Read Chapter 30: The Wounded Leader

The warmth of the fire was the first thing Callum felt—that, and the searing stitch in his side that pulled tight with every breath. He opened his eyes to a low peat-smoke ceiling and the soft crackle of burning turf. The timber storehouse was gone. This was a bothy, small and close, with blankets heaped over him and the smell of heather and dried herbs thick in the air.

“Easy.” Annabel’s voice came from his left, and he turned his head to find her kneeling beside a shallow basin, a cloth in her hand. Her sleeves were rolled to the elbow, and there was a smudge of something dark—blood, his blood—along her forearm. “You lost a good deal of it on the ride back. Eilidh stitched you. I’ve been keeping the fever down.”

Callum tried to sit up, and the world tilted hard. He gritted his teeth and pushed himself onto one elbow anyway. The wound in his side burned like a brand. “The powder.”

“Safe,” Annabel said. “Dougal and the others brought it in before dawn. It’s cached in the old chapel ruin, half a mile east. You did what you set out to do.”

He let out a long breath and sank back into the blankets. His fingers found the shape of his father’s knife still sheathed at his belt—someone had been kind enough not to strip him of it. The leather was warm, familiar.

“Where’s Eilidh?”

“With the council,” Annabel said. She wrung the cloth out and pressed it to his forehead, cooling the heat that radiated off his skin. “There’s been news. Bad news. She wanted to tell you herself, but she’s been arguing with the others for the better part of the morning.”

“Arguing about what?”

Annabel’s mouth tightened. She looked older than her years in the firelight, the dirt of the road and the strain of the last days carved into her features. “A prisoner came in at first light. One of the scouts we sent toward Inverness. He’d been caught by a British patrol and escaped in the night, and he brought word that Cumberland’s main army is on the march. Not a small force, Callum. The whole of it. Thousands of men, with horse and cannon, moving south toward Culloden Moor. They mean to meet us there or catch us in the open before we can reach Inverness.”

The room went quiet. Callum stared at the ceiling beams, feeling the weight of it settle onto his chest like a stone. Culloden Moor. He knew the ground flat and boggy, a killing field with nowhere to hide. A place where a Highland charge would break against disciplined lines and artillery.

“How long?” he asked.

“Two days,” Annabel said. “Maybe less, if they push hard. The council is calling for a vote to march out and meet them. Eilidh is trying to hold them back, but they’re frightened and angry. They want to fight now, while the anger is hot, before the British can dig in.”

Callum closed his eyes. The story of his own survival grew thin and strange in his ears—the gallop back to the camp with a ball in his side, the world fading in and out, Dougal’s arm holding him in the saddle. He had done it. He had won the powder. And it would not be enough. It would never be enough.

“Help me up,” he said.

Annabel looked at him sharply. “You can’t.”

“I have to.”

She held his gaze for a long moment, then set the cloth aside and slid an arm under his shoulders. The effort of standing sent a wave of nausea through him, and he swayed, gripping the wall post until the room stopped spinning. His shirt was off, and he saw the bandage wrapped around his torso, stained a pale rust at the side. Eilidh’s stitching was neat and tight. She had done this before.

“Walk with me,” he said.

The morning air was cold and sharp with frost, and the camp was not the camp he had left. There were more men now, gathered in clusters around the fires, cleaning muskets and sharpening swords. Their faces were grim with purpose. Somewhere down the slope, a blacksmith’s hammer rang out in steady rhythm. The smell of burning powder hung faintly in the air from weapons testing. This was an army awaiting a fight, and every one of them believed that fight would come at the end of a charge across open ground.

Eilidh stood at the center of a knot of men outside the largest tent, her arms crossed over her chest, her voice raised above the murmur of dissent. She wore a stolen red coat over her dress—a trophy from an earlier skirmish—and her hair was tied back loose, wind-torn. She saw him and broke off mid-sentence. Her eyes went wide and angry.

