Chapter Fifteen
Alexandra did not sleep on the road home.
She lay down when they made camp, because her father made her lie down, and she put her cheek on her arm and shut her eyes.
Behind them the same thing happened over and over.
She saw the gate of McKenzie Keep off its hinges.
She saw the thatch gone off the whole village and the forge cold.
She saw her mother’s hair down her back on the flagstones of her own courtyard, and no one left standing to have covered her.
She got up before the horses were fed every morning of that ride. Nobody said anything to her about it.
By the third day her hands had blistered on the reins and she was glad of it.
She rode with her eyes fixed on the country in front of her.
There was a hard cold weight sitting under her breastbone that had been there since the hollow in the forest. It was fear, plainly enough, and naming it did not shift it either.
It did not shift for anything. It did not shift when they crossed the ford.
It did not shift when Hamish told her they were a day out.
By then she had stopped hoping it would shift, and had begun only to hope she would know.
Not knowing was the worst thing she had ever carried. She would have taken almost any answer over it. She was ashamed of that, because she knew what some of the answers were.
On the fourth afternoon the woods thickened and went from strange to familiar in the space of half a mile.
She knew that turn in the trail, and she knew the leaning birch. She had come down this path with her brother more times than she could count, the pair of them always going too fast. She got as far as remembering that, and then could not breathe properly.
Alexandra put her heels in and broke out of the column.
She heard her father shout after her. She did not stop and she did not turn around. A low branch came at her that would have taken her out of the saddle. She went under it flat along her horse’s neck. Then the trail opened. She gave the animal everything it had left.
There was one set of hooves behind her the whole way.
She did not have to look to know. Arran had been a length back and on her right for four days. He was there now. His warhorse came up level with her on the rise and stayed there, matching her stride for stride, neither taking the lead nor falling away.
They came over the last hill together.
The McKenzie stronghold was standing.
The relief went through her so hard that it hurt.
She heard herself make a sound she had never made in her life, half a laugh and half something else entirely.
Her whole face was wet before she had understood that she was crying.
The outer towers were black with smoke. There was scaffolding up on the west wall and the roofs of the outbuildings were gone.
None of that mattered. The walls were up, the gate was whole, and there were McKenzie banners moving on the top of the keep in the wind.
Her eyes filled and she could not see for a moment. She scrubbed at them with the back of her wrist and kept riding.
She did not stop at the village. She went straight through it.
The people came out of their doors as she passed and some of them shouted her name.
She could not answer one of them, because her throat had shut.
The forge was lit. There was a cart being mended in the road.
A woman with a bandaged head straightened up from a water trough and put her hand over her mouth as Alexandra went by, and her eyes went bright, and Alexandra’s throat closed all over again.
The gates of the courtyard stood open.
Her mother was already coming through them at a run.
Alexandra got one leg over the saddle and did not so much dismount as fall. She hit the flagstones badly and did not care. Then Iona McKenzie’s arms went around her so hard that they drove the breath out of her.
Neither of them said anything for a long time.
Her mother had a burn up one side of her neck and her hair was full of ash. She smelled of smoke. She was warm and alive and shaking. Alexandra held on to her and wept like a child in her own courtyard in front of them all, and could not have stopped for any price on this earth.
“Ye’re here,” Iona kept saying into her hair. “Ye’re here, me lamb. Ye’re here.”
Behind them the yard filled with riders.
Alexandra heard her father come in, and the whole army after him.
She did not let go. He arrived beside them.
She had her face in her mother’s shoulder and did not look up.
Finn McKenzie got down off his horse and stood there, and when he said her mother’s name his voice broke clean in the middle of it.
“Iona—”
“I’m well.”
“Are ye hurt? Iona. Look at me. Are ye hurt?”
“A burn and a bad week,” Iona said. “I’m well, Finn. I’m well!”
“And the village? The people?”
“We got them inside. Every soul of them.” Her mother’s hand was in his hair, which Alexandra had not seen since she was small. “We lost some on the wall. I’ll give ye the names when ye can hear them and nae before.”
