Read Chapter 19: The Lost Bread

The dawn patrol came back at first light with mud on their boots and a story that turned Callum’s blood to ice.

He was at the horse lines, grooming a bay gelding that didn’t need grooming, when Sergeant Doyle ambled past with a dead hare slung over his shoulder. “You hear about the beggar?” Doyle asked, not stopping.

Callum’s hands stilled on the curry comb. “Which beggar?”

“The blind one down by the Kilmorack crossroad. Found him in the ditch two mornings ago. Throat cut, bread stolen from his basket. Looks like some of our boys got hungry and didn’t want to pay.”

The air left Callum’s lungs. He forced his voice level. “Who found him?”

“Patrol. Captain Thorne’s been asking questions all morning. Seems the poor bastard had something in that loaf besides rye.” Doyle spat and moved on toward the cookfire.

Callum stood frozen, the comb dropping from his fingers. The map. The bread. The boy with the cart. None of it had mattered. The British soldiers had taken the bread from a dead beggar before the boy ever arrived—or the boy had taken it and been robbed, or the beggar had been killed for the loaf without even knowing what it held. Either way, the supply route map was now in Captain Thorne’s hands.

And Thorne knew Callum had been at that fair.

He spent the morning in a haze of dread, working the stables and the practice ground with mechanical precision, waiting for the blow to fall. But noon came, and no one arrested him. No one looked at him twice. Thorne did not summon him. The Glasgow tracker did not appear.

Around the mess tent, Callum heard the whispers. The captain had new papers spread across his field desk. A breakthrough, the quartermaster muttered. Something that would finally smoke out the rebels’ supply lines.

Callum’s stomach turned to stone.

He found his moment that afternoon. Thorne left his tent for a meeting with Colonel Grant, taking only his adjutant. The sentry outside was a young private named Jessop, fresh from the lowlands, who yawned openly as Callum approached with a tin cup of tea.

“Captain left his pipe,” Callum said, nodding at the tent flap. “Asked me to fetch it. Says it’s on the desk.”

Jessop squinted at him. “You’re the hunter.”

“That I am. Cold out here, waiting on a man with a pipe. You know how they get.” Callum offered the tea. Jessop took it, drank, and waved him through.

Inside, the tent was dim and close. Thorne’s field desk sat against the back wall, a scatter of papers weighted by a brass compass. Callum’s eyes scanned them swiftly. Payroll. A letter from the quartermaster general. A sketch of the rebel camp at Glenshiel with troop positions marked in pencil.

And there, folded in thirds beneath a leather satchel, the map.

His map.

It looked the same as it had when he’d drawn it from the quartermaster’s ledger—ink lines, red circles, the winding road through the passes. But it was creased now, stained at the edges by rain or blood. Thorne had read it. Had studied it. There were marginal notes in a hand Callum didn’t recognize. *Artillery possible here. Guard post weakened after storm.*

Callum’s hand hovered over it. Take it now, and Thorne would notice within an hour. Take it, and the captain would know someone inside had stolen it—and his suspicion would land square on Callum, who’d been at the fair, who’d talked his way into the tent.

But leave it, and the rebels would march into an ambush. Eilidh would lead them. Duncan would be proclaimed a traitor and hanged without a second thought. And Laird MacLeod’s clan, awaiting a rescue that would never come, would be slaughtered or shipped to the colonies in chains.

He reached for the map.

And snatched his hand back as footsteps approached the tent. Jessop’s voice, low and apologetic. “Sorry, sir, I didn’t know you were coming back so soon.”

Thorne’s voice, flat as slate: “Leave us.”

Callum straightened, turning to face the tent flap as it swept open. Captain Thorne stepped inside, tall and lean, his steel-grey eyes fixing immediately on Callum. Behind him, Jessop’s frightened face vanished as the flap dropped.

“MacRae,” Thorne said. “Just the man I wanted to see.”

Callum’s heart hammered against his ribs. “Captain. I was fetching your pipe.”

“My pipe.” Thorne’s mouth curled, not quite a smile. “How thoughtful.” He moved past Callum to the desk, not looking down, not checking the map. Instead he reached for a trinket on the corner—a brass snuff box—and turned it over in his fingers. “I’ve been thinking about the fair at Kilmorack. About that eye you lost on the shooting green.”

