Chapter Thirteen
Iona McKenzie had been on the north battlement since before it was light, watching the treeline, because she had known for days that this was coming. When it moved she felt no surprise at all. She had only been waiting to see how much of it there was going to be.
She thought at first that it was the wind. Then she understood that wind does not come out of a wood in a line. She put the list down on the stone and did not pick it up again.
They came out of the trees in dark mail with the light behind them, riders and riders and more riders, and they kept coming long after there should have been no more of them. The Campbell banners went up as they came. The two serpents, one after another, all the way along the treeline.
Away to the east the outer watchtower was already burning, and the fear came up through Iona so cleanly that she was almost grateful for it. Fear she knew what to do with.
Iona stood with her hands on the parapet and made herself look at all of it before she moved. She had learnt that from her own mother, who had held this wall once when Iona was small enough to be carried down into the cellars. Look at all of it first. Then give the orders.
She looked at all of it. She was afraid. She let herself be afraid for exactly as long as it took to look.
There were not enough of them. That was the answer, and it did not change however long she looked.
Her husband had gone north with the McKenzie strength and taken her daughter with him, and what was left inside these walls was the old men, and the boys who were not old enough, and the ones who had stayed back because of a bad leg or a bad chest.
“Me lady!” The captain came up the stairs two at a time. “Me lady, the—”
“I see them, Cameron.” She was surprised at how steady her own voice came out. “Shut the gates and drop the bar. Every archer we have on this wall and the west one, and put the boys with them tae carry arrows so they’ve somethin’ tae do with their hands.”
“Aye, me lady.”
“The village comes inside. All of them, this minute, and the animals in the lower yard.” She turned around.
“Anyone that cannae fight goes intae the deep hall under the keep and the door gets barred from the inside. Mairi kens where the water is kept. Tell her tae start now and nae tae wait for the fires.”
“And the wounded, me lady?”
“There arenae any wounded yet,” Iona said. “Go on, now…”
He went. She heard him shouting on the stairs before he had reached the bottom of them.
She stayed on the wall a moment longer by herself.
Her son was dead in a Campbell field and had no grave.
Her daughter was four days north of here with her father, riding at a castle Iona had a bad feeling about and had not said so out loud, because there had not been a good way to say it and now there never would be.
And the man who had done all of it was coming at her Castle, her home, with an army.
Iona McKenzie put her hand flat on the stone of her own wall.
This house was the last thing left that she could put her two hands on.
“Ye’ll nae have this too,” she said, to nobody at all.
Then she went down to the yard, and after that there was no more time for thinking.
They came on in the way she had been afraid of, which was slowly and in order.
There was no rush at the gate. No shouting, none of the noise she remembered from the old fighting, and the quiet of it went through her people like cold water.
They walked their horses to just outside good bowshot and stopped. Then the line began to spread, and it kept spreading, along the whole front of the keep and past both ends of it, until a woman near her said God out loud and put a hand over her mouth. The ends started to bend around the sides.
“How many is that?” someone said. “Me lady. How many is that?”
“Count the standards, nae the men.” Iona did not take her eyes off the line. “It’s fewer than it looks.”
It was not fewer than it looked.
It took them the best part of an hour and no part of it was hurried.
Twice her archers came to full draw and twice she had to send word along to let down, and by the end of that hour their arms were shaking and two of them had been sick behind the merlons.
That was the point. She understood the point perfectly well, and understanding it did not help her at all.
She went along the wall and put her hand on shoulders as she passed. She told them it was a good sign, which was a lie, and they were glad of it.
“They’re nae even tryin’ the gate,” Cameron said.
“They dinnae need the gate. They’ve time.” Iona watched the far end of the line reach the burn and stop. “They’re makin’ sure nae one gets out tae fetch help.”
The fire arrows started when the light began to go.
They came in high, in twos and threes, and they came all evening.
The thatch on the smithy went first, then the roof of the long store, then the stable.
The McKenzies ran with buckets and beat at it with wet sacking and got each one out.
Then another one came over. That was the whole shape of the night.
Iona walked the walls the entire time and did not sit down once.
She learned the names of two boys on the west wall who could not have been more than a season past their first hunt.
One of them was shaking so badly he could not nock, and she stood beside him and talked about his mother’s dogs until his hands came back to him.
She sent a man down to the deep hall three times with word that the walls were holding, because she knew what it is to sit in the dark under stone and hear things falling.
She helped carry a woman with a burnt arm down the north stairs herself.
The woman wept the whole way and apologised for weeping. Iona told her to hush and never mind.
Some time after midnight a Campbell rider came out from the line under a white rag and offered terms.
Iona listened to all of it from the wall, and she was so tired that for one moment she wanted to say yes, and she despised herself for it, and she leaned out over the parapet.
