Chapter Ten
Alexandra rode north for four days with her brother’s cloak wrapped around both her hands.
She had taken it out of the saddlebag on the first morning and she had not put it back. The wool had gone soft where her fingers worked at it, and she knew she was ruining it, and she could not stop. It was the only thing she had left of Rory that she could hold.
She did not talk much on that road. She spoke to Catriona about the horses. She spoke to her father twice, about nothing.
She did not speak to Arran at all.
He was there the whole way, though. He rode a length behind her and a little to her right, on the side where the ground fell away, and he did it for four days without once making her look at him.
When her horse stumbled at the ford he was level with her before she had got the animal’s head up.
When she went too long without eating, food arrived at her elbow, handed over by a Kincaid lad who could not meet her eye and had plainly been given his instructions.
She knew he was watching her. She could feel it on the back of her neck like the sun.
It would be easier if he were not here.
The thought came on the third night and it shamed her, but she turned it over anyway.
If Arran Kincaid went home tomorrow she would have one person less in the world to be frightened for.
She would ride into whatever was waiting with nothing to lose but herself, and that was a light and simple thing to carry.
But then she thought about Rory. Rory was the reason she was on this road, and Rory was worth more than her comfort, and so she kept her eyes forward and her hands on the cloak and rode on.
The country turned worse the further north they went.
They passed a farm with its roof gone and its doors standing open. Then another. Then a whole glen of houses with no smoke coming from any of them, and no dogs, and no people. No one had burnt these. The families had simply gone, and taken the animals, and left the doors swinging.
“They kent he was comin’ back through,” Catriona said. “So they went.”
“Where do ye go?” Alexandra asked her.
“South, if ye’re lucky. Intae the hills, if ye’re not.”
On the fourth afternoon they came up out of the trees and Campbell Castle stood on the ridge in front of them.
It was uglier than she had imagined it. She had built something out of her own head over the past weeks, and this was not it.
There was a curtain wall, grey and blunt, and a square tower behind that, and a gate with the twin serpents cut into the stone above it.
Men moved along the top of the wall. There were a great many of them, and every one had a bow.
Her heart began to beat so hard that she felt it in her teeth.
“He’s here,” her father said. “Look at the wall. Ye dinnae hold a place like that unless there’s somethin’ in it.”
Arran was on Finn’s other side. Alexandra saw him look along the wall, and then at the ground in front of it, and then back along the wall again, and she saw him decide something.
But he said nothing at all. He had said everything he had to say on the shelf above the gorge, and Finn McKenzie had told him to be quiet, and Arran Kincaid didn’t say a thing twice.
Her father drew his sword.
“For Clan McKenzie!” he roared, and eight hundred voices came back at him off that ridge.
Then they charged.
Alexandra went in on her father’s left because that was where she had put herself and no one had the time to argue.
She could not afterwards remember being afraid on the way up the slope.
Her body had gone numb and useful, and her arms did what her father had taught them in a cold yard, and the noise was so enormous that it stopped being noise and became a kind of weather.
The Campbell men on the ground fought well. They fought like men who had done it before and expected to do it again. But the McKenzies had been carrying that boy’s cloak up the country for four days, and they went through them.
Arran’s archers came up on both flanks. Alexandra heard the strings go, all together, twice, and the men in front of her seemed to fold backward.
And then the gates opened.
The great doors swung inward and the McKenzies poured into that courtyard shouting, and Alexandra went with them.
The fight in the yard was savage. It was also very short.
The first one came at her from the side of the well with an axe and no shield, and he swung it at her head the way a man swings at a post.
She went under it.
Her father had made her practise that in the yard until she hated him for it.
Let the weight take him past you. Come up on the outside.
She came up on the outside with the axe still travelling and put her blade into him under the arm.
All of his weight came down on her wrist. She had to put her boot on his hip to get the sword back out.
The second one saw her do it and did not want any of it. He backed off two steps with his hands up. She let him go. A McKenzie behind her did not.
Catriona was at the stable arch with two of them at once. She took the first across the thigh and let him fall into the second. While they were tangled she killed them both, so fast that Alexandra was not sure afterwards which stroke had been which.
Her father was ahead of them the whole time. He fought the way he had fought on the shelf, bellowing, giving no ground, and the Campbell men in that courtyard fell back from him and kept falling back. Then they were running. Then they were finished.
It had taken almost no time at all.
Alexandra stood in the middle of that yard with her sword down and her chest heaving, and the McKenzies were cheering all around her, and she waited to feel it.
Nothing came.
“The keep!” her father shouted. “Catriona, with me. Alexandra, at me shoulder. The rest of ye hold this yard!”
They went in through the inner door with Catriona on one side and the best of the McKenzie warriors on the other. Arran came behind them without being asked and nobody told him to stay out.
The great hall of Campbell Castle was cold.
That was the first thing she noticed, and it was wrong.
There was no fire in the hearth and there had not been one for days, because the ash in it was grey and dead all the way through.
The long table had nothing on it. There were no dogs.
There were no servants at all, not one, not even the frightened kind who hide behind a door and are found later.
Her father turned all the way around in the middle of it.
