Read Chapter 36: The Last Stand

Callum’s boots hit the frozen ground like hammer blows. The camp sprawled ahead, a scatter of dying fires and huddled shapes, men and women asleep in the last gray dark before dawn. He had run two miles through the heather, lungs burning, the Royal pardon folded against his chest like a coal.

He found Eilidh at the edge of the camp, her sword drawn, her eyes scanning the treeline where the road came down from the moor. She saw him and went still.

“Callum.” The word left her like a prayer. She closed the distance in three strides and seized his arm, fingers digging hard enough to hurt. “You’re alive.”

“Barely.” He pulled breath in ragged. “Where’s the command?”

“The command is drunk on pride and waiting for your return.” Her voice went flat. “The chiefs want to form on the moor at first light. They still believe Cumberland will meet them in open battle.”

“They’ll be butchered.”

“I know.”

He looked past her shoulder at the camp. Two thousand souls, most of them starved, half of them without powder enough for a single volley. And behind them, the hills. The only country that had ever kept his people alive.

“Gather them,” he said. “All of them. Tell them a hunter has come in from the dark with news.”

She moved without another word, sharp and quick as a hawk. Within minutes, men and women drifted in from the cold, wraps clutched around shoulders, faces pinched and hollow. Callum climbed onto a cart that had lost its wheel, and the mass of them turned to him, a single dark animal with two thousand eyes.

He didn’t waste words on greeting.

“The British are not on the moor,” he said. Loud enough for the back ranks to hear. “They are not waiting for dawn to line up and fight like gentlemen. They are positioned on the ground east of the moss, artillery placed to enfilade any advance, their infantry formed in deep ranks behind a stone dyke. They have prepared the field for one purpose: to murder us when we charge.”

Murmurs rippled through the crowd, confused, angry, disbelieving.

“I was captured tonight,” Callum said. “I saw the disposition with my own eyes. I fed Cumberland false positions, but he will not fall for that. He means to fight us in the morning on the moor, and he has chosen the ground so that we must cross open bog into a wall of iron. If we attack, we die. All of us.”

An old clansman near the front stepped forward. “And if we run?”

“We live to fight again.”

“The Prince says we must make our stand.”

“The Prince is a Stuart,” Callum said, and the words rang out hard and clear. “And I am a hunter who has watched the deer move before the storm all my life. Cumberland means to end this rebellion with one slaughter. If we give him that slaughter, we give him everything. If we slip into the hills, we keep our people, our names, our cause.”

He looked down the barrel of the silence. Two thousand faces, waiting on the turn of a coin.

Eilidh stepped forward and drew her sword. She raised it overhead, point to the sky, and her voice cut through the cold air.

“We are not beaten,” she said. “We are withdrawing to hunt another day. Those who wish to come with me and deny Cumberland his easy victory—step to the right. Those who wish to stay and make him pay dearly for every step he takes on this ground—step to the left.”

For a moment, no one moved. Then a woman near the front stepped right, gripping her children’s hands. Another followed. Men began to move, families splitting, brothers clasping arms and kissing foreheads before choosing their direction.

Callum watched them sort themselves. The right side grew large—old men, mothers, the wounded, those who could not run far or fast. The left grew smaller but harder. The fighters. The desperate. The ones who had nothing left to lose.

Eilidh lowered her sword and looked at Callum.

“You don’t have to stay,” she said, low enough that only he could hear. “You have the pardon. You could walk away. All of it.”

He shook his head.

“Duncan is still in their camp.”

“You can’t save him by dying.”

“No.” He met her eyes. “But I can save him by buying time. If the main force escapes into the hills, Cumberland’s attention will turn to pursuit. He won’t hold one prisoner when two thousand rebels scatter. Duncan has a chance if the chase goes long and hard. And I mean to make the chase very hard indeed.”

She studied his face for a long moment. Then she nodded once, reached up, and touched the hilt of the knife she had given him long ago—a twin to his father’s, the one Cumberland had taken. Her fingers traced the worn antler grip.

“Then we die old,” she said. “Or we die now. Either way, we do it together.”

The sky had begun to pale in the east, a thin gray line bleeding over the ridge. From the south, carried on the wind, came the distant sound of drums. British drums. Slow and steady, rolling toward them like the pulse of an approaching thing.

Callum turned to face the sound. He drew his sword—a plain, battered blade, not his father’s, but it would do. Around him, the rearguard formed up in a loose line across the track: MacDonalds, Camerons, a handful of MacRaes, all of them ragged and hollow-eyed, all of them still standing.

Eilidh took her place beside him.

“Orders?” she asked.

Callum looked down the road where the drums grew louder, where steel and scarlet would soon appear beneath a cold and indifferent sun.

“Hold the line,” he said. “Make them pay for every inch.”

The drums quickened.

The light came.