Page 36 of So Close To Heaven (Far From Home #11)

From the ridge where Alaric sat his horse, the English column stretched like a dull serpent along the lochside track—chain mail and spearpoints, creaking axles, the bawl of driven oxen. Three thousand men, and a tail of wagons so long a man might grow old counting them.

The reek of smoke and iron rode the damp air of the Great Glen. Ciaran edged his destrier upslope until their stirrups brushed. Mist filmed his hair and cloak.

“We canna break that head,” he said, frustration evident after three days trailing the enemy. “But a beast that long—aye, it bleeds easy at the tail.”

Alaric’s gaze never left the road. “Aye, we bleed it, but when? Where?”

A scout scrambled up through the bracken as if on cue, peat and muck as high as his knees.

“Laird! There’s a choke a half-mile north.

The track pinches hard to the water with an old birch stand on the slope and bog to the west. The wagons’ll have to slow for a burn crossing—rotten planks and slick stone. ”

“Guid,” Alaric said, drawing Ciaran’s gaze. “We make our cut there.”

Ciaran nodded and raised his hand, giving a sharp whistle which drew the MacKinlay and Kerr officers close.

Mathar, broad-shouldered and steady, bareheaded in the mist, drove his steed up the slope.

Mungan, the Kerr captain, lean as a fox and twice as hungry, came in Mathar’s wake.

Two more Alaric trusted with steel and his life, if need be—Neacal, all scars and scowl, and Petrus, young but quick with a bow—gathered as well.

Alaric spoke low and clean, no words wasted.

“?Tis time to move. Mathar, we’ll take a unit up among the birches and keep to the roots; the ground will swallow us if we dinna watch.

Arrows first, then steel when we spring.

We’ll break their back at the crossing. Ye want the wagons?

” He asked Ciaran, knowing that the first of the fight would happen there.

Ciaran nodded. “Aye, we’ll cut the traces, drive the oxen uphill into that gulley; they’ll take the carts with them and bog the lot. Nae heroics. Ruadh can hold the far flank and cut down any who try to form a line.”

Alaric turned to Neacal and Petrus. “Circle with a dozen, Torches when my horn sounds. Make them ken the shadows have teeth.”

“Ye take the rearguard,” Ciaran said to Mungan.

They checked girths and leather. Faces were smeared with peat, and steel was wrapped to keep from clinking.

Alaric drew his sword a thumb’s breadth and settled it again, the familiar weight right in his hand.

Below them the English moved with the tired arrogance of men who believed themselves too large and strong, safe from the hill and its wolves.

A flicker of hazel eyes came unbidden to him. Ivy in that chamber at Caeravorn nearly a week ago, her eyes shining and startled after he’d kissed her. Be safe , she’d said, small and fierce. He shut it away with a breath and put his heels to his horse.

Dusk sloped down the glen as they took their places.

Mist rose off the loch in the distance. The tail of the English column hit the pinch-point—the road squeezing to a slick spine of rock with the burn foaming white over black stone.

Wagons squealed and balked. The cattle slowed, hooves slipping.

The rearguard formed a lumpish hedge of spears to cover the crossing.

Ciaran raised his arm, fisted his hand, giving the silent signal.

The Kerrs and MacKinlays moved into position.

From the birch stand above, a hiss and a thrum, as Mathar’s first volley of missiles fell swift and hard.

Men shouted; one tumbled backward into the water.

Stones came next, the size of a man’s skull, loosed from ropes and levered roots, bounding and crashing down.

An ox bellowed, struck, staggered sideways; the wagon behind it skidded across the track and jamming the way.

Ciaran and his men erupted from the brush with swords and axes. Two slashes and a heave, and a yoke of oxen bolted, hauling a cart sideways into the bog. Mud sucked, wood groaned, and the cart tipped, spilling sacks of oats like dry sand.

“Now!” Alaric called out and put spurs to his destrier.

They went down the slope at a controlled slide, iron-shod hooves biting.

The English shouted and tried to form ranks, but the burn, the jammed cart, the sudden rain of arrows had made a tangle of them.

Alaric hit the first man like a hammer, his blade finding the narrow gap where helm met mail at the throat; the man folded as if the bone had gone out of him.

The second swung a scythe; Alaric shoved the weapon off course and drove his blade up beneath it.

