Chapter Twenty
Ian Campbell looked up at the hill for the space of one breath.
Alexandra watched him do it. She watched him take in the archers on the crest, and her father’s banner going out along the ridge, and the whole shape of what had just landed on the back of his army. Then she watched him put it away again, like a man folding a letter he has already read.
Then he turned to the nearest of his captains.
“Kill the Murrays,” Ian said. “Every one of them ye can reach, and Seamus first if ye can get at him. I’d sooner have that than the field.”
“Me Laird, the north end’s gone—”
“Did I nae hear ye the first time?” Ian was already moving. “There’s a thing in it that pleases me. Every Murray that ever mattered is standin’ in this valley and we’re goin’ tae finish them here. Kill them in it. Bathe the valley in their blood!”
Alexandra went at him with her heart going like a hammer.
She got three strides. A Campbell man came in from her left and she took his arm off at the elbow without slowing, and then there were four of them between her and Ian and she could not get through. She was screaming at him over their heads until her throat tore.
Ian did not look back at her. He swung up onto the black horse.
“I’ve wanted Seamus Murray since I was a lad,” he said, to nobody in particular, in the same pleasant voice. “I’ve thought about it more than is good for a man.”
Then he was gone into the smoke, and the men closed in front of her, and Alexandra stood in the mud with her arms shaking and howled at him. She had never hated anything so much in her life.
What happened after that, she could only ever put together afterwards, in pieces, from what people told her.
Catriona came out of the smoke on foot with blood down one side of her face. She put her shoulder into the man on Alexandra’s right. The two of them went down together in the mud, and Catriona came up, and the man did not. She was already turning. “Go on!” she shouted. “Alexandra, GO ON!”
Elsie’s arrows came in over their heads, close enough that Alexandra felt the last one go past her ear. She was so grateful she could have wept.
Rolland Murray brought what was left of the Murray riders across the front of the war council building at a gallop and split the men in front of her clean apart. He was bleeding from a wound above the eye and had not noticed it. He got his horse around and came back through them the other way.
Christopher and Morag came up on the left together, and they fought like one person with two swords, and Alexandra loved the pair of them so hard in that moment that her throat ached with it.
Morag would take a man’s guard out of line and Christopher would put him down and neither of them looked at the other once.
“THE HORSE!” Morag shouted. “Alexandra! The black horse, he’s turnin’!”
Then Arran was beside her with a dead man’s sword in each hand.
“Together?” he said.
“Aye.”
They went through the opening, and it closed behind them, and her heart was in her mouth, and there was nothing in the world in front of them but Ian Campbell.
He had come down off the black horse again. He had a bad wound in his left thigh that one of the Murrays had given him in the smoke, and his shoulder had gone dark where Elsie’s arrow had come out of it. He was still faster than either of them.
He put Arran into the mud with the flat of his blade across the temple, and the terror that went through her at the sight of it was worse than anything in the whole day.
Then Alexandra was on him.
She did not fight him as she had been taught.
She fought him as she had wanted to since a clearing in a Campbell forest, in the worst season of her life.
She came inside his guard and took a cut along her ribs to get there.
She got her shoulder under his arm. His bad leg went out from under him.
He came down onto one knee in the churned mud in front of her.
Alexandra put the point of her sword against Ian Campbell’s throat.
The whole valley went away. Her heart was slamming and she could hear nothing else at all.
She could hear her own blood. Her hands were perfectly steady. She noticed that they were steady, and her mother’s voice came into her head, saying steady hands are a gift you get twice in a life and you had best know what to do with them.
“Rory McKenzie,” she said. “Say his name.”
Ian looked up at her.
He was grey with the leg. His mouth was bloody.
He was not frightened. That was the thing she would think about for years, long after there was nothing left to be afraid of.
He knelt in the mud with a blade at his throat and he looked up at her with mild interest, as though she were a hand of cards he had not expected.
“Rory,” Ian said.
“Say it!”
“I’ll tell ye somethin’ about Rory McKenzie,” Ian said. “If ye put that through me neck, he rots in his cell.”
The world stopped. Her heart stopped with it.
Alexandra stood with her arm out and her sword at his throat and every single thing in her went still and cold and white.
