“Did you think I had left you?” she asked him softly, finally, as she lifted her head from his chest and looked into his eyes. He hesitated for a moment.
“Aye,” he confessed, at last, his gaze sliding away from her. “But no’ because of anything you’ve done. Because…”
He trailed off, but she was sure she already knew where his mind was going.
“Because of your mother?”
He stared at her for a moment, frowning.
“Did someone tell ye?”
She shook her head.
“No, nobody’s said anything to me about her,” she replied. “Nothing that I believe, anyway.”
“Effie? Did she tell ye something?”
She hesitated, but then, deciding that honesty was the best policy between them, nodded.
“Yes. She told me that… that your mother was an Englishwoman, and that she fled the Keep one day. And that you had all the English people and outsiders in the land slaughtered in your rage at her.”
He snorted with amusement.
“Is that what she told ye, aye?”
She nodded.
“Well, she got some of it right,” he admitted. “She was an Englishwoman. And she fled the Keep, a long time ago.”
She smoothed a hand over his chest.
“I’m so sorry…”
He shook his head.
“Dinnae be,” he replied gruffly. “She… she was probably right to do it. She and my father, ye see, they were an arrangedmarriage. She was sealed to him to secure a deal between their families, I dinnae think she ever truly cared for him.”
She shivered at the thought. To be trapped in a marriage to someone you didn’t care for… It was a fate that she had come perilously close to enduring herself, and one that she was relieved she seemed to have escaped.
“But she cared fer me,” he continued. “She’d always tell me that. And she took good care of me when I was a wean. I’m grateful to her for that. But as soon as my father died, when I was fifteen, and the run of the Keep fell to me… she left.”
Silence hung in the air between them. She could hear the pain in his voice, and it ached deep in her soul to hear him hurting so badly. She wished she could reach within him, lift some of this weight from his shoulders, but she knew it was not so simple. At least, she hoped, talking about it might go some way to salving his pain.
“Why did she do that?” she wondered aloud. He shook his head.
“I dinnae ken,” he admitted with a slight laugh. “I never had a chance to ask her, after all. But if I had tae guess…”
He paused for a moment, considering it. It was clear that he had done all he could to keep from pondering this question, perhaps because it would have been too painful to consider, after all he had been through.
“She was finally free,” he replied simply. “She had done her duty by my father, by me, and she wanted to live some life of her own.”
Her heart caught in her throat at the sound of his words.Freedom…It was something that she had come to treasure in her time here, but she could only imagine how oppressive this place must have seemed if it had been a prison instead of a pasture.
“Did you never think of looking for her?”
He sighed heavily.
“Aye. I thought of it a lot, especially in those early days, soon after she left. But I was so busy with the Keep, with my people, I hadnae found a chance to go after her. And, by the time I did… I decided that she deserved her freedom. Whatever she had found out there, it was clearly better than what she’d had here. And who was I to go after her and prove her wrong?”
