Chapter Sixteen
The knock came before the light did.
Arran had been awake a long while by then, in the chair with his boots still on, watching her sleep.
Alexandra lay with her hair across the pillow and one arm flung out over the edge of the bed toward him.
He put the backs of his fingers against her cheek, very lightly, so as not to wake her. Then he smoothed the hair off her face.
He loved her. He had known it for a long time and he had said none of it out loud, and this morning, with the light not up yet and her breathing in the dark beside him, he could not think of one good reason why not.
He was not going to be parted from her again. That was all he wanted, and it was a simple thing to want, and he lay there and let himself have it for a minute longer.
The knock came again, harder.
“Arran.” Elsie’s voice, and something in it. “Arran, get up.”
He had the door open before he had thought about the boots.
Elsie was there with her plait half undone and her cloak still on from the night before.
Christopher stood behind her with a face on him that Arran had seen exactly twice.
Neither of those times had ended well, and his stomach turned over before a word was said.
“What.”
“Come and look out the north window,” Christopher said. “Then we’ll talk.”
Alexandra was up by then. She came past him barefoot with her hair down her back. She did not ask anything, which was its own kind of answer. The four of them went down the passage to the window at the far end, the one that looked out over the low country to the south and east.
There was smoke on the horizon. Two columns of it, well apart, thin at the top and going grey into the morning.
Arran’s stomach dropped away from him.
“When,” Arran said.
“In the night.” Christopher put his hand flat on the sill. “Two villages. Both of them inside the south McKenzie line. A rider came in an hour ago and he’d been going since dark.”
“How many.”
“He didnae ken how many. He had a number of the dead he was sure of and called it low. Then he allowed that he had walked only one end of one village.” Christopher looked at him. “So it’s probably nae low in truth.”
Arran watched the nearer of the two columns lean off to the east where the wind took it. He found that he was perfectly steady, which he distrusted. Under the steadiness there was a cold sick dread sitting low in him, waiting.
“Ian isnae stoppin’!” Elsie said.
“Nay.”
“Arran.” She waited until he looked at her. “That’s nae the worst of it.”
And there it was. He had known it was coming since the knock, in the way a man knows a step is missing before his foot finds the gap. He stood at that window with his boots still in his hand. He was afraid to hear it and more afraid to make her wait, so he said nothing at all.
“A messenger came from Liam,” Elsie said. “His scouts have Campbell men movin’ north and west. Toward... Kincaid territory.”
Something went out from under him.
He had lost one family already. He had been a boy when it happened and he had not been able to do a single thing about it, and he had promised himself, in the way a child promises, that it would not happen twice.
It came up through him whole, in the space of one breath. His hands had gone cold to the wrist. He could not feel the boots he was still holding. He was terrified in a plain, childish way that had nothing of the commander in it.
Alexandra’s hand closed around his.
Her fingers were warm. The warmth of them went up his arm and into his chest and hurt him. She did not say a word.
“We dinnae ken it’s true.” Christopher had his hand up. “Arran. Hear me. We dinnae ken.”
“Ye said his scouts saw them!”
“I said his scouts saw men move. That’s all I said.
” Christopher came off the sill. “It could be another misdirection. It’s been a misdirection every time so far.
Finn’s below with Rolland and Morag this minute, puttin’ it tae Caindach, and if there’s a word of truth in it we’ll have it out of him inside the hour. ”
“Then I’m goin’ below!” It came out of him louder than he meant it.
“Arran—”
He was already moving.
The dungeons under the McKenzie Keep were older than the keep.
The stairs down to them turned twice and went cold at the second turn.
The smell that came up was stone and wet and the sourness of men kept too long in the dark.
A torch burned at the bottom in the wrong bracket, so that the whole passage guttered.
Finn McKenzie’s voice was coming off the walls before Arran reached the last step.
“—will ask ye once more, and then I’ll stop askin’. Where is he.”
Robert Caindach was against the back wall of the second cell with his hands bound in front of him and one eye shut with swelling. He had been a big man a week ago. He looked up at Finn with his head tipped back against the stone. He was smiling, and there was blood in the smile.
“Ye’re shoutin’,” Caindach said. “That’s a grand sign, that.”
Rolland was in the corner with his arms folded. Morag stood nearest the bars, with a stillness on her that frightened Arran more than her father’s smiling did.
“Where is Ian Campbell?”
“Ah.” Caindach’s head came forward. “I ken where he isnae. He isnae here, is he? Ye’ve had an army in a field and a keep half burnt and yer wife stood on a wall for two days, and he wasnae there for any of it. Does that nae worry ye?”
“Where.”
“Yer son died on his knees,” Caindach said. “Did ye hear that part? I heard it. He’d a sword in his hand right up until he didnae, and then he was on his knees in the wet like a—”
Finn hit the bars. The whole run of them rang.
“Da,” Morag said. Not to Finn. She had not moved.
Caindach’s eye went to her and something ugly came into his face and went out of it again. Then he looked past her. He saw Arran on the bottom step. The smile went off him, in a way that was worse than the smiling.
“Well,” he said. “There he is.”
“Ye ken me.”
