“Ye’re shakin’,” Caitlin said.
“I’m nae shakin’.”
“Ava.” Caitlin set down the ribbon she was holding and looked at her directly. “Yer hands are shakin’.”
Ava looked at her hands.
They were, in fact, trembling slightly, which was irritating and also apparently impossible to stop.
She pressed them flat against the skirt of her gown. Blue, as Caitlin had drawn it days ago, with the MacGregor tartan sash pinned at her shoulder, and breathed carefully.
“It’s cold in here,” she said.
“It’s nae cold. There’s a fire.” Caitlin picked the ribbon back up. “It’s all right to be nervous.”
“I’m nae nervous. I’m...” She stopped. “Fine. I’m a little nervous.”
“Of course ye are. Ye’re about to stand in front of the whole clan and hand yer wrist to the most terrifyin’ man in the Highlands.” Caitlin began weaving the ribbon through the end of Ava’s braid with the focused expression of someone who has been practicing this. “Anyone would be nervous.”
“He’s nae terrifyin’.”
“He is a little terrifyin’. Even ye thought so at first.”
“I thought he was...” Ava paused. “Intense.”
“That’s a polite word for it.” Caitlin tied off the braid and stood back to look at her work.
Her eyes went slightly bright. “Oh,” she said. “Ava.”
“What? What’s wrong?”
“Nothin’s wrong.” She pressed her lips together. “Ye look beautiful.”
Ava looked at herself in the glass.
The gown was simple. She had requested simplicity, had been firm about it, and had resisted three different attempts by the seamstress to add embellishments.
The blue was the right blue, and the tartan sash sat across her shoulder with the clan colours vivid against it, and she did look, she admitted privately, like someone who belonged here.
That was the part that still surprised her, some mornings.
A knock came at the door. Caitlin went to it and opened it slightly.
“Lady Annabeth’s here,” she said, turning back with a slightly awed expression. “And she brought the Laird MacLennan.”
Ava looked up. "The MacLennans? Noah's allies?"
"Aye." Caitlin lowered her voice. "The Laird MacLennan and Noah spent years mendin' what our previous laird broke between the clans. They're close now — as close as men like that get, anyway. And Lady Annabeth is..." She paused, searching for the right word. "Ye'll see."
“Send them in,” Ava said.
Esther was already in the room, sitting on the window seat in her good dress, watching all of it with the quiet attentiveness she brought to things she considered important. She had been theresinceafter her bath and breakdfast and had not been asked to leave.
Annabeth Reid came in first. Small, warm-faced, with the kind of energy that suggested she was always in the middle of something interesting. She crossed the room in four steps and took both Ava’s hands in hers.
“Look at ye,” she said. “Oh, look at ye.”
“Lady Annabeth.”
