”
“No, ye’ll hear it.” Rolland came off the wall.
“Ye killed yer own father. Ye brought Morag out of that castle. Ye have bled in this courtyard for people who would just as easily call ye a traitor or a bastard, and if Finn McKenzie wants tae doubt ye he can come and say it tae me face, and I’ll ask him what he’s ever risked that ye havenae.
” He turned around. “And it doesnae matter. Whether he’s wrong about Christopher isnae the question.
The question is whether we sit here and let him go up that road on his own. ”
“We’ve a border tae hold,” Seamus said.
“We’ve been holdin’ it for a fortnight and what have we got?
We’ve saved half of Fintry and buried the rest. We’ve been playin’ this safe and safe has cost us village after village.
” Rolland put his knuckles on the table beside Christopher’s.
“Perhaps Finn’s right. Perhaps Ian is up north after all, sat in his own hall, and Finn’s the only one of us with the stomach tae go and knock on the door. ”
“Or he’s ridin’ intae the one place Ian wants him,” Christopher said.
“Aye. Or that.” Rolland looked at him. “Which is why we go.”
Christopher looked at the map for a moment. Ardochy sat there, a long way wrong.
“I’ll nae let Arran walk intae that country without us behind him,” he said. “Whatever else is true. I’ll ride the day after tomorrow if we can be provisioned.”
“Tomorrow,” said Seamus, who had not said one word for a while.
The room started to move. Connor was counting men out loud. Flora had gone to the door to shout for a steward about the wagons. Rolland was asking Morag about the Caindach roads north.
“STOP.”
Elsie did not raise her voice often. When she did, it went through a room like a bell through a courtyard, and every one of them stopped where they stood and turned around.
She had the letter open in both hands.
“None of ye asked me what he wrote,” she said.
Not one of them answered that.
“He isnae askin’ for reinforcements.” Her voice had gone strange. “He didnae send these two men three days through Campbell country tae ask us for men. He’s askin’ the opposite.”
Rolland said, “What?”
“He’s askin’ us tae stay.” She looked down at it again as though it might have changed.
“He says whatever we hear about the north, whatever comes down that road tae us, we’re nae tae follow him.
Nae one man. He says the north is where we’ll be lookin’ and that’s the whole point of it.
” She stopped. “He says tae hold what’s behind us. He’s underlined it.”
The silence went on a long time.
“Hold what’s behind us,” Seamus said. He said it twice more under his breath. “What’s behind us?”
“He doesnae say.”
“He doesnae say? Elsie, what does that mean, hold what’s behind us? Behind us is… “
Seamus stopped.
“He’s careful the whole way through,” Elsie said. “There’s nae place named in it anywhere. There’s nae numbers. He’s written it so that if it went astray on that road it would tell whoever picked it up nothin’ at all.” She looked up. “Which means he thinks it might.”
Christopher put his hand out for it, and she gave it to him, and he read it standing at the end of the table with the whole room watching him.
His brother’s hand. Small and even and going a little wrong at the ends of the lines the way it did when he was tired.
Christopher had spent three days trying to find the shape behind Ian’s noise and was still not sure he had it.
Arran had gone north with Finn McKenzie, into a trap he had named as a trap to the man’s face.
And somewhere in the middle of all that he had found the time to work out that the real danger was somewhere else entirely.
He loved his brother very much. He did not say so, in that room or any other, and it came up in him now with a force that was close to anger.
He read the last line twice. His throat had closed over and he had to stand there a moment and let it pass.
“Morag,” he said. “The Kinloch road. Get me every report Liam’s sent since the burnin’ of the horses, in order, and dinnae leave one out.”
“Ye’ve thought of somethin’.”
“I’ve thought of somethin’ I dinnae like.”
He put the letter down on the map. It lay there across the whole north of it, and not one soul in that room went near it.