“Iona—”
“Nae before, Finn.”
Her father put both arms around the pair of them and held on. Alexandra felt her mother’s hand come up and take a fistful of his cloak at the back. None of the three of them said anything for a while after that.
The others were all around them. She saw them in pieces as she came back to herself.
Rolland Murray with his arm strapped across his chest. Elsie with a bow still over her shoulder and her face gone bright with relief.
Christopher a pace behind her. Morag beside him, streaked to the elbows, watching everything.
“The Murrays came,” her mother was telling Finn.
“Finn, listen tae me. We couldnae have held another night. We were down tae the last of the arrows and the west wall had cracked, and they came over the ridge at first light intae the back of them.” Iona’s voice was going.
“They came in time. That’s all. They came in time. ”
Then her mother turned around and looked for Arran.
He had got down off his horse at the edge of the yard and stayed there, holding his own reins, in exactly the place a man stands when he is not certain he is welcome. Alexandra watched her mother cross the courtyard to him.
“Ye wrote tae yer sister,” Iona said.
“I did.”
“Against me husband’s word.”
“Aye. I did that as well.”
“And what did ye think would happen tae ye for it?”
“I kent fine what would happen tae me for it, me lady.”
“And ye sent it.”
“I sent it.”
Iona McKenzie took his face in both her hands the way she had taken her own daughter’s. She was crying. She did not mind one bit who was watching her do it.
“There are near four hundred souls behind them walls that are breathin’ this mornin’ because ye did,” she said. “Ye’ll let me say that tae ye in front of these men, and ye’ll nae argue with me about it, and ye’ll never pay for it in this house again as long as I’m the McKenzie Lady. Do ye hear me?”
Arran did not seem able to answer her. He stood there with his eyes wet and no words in him at all, and Alexandra loved her mother very much in that moment for doing it in front of them all.
After that everyone started talking at once.
Her father wanted to know where Ian was. Christopher was telling him about Ardochy and Rolland was cutting across the both of them. A man was shouting for a healer at the far end of the yard. Elsie was trying to get Morag to sit down, and Morag was refusing.
Alexandra stopped hearing any of it.
It went away from her the way sound goes when you put your head under water.
And there was only Arran.
He was covered to the eyes in four days of road.
His shirt had blood on it that was mostly other people’s and his hair was flat with sweat and there was a healing mark on his cheekbone where her father had struck him.
He looked terrible. And yet, she had never in her life been so glad of the sight of anything.
She had spent a year telling herself she did not know what that look was. Her heart was going so hard that it reached her fingertips.
Alexandra walked across the courtyard to him.
She did not hurry and she did not care in the least who was watching her do it. Her father was somewhere behind her. Half the country was in that yard. She crossed the whole open space between them with her legs going under her and stopped close enough to see the dust in his eyelashes.
Arran did not move at all. He never did. He stood there and let her come, the way he had stood in the river and let her decide.
Her voice would not come out properly. “Me mother is alive because ye disobeyed me father while I stood there and took his side against ye.”
“Alexandra—”
“Dinnae.” She got hold of his sleeve. “Ye’ll let me say it. I’m sayin’ thank ye. That’s all it is and it’s nae enough and I’ve nothin’ else.”
She meant to say more.
The courtyard tilted very gently to the left.
The noise came back all at once and then went a long way off again, and the edges of everything greyed, and Alexandra understood quite calmly that she was going to faint in front of the whole yard.
The last thing she thought before the ground went was that she did not need to put her hands out.
He was in front of her. He would have her.
She did not put them out. She let herself go.
She woke in the dark in her own bed.
She knew the room before she opened her eyes, because there is a way that your own ceiling sounds, and because the fire in her own grate always made that particular small noise as it went down.
There was a candle nearly gone on the chest. Someone had put her out of her boots and her filthy riding clothes and into a nightgown.
The sheets were cold and clean against her legs.
Her whole body hurt. Her shoulders, her hands, the backs of her legs, and a deep dragging ache through her hips from four days in the saddle.
Arran was asleep in the chair beside the bed.