Chapter Twelve
Arran got hold of her hand in the middle of the courtyard and did not let go of it again until they were out.
Alexandra never afterwards remembered agreeing to it. One moment she was standing in the open with arrows coming down. The next, his fingers were locked around hers and he was pulling her along the inside of the wall where the men above could not reach, shouting at the Kincaids as he went.
“Wounded first! Every man that can walk, take one that cannae! Get them tae the gate!”
His hand was shaking around hers. She could feel it. She held on tighter, and neither of them said a word about it.
They went out of that place the way water goes out of a cracked pot. Slowly, and losing a great deal on the way.
The Campbells came at the gate mouth in a press with no room in it to swing anything properly.
A McKenzie went down on her left with a spear in him before she had understood he was hit.
She got her shoulder under his arm and dragged him three steps, no further, because the next man came over the top of them both.
She put her blade up into him without ever looking at his face.
Her arm rang with it to the elbow. Someone behind her was screaming about the horses and nobody was answering.
Then Arran was there, shoving through with his shoulder and the whole weight of him behind it, and a space opened that had not been there a breath before.
“The treeline!” He did not look at her. He was looking at what was coming. “Alexandra. Run for the treeline and dinnae stop for anythin’ on the ground!”
“I’ll nae leave ye stood in a gate—”
“RUN, lass!”
She ran. She was frightened the entire time, and there was not one moment free in which to be frightened.
She carried a McGregor lad the last thirty yards herself with his arm over her shoulders and his blood soaking into her sleeve, and he talked the whole way, apologising to her, until she told him to be quiet and save it.
She never learned his name. She got him through the gate and handed him to a healer and went back for another one.
She was crying by then. She had not noticed starting and she did not stop.
There was no time to do anything about it.
Arran held the gate.
He put his best fighters across it in two ranks and stood in the middle of them.
He kept it open while what was left of that army came through.
He didn’t move out of it until the last man was clear.
Alexandra watched him do it from the treeline with her heart in her mouth and her hands full of another man’s blood.
Every time the ranks moved she lost sight of him, and every time she found him again something went through her that she had no name for and no time for.
Only then did he call for his horse.
Valiant came out at a gallop with Campbell men after him. Hamish’s riders took them off him at the treeline. Alexandra found that she had been holding her breath for a long time.
They rode.
It was when they were half a mile out and going up the long slope that she looked back.
The Campbell banner was going up the highest tower of that castle.
The grief that came up in her then had a hard cold edge on it.
That frightened her. She could see the thing clearly in the flat evening light.
Two serpents, coiled around one another.
All of it had been painted fresh in red, so bright against the grey stone that it could only have been done that morning.
Someone had stood on that tower and painted a banner while the McKenzies were still hours down the road.
Alexandra turned her face forward and didn’t look back again. Her eyes were burning and she let the wind dry them.
They regrouped a long way into the forest, in a hollow with a burn running through it.
It was done in the dark, because no one dared light more than the fires the wounded needed.
The horses were exhausted, and the wounded far fewer than the number they had managed to get out the gates.
Alexandra sent a prayer for those lost in the battle.
She walked through it and made herself look at all of it. She owed them that much, and it hurt, and she did it anyway.
The healers had laid the worst of them along the burn on cloaks. Catriona was going down that line with a candle, stopping at each one, Alexandra watched her stop for a long time at one of them, and then move on without doing anything, and understood.
She felt nothing at all. That was the thing she noticed, walking about in it. She had thought she would weep, or be sick, or want to kill something. Instead there was a flat grey nothing where all of that should have been, and it went with her everywhere she walked.
Her father was in the middle of the McKenzies with his sword still in his hand.
“They kent,” Finn was saying. “They kent the hour. They had men in that gatehouse the whole while and they had archers set at their places and they had a banner painted.” His voice was getting louder. “That was nae ambush. That was arranged. Someone in this army sold us.”
“Da—”
“Someone told him we were comin’!”
The men around him were not arguing. That was the frightening part. They were nodding. They were angry, and anger in a wood full of grieving men wants a name to put itself on.
Then Catriona came forward out of the dark.
She had blood to the elbows and her face was set like something carved. She stopped in front of Finn McKenzie and said what she had come to say without any hesitation at all.
“Me laird. Four nights back I saw two of the Kincaid riders leave the camp after dark. They went down through the trees and nae out past the pickets, and they didnae take the road.”
The hollow went very quiet.
“Who sent them?”
Catriona’s jaw moved once as if she wasn’t sure what she was doing or why she was doing it. “It was Arran Kincaid, me laird. He stood at the fire and watched them intae the trees.”
Alexandra opened her mouth and nothing came out of it. Her heart had gone somewhere down under her ribs and stayed there.
Her father was already moving.
He went through his own men like a horse going through a hedge. They got out of his way. Alexandra ran after him with her boots slipping in the mud and her heart banging in her ears at last.
They found Arran at the far end of the hollow, on his knees beside a Blackwood soldier, holding a candle for the man who was working on the wound.
“KINCAID!”
Arran got up. He put the candle into another man’s hands first, so that the light stayed where it was needed, and then he turned around.
“Me laird.”
“Did ye send riders out of me camp?”
