Act 4: Alliance
The nineteen-year-old's name was Ewan.
I learn this the next day, when the casualty list is posted in the great hall. Ewan MacLeod. No relation to the warlord. A farmer's son from Killin who'd volunteered for crossbow duty because he was quick and steady and believed in what the alliance was trying to do.
Nineteen years old. Dead on a frozen field because a group of people who'd never met decided that survival was easier than whatever they were fighting for.
I stand in front of the list for a long time. Reading his name. Reading the names of the wounded. The numbers that I spent yesterday treating as data points on a map, reduced to handwriting on paper.
He was a person. Not a number. Not a position on a map.I knew this. I always knew this. The military trains you to think in abstractions. Troop movements. Asset allocation. Strategic positioning. The abstraction is how you function. The person behind the number is what you process later, if you process it at all.
I'm processing it now. Standing in a great hall that smells like woodsmoke and blood, looking at the name of a boy I never met, feeling the weight of a death I helped coordinate.
I didn't fire the crossbow. I didn't order the charge.
I put him in the position where the bolt found him.
The maths worked.The maths. As if maths can mourn.
The days after are quiet in a way that battle makes inevitable. People move slowly. Talk less. Eat in silence. The alliance holds. Patrols rotate. Supply runs resume. The machinery of survival grinds on.
But the grinding is different now. Heavier.
I'm in the warehouse, going over the supply reports, when Anya finds me.
"You missed the group session."
"I had things to count."
"You always have things to count." She sits on a crate across from me. Not pushing. Just present. "How are you?"
"Fine."
"Jamie."
"I don't know how I am." I put down the manifest. "I spent yesterday moving people around a map like pieces on a board. One of those pieces is dead now. I don't know what to do with that."
She doesn't offer platitudes. Doesn't tell me it's not my fault. Doesn't try to fix anything.
"Ewan MacLeod," she says. "That was his name. He came to two of my group sessions at Killin. He was scared. He volunteered for crossbow duty anyway because he thought it would help. And it did help. The western flank held because his team was there."
"I know."
"You should hear it anyway. The western flank held. Your coordination got Balloch's reinforcements to the right place at the right time. More people would be dead if you hadn't been in that radio room."
More people would be dead.A fact. The same kind I've been working with for weeks. Cold, hard, verifiable.
"I'm not going to tell you it's okay," she says. "Because it's not. A nineteen-year-old is dead. That's not okay. It's never going to be okay. But the alternative was more people dead. Different people. Maybe people you know. Maybe me."
"I don't want to think about that."
"I know. That's why I'm thinking about it for you." She stands. "You don't have to come to the group session. But you should eat something. You look like you haven't slept in a week."
"Two days."
"That's what I said."
She leaves. I sit in the warehouse with the manifests and the numbers and the name of a boy I never met running through my head.
Ewan MacLeod. Nineteen. Quick and steady. Believed in what the alliance was trying to do.
I don't feel numb. That's the thing I notice. After the cabin, after the nine bodies, after the knife at Hugh's throat, I felt nothing. Or too much. The extremes. The all or nothing.
This is different. This is the quiet weight of a thing I participated in. A radio room. Pieces on a map. Exactly what I was trained to do. Done well.
And a boy is still dead.
Maybe that's growth. The grief stays. You just get a stronger back.I don't know if that's true. I don't know if I'm growing or just getting better at hiding the cracks. But I feel it. The weight. The specific, particular grief of a specific, particular loss.
I put down the manifest. Go to find something to eat.
Hugh finds me that evening. I'm on the wall, watching the sun go down over the hills. The same wall where I stood with a rifle, looking down at him.
"Eighteen wounded," he says, standing next to me. "Six serious. One dead. We're resupplying Killin with antibiotics and crossbow bolts. Balloch needs food. Drymen's fine."
"The maths."
"The maths." He looks out at the darkening hills. "Ewan MacLeod. Did you know him?"
"No."
"He was nineteen. His mother is in Killin. She's been told." A pause. "Hugh Gilespie, age sixty-three. Two hundred and ninety-seven people in this castle. I'm responsible for all of them. I've been responsible for every decision that kept them alive and every decision that didn't."
He carries it the same way I do."How do you carry it?"
"Badly. Consistently. Every day." He's not looking at me. He's looking at the horizon. "You learn to live with the weight. You don't learn to stop feeling it. If you stop feeling it, you've become something you don't want to be."
I think about Liam. About the order to fire. About the nine bodies in the snow. About a boy named Ewan who I never met.
"I'm starting to feel it," I say.
"Good." He turns from the wall. "That means you're still human. Don't let anyone take that from you. Not even yourself."
He walks away. I stay on the wall until the last light fades.
The weight doesn't lift. I don't expect it to. But I'm carrying it. One foot in front of the other, the same as Hugh, the same as everyone in this castle.
The cold settles in. I pull my jacket tighter. Touch the leather cord in my pocket.
Go inside. Eat. Sleep. Wake up. Do it again.