A fiddle started up, thin and trembling, then a second, and the terrible spell over the hall broke into a quiet, uneasy murmur and the scrape of a tune.
Ragnall sheathed his dirk and turned to look at his bride.
She stood exactly where he had left her, one hand pressed flat against the torn blue bodice of her gown, holding the ripped fabric closed at her shoulder. She was as white as bone. Her eyes were enormous and fixed on him, on the blood drying on his hand, on the dirk he had just put away, and he could not read what was in them at all.
She is lookin’ at the monster again. Aye. There he is, then. The one she kent was in me underneath it all.
He came toward her slowly, his hands open and held away from his sides, like a man approaching a wounded creature that might bolt or bite.
“Olivia, are ye hurt? Did he?—”
“I… I am fine.” Her voice came out steady, and the steadiness cost her. He could see it. “He bruised me arm and tore me gown, but I am fine.”
“Ye’re nae fine. Ye’re swayin’ where ye stand.”
“I am nae—” Olivia’s eyes flicked past him, over his shoulder, and she froze.
Kate was standing. She had risen from her chair by the fire and was standing quite straight and quite still in the middle of that shrieking hall, with Maisie’s hand closed hard around her wrist and Maisie’s face turned up to her in open fear.
Kate was not looking at the body on the floor. She was looking at her brother. At the dirk in his hand, and the blood on his cuff, and the flat, unchanged calm of his face.
Olivia knew what she was seeing. She understood it in one cold rush, the way one understood a thing one had never once been told before.
She has stood in a room like this before. She has known him to do this before. And the man who was killed that time was the faither of her child.
“Kate,” Ragnall said. He had gone very white.
Kate did not answer him. She looked at him a moment longer, and there was no horror on her face, which was somehow far worse than horror, and then she gathered up her crooked green skirts in both hands and crossed the floor to Olivia.
She did not look at the blood. She had to step around it, but she did not look at it.
“Yer gown’s torn,” she said.
“Kate—”
“It’s torn at the shoulder. Come with me, and I’ll pin it.” Her voice was perfectly level, and it did not carry past the three of them. “Come with me now, Olivia. Ye daenae want to be in this room. I ken what this room does to a body, and ye daenae want to be in it.”
She put her thin arm through Olivia’s, not trembling at all, and took the first step toward the door.
Olivia got two paces. Then her body chose to betray her. The color drained clean from her face, the hall tilted, and her knees simply gave up holding her.
“Olivia—”
Ragnall had her before she reached the floor. He flew across the hall faster than a big man had any right to move, and he took her weight out of his sister’s thin arms as though she weighed nothing. Kate let her go and stood back, not making any sound.
Olivia came into his arms light as the bride in the auld song. Light as Kate had been on the stairs that night, with the blood on her.
The thought went through him cold as well water.
He slid one arm under her knees and lifted her clean off the floor, and she did not even fight him, which frightened him worse than anything else in that whole black night.
As he turned for the stairs with his wife cradled against his chest, he looked back once to find his sister standing in the middle of the hall in her crooked green gown, with her chin up and the blood on the flagstones behind her, watching him carry another woman out of a room he had just killed a man in.
Kate did not look away. She held his eyes until he was gone.
“I’ve got ye,” he murmured against Olivia’s hair, low enough that the hall could not catch it. “I’ve got ye, lassie. Nobody touches ye now. Nobody in this world.”
He carried her out of his wedding feast in his arms, past the body, the blood, and the staring eyes of two clans, up the cold stone stairs toward his chambers, with her heart pounding hard against his ribs, and her torn blue skirts trailing down over his arm.
