Read Chapter 33: The Eve of Culloden

The night air carried the smell of wet wool, smoke, and something fouler—the gangrene creeping through wounds that would not close. Callum sat apart from the main cluster of rebels, his back against a moss-slicked boulder, watching the embers of a dying fire gutter in the wind off the moor.

Three hundred men. Perhaps fewer now. He counted them each time he closed his eyes, subtracting the dead, subtracting the wounded who could not hold a musket, and the number never improved.

Around the central fire, the council had fallen into silence. Angus MacLeod stared into the flames like a man reading his own death in them. Young Dougal MacKinnon—no more than seventeen—had fallen asleep sitting up, his head lolling against his brother's shoulder. They had come from the same croft, Callum knew. He wondered if they would die on the same patch of heather.

Nearby, a woman—Mairi, he thought—was tearing strips from a skirt to bind a boy's arm. The boy's face was grey, and he did not make a sound when she pulled the cloth tight. They were all so young. Or perhaps they were not; perhaps hunger and fear had simply peeled away the years until everyone looked like children playing at war.

Eilidh emerged from the dark, a shawl wrapped tight around her shoulders. Her face was hollow-shadowed in the firelight, and Callum felt the familiar twist in his chest—the wanting, and the guilt of wanting, when the world was ending.

"The sentries have word," she said, settling onto the ground beside him. "Cumberland's scouts have been seen within a mile of the moor. They know we are here. They know where we bide."

Callum let out a slow breath. "Two days, then. Perhaps less."

"Tomorrow," Eilidh said. "At first light, they will come. Our own council cannot agree on where to stand, but Cumberland will have already chosen his ground."

Callum watched the fire pop and crackle. "Then we cannot meet him on the field. There will be no glory in it. Only slaughter."

"You will hear no argument from me." Eilidh shifted closer, and he could smell the pine soap she had used to wash her hair—a luxury she had saved for a night like this, it seemed. "Which is why I think we should not meet him at all. Not on his terms."

Callum turned his head. "What do you mean?"

"The British are confident. They know we are ragged and hungry and outnumbered. They will not expect us to attack tonight. A harrying force—small, fast, striking at their pickets and their baggage—could buy us a day. Perhaps two. It would force Cumberland to slow his march, to guard his flanks."

It was a good plan. Callum hated it for that reason.

"They are a professional army, Eilidh. Seasoned. They will have sentries at every approach. And even if we cut down a dozen of their men, what will it accomplish? They will fall back into formation, light their lamps, and hunt us across the moor like the rats we are supposed to be."

"Then we do not aim for their camp," Eilidh said, her voice hardening. "We aim for their supplies. Their horses. Their powder. You did it to Thorne's convoy. You can do it again."

Callum shook his head. "A few men can ambush a wagon train. To strike an army of thousands, with its full complement of guards and patrols—that is suicide."

"One hundred men," she pressed. "Fifty."

"You cannot harry the Duke of Cumberland with fifty starving clansmen."

"I can with the right men." Her eyes caught the firelight, fierce and unyielding. "Send me. I know the ground. The MacKenzies know the ground. We will take our own and go."

The thought of her crawling toward the British lines, her dark hair bound in a kerchief, her fingers wrapped around a blade—

"No," Callum said, and the word came out harder than he intended.

Eilidh's jaw tightened. They had not quarreled in the days since the pardon was revealed—there had been no time for quarrels amid the wounded and the dead—but the old heat was still there, banked beneath the surface.

"You do not command me, Callum MacRae. You did not put a ring on my finger, and even if you had, you would not tell me where I may fight."

"I am not trying to command you. I am trying to keep you alive."

"While you go and die on that moor tomorrow? Does that keep anyone alive?"

The accusation struck him in the chest. He had not said it aloud—that he intended to stand with the front ranks, that he expected to fall among the first—but she had seen it in him. Of course she had. She had seen all of him.

"There must be another way," Callum said, more quietly. "Time. Ground. A defensible position."

"Time _was_ our position. We spent it." Eilidh gestured toward the sleeping men and women beyond the fire. "Every day, Cumberland grows stronger, and we grow thinner. The wounded will not recover before he arrives. A night raid is not a victory—it is a delay. A small one. But a delay is something."

"And if the delay costs us the men we need to delay longer?"

"Then we will die tomorrow instead of tonight." Her voice cracked, just slightly, on the word _die_. "At least tonight we might die doing something."

Callum closed his eyes. He saw Duncan's face in the dark of the prison at Inverness, pale and desperate. He saw his father's knife, and the folded paper hidden in its haft. He saw the whole sad, straitened path that had led him to this fire, with this woman, on the eve of Culloden.

He knew what his father would have done. And he knew what the Laird would have ordered. But he was no longer sure those two men would have chosen the same path.

"Fifty men," he said at last. "No more. Volunteers only. We strike at their supply train east of the moor. We burn what we cannot carry. And we fall back before first light."

Eilidh's face shifted through surprise, then something softer, then to a fierce resolve. "I will choose them."

"No. I will choose them." Callum held her gaze. "You will stay here, with the main defense. If the raid fails, someone must still have a plan for the morning. Someone must still lead."

She opened her mouth to argue, and he saw the sparks forming in her eyes. But then something crossed her face—some calculation, some concession to the night's weight—and she nodded once.

"Then let me at least prepare the fire. If your raid works, you will need somewhere to come back to."

Callum stood, his muscles protesting, the old wound in his side still a dull ache beneath the strapped bandage. He looked down at Eilidh, her face half in shadow, and wished he could say something other than what they both knew.

"Eilidh—"

"If you are going to say farewell," she said, "do not. We have all had enough of farewells."

She rose, and for a moment she was close enough that he could see the fine lines around her eyes, the exhaustion that she carried like a second shawl. Then she reached up, pressed her hand against his chest, just above his heart.

"Come back," she said. Not asked. Commanded.

He covered her hand with his own. "I will."

She did not believe him. He could see it in the hollow of her eyes. But she turned and walked back toward the fire, and he let his hand fall.

Callum found the fifty he needed among the ragged clansmen—the ones with the least to lose and the fastest legs, the ones who had been hunters before they were soldiers. Dougal MacKinnon woke his brother and came forward barefoot, and Callum did not have the heart to turn them back.

He gave them their orders in whispers. They would cross the Burn of Nairn, keep to the dips in the moorland, and strike the supply wagons that the scouts had spotted two miles east of Cumberland's main camp. No musket fire unless necessary. Knives and torches only. They would be ghosts.

As they slipped away into the dark, Callum paused at the edge of the sheltering rocks and looked back once.

Eilidh stood at the fire, silhouetted against the flames. She had lifted her chin, and she was watching him go. She did not wave. She did not call out.

But before she turned away, she did something Callum had never seen her do before.

She brought the blade of her hand to her chest, and pressed it there, hard—an old gesture, older than the rebellion, older than the English wars.

The sign of the oath.

She was binding herself to his return. And Callum knew, with sudden and terrible certainty, that if he died tonight, Eilidh would hold that oath against the world until the world broke her for it.

He turned his face toward the dark, and went to meet the Duke's sentries.