Page 82 of The Speed of Lightning
Balder’s face flushed. “They gave Hector what was owed?—”
Calum shoved off, bored already. “Astonishing. Have a fine evening, Balder.”
“Wait!” Balder clutched the stern. Bog lunged, snapping at his fingers. “Ragnall’s used the rest for a redistribution scheme. There’s a bounty on your head. And on Freya’s.” Calum stabbed his oar into the silty bottom, halting the boat. He wasn’t sure he’d heard right.
Balder shook out his bitten fingers, cursing. “Aye, that’s right, foul beast. I’m trying to help yer master. Ragnall and Rory have set up a redistribution fund—coin for any word on you or your wife. Where you go, how you earn, what missives you send. If you leave Jura. And that’s when I thought of Freyaand her stories. They dinnae ken yet she was Týr’sfilí,?3 but it’s only a matter of time. Someone will take the coin, Cù Cogaidh. Someone always does.”
Calum’s stomach tightened. A bounty on him and Freya. Every word of Balder’s breathless confession felt like a knife’s edge. He didn’t know where to begin. “It’s Calum. Call me Cù Cogaidh where Ragnall can hear and it’ll be your neck.”
Balder scowled. “Aye, I ken. It isnae right?—”
“What makes you think my wife and father worked together?”
The lad hesitated. “I dinnae ken for certain, but I suspect. I was eleven when you left for Duart. I’d heard Freya tell tale after tale as a child—hundreds, maybe six hundred—each one different, none about you. The MacSorleys always whispered she learned them from her mother, Amie. The sheer number alone made it seem she must have been anollam?4.” He blew into his hands for warmth. “Folk liked her, Ragnall’s Amie. What little they saw of her, anyway.”
Calum felt his hackles rise. He didn’t like the lad’s roundabout way of speaking—or that someone close to Ragnall might betray Freya. “You havenae answered my question.”
“After you left, Ragnall kept Freya shut in, so the stories stopped—at least we thought so. Then word of your time in Duart began to spread, and I suspected she’d written them. They were good tales, like Amie’s, only…”
“Different?”
“Aye. Better. Sharper. As I grew, I noticed none of the MacSorley bairns near Ragnall’s circle knew the stories—only those close to the MacLeans. That’s when I thought…perhaps it was Týr’s doing. Who else would commission tales about a traitor, if not his own father?”
Calum bristled. “I was never a traitor.”
Balder’s face flushed. “I ken that now. I saw ye the night of the raid—how ye fought, how ye hunted the men that took your wife. The skill, the fury, the bravery. I want to fight like that. I want to learn from you.”
“No.”
Balder’s face fell. “Ye wanted to train a guard before.”
“No. I’m done with war, with fighting. Besides, I thought ye knew it all.”
“I thought battle was different. More organized. More…I dinnae ken.”
Calum barked a laugh. “Organized? War?”
Balder flushed. “Aye. Our side on one end, the enemy on the other. Not this—a lawless massacre, a coward’s fight. Sneaking up on folk in the night, murdering women and children. I thought the enemy would seek warriors.”
Calum drew a long breath, the weight of truth settling heavy. He’d never known war to be as ugly and brutal as the last three years. In Scotland he had fought soldiers on open fields, guard against guard. Never this. It had changed him, hardened him, sickened him, and left a bitter ache in his chest.
“Now you know why I wanted you all to work and drill together; strategy and structure are the only things that seem to succeed against them.”
“We should have listened. My father said the same.”
The lad looked earnest, but Calum still didn’t trust him. “Aye well, the jobby’s out of the cow.”
Balder snorted. “There’s an image.”
Calum’s temper snapped. He stepped out of the boat, dirk drawn, boots crunching on the pebbled shore. His chest heaved, every word dragged from three months of loss.
“It isnae a jest—it’s true. I cannae turn back time. I cannae bring back my mother or father, or the ninety-one of our clan who died. I cannae make you listen so we might’ve had achance to survive what barreled our way. Because of your father, because of Ragnall, because of your own haughty attitude we lost—and lost badly. You could have been prepared. Ye could have known something instead of absolutely nothing. And now you come to me with tales about my wife, and I’ve half a mind to cut your tongue out to stop them.”
Balder lifted his chin, unafraid. “And who cared a whit about Jura before you crossed the Wolf? No one. You’re as much to blame as I am. You drew his eye running with Hector’s Shield. And someone—perhaps Freya, perhaps not—was feeding the fire with tales of your deeds. And unless I’m fresh from the cradle, that person that commissioned them was Cù Ceartas, I’m positive.”
The dirk in Calum’s hand trembled, his grip bone-white on the hilt. He yanked Balder closer, ready to strike, to silence him—but the fury gave way to a crushing heaviness. Strength drained from his limbs, as though the last three years of war had landed on him at once.
His hand fell. He staggered back toward the boat, chest heaving, legs shaking. He needed to get home. Needed to go back three years—to stay a simple guardsman, to let Hector save his own wife, to undo the missions, the losses, the rivers of blood. The weight of it pressed into him, bone-deep. None of it had been worth the price of losing his parents. Behind him, Calum heard Balder step closer.
