Isabel scowled as she set aside the cloth and needle and made to rise.
A tall figure trotted away from the training below, moving quickly but without great haste, his attention fixed squarely on Elena, his brow drawn with concern. Jacob Jamison reached the oak just as the branch dipped, his hand coming up instinctively to steady Elena’s back.
Isabel paused and watched.
The lad moved with a surety that belied his years, his touch firm without being rough, his timing precise. With his free hand, he reached up and retrieved the doll.
“Here,” he said, sounding more exasperated than alarmed. “Ye’ll break yer neck one of these days, climbing like that.”
Elena turned toward him at once, cheeks flushed, eyes bright, clutching the doll to her chest but now giving it little thought. The look she gave Jacob Jamison—open, admiring, utterly unguarded—was so familiar it made Isabel smile.
“Alexander hid it,” Elena explained to Jacob.
Isabel rolled her lips to keep from grinning. The look Elena gave Jacob then—the pout, as it were—clearly said she expected Jacob to do something about that.
“Aye, and he’ll keep hiding it—he and Michael,” Jacob advised, “so long as they ken how much it upsets ye.”
“Aye, ye said that before,” Elena reminded him.
Jacob swung Elena down from the stout limb and set her in front of him.
“And I’ll say it again until ye ken, Elena,” Jacob went on, standing easily a foot taller than the petite Elena, being that he was a full five years older. “As long as they believe it rattles ye, they’ll keep at it.” He shrugged, his narrow shoulders lifting and dropping. “My own brothers do the same to my wee cousin,” he rationalized.
He bent then and took the time to fasten the frog closure of Elena’s mantle, his fingers working carefully beneath her chin. Isabel was forever reminding her daughter to secure it properly.
Elena might have been listening to Jacob as he spoke; Isabel could not be certain. She nodded up at Jacob as though she understood his point well enough, but her attention had drifted somewhere else entirely. Her gaze lingered on him with an intensity that had nothing to do with dolls or brothers or advice freely given, her expression softening in a way that made Isabel’s mouth curve upward again.
Elena’s obvious infatuation with the lad was not new. Isabel had seen it almost from the first day Jacob Jamison came to Wolvesly to foster, at the end of winter—how Elena’s eyes had widened at his polite smile, how she had found reasons to appear wherever he happened to be, trailing after him with a quiet devotion she did not yet know how to disguise. It had seemed harmless then, even sweet, the sort of affection that bloomed easily in a household where familiarity bred fondness and children grew up together like kin.
Watching her now, Isabel felt a flicker of recognition that reached back across the years. She remembered standing just so herself once, young and unguarded, caught off balance by a man who seemed larger than life simply because he had stepped forward when she needed him. As she recalled, the tender regard she’d harbored for Liam as a child had begun by his coming to her rescue. She had been fourteen when she first came to Wolvesly, young and uncertain, trailing behind her cousin like an afterthought. She remembered how vast the place had seemed then, how intimidated she’d been, how fierce Liam had appeared from a distance—hard-eyed, commanding, already spoken for by duty and betrothal. She remembered, too, the heartfelt devotion she’d clung to after he’d gone away.
Smiling again, Isabel picked up the tunic and needle and went to collect her daughter as Jacob made his way back to the training field, knowing that such things as a young heart’s attachment were not so fleeting—or as easily forgotten—as many imagined.
Jacob was a good lad—steady, observant, already carrying himself with a man’s quiet confidence that sat easily on his broadening shoulders. He crossed the yard toward the troublemakers with an air of patient inevitability, as though he had long since accepted that Alexander and Michael would often require correction.
The Jamisons had been part of their lives for more than a decade now. Jacob’s father was a steady presence, his mother Meggie warm and sharp-witted, and the easy familiarity of the MacTavishes and Jamisons came from united duty to King Robert, and shared joys and grief. Jacob had spent plenty of weeks in his youth at Wolvesly with his family, visiting often enough to feel known, and now fostering here to cement bonds that had never truly been in doubt.
He had his father’s quiet strength and his mother’s thoughtfulness, and something else besides—a gravity that drew others to rely on him without asking.
Elena, it seemed, had noticed.
She stood very still now, clutching the doll to her chest, her gaze trained yet on Jacob. Isabel could almost feel the force of her daughter’s attention, the unguarded admiration written plainly across her face.
Isabel shielded her eyes from the sun and glanced down, her gaze landing on her sons as Jacob closed in on them.
Alexander stood at the end of the line of sparring soldiers, idle at the moment, tall for his years and already cut in Liam’s image, from the set of his jaw to the stubborn squint in his eyes. He wore his mischief like armor, arms crossed, chin lifted in defiance even as he knew himself caught. Michael, by contrast, hovered half a step behind, slighter and not so quick to grin, his dark eyes and expressive mouth unmistakably Isabel’s own. Where Michael met reprimand with sullenness, Alexander greeted it with laughter, as though trouble were simply another form of sport.
“Hassle her if ye must,” Jacob allowed, his tone firm but not unkind, “but dinna put her in harm’s way.”
Alexander laughed outright, bright and unrepentant. “'Tis Elena that needs to learn, nae us.”
Michael assured Jacob, “She needs to be made strong, and a fall or two willna hurt in that regard.”
Jacob stared down the younger Michael until Alexander broke the tension by announcing cheerily, “Ye ruin everything, Jamison.”
Jacob directed his response to Alexander. “Choose better mischief.”
Isabel did not intervene. She passed by the open gates with a quiet smile, knowing the exchange for what it was: not arebuke, but a lesson given gently, one boy to another. Jacob Jamison had learned early how to stand between recklessness and consequence, and she found herself grateful, once again, that Wolvesly had been entrusted with his shaping.