“Ye can tell him,” she called down, “that this is McKenzie ground, and I am the McKenzie, and there isnae a thing on this earth he has that I want.”
The man rode back. The arrows started again a few minutes later.
By the grey of the morning the outer store was gone and the stable roof was gone and there was a crack running up the west wall that had not been there the day before, and Cameron came to find her with his face black to the eyes.
“Me lady.” He did not dress it. “We cannae hold another night. There’s nae enough of us tae work the buckets and the bows both.”
“I ken.”
“If they come at the gate in daylight—”
“I ken, Cameron.” Her eyes had filled and she did not let him see it.
They stood together on the wall in the smoke and neither of them said the rest of it. Iona’s hands had started shaking some time in the night and had not stopped. She kept them on the parapet where they did not show.
Elsie Kincaid had been riding Radiant since before the light. She had not spoken for the last two hours, which anyone who knew her would have said was the most frightening thing about that morning.
She had Arran’s letter inside her shirt.
She had put it there on the first day and it had been rained on twice through the cloth, and the ink would be running by now.
She did not care. It was not the words she wanted.
It was that her brother’s hand had been on it.
She was so frightened for him that she could not let herself think his name for long.
Hold what’s behind us, Arran had said. Kind, brave, sweet Arran who had survived an illness as a child, and had become her real brother in a way her own born brother, Ian Campbell, never would be.
She had read that line more times in four days than she could count and it had not once stopped meaning what she was afraid it meant.
Elsie was frightened in a way she had not been at Fintry or anywhere else, because at Fintry the worst that could happen was in front of her, and this was four days of not knowing.
Rolland rode at the head of the column with the Murray men behind him.
He had not put a foot wrong since Seamus gave him the order.
Elsie had watched her husband turn into something she had not seen before over these four days.
He was quiet and he was fast. Every order he gave was one word long, and the men went where he pointed without asking a thing.
Christopher and Morag came behind them with a wing of the Murray riders.
Her brother had not slept. She knew that because she had not seen him lie down. At the last halt he had been standing over a map in the rain with his thumb on one spot, and when she asked him what he was looking at he said, “Ardochy,” and nothing else.
They came up the last long rise before the McKenzie Castle with the sun behind them.
“Elsie,” Rolland said.
She had already seen it.
Then her heart dropped straight through her. There was smoke over the hill in front of them. Not a chimney and not a fire in a yard. It was a great dirty column of it going straight up into a still morning, and it was coming from exactly where she knew McKenzie Keep to be.
Then something else came up under it that was not fear at all. Elsie Kincaid was glad of it, and she went with it.
“Faster,” Elsie said.
They crested the ridge, and all of it opened out below them.
McKenzie Keep was standing. That was the first thing, and she thanked God for it out loud.
But the outer towers were burning and the walls were black.
The ground in front of that gate was full of men in dark mail.
They had a ram up and they were at the gate itself, and the McKenzie archers above them were too few and too slow and had plainly been shooting all night.
The Campbell army had its whole back to the ridge.
Nobody had ever expected anyone to come from the south. Why would they? Every fighting man in this country was four days north.
Rolland stood in his stirrups and looked down at it, and then he looked at his wife, and Elsie saw her husband smile for the first time since Fintry.
“Well,” he said. “They’re all facin’ the wrong way.”
“Rolland.”
“Aye.”
“Go.”
He put his arm up and brought it down, and the Murray horns went off along the whole ridge at once, and Elsie Kincaid took her archers down that slope at a gallop into the back of Ian Campbell’s army with her brother’s letter still against her ribs.
They went through them like a stone through a window, and Elsie was shouting, and half her archers were shouting, and none of them could have said afterwards what any of it meant.
Elsie had her people off their horses and shooting inside a minute.
She put them on the higher ground east of the track, where their arrows could reach every foot of open ground in front of that gate and still pass over the heads of their own men.
Rolland took the Murray riders straight into the ram.
It never went at the gate again. Christopher came around the eastern side with the men Rolland had given him and shut the Campbells’ way out against the burn, which was the thing he had said he would do at the last halt, and which he then did exactly.
The Campbells broke in the way she had watched them break at Fintry, all at once and in four directions.
Only this time there was nowhere for them to go.
Through the smoke, high up on the north wall of that keep, Elsie saw a woman standing.
She had a bow in her hand and there was blood down one side of her face and her hair had come out of its pins entirely.
She was leaning on the parapet with her whole weight because she had plainly been on her feet all night.
A man beside her was pointing at the ridge.
The woman turned and looked up at the Murray banners coming down the slope, and even at that distance Elsie could see what it did to her.
Her whole body changed. Elsie’s own eyes went hot. She did nothing about them at all.
Then Lady Iona McKenzie straightened her back, and lifted the bow over her head with both hands, and every soul on that wall started shouting at once.