“You should be lying down,” she said, stepping toward him.

“I should be many things.” He leaned on Annabel’s arm more than he wanted to admit. “What’s the word?”

“You’ve heard, then.” Eilidh’s jaw tightened. “Cumberland is coming.” She glanced at the men around her. “These fools want to meet him on the moor.”

“It’s the only ground that lets us use the charge,” one of the men said—a big, bearded clansman Callum did not know, one of the Lochaber men who had come in with the prisoners freed from Inverness. “We can’t take them in the hills. They’ll starve us out or burn us out. If we catch them on the moor, we have a chance. One good charge, and their line breaks.”

Callum looked at the man. At the hunger in his eyes. He had seen that look before, in taverns and at wakes, in the faces of men who had lost everything and wanted only to swing a sword at something that deserved it.

“And if the ground is boggy?” Callum asked quietly. “If the rain keeps falling and your charge bogs down in the muck? Their cannon will cut you to pieces from five hundred yards. You’ll be dead before you reach their line.”

The man’s face reddened. “So we should hide? Let them come to us and burn our homes?”

“I’m not saying hide,” Callum said. There was a stabbing pain in his side that had nothing to do with his wound. He could feel the council watching him, waiting for him to say the thing none of them wanted to hear. “I’m saying we should not hand them the exact battle they want on the exact ground they have chosen. Cumberland is marching to Culloden because he knows we will meet him there. He has planned for it. He has drilled for it. And we are tired, outnumbered, and short of powder.” He paused, letting that land. “A battle is what he wants. What we need is time.”

There was a mutter of dissent, and Eilidh stepped in close to him, her voice dropping low enough that only he could hear.

“They don’t want to hear time. They want to hear blood,” she said. “They are not wrong to want it. But you are not wrong either. If we stand at Culloden, we die.”

“We might die anyway,” he said.

She looked at him and, for a moment, something softer crossed her face. She put a hand on his arm, and the touch was warm even through the cold air. “Then we should choose a death that means something. If we meet them on the moor and are broken, the rebellion is over. Everything we have done, everyone we have lost—Rab, the prisoners, Thorne—it will all mean nothing. But if we can hold on, if we can find another way…” She trailed off, shaking her head. “The council is waiting. They will vote on the march within the hour.”

Callum looked away across the camp. Men were oiling musket locks and checking the flints with the careful, practiced care of soldiers who knew they might not get a second chance. The morning sun was climbing over the hills, pale and thin through the haze of smoke. It would be a fair day. A good day for a battle.

And then, unbidden, a thought surfaced—something he had heard his father say once, in the kitchen of their croft when Callum was very young, warming his hands at the fire. Some fights are not won with swords, his father had said. Some are won with a single piece of paper and the right man to read it.

Callum blinked. His hand drifted to the knife at his belt, the worn leather and the familiar weight of the haft. He had carried it for ten years since his father’s death, a relic of a life he thought he had buried. A hunter’s tool, he had always called it. Nothing more.

But his father had been more than a hunter. Callum knew that now—knew it with a certainty he could not explain, a low cold feeling in his gut like the moment before a shot breaks from cover. The knife had never felt heavy before. Now it did.

“The council,” he said slowly, “has not yet voted.”

Eilidh looked at him, frowning. “No. They are waiting for you.”

The pressure was enormous, a stone weight that pressed him toward the ground. He wanted to lie down. He wanted to sleep for a day and a night and another day. But the image of his father’s hand on that knife, turning it over by the firelight, stayed with him.

“Then I will speak to them,” Callum said. “Before they vote. I need a few hours. And I need to be alone.”

Eilidh’s frown deepened, but she nodded, and Annabel let go of his arm. The wind ran through the camp, carrying the smell of woodsmoke and iron. The men watched him as he turned and limped back toward the bothy, one hand pressed against his wounded side, the other resting on the knife at his belt.

It did not feel like a knife anymore. It felt like a question.