Chapter Nineteen
The valley did not make a sound.
Alexandra sat her horse at the edge of the trees with her heart slamming and waited for the noise to start, and it did not start.
Below them a camp of Campbell men went on about its morning.
A man carried a pail. Two more were arguing over a fire.
Nobody looked up at the ridge, and the dread of that went through Alexandra colder than any shout would have.
It went on a heartbeat too long.
Then Rolland Murray stood in his stirrups with his father’s sword up over his head. He was weeping with fury at the sight of those banners over Liam’s roof. He did not trouble to hide one bit of it.
“For Murray Clan!”
The whole ridge answered him.
The sound that came out of that treeline went down into the valley ahead of them, and Alexandra felt it in her own chest. Then the horses were moving and the ground was moving and she had her sword out and her braid coming loose.
She was shouting with the rest of them without knowing what she shouted.
Arran was at her left knee. Christopher took her right.
They came down that slope in one line, and for a hundred paces it was the finest thing she had ever been part of. Her heart was enormous in her. She was not afraid at all, and she loved every soul on that hill.
Then the valley turned on them.
The first pit opened under the McKenzie horse to her left. It simply was not there and then it was, a black mouth in the grass with the sharpened stakes standing up out of it, and the animal went in headfirst and screamed, and the man went over the top of it and did not come up.
“Pits!” Elsie’s voice came from somewhere behind them. “Watch the ground!”
Alexandra hauled Splendor left. Another one opened. A third.
Then the earth on the eastern slope came apart in a long tearing line and threw dirt and stones the height of a man into the air.
The sound of it hit her a moment after the dirt did.
Her horse tried to go sideways under her, and she brought his head around by main strength, with both hands and her arms shrieking.
Men were screaming. Horses were screaming, which was worse.
Her eyes were streaming with the dirt and the terror of it.
She got them clear. Where the grass had been smooth there were now holes, and out of the holes men were rising, Campbell archers who had lain in them since before dawn under cut turf and had waited for the whole allied line to come down onto their range.
They shot at forty paces into a moving mass. Nobody could miss at forty paces.
Alexandra saw Hamish’s horse go down. She saw two Kincaid men she had eaten beside for a week go over backwards.
Her throat closed and the tears came and she did not slow, because slowing was death now, and because her brother’s face was in her head and would not get out of it.
The grief of it made her furious. The fury was easier to ride with.
The valley had been made into a weapon. Ian had built it and baited it and had let them walk down into it in a line.
“Alexandra!” Arran had come across in front of her. He had put himself and Valiant between her and the pits, which he had no business doing and had plainly decided upon before she had seen the danger at all. “The gap. Take the gap and dinnae stop for me.”
“And leave ye here? Are ye mad?”
“Take it! Will ye go?”
She took it. Splendor went through the gap in the archers’ line with Arran a length behind, and Christopher came after them, and then they were inside it, in among the tents, and the fighting closed over her head.
After that there was no shape to any of it.
A man came at her stirrup with a spear and she cut down at his hands and he let go of it.
Another one got hold of her boot. She got her heel into his face.
Splendor knocked a third one down without being asked to and went over him.
Her arm had already gone heavy and she had not been fighting three minutes.
She was frightened in a way that had nothing to do with dying.
She kept moving. She kept looking.
She was hunting one man in all of it and she knew exactly how mad that was and she did not care.
Ian Campbell had sent men to a burnt village.
He had put her mother on a wall. He had stood in a clearing and watched her brother go down in the wet grass.
She had thought about his face every single night since. She wanted it in front of her.
Then the crowd opened and she got it.
Ian Campbell came out from behind the war council building on a black warhorse, at an easy canter, with his sword already out.
Alexandra had expected—she did not know. Something else. A man in the middle of his own army, giving orders, protected. Ian Campbell rode into the worst of that field the way another man walks into his own hall.
A Murray rider went at him. Ian took him out of the saddle with one stroke, a short clean thing with no swing in it at all, and his blade was already turning towards the next man before the first one had finished falling.
There was no hurry in him. There was no anger in him either, and the absence of it was the most frightening thing she had ever seen on a man.