Alexandra’s heart went. She saw the exact moment he understood what was being asked and what it was going to cost him. She watched him decide. And she knew, before he opened his mouth, that he was not going to lie.
“I did,” Arran said.
The whole hollow heard it.
“Tae who?”
“Tae Murray Keep. Tae me sister and me brother…”
“After I forbade it. Tae me face. On that rock.”
“Aye.”
Finn McKenzie hit him, and Alexandra heard herself cry out.
He did it open-handed and it still put Arran two steps back. The Kincaids came off the ground all around them with their hands going to their belts. Arran got one arm up behind him and stopped them dead without turning around.
“So there it is.” Finn was shaking. “There it is, and every man here can hear it. I told ye there was a traitor in that house and ye wrote tae him anyway. Ye sat at me fire and took me orders and then ye went intae the trees like a thief and ye handed me road tae Alistair Campbell’s son.”
“I did not.”
“My men are lyin’ along that burn!”
“And ye think I put them there?” Arran’s voice came up for the first time since the Murray gates, and it came up hard.
“I told ye it was a trap on that rock. I told ye he’d chosen the road and the hour, and I said it in front of yer whole council, and ye called me a coward and rode north anyway.
It wasnae a letter that filled that courtyard. It was you!”
“Ye—”
“Ye’ve been played from the day yer son died!
” Arran was shouting now and could not stop it.
“He kills Rory and ye stop thinkin’. He burns me horses and I stop thinkin’.
He hangs a boy’s cloak on a spike above a gorge and the pair of ye go straight up the road he cut for ye.
That’s all of his plan, me laird, and it’s workin’ this minute, because ye’re stood in a wood full of yer own dead lookin’ for a traitor instead of lookin’ for him! ”
Finn McKenzie’s sword came up.
He did not shout when he did it. That was what frightened Alexandra more than any of the rest, because she had grown up in that man’s house and she knew exactly what it meant when he went quiet.
She got between them.
She did not plan it. She was simply there, with her back against Arran and both hands closed around her father’s sword arm. She was looking up into a face she had known her whole life and had never once been afraid of until this moment.
“Da.” She could hear her own voice shaking and she was afraid of him, properly afraid, for the first time in her life. “Da. Look at me.”
“Get out of the way, Alexandra.”
“No.”
“Get OUT of the—”
“If ye touch him,” she said, “ye lose me as well. This night. I’ll walk out of this wood and ye’ll never see me again as long as ye live, and ye’ll have buried both yer children in one season.”
Finn McKenzie stopped.
Everything stopped. There was no sound in that hollow at all except the burn going over the stones and a man somewhere down the line breathing badly.
She watched her father’s face come apart.
He had been terrifying a heartbeat ago. Now he was only a tired man who had lost a son, and loving him hurt her worse in that moment than being afraid of him had.
His arm went slack under her hands. The sword came down and hung at his side.
He looked at her, and he was so tired that she could hardly bear to look back at him.
“He wrote tae them,” Finn said.
“Aye. He did.” She did not let go of his arm.
“And we’re both of us blind, Da. We have been for weeks.
Ye were blind at the gorge. I was blind on the rock beside ye, and I stood there and told him he was wrong when he was right, and I’ll carry that.
” Her eyes had filled. “Arran has been right about every single thing since the burnt village. Every one. He’s the only person in this whole army who understands what Ian Campbell is doin’, and we’ve spent a fortnight shoutin’ him down for it. ”
Her father said nothing.
Alexandra turned around.
Arran was standing where she had left him with the mark of her father’s hand coming up red on the side of his face.
He had taken it without a sound. The sight of it made her throat ache so badly that she had to look away, and then make herself look back.
He had not moved at all. He looked at her the way he had looked at her across the Murray courtyard, and she had to swallow before she could speak.
“Arran.” Her voice came out much smaller than she meant it to. “Tell me why.”
“Why what?”
“Why he brought us here.” She made herself say all of it, and her voice went on her halfway through. “Ye kent it was a trap. Ye kent it before we left the gorge. So tell me what the trap was for, because it wasnae for a castle. He gave us the castle.”
Arran did not answer straight away.
He looked past her at the men along the burn, and then at Finn McKenzie, and Alexandra understood that he was giving her father the chance to say it first. Finn did not take it.
“He wanted this army out of the south,” Arran said.
“Say the rest.”
“Alexandra—”
“Say the rest of it!”
“He wanted every fightin’ man ye have four days north of yer own gate.
” Arran did not raise his voice, and it went around that whole hollow all the same.
“That’s what the village was for, and the cloak, and the men on the west road.
He wasnae buildin’ a trap tae kill ye. He was buildin’ one tae move ye.
And it worked, and we’re here, and yer keep is stood there with the old men and the boys in it. ”
Nobody in that hollow made a sound.
Alexandra found that she had put her hand over her mouth.
The terror came up under her ribs and took hold of her there.
Her mother was in that keep. Her mother, and Mairi, and the cooper with his cap wrung up in his fists, and the old man who had gone down on his knees in the mud when Splendor went past.
Her father had gone the colour of the ash in the Campbell hearth.
“How long,” Finn said, “would it take a man tae get tae me gate?”
Arran did not want to answer it. She could see that he did not want to.
“Three days,” he said. “If he went the day we came north. Two, if he had them waitin’.”