Chapter Twenty #2
The Campbell line broke at the north end first and then along the burn, and after that it was not a battle any more but a great deal of shouting and men putting their weapons down in ones and twos.
Rolland had them penned in the horse lines before the light started to go.
He wept once, briefly, where he thought no one could see him, and then he went back to work.
The wounded came into the war council building because it was the only roof standing that would hold them, and Morag took charge of that without being asked and did not sit down again all evening.
Alexandra’s father found her.
Finn McKenzie came across that ground with his helmet gone and his sword arm hanging. He did not say anything. He put his hand on the back of her head and held it there, and Alexandra felt her father shaking. She had never once in her life felt that.
They came in around her one at a time as the light went.
Elsie with her quiver empty. Christopher with his arm strapped by Morag.
Catriona, limping badly. She had crossed that whole valley on a leg that would trouble her for the rest of her life, and she was grinning like a fool.
Rolland with the cut over his eye stitched crooked and already going purple.
Seamus and Flora Murray, together, holding hands like young people.
Alexandra got hold of Arran’s sleeve before he could stand.
“Dinnae tell me father,” she said, very low. “Nae yet. If we’re wrong, I’ll have killed him twice.” Arran looked down at her for a moment and then he nodded once, and she let go of the sleeve.
He stood up in front of all of them.
“Laird McKenzie,” he said. “I want every building in this valley opened. Every storeroom and every cellar under it, every hut, every byre, every place a man could put a door and a bar on it. Tonight. I dinnae ken this ground. I’ll want somebody who does.”
“There’s the old monastery at the head of the valley,” Flora Murray said. “Ye’d walk past it and never take it for a building at all.”
“Then that’s where I’ll start. I’ll take the eastern side myself.”
“For prisoners?” her father said.
“For prisoners.”
Finn McKenzie looked at his daughter sitting in the mud with her arms around her knees, and then he looked back at Arran, and something went over his face that Alexandra had never in her life seen him show to that man.
“Aye,” he said. “We’ll open every door of it.”
It was Flora Murray who found the monastery door. She had known that building long before she was ever a Murray, in the years when she was a rebel in the Lost Valley herself, against Campbell’s tyranny. She did not search for it. She walked to it the way a woman walks to a room in her own house.
It stood at the head of the valley where the ground began to rise.
It was a low building with half a roof that the rebels had used for shelter since before Alexandra was born.
The Campbells had put a new bar on the outside of it.
Flora had come up that slope with Finn and Catriona and a handful of Murray men.
She saw the bar. She put her hand on it and stopped.
“There’s a bar on the outside,” Flora said, “of a building with nothin’ in it.”
They took it down.
Alexandra was halfway up the valley when the shouting started. She ran the rest of it. She fell twice on the wet ground and got up both times without slowing.
There were lanterns in the doorway and men coming out of it carrying other men, and Alexandra was so frightened of what she would find that her legs nearly went again. A man was calling for water. Another was being sick against the wall.
Catriona came out of the dark of that doorway and her face was wet and shining and she was laughing and crying at the same time, and got hold of Alexandra with both hands.
“He’s here!” Catriona said. “Alexandra, he’s here, he’s alive, he’s in there—go on, go tae him!”
Alexandra went past her.
The inside of the place smelled of stone and old smoke and worse things.
Her father was down on his knees on the floor at the far end with a lantern beside him.
There was a man on the straw in front of him.
Finn McKenzie had his face in his hands, and he was making a sound Alexandra had never heard out of him in her whole life.
She went down onto the floor beside him.
Her brother looked up at her.
He was so thin. That was the first thing, and the grief of it went through her like a blade.
She was glad of the poor lantern light. His face had gone down to the bone.
His hair had been cut off badly with a knife.
There was a wound in his side that had been bound and rebound with rags.
One of his hands was wrong. His face had not been near a razor in all that time.
He looked at her for a long moment, as though he had to make certain. His eyes filled.
“Alex,” Rory said.
She could not speak. Then she was laughing and crying at once, neither of them properly, and she got her arms right around him and held on hard enough to hurt them both.
He made a sound into her shoulder that she had not heard out of him since he was a boy.
She put her forehead against his and stayed there.
Her brother’s hand came up and took a fistful of the back of her cloak, and neither of them said one word for a long time.
“Ye came,” Rory said at last.
“Of course we came, ye daft lad. Did ye think we’d nae come?”
“I kent ye would.” His voice was almost nothing. “He told me they’d come. He said it every day.”
Alexandra pulled back enough to see his face.
“Who did?”
“Liam.” Rory’s chin went. “Liam. They had him in the cell with me these last weeks.”
Behind her she heard Rolland make a sound and go very quiet.
“Rory.” Alexandra had her hand on the side of his face. “Rory. Where is he?”
Her brother started to cry then. It frightened her, because it was silent and his face barely moved.
“He’s dead,” Rory said. “He went a few nights back. I couldnae tell ye which one, I’ve lost the count of them.
” He got his breath. “He wouldnae let me change the bandage at the end. He said ‘twas his time and he’d had a full life and he’d nae have anyone bein’ sad over him.
” His mouth twisted. “He named them all. Errik, and his sister, and Ewan that carried the powder at Kilmorack. And Rolland. He was that far gone he thought I was some lad they’d put in with him, and he changed me bandages with his own hands for weeks before he couldnae, and he never once kent whose they were. ”
Nobody in that room said anything at all. Rolland had his hands over his face and his shoulders were going.
“And what did he say tae ye?” Rolland asked. He had come up behind them and he was on his knees now too. “At the end. Liam. What did he say?”
Rory looked up at him.
“He said they were comin’,” Rory said. “He said this valley’s been taken before and it wasnae finished then and it wasnae finished now.
And he said hope doesnae die in this place.
” His face went. “Men die in it. That’s a different thing altogether.
That’s what he said tae me, and I didnae believe one word of it, and I told him so, and he just went on sayin’ it. ”
“Alex.” Rory got his hand round her wrist. “The clearin’.”
She went very still.
“I ken what ye’ve been carryin’. I’d naught else tae do down there but think on it.” He had to stop for his breath. “I turned because it was yer voice. I’d have turned every time, and I’d turn again the morrow. Dinnae ye dare make that intae a thing ye did tae me.”
“Rory—”
“Nay. Ye’ll take it.” His chin went. “I’m nae sayin’ it twice.”
Alexandra put her arms around her brother in the ruin of that building and held on.
Someone had carried her saddlebag up from the horses. She got it open one-handed, without letting go of him, and took out the cloak she had carried since the morning she left Murray Keep, folded, all that way, because there had been nowhere on this earth to lay it down.
She put it round his shoulders.
Rory looked down at it. Then he got a corner of it in his fist, the way he had taken hold of the back of hers, and he kept it there.
Outside, the valley was full of lanterns going along in lines, all the way down to the burn, men calling to each other in the dark as they opened one door after another.
She had come here to kill a man. She had thought too much on this journey, about what she had lost and what it had cost and who owed her for it. She had been wrong about nearly every part of it.
Her brother was breathing against her shoulder.
She had come the whole of that road wanting a reckoning, and she had been handed her brother back instead, and she was a long time letting go of him.