He stepped out into the rainwashed night, wanting to put distance between himself and the shackled giant he could feel through the stones of the keep.
Yet, all the long, wet night’s ride away from the place, he felt the heat of Wallace’s unseen, accusing stare through the dark of his prison and felt something he had not felt for a long time, something calloused over long since and now split open, raw and red.
Shame.
He stared at the stones as if he could dig through them with only his gaze, as if his eyes could search out those left and shame them into rescue.
In the dark, he knew most of them were dead. Those who had stuck by him, that is – the others would deny him faster than Saint Peter did Christ. He crossed himself for the blasphemy, but could not stop the wry thought creeping in, that even God had forsaken Will Wallace faster than he did Christ on the Cross.
Who else had forsaken him? He thought of them then, the faces coming at him like dead leaves whirling in a wind. Fergus the Beetle, arguably the most loyal of all, had died of the coughing sickness last winter, slick with sweat and pain and fear and still able to call Wallace ‘the best chiel he had ever walked with’.
There had been others there to meet Fergus when he slipped into God’s Grace, good men – aye, and women as well – who had followed him for the belief in it. They had fought and laughed, taken hunger and plenty in equal measure and had found the understandings that come with a life so close together, so shared in the one desire – a good king in a realm that was their own.
Gone. All gone, snuffed like a guttering candle and the best part of him with it. He looked at his hand, grimed and shackled; once it had slashed Hell into his enemies, had pressed an arrogance of seal into letters on behalf of the Kingdom. Now it was fastened to the wall of the cell they called Lickstone, because the only way of quenching your thirst was to suck the damp from the run-off near the lintel.
He knelt in the darkness, shivering and silent and wondered who had betrayed him. Lang Jack Short, of course – but he would have been put to it, by appeals to vengeance as much as a fat purse. Should not have broken his neb before, Wallace thought. Even if the wee moudiewart bastard had deserved it, carping on and on about what should be done and what should not, as if he had been leader …
Leader of nothing now. Left to pay the price for it – his fist closed, as if on the hilt of the sword he no longer had. Everything worked for, gone like smoke.
Like dreams.
Who had betrayed him? A woman, possibly, though he could not recall any he had treated particularly badly – nor any he had loved particularly well.
Menteith, mayhap. No, he was only the luckless chiel who had to carry it out and was clearly unhappy at it. He had come to Wallace not long after he had been huckled into the cell, loaded with enough chains to stagger a pachyderm. Poor Sir John, Wallace had thought at the time, seeing the man standing with his mourn of a face and his feet shuffling in the filthy straw, trying to summon up the words to say how sorry he was.
‘When you decide that peace is best at any price,’ Wallace had told him, ‘the price you pay is in chains.’
‘It is you in chains,’ Sir John had spat back, unable to contain his pride, even now.
‘Here,’ Wallace had replied, shaking his shackled wrists, not yet fastened to the wall.
‘No’ here or here,’ he added, touching his heart and his head.
Clever Will, who could not button his arrogant lip. Menteith had flushed to the brim of his fading hairline and ordered ‘the prisoner’ fastened to the wall.
Not Menteith, then. Buchan or Badenoch, playing some cat’s cradle game of their own in which they saw Will Wallace’s end as some new beginning for the Comyn.
But if it was new beginnings we are speaking of, he thought to himself, then Bruce is at the heart of it. He heard himself say it, clear as running water, when they had crossed swords at Haprew.
If I remain, you cannot get started.
In the end, it did not matter which black heart had done it, for he knew that his time was done and that all he had fought and bled for – aye, and all the bodies he had stepped over, on both sides, to achieve what he did – was come to nothing.
Freedom was as far from the Kingdom as it now was from himself and he knelt in the sodden dark and felt the black years of it leak from him in a series of hacking sobs, a brief collapse into pity for poor Will Wallace, abandoned and alone and facing sure death.
Just as quickly, he reeled back from it. A last few sobs, a snort of snot into the back of his throat and he hoiked out his fear and loss in a disdainful spit. That life was gone and what was broken could not be mended. All he could do now was die well, so as to leave some flame for others to follow.