He looked like a man doing a piece of work he was good at and had been looking forward to.
That was the whole horror of it. He was enjoying himself, and it did not show as joy. It showed as ease.
And then he saw her across the field, and his face changed, and Ian Campbell smiled at her the way a man smiles at a guest arriving.
What went through Alexandra then was hatred, plain and whole, the first she had felt in her life for a living man. Her ears were roaring. Her hands had gone light.
She started towards him.
She got four strides. Then Ian’s eyes went off her and past her, and found Arran, and stayed there. He lifted two fingers to the men in the pits.
“Arran!” Alexandra screamed it across the whole field.
Arran heard her.
He had time to turn his head. He had time to see her coming at the gallop with her mouth open and her sword down and her face torn wide open with terror. He had time to think, quite clearly, that he had never once seen her frightened for herself.
Then the arrows came.
The first one took Valiant in the neck. The second and third went into his chest, and the great stallion did not scream.
He simply stopped, mid-stride, as though someone had told him to.
His head went down. Arran’s heart went with it.
Then his legs folded under him from the front, and the whole world tipped forward, and Arran went over the top of his horse’s head into the mud with his sword gone out of his hand.
He hit hard on his shoulder and rolled and came up onto one knee.
Valiant was down on his side, six feet away, still trying to get his forelegs under him. He got them under him twice. He could not do it a third time.
There was no time. There was no time at all, and Arran loved that animal. He knew already that the grief of it would come back for him on some quiet evening years hence and take him apart.
“I’m sorry,” he said to his horse, and got up.
Four men were already on him.
He had no sword. He had his dirk and he had the mud and he had the dead animal at his back stopping them coming around behind.
He used all three. He went at the nearest man low and inside, took him at the knee, and had the man’s own blade out of his hand before he had finished going down.
Arran came up out of the mud with it, roaring, and put it through the second man’s shoulder.
The third one opened his forearm from the elbow down. He did not feel it happen.
“Arran!”
Splendor came into the fourth man sideways at a canter and put him under. Alexandra was off and down beside Arran before the horse had stopped, and Christopher came in on the other side, and for a moment the three of them had a piece of that field to themselves.
“Ye’re cut. How bad is it?”
“’Tis nothin’.”
“It is nae nothin’—”
“Alexandra.” He got his shoulder in front of her. “Behind ye.”
Then the field went quiet in a circle around them, and Arran knew what it meant before he turned.
Ian Campbell had come down off his horse.
He stood in the mud in front of them with the arrow-holes in the ground either side of him and his men making room without being told. He was not even breathing hard. He looked at Christopher for a long moment. Something almost warm went over his face.
“Murdoch,” Ian said.
“Will ye stop callin’ me that?”
“’Tis yer name. Our father gave it tae ye and I’ve never once used another.
” Ian turned the sword over in his hand, unhurried.
“Do ye remember what he said tae me? At the end, when ye’d done what ye did tae him.
He said tae me that I was tae make ye watch.
Every soul ye loved, one after the other, and ye standin’ there able tae do nothin’ about any of it. ”
“Are ye mad? Is that what this is?”
“I’m patient. Folk confuse the two.” Ian’s eyes went sideways to Morag, who had come up on Christopher’s left with her blade out and her face white. “I’d have done it slow. A season apiece, and ye’d have had time tae grieve each one properly. But this will serve.”
He moved on Christopher. Christopher met him.
It lasted four strokes and Arran saw, sick, that Ian was better.
Not stronger. Better, in the way that a man who has done a thing every day of his life is better than a man who has done it when he had to.
He let Christopher come, gave ground twice on purpose, and then rolled his wrist and put Christopher’s guard three feet out of line and stepped past him entirely.
Straight at Arran.
Arran got the borrowed sword up. Ian came through it and cut him along the ribs, a shallow burning line under the mail, and Arran twisted away from it and went down on one knee in the mud for the second time.
Ian raised the blade.
An arrow took Ian Campbell in the shoulder, above the collarbone, with a sound like an axe going into wet wood.
“Get yer hands away from me brothers!”