“It wasnae…” Lucas trailed off. “Cairn, it isnae the way it looks. He came at me. I swear it on me faither’s grave, he came at me out of the dark, and I only?—”
But the men at Ragnall’s back had seen one of their own lying dead with a Blythe blade standing over him, and the growl that tore out of their chests was a sound from somewhere south of reason.
A horn began to blow the muster, low and insistent, off in the dark where he could not reach it. And Ragnall felt the night tip, slow and certain, toward the edge of the cliff.
Olivia had lost him in the first ten seconds.
One moment, Ragnall’s hand had been tightly gripping hers, pulling her up the slippery bank; the next, the crowd had closed around them like dark water swallowing a dropped stone. She was suddenly alone in a heaving mass of bodies, firelight, and screams, pushed one way and pulled the other, her half-laced bodice clutched to her chest with one fist, her heart pounding painfully against her ribs.
She did the only thing her churning mind could fix upon—she went to find her brother.
She fought toward the center, ducking under a swung arm, shoving past a man who did not so much as see her, calling Lucas’s name into the din until her throat burned. An elbow caught her square across the cheekbone and lit her vision white, and she tasted blood, but she kept moving.
She clambered over the wreck of an overturned trestle. She put a weeping girl behind her into the arms of an older woman without breaking stride. And she came out at last into the open ground before the embers, and what she found there stopped her heart dead in her chest.
Her brother. And her husband. The two of them were facing each other across a dead man, both bloodied, both with bare steel naked in their hands and three hundred years of feud crouched between them like a beast about to be fed.
“He came at me,” Lucas was saying, his voice high-pitched, a boy again and no laird. “Ye have to believe me. I never?—”
“Step away from me man.” Ragnall’s voice came low and terrible, the voice she had heard from him exactly once before, on her wedding night, in the breath before he had killed Dougal Ross in the Great Hall. “Step back from him, lad, and put up yer blade, or God help me there’ll be nay holdin’ back what comes after.”
Olivia saw, with a clarity that turned the spinning world as slow as cold honey, the muscles bunch and gather in her husband’s sword arm. She saw the broad blade begin to lift. She saw two clans hang their entire bloody future on the next half-second, and her brother, her last living brother—her solemn, good, brave, foolish brother—stand frozen and white beneath the rising steel with his own sword forgotten in his hand.
“Daenae!”
It tore out of her raw and broke in the middle, then she was running, throwing her whole self across the open ground between the two of them with both bare hands extended in front of her, as if two bare hands had ever in the history of the world held back a war.
“Daenae! Please! Ragnall, please, it’s Lucas. It’s me braither! Daenae. I am beggin’ ye, daenae do this?—”
And Ragnall, with his blade at the very top of its terrible arc and his entire clan howling behind him for Blythe blood, went still as a stone cut from the hill. He looked at her. Only at her. Over the dead man’s body, the cold embers, and the smoking wreck of a month of hard-won peace, he looked at his wife, and the rest of the burning night fell away from both of them, leaving only that.
CHAPTER 33
It washer plea that stopped him.
Olivia had been called proud, fierce, a hellion bred of hellions, a witch, and many uglier names besides, muttered in the dark corners of his hall by his own folk. He’d heard her speak up and curse and argue, but never once in their strange marriage had he heard her beg.
And now she was begging him, his unbending wife, on her feet in the churned mud with her hands flung out and her bonnie face wet and ruined and a bruise blooming dark on her cheek, and the sound of it reached down into him past the blood-roar and the muster-horn and the thirty hard years of a warrior’s schooling, and it caught his hand at the top of its swing as surely as if she had laid her soft palm flat against the steel.
He paused for a moment that felt like a year to him, every muscle in his back and shoulders screaming, as if the full weight of hisclan’s anger was pressing down on him like a spring tide against a crumbling wall.
Then he lowered his sword.
“Hold!” he bellowed, and there was a raw and broken note in it this time that had not been there before. It carried where the cold command had not, cutting clean through even the blood-madness. “Stay yer hands, the lot of ye! Look here! Yer Laird is standing afore ye with his steel pointed at the ground. Will ye shame me, every man of ye, by liftin’ yers when mine is down?”
It was the thinnest thread he had ever asked to bear a weight in his life. He could feel it could go the other way, could feel the whole night balanced on the edge of a dirk. He kept his eyes hard on Lucas and let his blade sink the rest of the way slowly until the tip rested in the mud so that every soul could see it.
“Put it down, lad,” he said, quieter now. “Ye and me both, in the sight of them all. We daenae have to ken yet what had happened on this ground. We only have to be the two men in this glen with the stomach to refuse to make it worse. Can ye do that with me? Now?”
For one long beat, Lucas did not move at all. Then he opened his hand and let his sword fall from it to the trampled grass.
A great shudder ran visibly through both gathered clans at the sight of it, the two lairds standing weaponless over a dead man with the last of the firelight on their faces, and the war drew one ragged breath and held it.
“Now,” Ragnall continued, his voice flat and hard and carrying to both banks. “Somebody tell me what in the name of God happened on this ground. For I will have the whole truth of it laid bare afore another blade is drawn in this glen, and I will have it now.”
“There,” said a voice. “There it is. Look well, the lot of ye, for that’s how it’s done.”
It came out smooth and carried out of the Blythe ranks, terribly calm in the wreckage.
