Page 68 of The Shape of Silence

The Scots struck in small violent pockets throughout the camp before the English could organize ranks or shields. Arrows flew constantly from the tree line where several mounted Thain archers remained partially concealed amongst the pines. Wagons caught fire one after another as torches and oil were hurled beneath canvas covers and grain sacks. Smoke thickened rapidly beneath the forest canopy while terrified horses broke loose and tore blindly through the encampment dragging ropes and shattered stakes behind them.

Morggán glimpsed Lucas briefly near the center of the confusion cutting down two men beside a burning cart with brutal efficiency before disappearing again through the smoke.

An English horn finally sounded somewhere farther north through the trees. Another answered it within seconds.

Already the mac Ruaidhrí and the Thains were breaking away in disciplined groups exactly as planned even as Morggán and Lucas’s voices rose above the nose to shout for them to go. Several wagons burned fiercely enough now that thick black smoke rolled upward through the trees while English soldiers shouted conflicting orders through the confusion trying desperately to form proper lines.

Morggán wheeled his horse sharply uphill toward the forest slope just as several mounted English riders finally burst through the northern timber attempting pursuit. One came dangerously close, sword raised high enough to catch weak daylight along the blade. Morggán barely turned in time to catch the strike against his own sword with a jarring crash that shot pain straight through his healing ribs. But then his horse slipped half a step in the churned mud near the burning wagons, opening enough space for Morggán to drive his blade brutally beneath the man’s raised arm. Blood sprayed hot across Morggán’s hand as the rider toppled sideways from the saddle.

Then arrows hissed from the trees above. Two more pursuing English riders collapsed almost simultaneously before the rest wisely reined back from the forest edge altogether as the archers covered their retreat.

The Scots vanished uphill amongst the trees moments later.

Behind them smoke and shouting still consumed the rear English encampment while burning wagons crackled loudly beneath the pines.

Finlay laughed breathlessly somewhere ahead through the trees. “Christ, did ye see them scrambling?”

“Aye,” Tormod called back darkly. “Like kicked ants.”

Morggán’s pulse still hammered hard from the brief clash while sweat cooled rapidly beneath his tunic despite the morning chill. For one dangerous instant during that collision he had genuinely thought the English rider might drive him backward beneath the horse line and pin him there before the others could turn.

And what had flashed through his mind in that instant had not been Ard Cael, not his mother or sisters or even Robert Bruce or Scotland’s freedom.

He’d thought of Avery, saw her standing inside her derelict bothy, saw the fire beside the narrow bed, pictured Charlie asleep near the hearth. Clear as day, he’d pictured Avery standing in the dim light with damp strands of hair against her cheek watching him as though reluctant to see him leave.

The realization struck him with no small amount of severity as the riders pressed deeper into the forest once more.

Years earlier, when he was scarcely more than a green lad himself, he remembered Tormod saying something not long after a battle that had nearly destroyed them all. The fighting had turned ugly before noon and worse by dusk, their smaller force driven hard against marshland while English cavalry closed in on them from three sides. Morggán still remembered the awful certainty that death would find him there amidst muck and blood and screaming horses.

Afterward, once the surviving men regrouped beside the riverbank, Tormod had glanced across at him and snorted quietly. “Christ, lad, ye look like ye’ve seen the Devil himself.”

Morggán, still half sick from what they had barely escaped, had muttered, “I kent I’d never see home again. Saw my mother’s face clear as if she stood before me.”

To his surprise, Tormod had laughed softly at that. “Och, then ye’ve sense enough after all.”

Morggán remembered frowning at him while wiping blood from his hands.

Tormod had shrugged then, looking back toward the field behind them where the dead lay thick beneath the darkening sky. “When death comes near,” he’d said, “a man sees what matters most to him. If ye see nae one at all, well, then, lad, ye fight for nae one and might as well lay down yer sword.” He’d spat into the grass. “That’s a poor way for a man to live.”

Chapter Seventeen

Sleep would not come.

Avery lay awake beneath the familiar weight of furs she herself had stitched and mended over the years, listening to the distant sounds of an army settling for the night beyond the walls of the house. Somewhere a horse stamped impatiently against the earth. Men laughed around one of the closer campfires before the sound drifted away into the darkness. A horse whinnied once, answered by another further away. Eventually even those noises faded until only the steady crackle of the dying fire and the sighing wind through the pines remained.

Ordinarily the familiar sounds of the forest calmed her. Tonight they seemed only to leave more room for her own thoughts.

William Wallace.

She closed her eyes tightly, as though doing so might somehow silence the name, and the preposterous idea that came with it. It was ridiculous, she knew.

History was full of repeated names. She herself had known two girls named Emily in school, three boys named Michael, and more than one Mr. Anderson. Surely there had been dozens, perhaps hundreds, of men named William Wallace. It proved nothing beyond coincidence, and she felt almost embarrassed for the wild thoughts that distressed her so badly.

Yet she could imagine nothing to give her assurance that what she outrageously imagined was not the case. Instead her mind wandered frantically back across the last ten years, gathering things she had never before thought to put together—the language, the clothing, the absence of every ordinary convenience she had once taken for granted.

For years she had explained everything to herself in the simplest way she knew. Something terrible must have happened while she'd been lost. Society had changed, people had changed. She had survived because she had been isolated, and with every passing season the life she'd once known had slipped a little farther away until remembering it required effort, and her present condition—in this life—seemed less and less strange.

The alternative was so completely impossible that she refused to shape it into direct words, even inside her own thoughts. Still, people did not simply move from one century into another. Such things belonged in novels and films and childish fantasies, not in the real world.