Abruptly, a thought landed on her like a brick dropped from a height, a memory from her conversation with her father. Sucking in a breath, Senga spun around, grabbing Noah by the shoulders as he came out of the tent.
“My father told me that Keep Kenneth was their next target,” she gasped. “I forgot, I never… I didn’t tell ye! He told me to my face that it was where they were going next.”
Noah’s expression darkened. “Ye are sure?”
“Aye, I’m sure.”
“Right. Well, I will have word sent to them as soon as possible.”
“I should have told ye before.”
He reached out, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.
“It’s alright, lass. Ye are telling me now. It’s going to be alright, ye know. We’ll be safe.”
She nodded, smiling faintly. As she met his eye, Senga realized that she was just as in love with him as she had always been.
But what lay ahead?
Senga insistedon letting someone else ride Bluebell. Many of the soldiers and healers offered their horses to the weak, injured villagers. The villagers accepted gratefully, although their smiles and eyes were still hollow. The two boys who’d hidden behind the barrels were the ones who got to ride Bluebell. They seemed the chirpiest of the survivors, arms wrapped around each other, occasionally patting Bluebell’s neck with awe.
There was certainly something to be said for the resilience of childhood.
They had buried the last of the dead early that morning. It had taken all night, with men and healers working in shifts, to collect all the bodies together and bury them in several mass graves.
It felt blasphemous, somehow, to bury them in mass graves, but there was simply no time to bury each person individually, and there was no way they could have been left behind for the birds and beasts to feast on. No, that couldn’t happen. It couldn’t.
The lines of hanged corpses had been cut down carefully, one by one, and added to the rows of dead. Frankly, Senga would have preferred to burn the whole village down to remove the stain of fear and misery from the landscape altogether.
Noah had said no, though. Others had to remember, he’d told her. Others had to see.
It was hard to argue with that, but Senga knew that for a long, long time, she would see the faces of the dead behind her eyes when she slept.
“Lost in thought there, lass,” came Noah’s deep, amused voice. She flinched, glancing around to find him standing rightbehind her, grinning. “Ye should stay aware of yer surroundings, especially on a road like this.”
“A road like what? It’s like every other road in the Highlands,” Senga quipped.
The road was long and wide, stretching behind them until it whipped around behind a hill and yawning ahead of them until the mists swallowed it up. It felt as though they were suspended in time. There was no past, no future, only here and now. Water dripped down the back of her collar, and her cloak had long since passed its saturation point. She was wet, but too wet to feel it any longer. There was a sort of relief in that, at least.
Noah chuckled, shaking his head. “Stay close to me, lass. I don’t anticipate trouble—there are scouts ahead of us and behind—but being on guard as if expecting trouble is always a wise thing to do.”
They trudged onwards, saving their breath for the journey ahead. Noah stayed by Senga’s side, and whenever she glanced up at him, a warmth spread through her chest, despite the cold and rain.
“How are ye feeling?” he asked, after about half an hour of walking.
“What do ye mean?”
He shrugged. “We’ve seen horrors over the past day or so. Ye have traveled far. Ye are cold, wet, tired, probably hungry, and somebody else is riding yer horse. How are ye feeling?”
She let out a ragged sigh. “Angry.”
He gave a thoughtful nod. “That’s a good feeling. Sensible.”
“I… I keep thinking of everybody who died in that village. They’re innocent. They did nothing wrong. There’s no reason for them to have died. They are only dead because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s notfair, Noah.”
“I agree.”
“I want justice for them,” she continued, pushing on. “I want their killers to pay. I want myfatherto pay.”
