“What’s her name?”
“Rosie,” Maisie said. “For her cheeks, ye ken, like two wee roses. Her maither never named her, ye’ll understand. Hadnae the heart for it, so the maids took it upon themselves, and it stuck fast.”
“And how old are ye, then, Rosie?” Olivia asked, soft and foolish. “And what’s yer favorite thing in the world?”
Rosie answered by closing one fat fist around a loose lock of red hair and pulling on it, which Olivia chose to take as a full and satisfactory reply.
“Rosie.” Olivia pressed her lips to the soft dark crown of the baby’s head and breathed her in.
The baby leaned back to look up at her. Her eyes were the exact clear blue of Olivia’s. Of her father’s. Of Magnus’s. The Blythe blue, a color that had persisted through ten generations of a proud, fierce clan.
The tears Olivia had so stubbornly refused to shed for her enemy in the muddy yard, and had again denied not long ago, now came silently and beyond her control.
“She has me eyes,” she whispered, a half-laugh and a half-sob caught together in her throat. “Isnae that the strangest thing in all the world? She has me very eyes.”
She did not see Ragnall’s face as he watched her hold the child. She did not see Maisie’s sharp old gaze move bright and satisfied from one to the other, with the quiet pleasure of a woman who had just watched two heavy stones begin to lean their weight together against every expectation.
What she did see was a maid hurrying up the corridor toward them, breathless, before bobbing a brief curtsy.
“Beggin’ yer pardon, me Lady. There are riders comin’ up the glen road. A cart, and an armed escort, and…” The maid’s eyes went wide as plates. “They’re flyin’ the banner of Blythe.”
Olivia’s heart leapt so hard it hurt her. She gave the baby back to Ragnall.
“Me maither,” she breathed. “Ragnall, it’s me maither. She’s?—”
But when she turned, he was already handing the baby back to the maid and reaching for the sword-belt hung on the peg by the door, and his face had shuttered like a gate.
“Alastair. With me.”
“Where are ye goin’?” She heard the words come out of her too sharp, too much like a wife, and hated herself for it.
He was already three strides down the corridor. “Out.”
“Out where? Me maither is at yer gate.”
“And she’ll be met with every honor this keep can muster, and I’ll nae be the first face she claps eyes on after what I did to her husband.” He did not slow down or look back, and his voice came flat over his shoulder as he went. “Maisie will see to them. I’ll be back before supper.”
With that, he disappeared around the corner.
A moment later, she heard a horse gallop out from under the arch.
Maisie clicked her tongue softly beside her. “He’s nae runnin’ from yer maither, lass,” she said. “He’s runnin’ from himself. He just hasnae worked out yet that the beast follows him.”
CHAPTER 7
Her mother heldher in the courtyard for a long time without saying anything, which was exactly how Olivia knew that she had prepared herself for tears all the way up the glen and was now stubbornly resolved not to be the first to cry.
“Lucas couldnae come,” her mother said into her hair. “He’s still learnin’ his letters and his laws from the council, the poor solemn lamb. He frets he isnae ready, and frets worse that everyone can see he frets. He sends his love and a great deal of unasked-for advice—he made me promise to give it to ye word-for-word. But I wouldnae let ye be wed without yer own maither here to fuss over ye and pin yer hem. And look who I stole along the road to keep me company.”
And there, climbing down from the cart with her spectacles already sliding down her nose and both her thin arms flung wide, was Anne.
Anne, who had been Olivia’s dearest friend since the two of them were knee-high to the kirk pews and inseparable as two halves of a walnut ever since. Tall and thin and black-haired, with her spectacles forever sliding down her nose, quiet as a closed door in any company and wickedly, gloriously sharp the very moment that company left the room. She had a quick wit that she showed almost no one, preferring to be thought meek so she might watch better, and a loyalty so fierce it had frightened more than one person who had been foolish enough to underestimate the quiet girl with the spectacles.
She had received her own summons to the wedding, plain and courteous, a guest’s card with no portrait folded inside it, and none of the cruelty the Council had pressed into Olivia’s.
“Daenae say anythin’ kind to me,” Olivia warned her, the moment she was near enough to hear it. “Nae one kind word. I will come apart at every seam if ye do, and I’ve only just gotten meself sewn back together.”
“I wouldnae dream of it,” said Anne, and hugged her hard enough to crack a rib, which said everything the forbidden kind words would have.
