"I'd expect nothing less."
She mounted with the ease of a woman who had found her own strength in the run. Ivar mounted beside her, and they turned back toward Duart. The wind was at their backs now, urging them home. The promontory shrank into the mist, and the castle grew ahead. Solid, amber-lit, and ready for whatever storm was coming.
He rode beside her in a silence that felt heavy with things yet to come.
The gathering was five days away. Callum was close. But as he watched the steady line of her shoulders, he realized he had been wrong about the cost of letting something matter. It didn't make him weaker. It made him stronger, it made him dangerous.
"Race ye back," she said.
He looked at her.
She was already a blur of dark wool and motion.
Ivar bared his teeth and followed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
He saw the smoke on the ride back.
It was the kind of thing that could be easily missed by a man less haunted. A thin, skeletal thread of grey against a grey sky, rising from the dense tree line off the lesser-used path that cut inland from the cliff road. It was the kind of thing a traveler not paying attention would take for a crofter's fire or a shepherd's lonely camp.
Ivar was always paying attention.
He slowed his horse without speaking, the leather of his saddle creaking in the sudden, heavy quiet. Matilda, reading the jagged shift in his posture, slowed beside him.
"What is it?" she said, her voice barely a whisper.
"Smoke. Off the inland path." He was already calculating the angle of it, the density, the way it was thinning at the top. Nota fresh, hungry fire, but a dying one. Something that had been tended and was now being left to go cold. "How long ago did we pass that fork?"
"Quarter mile, perhaps."
Ivar turned to the nearest guard, his expression turning to iron.
"Ride back to the fork and hold it. Nobody sets foot on that path until I've gone through." He looked at the second guard, his voice dropping into a register of command. "Stay with Lady Matilda."
"I'm coming with ye," Matilda said, her hand tightening on her reins.
"Ye're nae."
"Ivar."
"If it's naething, I'll be back in ten minutes and ye can be annoyed with me the whole ride home." He held her gaze, the intensity of his look pinning her in place. "If it's nae naething, I need tae ken ye're here and nae in the trees. Dae ye understand?"
She held his gaze for a long moment, her amber eyes searching his for a gap in his resolve. "Ten minutes," she said.
He went.
The path through the trees was a narrow, claustrophobic thing, barely wide enough for a horse ridden with extreme care. Thick branches clawed at his cloak like skeletal fingers, cutting the already dim grey light into jagged shards. The smoke was stronger here. The heavy scent of woodsmoke mingled with the smell of damp earth and something sharper underneath it: the stale odor of a fire that had recently been abandoned.
He dismounted at the tree line, his boots landing silently on the moss, and went the rest of the way on foot.
The camp was nestled in a natural hollow, screened by a dense stand of birch on three sides and open only to the south, toward the restless water. He stood at the edge of the clearing, his hand resting on the cold hilt of his blade, taking in the scene before he touched a single thing.
Four bedrolls, kicked aside rather than packed. A fire pit with a good stack of seasoned wood still beside it, the embers a deep, pulsing orange that radiated a lingering heat. This had been burning within the last two hours. Provisions were scattered. A wrapped bundle of salt meat, a skin of water, hard bread. Enough for several days. Enough for men who had expected to still be here when the stars came out.
They'd left in a hurry.
Someone had heard something. Perhaps the announcement of the gathering had been passed along by a disloyal ear, or one of Torvald's doubled patrols had come close enough to the tree line to spook the watchers.