Callum said nothing.

“You told me you shot at Harbottle that day and missed. Fled before you could correct your aim.” Thorne set the snuff box down. “But the Glasgow tracker tells a different tale. He says you hesitated. That you were a clear shot, and it fell apart in your hands.”

The words hung in the air like smoke. Callum could feel the trap closing. Deny it, and Thorne would press. Admit it, and he was finished. He chose a third path.

“The tracker was watching from behind,” Callum said, his voice rough with carefully manufactured anger. “He couldn’t see the angle. The wind was off the glen. I told you that.”

“You did.” Thorne circled the desk, his boots clicking on the ground sheet. “And yet I find it curious that a man who claims to be devoted to His Majesty’s service keeps finding himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. The fair. The cooper’s arrest. The death of a blind beggar with a suspicious loaf of bread.”

Callum’s throat tightened. “I don’t know anything about a beggar.”

“No?” Thorne stopped an arm’s length away. “Then you won’t mind telling me what you were doing at the crossroad stone that afternoon. My sentries saw you turn off the main road. They lost you in the press of carts, but you were heading that way.”

The lie came swift and bitter. “I was looking for a game trail. Rabbits. There’s a good warren west of the stone, but the rebels have been poaching it clean. I turned back when I saw the patrols.”

Thorne studied him, his pale eyes flat and unreadable. Then, slowly, he nodded. “Very well. I’ll take your word for it. But understand this, MacRae: the war in the Highlands is being won by men who can be trusted. And men who cannot.” He drew a finger across his own throat. “Find me another shot at Harbottle. His arrogance is growing, and I want him removed. That is your purpose here. Do not make me reconsider your value.”

He dismissed Callum with a jerk of his chin.

Callum walked out of the tent on wooden legs. The sun was low over the hills, throwing long shadows across the camp. In the distance, he could hear the blacksmith hammering at a shoe, the steady rhythm of soldiers drilling. None of it reached him.

The map was in Thorne’s possession. The rebels thought they were safe. Eilidh was planning an assault on a supply route that would be a slaughter.

And Duncan’s trial was now four days away.

Callum stood in the middle of the camp, destitute and friendless and watched from a dozen windows he couldn’t see. He had failed his brother, his clan, and the old laird who’d trusted him.

But he had one thing left. He knew where the map was. And Thorne, for all his suspicion, had just shown Callum his hand—the captain didn’t know about the false copy in Callum’s kit, a careful forgery he’d made during his sleepless nights, useless until now. If he could swap it, Thorne would guard a fiction while the real map escaped to the rebels.

He’d need darkness. He’d need timing. And he’d need to survive the night without being caught.

Callum turned and walked back toward his billet, his mind already mapping the sentry rotations, the shadowy lanes between the tents, the precise seconds of Thorne’s nightly routine. He would take the map back. He would deliver it to Eilidh himself if he had to walk through the whole rebel army to do it. Duncan’s life depended on it. Eilidh’s hope depended on it. The entire Jacobite cause now rested on a single, desperate theft.

As he reached his tent, he heard a boy’s voice calling over the camp noise. “Message for Callum MacRae!”

He turned. A lad in a dirty wool coat—the same straw-haired boy from the cart—was weaving through the soldiers, clutching a folded paper sealed with mud. He pressed it into Callum’s palm and vanished into the evening crowd before Callum could ask how he’d gotten in.

Callum ducked inside his tent and broke the seal. The writing was Eilidh’s hand, sharp and urgent.

*Word reached us of the beggar. The map is lost. We march in three days on the Glenshiel supply post. If the British know our route, we are walking into a trap. You are the only one who can warn us. If you cannot, tell no one, and pray your brother forgives you in the next world, because we will not.*

Three days. Not four. He had two nights before the rebels marched—if he failed to recover the map, Eilidh and every man she led would be cut down, and Duncan would hang for a cause already dead.

Callum folded the letter and tucked it into his boot. Then he lay back on his cot, hands behind his head, watching the canvas sway in the wind, waiting for full dark.