Chapter Eighteen
There was a drip somewhere behind the wall. It had been there since the first night. Liam no longer heard water in it.
It was a footstep on the stairs. That was what it had turned into. A man was coming down a long flight of stairs towards him and had been coming for weeks and never arrived. He had decided a while back that he did not mind the waiting, because he knew the tread.
Errik had walked like that. Errik, who had stood at his shoulder through two risings and never once let him down, and who came down heavy on the heel and light after it, because he had broken the same foot twice and never once admitted it.
Liam smiled in the dark. His mouth had gone numb days ago. He could not feel whether he was smiling. He thought he was, and that would do.
The straw under his shoulder was wet. The wall at his back was colder than the air, and that meant the burn behind it was running high, and that meant rain on the hills.
He had not seen rain since they put him down here.
He found he could still tell the weather through a foot of Campbell stone.
He was proud of that, in a small way, and it was the last thing left that he was proud of.
His side had stopped hurting three days back.
He knew what that meant. He was not a fool and he had seen enough men go to know the road when he was on it, and the smell coming off his own bandage had told him the rest before his body did.
There was no fear in him about it. That surprised him.
He had spent a whole life expecting to be frightened at the end and here he was, warm enough in his own way, listening to a man come down the stairs.
Then the other one moved in the dark, over by the door, and Liam came back into the room.
“Ye’re awake,” the man said.
“I’m awake. Is it night yet, or have I lost that as well?”
“I’ve water,” the man said.
The man came across on his knees, because he could not stand either, and Liam heard him come, dragging the one leg he had dragged since the first night. There was a rag and a cup and the cup was chipped along one side. Liam had held that cup a hundred times and had never once seen it.
He drank what he could. Most of it went down his beard, and the man wiped it away for him with a tenderness that shamed him, and Liam was grateful and could not find the words to be grateful with.
“Ye’ll let me at that bandage now,” the man said.
“Nay.”
“Liam—”
“Nay, lad.” He got the word out and had to rest after it. “Sit yerself down.”
There was a silence with breathing in it.
The breathing was ragged and the lad was afraid, and the fear on him was as plain as weather.
Liam had listened to that breath every night for weeks and thought every night that he knew it, and that he was too far gone to trust himself, and that a dying man will hear whatever he likes in the dark and call it a friend.
His eyes had been no use since the first week. The man was a shape against a shape.
“It wants changin’,” the man said. “’Tis gone bad and ye ken it has.”
“Aye. Does that satisfy ye?”
“Then will ye let me?”
“I’ll tell ye what I want,” Liam said, “and ye’ll do me the kindness of hearin’ it, for I’ve nae the wind tae say it twice.”
He waited. His chest went up and came down and did not fill the whole way. He had a speech in him somewhere and he had been putting it together for two days, and now that the hour was on him he could only find the middle.
His heart was going slow and light, like a bird settling. “I’m tired,” he said.
“Ye’re tired because ye’re wounded,” the man said.
“I’m tired because I’ve been at this a verra long while, and I’d like tae put it down now.
” He turned his head, which took him some doing.
“I’ve fought in more risin’s than I care tae count, lad.
I’ve buried more of me own than I can put a number tae.
There isnae one thing left in this world that I want tae see done that I havenae seen done, and there’s a good few I’m glad I’ll nae live tae watch. ”
“Dinnae talk like that,” the man said.
“Will ye nae let an old man talk? ‘Tis the only thing I’ve still got that works.”
“I’ll tell ye what’s waitin’,” Liam said.
He meant to lift his hand off the straw. He told it to move and it stayed where it was.
“There’s old Rolland waitin’,” he said. “Rolland that led us out of the low country and made this valley what it is, and lies at the top of it under a stone I helped set. Me sister that I’ve nae seen since I was a young man.
Ewan that carried the powder up the ledge at Kilmorack and never came back down it.
” He had to stop for a while. “And Errik. Errik last, because he was first in everythin’ else.