The thrum of Mathar’s second volley reached him, arrows biting into the enemy’s side. A horse screamed—another’s mount, not his—and then was quiet.

Torches flared in the trees to the north, Neacal and Petrus and their unit ghosting through the dark, fireflies become wolves.

A ripple of panic ran the length of the wagons.

A call in English went up to form on the standard, but the flag was already in flight, its bearer bolting to save the silk, not the men.

“Dinna waste good steel on unarmored rabble!” Alaric heard Ciaran call out.

Alaric kept his horse moving, never standing to be surrounded, always carving diagonals through soft spots.

A lad with a face too smooth for hair beneath the helm tried to hold him, but Alaric’s blade checked the lad’s heartbeat.

The boy’s eyes widened. A thrust came for his knee.

He cut it aside and felled the boy who held it, then forced his horse through the break in the line.

A horn sounded—three short blasts. The withdrawal.

Alaric turned his head, checked the edges.

Mathar was already falling back, archers breaking into pairs under the birches.

Blair was limping, blood black on his hose but still planting men in the mud as he stepped backward.

Someone had set one cart too many alight; flame flared high and hungry, and an iron band snapped off a wheel, coursing through the air, meeting with one of the Kerr men.

“Go! Go!” Alaric roared, and the command cut through the din.

They peeled away in scattered groups, up the slope, back into the hills.

An English captain—brave or witless—tried to rally men for a chase; two of Ciaran’s infantry raced across the trail and plucked him from his saddle like a goose, and the notion died with him.

The forested hillock swallowed the Scots as if it were its job to do so.

They didn’t stop running until the hill had them safe.

Horses blew hard, men spat blood and wiped mud from their faces.

Mathar came at a half-jog, bow over his shoulder, three fletchings snapped.

“We’ve two down that willna rise,” he said, breathing steady, grief tucked tight where it belonged.

“Four hurt. Ruadh’s leg’s nicked—nae to the bone, though, thank God.

” He eyed the glow below. “And the English will sleep cold tonight.”

Blair trotted up, hair singed at the ends, grin white in the gloom. “They’ll ken our names by dawn,” he said. “Did ye see that captain with the boar badge? I’ve nae heard shrieking like that since—” He caught himself, sobered, and dragged a hand through his hair. “We hit well.”

Alaric slid from the saddle and let his sword hang point-down as he listened to the sounds below—the confused bellow of oxen trapped in their own traces, dying men crying out for help for an army that had deserted them.

“Nae well enough to grow drunk on it,” Alaric said to Blair.

Alaric wiped his blade on the damp heather and sheathed it.

His shoulders eased, just barely, as if the weight never left, only shifted.

The men saw only command, the unbending edge that never turned from blood.

They cheered him in their rough way, because such nights belonged to them.

He gave them a nod; leaders always gave nods when victory, however small, had been won.

Nearby, Ciaran likely did the same.

Inside, the familiar weariness stirred. Not the kind that bent a back, but the kind that sat behind the heart.

He had ridden on nights like this more years than he cared to number.

He had burned wagons, cut men from saddles, left widows in his wake—he was good at it.

Small victories, like this one at the tail but not the entire beast, never truly satisfied. But they kept the greater fight alive.

Alaric wiped his brow, reminding himself that if such skirmishes meant he would live to see his own keep again, perhaps they were victory enough.

Perhaps they would carry him back to the woman who, against his better judgment, had begun to thread herself into the spaces a greater weariness used to claim.

“Shift the camp,” he said, voice sharp again. “We hold the pine hollow till midnight, then cross the burn and take the high path. Nae fires. Water the horses deep.”

Mathar added, “Ruadh, ye ride nae farther than the ash stand; if that leg protests, I’ll bind ye to the saddle myself and send ye home.”

A few fatigued laughs answered.

“Mungan,” Ciaran called, “count what we took.”

Mungan had the tally at the ready. “Six carts ruined proper, two teams away into the hills, a crate of crossbow windlasses smashed, and their oats scattered for the birds—though three we claimed as our own.”

“Guid.” Alaric lifted his chin toward the dark road below.

“We’ll do the same at the next narrows, when they ken they’re safe again.

” Hopefully, by weeks’ end, the English army would be reduced by hundreds, as the Scots kept trimming their tail.

By the time the lion reached Urquhart, it would be limping.

“See the men fed,” Alaric said, turning away.