Chapter Seventeen
The loop was wrong.
Alexandra had been holding that in her two hands since the courtyard, and the rain had gone through the paper, and still the loop was wrong.
It sat in the tail of the letter g. Liam put a small hard hook on his g, the way a man does who learned his letters late and learned them off a man in a hurry.
This g came around in a soft full circle like a girl’s.
A man had unpicked Liam and sewn him up again, and the stitching showed.
She stood in the passage outside the war room with the wet report in her hands and her heart going hard enough to hear, and her throat aching with it.
It was not the words. The words were his.
Every report that had come up from the south in the last four weeks had sounded like Liam, short and warm and unafraid.
She had read them out at that table herself and never once stopped over a letter.
The words were his. The hand was not. She had carried both up a flight of stairs before her head caught what her eyes had already done.
What came up behind it was a cold dread that had nothing to do with the letter at all.
Arran came along the passage behind her. He did not touch her. She heard him stop about a pace back. He had been standing there since the yard. She was so afraid of what his face would look like that she did not turn around at once.
“Ye said an hour,” Arran said.
“I ken what I said. Will ye come in?”
“Then say it tae me here, Alexandra, and dinnae make me sit in a room.”
She turned around. He was soaked to the shoulders and he had the look on him of a man holding still by main force. She had seen him afraid before. She had never seen him afraid and waiting.
“Because I need tae see the rest of the letters,” she said, “and they’re in that room.”
He looked at her for a moment. Then he opened the door for her, and she went through it ahead of him, and neither of them said anything about the hour it had cost him to give her.
The war room had been full since first light.
Her father had both hands flat on the long table and had plainly had them there since first light.
Her mother stood at the near end in yesterday’s gown.
The council took up both sides of the room, and Rolland Murray was at the window with his arm strapped across his chest, and Morag Caindach stood at the far wall where the light was worst.
Every one of them turned when the door went.
“Alexandra,” her father said. “We’re past this now, lass. I’ve riders goin’ out—”
“I need the letters.” She was already at the table. “Every report that’s come tae this house with Liam’s name on it. I want every one of them on this table, and I want them now, and I’ll nae say another word tae ye nor tae anyone till they’re in front of me.”
“Alexandra—”
“Da.” She put her palm flat on the wood, and her hand was shaking, and the whole room could see it shake. “Please.”
Her mother didn’t say anything. Iona McKenzie looked at Hamish, and Hamish went out of the room at a pace no man his rank had used in that house in years, and the council watched him go and stopped talking.
They came back in a wooden box that had held candles before it held anything else. Alexandra took them out and set them along the table in the order they had come, and the room stood over her while she did it. Four weeks of the war laid end to end on her mother’s table.
She got the note out of her breast pocket last.
It had been folded three times and sealed with a smear of dull wax.
She had put it into her mother’s hands herself in this room, because she had promised him she would, and it had sat in the box since with the rest. Her fingers would not behave.
Her eyes were stinging, and the poor light was a mercy.
She got it open and laid it beside the others and stepped back so that she was not standing in her own light.
“Bring me a candle,” Alexandra said.
Morag brought it. She set it down and did not straighten up again. Alexandra watched her go still over the paper, and watched her hands come down onto the table on either side of it, and knew before Morag said a word that she had it.
“Oh,” Morag said. “Oh, I’ve read every one of these.”
“Tell them. What is it ye’re lookin’ at?”
Morag didn’t answer at once. Her hands stayed where they were. The candle went on burning.
“Look at the hook on the g. He does it on the y as well, every time, and ye’ll find it on this one and ye’ll nae find it on a single one of the others.” She looked up. “How did I nae see it!”
Morag’s voice had gone very level. That was the sound she made when the anger was at herself. “I’ve sat at that table and read them out tae ye in me own voice. I look at folk for a livin’, and I’ve been lookin’ at the wrong end of this man for weeks.”
Then the room went up.
It went up like a thatch catching. A council man wanted to know how long.
Another said the word forgery twice, as though saying it again would settle whose fault it was.
Rolland came off the window with his good hand out asking who carried them, who took them at the gate, who signed for them.