“Search every room in this place,” Finn said. “Every room, every cellar, every cupboard a man could stand up in. Ye find Ian Campbell and ye do not kill him. Ye bring him tae me.”
The men went out through the doors at the far end, and their boots went away up the stairs, and Alexandra stood in that cold hall with her brother’s cloak still tied around her waist and looked at the dead fire.
Then, behind them, the gates of Campbell Castle began to close.
Arran heard it before anyone else in that hall, because he had been listening for it since the moment those doors swung open on their own.
It was a low, grinding, patient noise, iron on stone, and it went on and on. No man makes that noise in a hurry. Two teams of men make it slowly, on a winch, from inside a gatehouse they have been sitting in the whole time.
He was out of the hall door and into the yard before Finn McKenzie had finished turning around.
The courtyard was full of McKenzies with their swords down. They were laughing. A man had got the Campbell banner off the stable roof and was standing on the well with it. The great gates were three-quarters shut behind them and still coming, and not one man in that yard had looked up.
Arran looked up.
There were doors in the inner wall that had not been there when they came in, because they had been hidden behind hurdles, and someone had taken the hurdles away.
There were men coming out of them. There were men on the walkway above with bows already strung and pointed down, standing at even intervals the whole way around, which is not something a man does in a hurry either.
That is something a man does after being told where to stand and how long to wait.
And at the far end of the yard, two flagstones lifted out of the ground and swung back on hinges, and men came up out of the earth.
All of it went through him in one piece.
This was never a fortress. No one had defended it, because it had never been meant to be defended.
The wall was for looking at from a treeline.
The men on the ground had been paid to fall back and had fallen back on time.
Someone had opened those gates from the inside to let the whole of that army into a stone box.
They had not taken this castle. They had been let into it.
“KINCAID!” Arran’s voice tore out of him. “TAE ME! Shields up and get off the open ground!”
Then the arrows came.
They came in one flight off the whole circuit of that wall, and the sound they made when they arrived was like hail on a byre roof.
Men who had been cheering ten seconds earlier went down where they stood.
The lad who had been holding the Campbell banner on the well fell off it and did not get up. The horses in the yard went mad.
Arran got his shield up and got moving. He put himself along the inner wall where the angle from the walkway was worst, and he had the Kincaids doing the same inside a breath, because they had drilled it on his own ground a hundred times and their hands knew it without him.
Alexandra came out of the hall door into the middle.
He went for her without deciding to. He took three long strides across open stone with arrows coming down on both sides of him, got his shield over her head and his shoulder into her, and drove her back against the wall under the walkway where the archers above could not bend far enough to reach.
“Stay in!” he shouted at her. “Under the lip! Stay under the lip!”
“Get off me!”
“Stay under the LIP, Alexandra!”
Two Campbell men came around the corner of the stable at a run with their swords already up, and they came for her.
Arran took the first on his shield and turned it, and the man’s own speed carried him past and into the wall.
Arran killed him against the stone before he had got his feet under him again.
The second was better. He came in low and got inside the shield.
Arran felt the blade go along his forearm and burn there.
He brought the rim of the shield up into the man’s face, put him down, and finished it.
He did not remember any of it as a decision. He came back to himself with his arm bleeding and the second man sliding down the wall. Alexandra was beside him with her own blade out and blood on her sleeve that he badly hoped was not hers.
It was not going well anywhere he could see.
Finn’s men were pushing for the main stairwell in the corner of the yard, because that was where the enemy was thickest and Finn McKenzie always went at the thickest part.
But the resistance was not coming from one place.
It was coming from every door and every trapdoor and the whole ring of that walkway at once, all of it timed, all of it patient, closing in from every side like a fist shutting.
And the yard was too small.
That was the thing that frightened Arran most, and it was the thing nobody else had understood yet.
An army in an open field is an army. The same army in a stone yard is a crowd.
They could not swing a sword. They could not form a line.
Their own numbers were pinning their arms to their sides while men on a wall shot down into the middle of them.
Ian Campbell had not built a trap to kill them all. He had built one that made their strength into the thing that killed them.
“We have tae find him!” Alexandra shouted beside him. Her face was white and there was a cut along her hairline and her eyes were absolutely furious. “Arran! We have tae get intae that keep and find him!”
“He isnae here!”
“He IS here, he has tae be here—”
“Alexandra, he isnae here!” Arran took her by the shoulder and turned her, and made her look at the walkway, at the men standing on it at their neat intervals, shooting down into a courtyard full of their own countrymen with no one at all commanding them out loud.
“Look at them! Who’s givin’ them orders?
Nae one! They were told what tae do days ago and they’re doin’ it!
He wouldnae stand in a box he built tae shut on someone else! ”
She looked. He watched her see it, and he watched what it did to her, and he would have given anything to be wrong…
“Then what is this?” she said. “What are we standin’ in?”
He got his shield up again as another flight came down. “He’s takin’ our best men, and our horses, and every warrior the McKenzies and the Kincaids could put in one place. And when we’re done in here there’ll be nothin’ left standin’ between him and anythin’ he wants.”
The gates finished closing behind them with a sound that Arran felt through the soles of his boots.