“What did ye say.”
“Did ye nae hear me?”
“He’s dead.” Her voice had gone to nothing. “He’s dead. I was there. I watched ye—”
“Ye watched me put a sword intae him,” Ian said.
“Aye. Ye did. Ye didnae stay tae watch what came after, though, for me traitorous brother there had ye up on a horse and away.” He tipped his head very slightly.
“A lad of that name is more use breathin’.
His father would ride intae the sea for him.
I’ve kent that since the day I took him. ”
“Ye’re lyin’.”
“I might be.”
“YE’RE LYING!”
“I might be lyin’,” Ian agreed. “Ye’ll never ken. That’s all I’ve got left, lass, and I’d rather have it than the valley.”
Her arm was shaking now. Her eyes had filled and she could not see him properly. She could not lower the sword. She could not push it forward either. She stood in front of him with her whole life balanced on a man’s word, and could not make herself move.
Rory. Alive. In a cell. Somewhere. The hope of it came up in her so fast and so cruel that she thought she might be sick.
Ian Campbell watched her face and saw the exact moment it took hold of her. He smiled. He came up off his knee with a dirk in his good hand.
Alexandra did not see it.
Arran did.
Arran came up out of the mud roaring.
There was no craft in it and no plan. He came across that ground the way a man crosses the last of anything, with blood down the side of his head and one shoulder dropped and a sound tearing out of him that Alexandra would hear in her sleep for years.
Men turned for it the length of the field. Ian Campbell turned for it too.
He was fast even then. The dirk came up and opened Arran’s forearm to the bone as he came past it, and Arran did not so much as check.
He put his sword through Ian Campbell’s back and out through his chest, and leaned on it until the hilt met the mail.
Ian stopped.
He looked down at the blade standing out of his own body with something almost like curiosity. The dirk went out of his hand into the mud. He tried to say a thing, and could not, and Alexandra never did learn what it was going to be.
Then Arran took the sword out, and Ian Campbell went down on his face in the ground he had wanted more than anything in the world.
Nobody cheered. There was no relief in it, and Alexandra stood there waiting for some and none came.
The fighting around them was still going on and the noise of it went on going on, but in that small space nobody moved for a moment.
Elsie came through the smoke with her bow still in her hand.
She stopped a few feet short. She looked down at her brother lying in the mud with his hair across his face. She did not kneel. She did not weep. She did not go any nearer.
“I never kent him at all,” Elsie said. “I was a bairn when our mother took us out of that house. I’ve nae one memory of him that belongs tae me.
” She looked down a moment longer. “I’ve wondered what he’d have been, if he’d come away with us.
Grown up in the Kincaid yard and got shouted at by Aila for tramplin’ her herbs, the same as the rest of us. ”
Elsie’s face was wet and she did not touch it. Then she turned around and went back into the fighting, and Christopher went after her, and Alexandra’s heart broke for the pair of them.
Alexandra’s legs went out from under her.
She did not remember sitting down. She was on the ground in the mud with the cut along her ribs starting to make itself known. Arran was down there with her. She had a fistful of his shirt and could not let go of it.
“Was he lyin’.” She was sobbing so hard that the words came out in pieces. “Arran. Was he lyin’ tae me?”
“I dinnae ken, lass. How could I ken?”
“He said he’s alive. He said Rory’s—”
“I ken what he said. Do ye want me tae say it back tae ye?”
“If he was lyin’ I’ve let him die for nothin’, and if he wasnae then me brother has been in a hole in the ground for—” Her whole face came apart. “For weeks, Arran. Weeks. While I’ve been ridin’ about this country hatin’ a dead man.”
Arran got both arms around her and held on.
“Then we’ll search,” he said, into her hair.
“Every building in this valley and every hole under it. If he’s here, we’ll have him out before dark.
If he isnae here, we’ll take the next place and the next one, and I’ll nae stop, and neither will ye.
Do ye hear me? If yer brother is alive in this world, we will find him. ”
She cried into his shoulder in the middle of a battlefield with her father’s men all around her. She did not care who saw it. She did not stop for a long while.
The fighting ended slowly, as these things do.