“Does it ever cease,” Harry called out mildly, “that spigot of words?”
Jacob glanced back just in time to see David pretend to take offense and cast a gape-jawed look at the old retainer.
“A man might think,” Harry remarked, “that with all there is to see—and all there is to be wary of—silence might have its uses.”
“I speak so the rest of ye dinna have to,” David said magnanimously. “A service, really.” When Harry rolled his eyes, David laughed. “If I go quiet, Harry, ye’ll have to entertain yourselves—or worse, be entertained by Malcolm.”
Malcolm, younger but far stronger, reached across the space between horses and gave his brother a good shove. It wasn’t enough by far to topple David from his steed, but he pretended it was, giving a gruff cry before he straightened himself.
The noise he made was just loud enough to draw a quick, fierce glance from their father. The reprimand was no more than a look, and yet it worked as effectively as a shouted command. David offered an exaggeratedly solemn expression that fooled absolutely no one.
This was how they were—David all effortless charm and easy temper, Malcolm watchful and careful with his words, and Jacob somewhere in the middle, neither as boisterous as David nor as quiet as Malcolm. Their father often said all three of them had their mother’s stubbornness, though Jacob suspected his father had far more of it than he claimed. Harry had confirmed this on more than one occasion.
They had been riding since dawn, the Lowland castle of Strathfinnan still several hours ahead, its gates already open to the banners and retinues of arriving lords. By nightfall its hall would be crowded with mormaers, chiefs, and allied men of rank—drawn together under the Hamilton’s roof at Strathfinnan, whose lands bordered the eastern marches and whose loyalties, like so many others in the south, lay balanced uneasily between Scotland and England. The meeting was to be one of necessity rather than celebration: a council convened to speak of borders, truces, and the fragile calm that passed for peace at the moment.
And once the councils were done, the betrothal of Elena MacTavish would be formally confirmed before the assembled chiefs, as much a celebration as a seal placed upon the alliances shaped within Strathfinnan’s walls.
He’d heard of the betrothal weeks ago, and still it sat oddly with him. Jacob had always known that Elena MacTavish would one day be expected to make a good, useful marriage; Wolvesly did not exist apart from such reckonings, nor had Liam ever pretended otherwise. But this match gave him pause. Liam MacTavish was not a man who traded lightly in his daughter’s future. He was unyielding, strategic, severe when need demanded, but never careless where his family was concerned, and never blind to the cost such arrangements exacted. Whatever agreement had been struck, Jacob reckoned it had been weighed and argued, turned over from every side, and shaped into something Liam could live with. Jacob supposednecessity had a way of pressing even the most cherished things into service.
Or—another possibility—Elena was enamored of the young Thomas Hamilton.
His mother brought up the betrothal as they rode.
“I still cannot believe that wee child is old enough to be wed,” she said mildly, adjusting the fall of her cloak against the breeze. “Eight, ten, and twelve seems but yesterday, does it not?”
Jacob gave a noncommittal sound in reply, while David made some remark about his mother still thinking they, themselves, were only lads and not men.
Elena had been sixteen when last Jacob had seen her, no longer a child by any reckoning, but caught somewhere between what she had been and what she would become. And yet, even then she had seemed far removed from the bright, persistent girl of eight or ten his mother recalled.
That had been the year he left Wolvesly for good. After the final campaign he rode home to Blackwood, back into his father’s service and a life that allowed little pause—men to train, land to oversee, marches to ride when the call came. But in the three weeks he had remained at Wolvesly, he and Elena had crossed paths often enough to leave their mark.
He could still picture the first moment he truly recognized her then, if he allowed himself— Elena stepping into the hall to greet her returning father and brother, her movements far more assured than the girl he remembered. She had addressed Jacob with a calm, unguarded composure that unsettled him more than any battlefield ever had. Not shy, not bold, but simply poised. Familiar, yet unmistakably changed, standing on the threshold of womanhood.
In the weeks that followed, he found himself watching her more than he intended. She had come into herself with a quiet surety that caught him off guard, a little reserved, a touch aloofwhere once she had been open and loud, unabashedly dogging his heels. That shift unsettled him more than he cared to examine. He was drawn in without knowing why, beguiled by the woman she was becoming and by the absence of the girl he had known.
He left Wolvesly carrying more than memory, though he would not have named it as such then—only the sense of something begun too late, noticed only as it slipped beyond reach. Time and distance did the rest. When he was not in the field, the daily demands of Blackwood claimed him fully, and what had once caught his attention faded through simple absence. Elena MacTavish became a name he knew, a face he could still easily call to mind, but not much more than that—a memory softened and thinned by time, no longer something he turned over or held onto.
“Ye ken,” Malcolm said quietly from behind him, “when I fostered with the MacTavishes after ye returned, Jacob, they used to say she followed ye everywhere as a wee bairn.”
Jacob glanced back. Malcolm’s expression was mild, thoughtful, his tone neither teasing nor pointed—simply stating something he recalled.
Malcolm shrugged. “Alexander complained of it often enough. Said ye couldnae take two steps without Elena at your heels. Mooned over ye, he claimed.”
Before Jacob could reply, David twisted in his saddle, delighted.
“Mooned, is it?” he repeated. “Nae, more than that. I heard she wept herself to sleep nightly when Jacob rode out. Carved her name under his into a tree as well. Swore eternal devotion beneath the branches.”
Malcolm shot him a look. “Ye heard nae such thing.”
“Feels true enough,” David said cheerfully.
Jacob huffed a quiet breath, more amused than otherwise. He remembered Elena and her youthful devotion well enough—had nearly mourned its loss when last he saw her—but the rest was invention, pure and simple. Still, he held his tongue, well aware that contradiction would only encourage further invention.
Meggie made a low sound of amusement. “Aye, and now she’s to be another man’s wife. Time is relentless, is it not?” She leaned forward slightly, enough to catch Jacob’s expression if he dared reveal anything. “You saw her last, Jacob. Two—three years ago?”
“Four,” he corrected, voice even. “When I rode with Liam’s men in twenty-two.”
Meggie watched him now with an interest that made Jacob straighten slightly in the saddle and stare straight ahead. His mother missed little.