Forty years the pair of us, and I havenae had a right conversation since the day he went. ”
Beside him the man had gone very still. Then Liam heard a sound come out of him that he tried to swallow. Liam put it down to the fever and was sorry for the lad’s grief, and never once asked whose it was.
“Ye’ll be sad about it,” he said. “Dinnae be. I’ve had a full life, lad, and there’s men I started out with that never got the half of it, and I’ll nae have anyone standin’ about bein’ sad over an old man that got everythin’ he was owed and more besides.”
“I’m nae sad!” The man’s voice had gone rough and high, and it was a young voice, and it cracked. “I’m angry! I’m that angry I cannae see!”
“Aye, well.” Liam found the shape of the smile again. “Anger, is it? Aye. That’s the better of the two.”
He wanted to reach over and put his hand on the back of the lad’s neck, as he had done for a hundred frightened boys in his time, as Errik used to do for him. He told his arm to move.
His arm stayed where it was. The grief of that was worse than the wound had ever been. He was glad of the dark for it.
“Come here, then,” Liam said.
The man came. He put himself down on the straw with his back against the same wall, close enough that his shoulder was against Liam’s. He was shaking, and neither of them said one word about it. Liam had not been held by another living soul in years. He had forgotten what it did to a man.
“Now hear me, for this is the last and then I’ll sleep.” Liam had to stop. He got the breath and went on. “They’re comin’.”
“Liam.”
“They are comin’. Ye’ll nae believe me and I dinnae need ye tae.
” He turned his head towards the shape. “This valley has been taken before. It was taken when I was a young man with all me teeth, and back then there was some poor soul lyin’ in a hole in the dark exactly like this one, thinkin’ it was finished.
It wasnae finished. It has never once been finished in this valley. ”
“And if they dinnae come?”
“Then they’ll come after that. Did ye think there was only the one chance in it?” Liam closed his eyes, which changed nothing at all. “Hope doesnae die in this place, lad. Men die in it. That’s a different thing altogether.”
The man beside him was weeping, quietly and badly, with no practice at it at all.
“There now, lad,” Liam said, and he loved him without knowing his name.
He meant to say the rest. He had a great deal of the rest. About the lad’s own people.
About what he was to say to Rolland when he saw him, and about the ledge behind the falls, and the one place a man could still get out of this valley if he had the wit to try it in the dark. He got as far as arranging the words.
Liam lay in the straw with a stranger’s shoulder against his own and waited for it with no fear in him at all.
He was almost sure he knew who was coming.
It was a hard road, and the ground got worse the whole way.
Arran had the road under him and the light going grey behind the hills and Alexandra at his right knee.
He had been counting since the ford: the width of the track, the height of the banks on either side of it, and every place between here and the trees where a man with a bow could sit and not be seen.
There were too many. There were always too many, and it was a poor way to travel a country. He could not stop doing it.
Valiant went under him steady. The big stallion had come out of the McKenzie stables in a temper at being woken and had settled before they reached the ford. “Aye, I ken,” Arran told him, with his hand down on the warm neck more often than the animal needed. “I ken. Nae much further.”
Behind them the column ran back along the road further than he could see, and the sight of it frightened him more than it comforted him.
Rolland Murray had the head of it with the Murray riders.
Elsie had her archers strung out along the flank on the higher ground, because she would not ride in a column where she could not see over a hedge.
The McKenzie strength came behind under Hamish.
Iona had wanted to ride with them and Finn had not been able to talk her out of it, and in the end it was Alexandra who did, by asking her who would hold the keep if this went badly.
The Kincaid men Arran had brought north rode in the middle of all of it, and that whole country was on the move behind one man’s decision.
His decision.
He had made it in the war room with his back against the stone.
He had stood there while she handed it to him, and he had understood that she meant it.
He had known within two breaths what he was going to do.
He made himself wait a while longer before he said it, because a thing like that should cost a man more than two breaths.
The Kincaids would keep. Lachlan had walls and a bar and enough sense to use both. If he was wrong about that he would carry it the rest of his life.
He had sent riders west with word to bar the gates and hold. Then he had turned the whole country south, at the valley, at the thing that had been moving them around like counters since the spring.
