She stopped the thought there.
Esther pulled back from Noah’s shoulder to look at her scraped knee again, wearing the evaluating expression of a child assessing their own damage.
Noah said something low that Ava couldn’t hear, and Esther shook her head and then looked past his shoulder to where Ava stood.
“Ava,” she called. “Come see.”
Ava came. She crouched beside them both and looked at the knee with the appropriate gravity the situation required. She agreed that, yes, it was a very respectable scrape, and yes, it would probably leave a scar, but nothing too notable.
Esther found this satisfying.
Noah caught Ava’s eye over Esther’s head. His expression was unreadable, as it was when he hadn’t sorted out something in his mind yet.
He was close, crouched at the same level as her, close enough that she could see the line of his jaw and the breadth of his shoulders and the careful way his hands were still resting on Esther’s back.
She was aware of all of this in a way that was entirely inconvenient, given that she was supposed to be looking at a scraped knee.
“Right,” she said, in her most practical voice. “Shall we pack up and head back? I think this adventurer has earned Esther her afternoon rest.”
Esther, to Ava’s considerable relief, did not argue.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The fire in the tavern hearth was the only source of warmth in Dunmore, and even that was doing a poor job.
William MacGregor held out his cup without looking up.
The young, tired barmaid—the kind of tired that came from working too long for too little—hesitated.
“I’ve paid,” he said.
“Ye’ve paid for two, sir. That’d be yer third.”
“And I’m askin’ for a third.” He looked at her then, with the patient, slightly pitying expression of someone explaining something to a person of limited understanding.
“So either ye bring it, or ye fetch yer master, and I explain to him why he’s losin’ a customer who happens to ken three of themagistrates in this county by their first names.” He smiled. “Yer choice, lass.”
She brought the drink, but he didn’t thank her.
Across the table, Fergus, a border trader and small man, watched the exchange with the wariness of someone trying to correctly identify what kind of trouble he was sitting with.
“Ye were sayin’,” William said, settling back. “About the castle.”
“Aye.” Fergus wrapped his hands around his own cup. “The whole household’s talkin’ about her. Village lass, nay family, showed up with Esther after the bairn went missin’. Harris, they call her.” He paused. “Word is the Laird brought her back himself. She’s in the rooms adjacent to his chambers now.”
William turned his cup slowly on the table. “His chambers?”
“Aye.”
“A village lass,” he said it the way you would saya stray dog. Not quite contempt, but the category of things that did not belong in certain spaces. “And the clan just accepts this? Nobody questions it?”
“The clan loves her, from what I hear.” Fergus shrugged, with the diplomatic caution of a man who sensed he was conveying information his audience didn’t like. “She’s good with the bairn. Esther’s well. Better than she was, they say.”
William said nothing for a moment.
Esther. His daughter, his blood, his bargaining piece, and apparently now devoted to some tavern girl with a kind face and no name worth mentioning.
“Of course she’s better,” he said, with a smile that didn’t touch his eyes. “Children are resilient. They recover. Esther would have been fine regardless. She has MacGregor blood, whatever me brother likes to pretend about how I left her.” He took a drink. “Noah’s always had a talent for makin’ himself the hero of a story he arrived at late.”
