Page 43 of The Shape of Silence

They spoke of nearby Scottish positions, of roads and likely routes, of supply lines and timing.

“Lucas Thain is nearest,” Donnchadh said. “We crossed paths with his company a day and a half south from here. Marching toward MacClellan lands.”

“If we can bring the Thain army up,” Tormod suggested, “we might turn north together and catch that English force before they cross deeper inland.”

Morggán nodded once before his gaze swept briefly over the men gathered near the fire, naught but a third his army, it seemed. He nearly dreaded the answer, assuming they’d lost many in Caerwyll’s hare-brained scheme, but had to ask, “Where are the rest?”

“It took near two days to gather the company proper after the skirmish,” Tormod answered immediately. “Bloody confusion after ye vanished, and aye, we lost a dozen plus one, our lads gone—Harry has the accounts.” A faint grimness crossed his weathered face.

Morggán could picture it easily enough. The fighting had been brutal and scattered once the English cavalry pushed them toward the forest.

“I gathered what men I could and pulled them west to regroup,” Tormod continued. “Once we kent ye were missing, I split the companies.” He gestured vaguely southward as he spoke, counting them off almost absently. “Blair took his unit east toward the river crossings, toward Maighread’s Pass and the old Roman road besides. Thought perhaps ye’d been driven that direction. Seoras and Malcolm rode north with another score to search the low hills and shepherd tracks.” Tormod’s mouth tightened slightly. “Eòin the Elder has another company sweeping west along the pine valleys,” Tormod went on. “And Callum took riders south to seek word from nearby clans and any villages that might’ve seen signs of battle survivors.”

“We kept the largest company together,” Donnchadh finished, “on the chance ye still lived and attempted to return toward the original ground.”

Silence settled briefly afterward. Morggán looked into the fire a moment, absorbing the shape of it all. Nearly two hundred men spread now across half the countryside searching for him while England marched somewhere northward through the forests unchecked.

And thirteen of his own men lost to an ill-conceived fight. The line of his mouth thinned.

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“Aye. Send six riders to find Thain,” he decided after a moment. “If he’s nae bound to another task, bring him back here. We’ll track the English from this forest.”

Tormod nodded. “And I’ll pull in our own,” he said. “Might be days before they’re tracked and brought back.”

“Aye,” Morggán agreed.

The discussion carried on awhile longer after the decision was made, men dispersing only gradually once tasks and watches had been assigned. Riders were selected and dispatched toward Lucas Thain and the scattered mac Ruaidhrí units while others began settling the horses more securely among the trees. There was, not unexpectedly, talk of the fight that had separated them, of Caerwyll’s ineptness.

Having stewed about this himself for nearly a week, Morggán listened with only half his attention. The other half drifted to thoughts of Avery, and this crowding of her space.

At length he excused himself from the circle of men and crossed the clearing alone. The nearer he came to the house, the more sharply he became aware of the contrast between the quiet life she had built here and the intrusion now surrounding it. Horses shifted among the trees where before there had been only birdsong. Strange voices drifted constantly through the forest. A quick glance into the deeper forest beyond her house showed a sprinkling of canvas cropping up, tents already being erected.

He reached the door and knocked once against the frame before entering.

Avery sat near the small fire with Charlie sprawled beside her feet, one hand on the scruff of the hound’s neck, as if to calm either the hound or herself, while she stirred her watery stew with her other hand. She looked up immediately at Morggán’s entrance, but said nothing, only stared at him unblinking.

The hut itself felt smaller now somehow after standing among so many men outside.

Morggán began to close the door behind him but then decided against it, not wanting to add fuel to existing suspicions.

“I owe ye an apology,” he said, his back to the entrance, blocking an outsider’s view. “For this,” he continued, gesturing vaguely over his shoulder. “Ye took in one wounded man and now have half an army at yer door.”

Her gaze lowered briefly toward Charlie’s head beneath her hand. “I...it’s not that I didn’t believe you about an army, but I didn’t bother to...” she paused and shrugged, “to imagine it. It’s...I don’t know.”

Despite himself, Morggán nearly smiled. “Aye, mayhap it’s a spectacle to someone who has isolated herself for so long.”

Her gaze snapped to his. “I haven’t isolated—” she began.

“Ye have, Avery,” he countered. “Ye said yerself ye dinna go beyond certain points—ye’d never stepped foot upon the meadow ere two days past.” He let that be it—that wasn’t why he’d come. “Are ye frightened of the army, Avery? Do ye believe I would let harm come to ye?”

She shook her head almost at once but didn’t answer with words. Instead, she stared down toward the stew hanging above the coals, her expression tightening in a manner he’d begun to recognize.

“It’s all...” She stopped, searching for words that plainly would not come easily. “Wrong. Something is really wrong and I don’t know what it is.”

Morggán’s brows dropped low over his eyes. “Wrong how?”

Avery lifted her blue eyes briefly to his and then slanted them away again almost at once, as though the answer itself embarrassed her. “I don’t know,” she said again, frustration threading the words. “That’s the problem.”