“Ye’ve gone quiet again,” Alexandra said.
“I’m here. What is it?”
“Ye’re nae here! Ye’ve been away since the ford and I’ve watched ye go.” She brought her horse in until her knee was near enough his to touch. “Say it out loud and it’ll weigh less. That’s a thing me mother tells me and I’ve never once managed it, so ye can be the first.”
Arran looked at the road.
“I keep seein’ our yard,” he said.
She did not answer. She let him have the room.
“I was a lad. I’ve told ye some of it and I’ll nae tell ye all of it on a horse.
” His hands were steady on the reins, which struck him as a lie his body was telling.
“There’s a thing about a house that’s been burnt.
Ye can smell it a long way off, before ever ye see it, and after that ye ken.
Ye ken while ye’re still walkin’. And ye keep walkin’ anyway, because what else is there, and the whole time ye’re tellin’ yerself a story about how it’ll be the byre and nae the house. ”
“Arran.”
“And today I’ve put every fightin’ man between here and the border on a road goin’ the other way from them.” His voice cracked, and he let it crack. “That’s all. That’s what’s in me head and there’s nae more of it.”
Alexandra reached across and took the rein out of his hand, and then took his hand, and held on to it in front of the entire column.
“Then hear me,” she said. “If ye’re wrong, ye’re wrong with me.
I’m nae sayin’ that tae be kind tae ye. I’m sayin’ it because ‘tis a fact and ye’ll need it in about an hour.
” Her grip hurt. “Whatever’s in that valley, we go intae it together and we come out of it together!
And if we dinnae come out of it, then that’s together as well. ”
His throat had closed. He could not speak for a moment, and he was not ashamed of it.
“Aye,” Arran said.
“And the rest? Will ye say that as well?”
“There isnae any rest of it,” Arran said.
“There’s always a rest of it with ye.” Alexandra’s eyes were wet and she was grinning at him, which was a combination he had never in his life been able to withstand. “Will ye tell me at the treeline?”
The forest took them a little before the light went.
Arran sent Hamish back along the column with the order to bring the men off the road and into the trees, and to do it quietly, and it was not done quietly.
Rolland took the head. The army went to ground among the trees badly and loudly and took an age about it.
Their own party broke away from the rest: Rolland leading, Elsie behind him, Christopher and Morag riding knee to knee, and Arran and Alexandra at the back with the light coming down green through the branches over them.
Rolland knew this ground. He had come up here as a boy with Liam, and he carried the name of the man who founded this valley and lies buried at the head of it, and he had never once in his life spoken about that lightly.
He took them along a deer track that Arran would have ridden past, and then along the shoulder of a slope, and then down through a stand of birch where the whole world went quiet and the horses’ feet made no sound at all in the wet leaf.
Nobody spoke. Morag had one hand flat on her horse’s neck. Elsie had an arrow out of the quiver and lying across her hand. She meant to use it.
Then Rolland put his hand up, and stopped, and the trees ahead of them thinned out into grey.
Arran came up alongside him and looked down.
The Lost Valley lay open under a low sky.
The green bowl of it that Alexandra had described to him was gone.
The whole floor was tents and lines and beaten mud, the horse pickets running the length of the eastern slope, the smoke of the cooking fires going straight up and hanging there in the still air with nowhere to go.
And over the old war council building, over the roof that had been patched and patched again, the banners hung.
They were crimson and black. Two serpents circling one another, each with the other’s tail in its mouth. Arran had seen the Campbell sigil on a burnt door not two seasons past, and the cold went down him from the neck to the knees.
Beside him Alexandra put her hand over her mouth and kept it there. Elsie’s arrow went onto the string. Christopher set his jaw and would not look at Morag, and Morag saw that he would not, and said nothing about it.
Arran sat his horse at the edge of the trees with his family four days behind him and all of it in front, and found that his heart had gone quiet, and that his hands were warm on the reins for the first time since the dungeons.
She had been right. Ian was here, in this valley, with his whole strength around him. He had never gone anywhere near Lachlan’s gates.
God help him. Alexandra had been right.