Page 5 of The Shape of Silence

“Half-cocked plans are nae fashionable,” Alasdair remarked dryly.

Finlay’s mouth twitched. “The men will follow him,” he said, more serious now. “They always do.”

“They will,” Morggán agreed. “And so will we.”

That earned him a look from each of them, in different measures. Eòin’s was thoughtful. Donnchadh’s was resigned. Alasdair’s was openly skeptical.

“Ye dinna like it,” Alasdair said.

“Nae,” Morggán said. “I dinna.”

“Then why will we do it?” Finlay asked.

Because although the Earl of Caerwyll was not a man they would have followed by choice, he was a man whose banner gathered others. Because his family had held its lands for generations and lost them, and taken them again, and there were men in the camp who had come for that name. Because Scotland’s need outweighed their own, and because turning away from the earl would not weaken only him, but split what little strength they had left. Because politics did not stop at the edge of a battlefield, no matter how much soldiers wished it would.

Morggán did not say any of that out loud. They already knew all that.

“Because we dinna get to choose the war we’re in,” he said instead. “Only how we stand in it. And we dinna run from a fight or a chance to strike them.”

Alasdair scraped a line through the dirt with his boot, ruining Eòin’s careful work. “Aye, but he’s moving too fast, counting on what scouts report,” he said, “with nae further investigation.”

“Aye,” Donnchadh said quietly. “And that’s when men get dead.”

For a moment, none of them spoke.

Then Eòin rose from his haunches and said, “If it all goes to hell, ye’ll want us on the left. The ground breaks there. We can hold longer, or break more easily, and hie to the forest.”

Morggán looked at him, and then at the others, and felt the familiar, unwelcome tightening in his chest that came when men began planning for ways to improve another man’s bad idea. God, what he wouldn’t give to be embedded with the Nicholson or the Thains instead of Caerwyll. “Aye,” he said at last. “And give ʼem hell as best we can.”

Alasdair’s grin returned, crooked and unrepentant. “Och,” he said, “and if we’re to be scattered to the winds or to the heavens, I’d rather it be in guid company.”

Finlay snorted again and glared at Alasdair. “I’m nae dying next to ye—Jesu, and living all eternity with yer blathering in my ear?” He shook his head, his lips forming a thin, unhappy line.

Alasdair’s cocky grin improved, and he pointed a scolding finger at Finlay. “And dinna be seeking death on yer own, trying to escape me.”

Morggán let himself smile at that, just a little. But Alasdair’s fun did not make the plan better. Certainly, it didn’t make the morning safer. But it reminded him why he trusted these men to stand where he stood, and why, when the blood started spurting, they would know to look for one another.

“Get some rest,” he said. “Whatever tomorrow brings, we canna expect it will go as easily as Caerwyll predicts.”

They broke away then, one by one, back into the necessary, familiar business of making themselves ready. Morggán remained where he was for a moment longer, looking out toward the dark beyond the fires, and wondered—not for the first time—how many decisions were made by men who would not be the ones to pay for them.

***

Morggán knew before they reached the bottom of the slope that the day was going to be shite.

The valley ahead of them should have held a thin line of wagons and a light escort, something that could be struck hard and broken apart before the English had time to gather themselves properly. Instead, as the Scots came down out of the higher ground, he saw banners where there should not have been banners, and lines forming where there should have been confusion. The sound carried upward to them, not the loose noise of a camp caught unaware, but the heavier, steadier din of men who had already taken their places and were waiting.

He reined in and looked again, counting by tens, taking in the spacing, the way the ground was being used. There were more of them than there should have been. Worse, there was movement to the left, where the trees thinned and the land opened, and a moment later he understood why the air had begun to tremble beneath the hooves. Cavalry was coming in where there shouldn’t have been any at all.

Someone had been wrong. Or someone had lied.

Orders were already moving down the line, and there was no clean way to stop what had begun. The front ranks were too far forward, the banners too visible, the moment for doubt already behind them. They went in because there was nothing else to do that didn’t promise something worse.

The first clash was hard and brief and did nothing to change the shape of what lay ahead of them. The English line didn’t buckle. It held, and then it pressed back, and when the horsemen struck from the flank the fight broke open into something that wasn’t going to be easily mended.

Then the horsemen came in from the left.

He saw them only in pieces at first—the movement between trunks, the flash of steel, the sudden rise of sound—and then they were on them, driving into the flank with weight and speed, splitting what little shape the Scots still had. The fight stopped being a push and became a crush, and then it became a scramble for any ground that was not already taken.