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15
“You wouldn’t do that,” I mumble. “That’s not how you’d react. You’d dosomething.” Danny glances at me, and I realize all I’m speaking are numb, broken sentences.
“Can you sit down, please?” Arabella loudly requests behind me. “We want to see the show.”
I turn to her. “Show?” My mouth is still numb, my brain somehow whirring too fast and too slow at the same time, interrupted by a series of constant jams. “This is— what?Show?”
“Yes, please.” She peers around me, studying the action on the green, and then remarks to Li, “Well, this is better than I envisioned.”
Blinking, it seems to take an age for her words to catch up to me. Blood is rushing to my face, and I’m dizzy with worry for Luke.This is better than I envisioned. “What do you mean?” I bite out. “Better than envisioned?” I stare at Arabella. She looks obscenely calm even though the rest of the crowd is losing its shit. And although I know it makes no sense, but with Arabella sitting beside Li as composed as an ice queen while her nemesis, the former Prince of Wales, is languishing, injured on the ground in front of us, I’m compelled to ask, “Was this you?”
Her sharp eyes meet mine. “The games,” she corrects in her usual prim, no-nonsense voice, “thegamesare better than I envisioned.”
This year’s Highland Games ends with Luke being escorted off the pitch in a stretcher. All around us is the babble and chatter of excitable teens. A polarizing figure has just been attacked in public — whether you care for Luke or not, it’s bound to spark debate.
And in the end, it’s never actually about Luke-the-boy I’ve grown to know intimately. It’s always Luke-the-symbol: the crownless wonder that the hopes and fears of the country are pinned upon, a cardboard cutout, a strawman, built to project opinions about constitutional monarchy onto instead of a human being with his own thoughts and feelings.
In a bid to see Luke, Danny and I rush hand in hand toward the green the moment teachers begin to direct us back to the castle. We watch him get taken into a small first aid tent, Finlay and Rory right beside him for support. I make a beeline for the tent, but the instant I pull back the flap, I’m met with a yell:
“No girls allowed!”
“He’s my…friend,” I try to explain, but it turns out that the person who wants me gone is Baxter, and this statement clearly doesn’t wash with her.
The small tent is already filled to the brim with people. On the stretcher is a groaning Luke, with Finlay crouched close beside him muttering soft words of comfort. Rory stands in a kind of burning, raging silence that suggests he would be ranting were it not for the presence of certain other people. He frowns down at his injured fellow chief, something like remorse tinging his expression. The school nurse bustles this way and that, gathering flannel and cloths into her arms. Baxter observes the whole scene with Callum smirking right beside her.
Baxter’s already forcing me out with the point of her finger. She doesn’t show the same contempt to Danny, who stands beside me.
“He did it on purpose,” I manage to blurt before I’m booted out, staring at Callum. Rory’s head swings around, his attention now on me. “I saw it happen from the stands. It was totally deliberate.”
“There is no evidence for that,” Baxter states coolly. “Now, if I must ask you to move again, Ms. Weir—”
I leave the tent with an angry growl, loudly swiping the flap open and the plastic sheeting crinkles shut behind me. I gaze out onto the empty pitch, the stands now quiet and deserted. At the very edge of the green is the winding loch, the rush of water a faint but soothing noise in the distance, and as I stare at the flow helplessly, its calmness stills my sick, racing heart.
“He’s not safe here.”
I turn around to find Rory standing at the tent entrance, his arms crossed over his chest. The whispering breeze toys at his kilt. “You were right,” he adds grimly. “I was too stubborn to see it — I wanted the status quo, for everything to return to normal. But you were right all along.” He meets my gaze, his eyebrows pinched in the middle. “Despite our attempts, it’s looking like Lochkelvin might not be right for Luke… and that breaks my heart.”
It sounds like it, too. Rory is somber, pensive, absolutely cut up that the castle in which he promised Luke sanctuary has cemented the opposite view instead. That danger could lurk within its walls and grounds.
“If it’d been a few more inches, Luke would have been a goner.”
“It’s what they want,” I note. “Antiro. Abdication isn’t enough. They want him gone.”
“It’s not even Antiro anymore,” Rory says quietly, gazing out into the loch with the same intensity I had only moments ago. “It’s anyone who believes in them. In their message. The bigger their platform, the more hate they can spread — and the more people are willing to buy into it.”
We’re silent after that. It’s odd to think that Luke, a popular chief, is more of a target now than I ever had been in Lochkelvin. People had been jerks to me, but at least they hadn’t tried to murder me out of ideological purity.
“You did good,” I tell Rory in a bid to change the subject. “The stone. You made it seem effortless.”
His mouth is a grim slash. “Lochkelvin things are…differentaround me.”
I stare at him, nonplussed. He speaks in riddles the same way Danny had, with that mysterious lilt, implying something bigger than I could comprehend.
“It can’t bethateasy.” For fun, I approach the large stone, which from my perspective is at least half my height. In the light, the stone glitters like granite. It looks so huge and bulky, a big fat oval, that I start to doubt thatanyonecould lift it, not even Rory.
There’s a small iron hoop of a handle at the very top of the stone. Feeling experimental, I lay my hand on the hoop and tug. I’m all too aware of Rory’s eyes tracking me. To my surprise, however — although the stone doesn’t budge from its position, seemingly fused with the ground beneath, I sense something strange deep within. Something that tells me what to do, what stance to take to lift it upright.
They’re suggestions — from somewhere — and the more I concentrate on the stone, the easier it is to hear them. I move my body into a position that feels natural, bending slightly as my hands never leave the stone’s bulk. My brows furrow as my palms trace its rough texture, searching for the point, the perfect place it wants me to locate.
