The door was not quite shut. Voices came through the narrow gap of it, and that stopped him where he stood, because no one spoke in Kate’s room.
One of the voices was Olivia’s—low and unguarded, stripped of its usual armor. He stood frozen in the dark corridor, listening toher ask his wounded sister with such raw, unpracticed kindness whether Kate hated her for the wedding. And she meant the question.
She is askin’ me sister for forgiveness for a crime that was never hers. And she doesnae even ken that’s what she is doin’.
And then a voice he had not heard in long months, a voice he had begun in his blackest hours to believe was gone forever, a voice he had nearly forgotten the music of, said, “It looks good on ye, Olivia.”
Ragnall’s heart stopped.
He pushed the door wide before he had decided in any part of his mind to do it, and there they were, his enemy’s sister standing in her blue wedding gown and his own sister sitting up in her chair. Kate was looking at the world again, actually looking at it, her eyes alert and alive, and his legs all but went straight out from under him where he stood.
“Kate.” His voice cracked clean across the middle of her name. “Did ye… Did ye need somethin’? Did ye just… Did ye talk?”
“She is the only one who asked me a normal question, Ragnall.”
He was unable to speak, standing in the doorway like a man who had been felled. Throughout these silent months, he had bombarded his sister with a hundred questions, a thousand,kneeling by that chair until his knees hurt. All of them, without exception, were the wrong ones.
“Ye all come in here,” Kate went on, slow and thin, terribly and perfectly clear, each word set down with care like a foot on uncertain ice, “and ye ask me how I feel. As if there’s an answer to be had. As if I could hand it to ye and ye’d be comforted. The man I loved tricked me. And then, when I’d given him everythin’, he tried to kill me.”
Behind him, Ragnall heard Olivia draw one sharp, stricken breath, and he understood with a fresh stab of helplessness that she was learning this last black piece of the truth only now, in this room, from his sister’s mouth, and there was nothing on God’s earth he could do to soften the blow for either of them.
“And then ye killed him for it, Braither. With yer own hand. So now tell me, how do ye think I feel?” Kate turned her face slowly back toward the dark window. “I daenae have an answer to give ye. I’ve looked for one and there isnae any. But the lass didnae come to ask me about me feelings. She came to ken whether her gown sat well on her. It does. She looks lovely in it.” The faint thread of voice dropped lower still. “Now, leave me. I am tired. I am so tired, Ragnall.”
“Kate, Rosie’s grown so big. She has started to crawl. She gets clear across the floor now. If ye’d only see her, just the once, just for a?—”
“I cannae see her yet.” A long pause, and the candle guttered. “Nae like this.”
He turned, leading Olivia out. There was nothing else in the world to do but leave, and so he left and softly pulled the door shut behind him.
Then he stood in the dark of the passage with his hand still on the latch, and he did not move for a long moment, because he did not entirely trust his legs.
Six months. For six months, he had knelt at that chair until his knees ached on the cold boards. He had brought her broth she would not eat and news she did not want, and her own daughter twice, and had been sent away. He had begged. He had once, God forgive him, shouted, and she had not so much as blinked, and he had gone out and put his fist through a stable door and told Alastair it was a horse that did it.
A hundred questions. A thousand. And every one of them the wrong one.
And then a red-haired Blythe hellion who had every reason under heaven to wish his whole house in the ground had barged into the wrong room in her wedding gown and asked his sister whether the gown sat well, and his sister had answered her.
Ye asked her a question that wasnae about her sufferin’. That’s the whole of it. That’s all she ever wanted. I couldnae see it, but ye did, and ye werenae even tryin’.
He should have been glad. Hewasglad. It sat in his chest alongside a thing that was not gladness at all, a low and shamefulthing that he turned over once, and recognized, and set down again quickly, appalled at himself.
He was jealous. Of Olivia. For getting there first.
Down the passage, the candle in its sconce guttered and steadied. Ragnall let go of the latch at last, made himself breathe, and set off toward the stairs, finding that he had no earthly notion what he was going to say to the woman waiting for him there.
Olivia thought, as he steered her out of the room with a hand on the small of her back, that he would be glad.
His sister had spoken. After all these silent shuttered months, Kate had come back from wherever the dark had taken her, even if for a little while, even if only far enough to say a kind word about a gown to a near stranger.
Olivia had expected to see joy break over that hard, scarred face like the dawn coming up over the hills. Instead, his hand stayed firm on her back as he led her down the corridor, into his study, and shut the door behind them. When he turned to face her in the dim firelight, he was not glad at all. He was something else.
He wasundone.
“Ye’re nae supposed to see me in me weddin’ gown,” Olivia said, for lack of anything braver to put in the silence. “It’s ill luck, ye ken. The worst kind.”
“As if this match was made in heaven before.” He dragged a hand down his face and let out a shaky breath. “How do ye do it?”
“Do what?”
