She stood a while longer in the cold, though, and turned the healer’s words over in her mind.
“Ye’ve had so great a hand in fillin’ up its graves.”
It was not true, not in the sense Brigid had meant it, and Olivia knew as much. Still, it had found the soft place under her ribs and lodged there like a splinter, because the cruelest lies were the ones cut from the same cloth as a fear a body already carried.
She had wondered the same herself, in the darkness of this castle. Whether she was entitled to even a single happy hour under a roof her own blood had helped to ruin.
She did not step outside again for air. Instead, she returned inside for shelter. She did not go back up to her chamber. She could not have borne the faces. She went down the first corridor her feet found, around a dark corner, and through the first door her hand touched. She shut it behind her and leaned her full weight against the wood and gasped, trembling in the dark.
Then she realized she was not alone.
A single candle burned low on the sill by the window, and in the chair turned for once not toward the bare wall but toward the door, her eyes not fixed and empty but alert, sat Kate.
Olivia froze where she stood. Of all the rooms in all the cold castle, her blind feet had carried her to this one.
“Forgive me,” she said. “I didnae mean to… I wasnae thinkin’ where I was going. I only needed somewhere they wouldnae find me, and I…” She stopped, helpless, her hand still on the latch behind her.
And then, because the silence stretched on unbearably and the girl in the chair watched her so steadily, she let go of the door and turned a small, foolish circle in the candlelight, her deep blue skirts whispering out around her ankles and settling slowly.
“The whole keep has been desperate to see this,” she said softly. “I needed a respite from all the stares.” She let the skirts fall still. Kate had not moved, had not spoken, only watched. “I’m Olivia, by the way. I daenae ken if anyone has thought to tell ye. Nay one in this keep tells me anythin’ either, so we’re even in that at least.” She swallowed hard. “Did ye mind me bargin’ in on ye like this? I can go. I will go, only say the word. It’s only… Are ye all right with it, Kate? With me marryin’ yer braither in the mornin’? Because if ye arenae, then that makes the two of us, and I’d rather ye told me true to me face than have ye hate me quietly across the table for the next forty years. None of me kin are truly here, ye see.
“Me faither’s gone, and Magnus, and Lucas couldnae come for all he wished it, and I just… I daenae have anyone to ask. And I daenae even ken why I am askin’ ye of all the souls in this keep. Ye’ve every reason in the world to wish me straight to the devil and good riddance.”
Then she caught herself, heard how much she had just spilled at the feet of a near stranger, and made some rough effort at a smile.
“Anyway. Listen to me ramble. Half the castle’s been wild for a look at this, and ye are the first to have it.” She smoothed her palms down the blue silk. “Does it sit well, do ye think? Honest, now. Does it look good on me?”
She drew one long, shaky breath when she didn’t get a reply. She didn’t know what she had expected.
“I am sorry. I will leave ye in peace now.”
She turned for the door.
“It looks good on ye, Olivia.”
Olivia went absolutely still, her hand frozen on the cold latch.
The voice was raspy and faint, barely more than a thread passing through a needle’s eye, belonging to someone who had not used it in a very long and terrible time. But despite its frailty, it was unmistakable, and it had said her name—her own name.
Olivia slowly turned around to find Kate watching her, a flicker of life stirring behind those deep green eyes.
“Ye ken me name,” she said stupidly.
“I ken everythin’.” Kate’s voice cracked and held. “That’s the part nay one in this keep has worked out yet. I daenae speak, but I have never once been deaf.”
Olivia could not move at all.
“I ken ye ride like a man and ye have a tongue on ye like a whip. I ken ye told me braither he’d never lay a hand on ye, and I ken he agreed to it, for the maids talk in the passage and they think a shut door is the same as a shut ear.” Kate’s hands lay quiet and still on the coverlet. “For half a year they’ve stood at the foot of that bed and talked over me about what’s to be done with me, and nae one of them has once asked me a question and waited for the answer.” Her chin lifted a fraction. “Ye asked. And then ye stood there like a fool in yer weddin’ gown and waited.”
“Kate—”
“So aye. I ken yer name.” Something moved at the corner of her mouth. It was not a smile, but it was the country that a smile came from. “Olivia.”
CHAPTER 9
Ragnall had comedown the corridor that night for the same reason he came every night—to stand a moment in the doorway of his sister’s room and look upon the wreck that her bright life had become, and feel the full crushing weight of his own failure settle onto him, before he let himself go and seek what little sleep would have him.
It was the one penance he never missed. He had failed her, had been too busy with his duties to see the danger creeping up on his own blood under his own roof, and so he paid her now in the only coin he had left, which was to refuse himself the mercy of looking away from what had been done to her.
