Olivia looked down at her pale hand lashed fast to Ragnall’s broad scarred one, at the bright wool crossing both their wrists, and felt the whole impossible weight of it come down on her like snow.
His thumb moved once against the side of her hand. She did not think he knew that he had done it. It was the smallest gesture, a single stroke of a callused thumb across her skin, and it went through her like a struck bell. She hated that it did, but she could not make herself pull away.
“I, Ragnall, take ye, Olivia,” he said, and his deep voice did not shake, not at all, though his hand had shaken against hers the whole while. “To honor, and to shelter, and to keep. Against any harm, from any quarter, while there is breath left in me to stand between ye and it. This I swear.”
It was not the vow the priest had given him. She saw the priest’s eyebrow twitch at it. It was his own, plain and absolute, and he said it looking into her eyes.
Her own careful, rehearsed words turned to ash on her tongue.
“I, Olivia, take ye, Ragnall,” she said when she finally found her voice. And then, because he had gone off the priest’s script and she would be damned before she let him out-honor her at her own wedding: “To spar with. And to suffer. And to try.” A startled ripple of laughter went around the kirk. “It’s the best I’ve got to give for now. It’ll have to do.”
A flicker moved in his dark eyes that she had no word for.
“It’ll do,” he said quietly. “It’ll do fine, lassie.”
“Then by the cord and the kirk and the word of the Elders,” said the priest, “I pronounce ye man and wife. Ye may?—”
Ragnall kissed her before the man could finish.
It was nothing like the night before. That had been a fire, a fire neither of them could stop once it had caught. This was slow and unbearably gentle, his bound hand lifting to cradle her jaw while the cord pulled taut between their wrists, his mouth soft against hers before God and the priest and three hundred staring souls.
It lasted no longer than a single heartbeat, but Olivia felt it in the soles of her feet.
When he drew back, his forehead came to rest against hers for the space of one breath.
“Courage,” he murmured, so low that only she could catch it. “The hardest part is behind ye now.”
He was wrong about that.
The cèilidh filled the Great Hall with firelight and fiddles, and the roaring din of two clans set on drinking a wary peace into being.
Olivia moved through it in a daze, accepting cups she did not drink from and blessings she did not believe in and the careful,assessing looks of a hundred Cairn folk weighing up their Laird’s enemy bride and finding her wanting.
“Smile,” murmured Anne, materializing at her elbow with two cups and a face of perfect innocence. “Ye look like a woman countin’ the exits.”
“Iamcountin’ the exits.”
“Aye, well, count them with yer teeth showin’.” Anne pressed a cup into her hand. “There’s a woman by the second pillar who has been watchin’ ye the whole night like ye owe her money. And a man by the door with a face like a slammed gate. And the auld one with the stick has been tellin’ anyone who’ll stand still that he buried two sons by the river.” She sipped, serene. “So dinnae look at the pillar, dinnae look at the door, and for the love of God dinnae look at the auld one.”
Olivia laughed before she could stop herself. It was the first honest sound she had made all evening, and half the hall turned to look at her for it.
“There,” said Anne. “Now they’ve all seen the enemy laugh, and it’s ruined for them. It’s very hard to hate a woman ye’ve heard laugh.”
Her mother came and stood a while at her shoulder, saying nothing. She squeezed her hand once, hard, in the way that meant more than any of it.
Kate came too, on Maisie’s arm, moving slowly and holding herself carefully upright. The hall went quiet in patches as she passed, because half these people had not laid eyes on her in six months and had privately buried her.
“They’re starin’ at me,” she noted.
“Aye,” Olivia said.
“It’s dreadful.”
“It is.”
“How do ye bear it?”
“Badly,” Olivia replied. “And with me chin up. It’s the only way I’ve found.”