Her father was shouting for Hamish before Hamish had got back through the door, and then he was giving orders over the top of them all, and the orders were good ones and they were all for the wrong country.
Halfway down the table a councilman had gone grey in the face and sat himself down without being told to.
There was fear in that room now, plain and moving, and it was the first honest thing in it all morning.
“The northern line’s blind, then! It’s been blind for weeks and we didnae ken a thing about it!”
“Every patrol report this month is a lie!”
“Nay, worse than a lie, ‘tis a hand! Some man sat down and wrote these tae us—”
“Then where’s Liam? Where’s the man himself, if he isnae the one writin’ tae us?”
“Enough of it!” Her father brought his fist down and the candle jumped. “Hamish! I want riders on the south road inside the half hour, and I want—”
Alexandra did not hear the rest of it.
She had turned around. She was looking at Arran.
He was standing where he had stopped inside the door with his back against the stone.
He had not moved through any of it. He had gone the colour of the wall behind him.
The sight of him took the last of the anger out of her.
She knew what was in his head. She had watched him work it out in the yard.
He was doing it again here, faster, with the new number in it.
He was already at Kincaid in his mind. He had been there since the dungeons.
She crossed the room to him. The shouting went on behind her. She let it.
“Arran.”
He looked at her.
“I want tae say this the once and I want ye tae hear all of it,” Alexandra said, “so dinnae speak until I’m done.”
“Alexandra—”
“Dinnae.” Her eyes had filled and the tears came over.
She did not put a hand up to them. “I ken what the Kincaids are tae ye. I’ve kent it since we were bairns, and I ken what it has cost ye tae stand in this room for an hour instead of bein’ on that road.
” Her voice went. She waited on it and got it back.
“So here it is. If ye ride for Kincaid, I ride with ye. Nae if, nae hour, nae conditions. I’ll be on that road beside ye and I’ll fight at yer shoulder until me last breath, and if it’s the wrong road we’ll be wrong together, and I’ll nae say one word about it after. ”
Arran’s throat moved. He didn’t speak, because she had told him not to. He did what she told him, and took that from few others.
“And now the rest,” she said. “I think Liam’s taken.
I think the valley’s taken, and taken a long while, and I think every word that’s come out of it since came out of Ian Campbell’s mouth and nae out of Liam’s at all.
Ye’ve been readin’ a dead man’s name in a livin’ man’s hand, and so have I.
” She looked back at the table with the letters on it.
“He’s had us on a string for weeks, Arran, and ye ken it as well as I do.
He put us at the shelf. He put us at the gorge.
He put me mother up on a wall with boys and men too old tae hold a bow, and where were ye and I?
Four days north, the pair of us, lookin’ for an army that was never there tae find.
” Her chin went. “And this mornin’ he told us where his men are goin’ next. Arran, why would he tell us?”
Arran said nothing. His hands had opened at his sides. He looked as frightened as she had ever seen him. He was not troubling to hide it, and that frightened her worse than anything the letters had told her.
“Because he wants ye on that road,” Alexandra said. “That’s what I think. I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong about him from the first day tae this one… and I’m frightened tae death that I’m wrong now, and I havenae got a thing tae prove it with except a letter and a loop.”
Her father had stopped shouting somewhere in the middle of it. The room had gone quiet. She was ashamed of how loud her own weeping sounded in it. She did not turn around to see.
Her hand came up between them. She got as far as his sleeve and stopped there, close enough to feel the cold coming off the wet wool, and did not close the last of it.
“So the choosin’ of it is yours,” she said.
“Alexandra.”
“It’s yers, Arran. I’ll nae argue ye intae it and I’ll nae argue ye out of it, because if I do, then whatever comes of it is mine and it isnae, it’s theirs, and they’re yer family.
” The tears were coming properly now. She did not care one bit who saw them.
“Ye’ll say the word and I’ll put me foot in the stirrup, and I’ll do it gladly.
Whatever happens next, it’s yer decision. That’s all I came in here tae say.”
Arran looked at her for a long moment, and his eyes were wet, and he didn’t look away from her.
“Ye’d have me choose,” he said.
“I’d have ye choose.”
“And if I choose wrong?”