“I ken yer face. He’s got a drawin’ of it.” Caindach shifted against the stone. “Ye’re the one, are ye? Ye’re the one that took his family off him.”
“I never took anythin’ off him.”
“Ye did, though. Ye and that fool Lachlan Kincaid and his whore of a wife.” Caindach sneered.
“Ye think this is a war. It isnae a war. He stopped fightin’ a war a long while back.
He’s writin’ it down again, lad, the whole line, and there’s nae room on the page for two families with a claim on the same ground. ”
“Speak plain.” The dread came all the way up then and sat in his mouth.
“Ye took his,” Caindach said. “So he’ll take yours.”
Behind him Elsie made a sound he had heard from her once before, on a road, a long time ago.
He worked it out without meaning to. Lachlan would have the gates barred and the Kincaid men on the walls before the first rider was in sight, and Aila would be up there beside him with a blade in her hand, because she had never once in her life stood behind a man.
They would give a good account of themselves. That was not what frightened him.
Cassie was twelve. Christopher had been putting a practice blade in her hand since the spring and she was prouder of that than of anything else in her life, and she had never once seen what a real one does to a person.
Something came up in his throat. He stood very still on that bottom step until it went down again.
“Cassie,” he said.
No one answered him.
He went up the stairs. He did not remember deciding to. He did not remember any of the turns.
The courtyard had rain in it, and men crossing it with their heads down. He was halfway to the stables before Christopher got a hand on his arm.
“Arran. Stop.”
“Take yer hand off me.”
“Listen tae yerself—”
“I’ll take riders.” Arran heard his own voice going too fast and could not do a thing about it.
“As many as can be mounted, and the spare horses with them. We can be at the ford before dark and at Kincaid by tomorrow night if we ride it through, and I’ll send word ahead tae Lachlan tae get them intae the tower and bar it—”
“And if it’s a lie?” Rolland had come out behind them, and Morag with him.
There was pity in his face, which Arran could not bear to look at.
“If it’s a lie, ye’ve taken riders off this castle and put them on a road Campbell already kens ye’ll take, at the one hour ye’re nae thinkin’ straight. Which he also kens.”
“It’s me family.” His voice came out of him wrong and he heard it. “It’s the only one I’ve got left tae lose.”
“Aye,” Rolland said. “That’s why he said it.”
“Rolland’s right,” Morag said. “Arran, me father sat in that cell for two days and said nothin’ but names and weather, and this mornin’, the one mornin’ ye’re stood in front of him, he suddenly finds his tongue about Cassie Kincaid?
” She shook her head. “He was told tae say it. Someone put that in his mouth.”
“And if he wasnae?” Elsie’s voice went up. “If he wasnae, and we stand in this yard debatin’ it, and it’s Aila?”
“Elsie—”
“That is me mother ye’re standin’ here debatin’ about!
” Elsie’s face had gone white around the mouth and her eyes were streaming and she was not troubling to stop them.
“Mine and Christopher’s, and the wee sister we both taught tae ride.
Aila took the three of us in when there wasnae one soul in this country would look at us twice, and ye want me tae stand in a yard and weigh it! ”
“Nor will I,” Christopher said.
“Then ye’re all three of ye ridin’ intae it with yer eyes shut,” Rolland said, “and I’ll say so, and I’ll keep sayin’ so, because someone in this yard has tae.”
They were all talking then. Arran could hear it going up around him.
He could not have said afterwards who had said what.
He had his hand on the stable door. Some part of him stood off at a distance and watched the rest of him do it.
That part was saying, quite calmly, that this was a trap plain and clear.
But he was doing it anyway. Because he could not risk his home, his family, his soul…
“Enough.”
Alexandra joined them and the sight of her went through him like warmth through a frozen hand, and hurt exactly as much.
She had dressed. She had Liam’s last report in both hands, the one that had come up from the south four days ago and had put them on the wrong road, and the paper was shaking. She was not looking at any of the others.
“Arran.”
The yard went quiet the way a room does. Arran’s heart was still going and his hands would not warm, and the sight of her on those steps did something to his chest that he had no name for and no time for.
He crossed to her. He wanted, absurdly, to put his forehead down on her shoulder and stay there. Behind him he heard Rolland say something to Morag and stop saying it.
“The letters.” Her voice came out of her far too loud and it cracked in the middle. “Where are the letters? Every one that’s come from Liam since the spring—where does me father keep them?”
Arran stared at her. “Alexandra—”
“WHERE ARE THEY?”
The yard stopped. A stablehand halfway across it put down the bucket he was carrying and did not pick it up again. Morag came off the steps at a walk that turned into something faster.
“The war room,” Rolland said. “The long chest under the window. Alexandra, what is it?”
She was already going. She went past Arran without touching him and she took the hall steps two at a time with the wet paper still gripped in her fist, and her voice came back down the passage behind her, high and not steady at all.
“Bring me a candle! Bring me every one of them and bring me a candle!”
Arran looked at Christopher. Christopher was already moving.
“Get the horses back in the stalls,” Christopher said to nobody in particular, and it was the first order he had given all morning that anyone obeyed.