“Ye cannae refuse it.” That was old Dougal, who had served her father for forty years and sat at his right hand on this same council, and who had bounced her on his knee when she was a bairn and slipped her honeyed bannocks behind the cook’s back. He would not meet her eyes now. He turned his bonnet round and round in his spotted hands, and he said it again, heavier.
“Lass, ye cannae. It is an edict, sealed at the Stones. We defy the Council, and they will set every clan from here to the western coast against us, and they will be in the right to do it. We havenae the men. We havenae the grain to last a siege, nor the walls to hold one since Cairn broke the gate. There would be nothin’ left of Blythe by the spring but a name and a graveyard, and the graveyard’s full enough already.”
“So I am to be the grain,” she said. “I am to be the coin ye lot pay over so the rest of ye can sleep easy in yer beds.”
“Ye are to be the peace,” said her brother quietly.
That was worse, far worse, because Lucas had a beard he could still only manage in patches, and their father’s ring was turning loose on his finger, and he was trying so desperately hard to bea laird, and his hands were shaking under the table where he believed she could not see them.
He made himself go on, and he made himself look at her while he did it. “Olivia, I daenae want this. God as me witness, I’d burn the letter and fight them all if I thought we’d win. But I’d be sendin’ men to die for me pride dressed up as yers. Is that what ye’d have of me?”
“It isnae pride,” she said, and heard the lie in it even as it left her.
“It is, lass.” Dougal, gentle now, which she could not bear at all. “And there is nay shame in pride. Ye come by it honest, from a long line of it. But pride’s a poor roof in winter and a worse one in war.”
Around the table, the others took it up, one after another, like water finding every crack in a wall. Hamish the smith, who had shod her first pony, said the forge had iron enough for plows or for blades but not for both, and he knew which he would choose if the choice were left to a sensible man.
The miller’s brother spoke of the grain stores, and how thin they had worn through a hard year, and how a siege would empty them by the feast of the Nativity with nothing to follow but the eating of seed corn and then of nothing at all.
An old woman who had served three lairds said that she had buried two sons in this feud already and had no third to give, and looked at Olivia down the length of the table with eyes thathad done all their weeping years ago and had none left over for anyone’s pride, least of all a lady’s.
They were not cruel. That was the unbearable part. Not one of them was cruel. They loved her, in the gruff sidelong way of people who had watched her grow, and they were asking her, every weathered face of them, to lie down in the road so the rest might pass.
Olivia looked at her young brother with his ring, too large for his hand, and at the empty chair at the head of the table where her father should have sat, and at the candle her mother had left burning in the window for a husband who would never return up the glen at dusk.
They’re all right. That’s what I cannae bear. They’re all right, and I am the only wall standin’ between me people and the grave.
She had built her whole self, brick by furious brick, on the certainty that she would never bend to the man who took her family. And here was the price of that certainty laid out plain on the long table, counted in other folk’s sons.
She did not stop hating him in that hall. She was not so quick nor so soft as that. But for the first time, the hate felt like a weight she was carrying rather than a weapon she could swing, and she resented him for it, fresh and hot, for putting a price on her grief.
She opened her mouth to say something cruel, because cruelty came more easily than the grief pressing hot and thick at the back of her throat.
The hall door banged open on its hinges.
A maid stood in it, white to the lips, her cap knocked askew. She looked at Olivia and then at Lucas and seemed unable to decide which of the two she ought to be more afraid of.
“Beggin’ yer pardon, me Laird, me Lady,” she gasped out. “He’s here. At the gate. With six men and a cart.”
The whole table went still.
“Who is here?” Lucas asked, though every living soul in that room already knew the answer in their bones.
“Laird Cairn,” the maid whispered, as if saying it louder might call something worse down on them. “He says he has come for his bride.”
CHAPTER 2
Olivia did not waitfor the council to decide what one did with an enemy who walked up to one’s gate and asked politely for a wife.
She went out to meet him herself.
She had braced for the monster the whole way down the keep steps. In the six months since, the man in her memory had worn a beard like a thornbush and a face twisted with the joy of killing, the only shape her mind could find large enough to carry what he had done.
She had nursed that face in the dark. She had fed it. She came down into the courtyard now with her chin up and her hands fisted in her skirts, ready to spit in the devil’s eye and dare him to wipe it away.
The devil was not there.
The man waiting in her courtyard was clean-shaven and as still as a standing stone, with the only wildness about him being his black hair, pulled back and tied at the nape of his neck. A long, pale scar ran from the corner of his left eye to the edge of his lip, tugging at it very slightly, so even in stillness he seemed caught on the edge of a word he had thought better of.
