Chapter Nineteen #2
Elsie Kincaid stood on the ruin of a cart forty paces off with her bow already bent again, and her face was terrible. She was crying. She did not stop shooting. Three more arrows came in around Ian and put his men back on their heels.
Ian Campbell looked down at the shaft in his own shoulder.
Then he looked up the field at his sister.
Nobody in Arran’s sight moved for a moment.
Elsie had the string at her cheek and she did not loose.
Her whole body was shaking with it. Arran had known her since he was eleven years old and he had never once seen her hesitate over a shot in her life.
He understood, with the field burning around him, exactly what she was looking at.
Not a Campbell captain. Her own brother, born of the same father as Christopher, with her arrow standing out of him.
“Isla,” Ian said.
“Dinnae.” Her voice cracked across that whole ground. “Dinnae ye say it!”
He took hold of the shaft and drew it out of himself. He did not flinch. He dropped it in the mud without looking at it.
Then his men closed around him, and he was up on the black horse again, and the moment was gone.
What came after that was worse.
The Campbells had the numbers and now they had the shape of it too.
Arran got his back to a tent pole with Alexandra on one side and Christopher on the other and fought where he stood, and every time he got a look at the wider field it had gone further wrong.
Rolland was cut off near the burn with a knot of Murray men around him.
Catriona was down on one knee, up again, down again.
Morag was on foot, Feeroch gone. Elsie’s archers had been driven off the cart and back towards the trees.
Ian rode through his own men and out the other side of them, cutting, and wherever he went the allied line bent away from him.
He came around for Arran a third time.
Alexandra put Splendor across his path.
Arran shouted at her and she did not hear him or did not care. Ian did not even slow. He took her horse’s bridle with his off hand as he passed and hauled, and Splendor’s head came around, and Alexandra went out of the saddle sideways and hit the ground on her back hard enough that Arran heard it.
He was already moving. He had a man in front of him and he went through him without looking at his face.
Alexandra got up.
She got up with mud all down one side and her braid gone entirely and her sword still in her hand. Arran, running, felt his heart turn right over at the sight of her. He was more afraid in that moment than at any point in the whole terrible morning.
Ian came off the black horse to meet her, which he did not have to do, and which told Arran everything.
They came together in the mud. Ian was taller and stronger and rested, and he toyed with her. He let her come at him twice and turned both of them aside with an economy that made Arran want to be sick.
“Ye took me brother!” Alexandra was sobbing and swinging. “Ye took Rory, and he was a lad, and he never—”
“I ken exactly who he was.”
“I’ll have yer life for it!”
“Ye’ll try.” Ian caught her blade high and held it there, and leaned into it, and his voice never went above the ordinary.
“And when ye’re done tryin’, lass, I’ll take the rest. Yer father’s ground.
Yer mother’s hall. Yer wee Kincaid, and what’s left of me own family, and every acre me uncle held and a great deal that he never had the wit tae want. ”
Arran killed the last man between them and came in at Ian’s flank with the borrowed sword.
Ian gave ground for the first time.
He stepped back and put himself where the two of them could not come at him together. He looked around the valley. He laughed. It was a small laugh, and it was pleasant, and it was the worst sound on that field.
Arran followed his eyes and understood why.
Rolland, cut off. Elsie driven into the trees.
Christopher and Morag back to back with a ring of Campbell men closing on them.
Catriona on her knees in the mud with a man standing over her.
The Kincaid warriors he had brought south with him, all of them, hunted across that valley floor in ones and twos.
They had lost. He looked at it and he knew it, and beside him he heard Alexandra’s breath go out of her as she saw the same thing.
Then the light went off the ground.
It was there and then it was gone, for less than the space of a breath, as though a cloud had crossed, and Arran looked up because every man on that field looked up.
The sky over the western hill was full of arrows.
They came down into the Campbell rear like hail onto a slate roof, and that side of the valley came apart in shouting.
Arran got his hand up against the light and saw them strung out along the crest. Murray archers, and Flora Murray herself at the head of them with her arm going up and coming down.
Seamus stood beside her, and Finn McKenzie’s banner was going out along the ridge to the north.
Beside him Alexandra made a sound like a laugh and a sob together, and her face was wet, and the relief coming off her was so plain that it hurt him to look at.
Arran put his hand flat on her back and left it there, and gave himself one breath before he picked the sword up again.