“The bread’s good,” he tried.
“Aye.”
“Cook has a way with it.”
“She does.”
Down the table, Alastair had found something of great interest at the bottom of his cup. Maisie was watching the pair of them the way a cat watched a bird and had not said one word in ten minutes, which was as good as a scream.
“Ye’re nae eatin’,” Ragnall said.
“I ate this mornin’.”
“Ye ate half a bannock this mornin’ and gave the rest of it to me dog.”
“Then ye’ve been watchin’ me eat,” Olivia said to her plate. “How very close a study ye’ve made of me, me Laird.”
And there it was. He had no notion at all what he had done, but it was there in her voice, cold and clean and edged like new frost. It had not been there when he left her not two hours ago.
Two hours. I’ve been in me study for two hours, and she’s gone from cursin’ me for a peepin’ bampot to callin’ meme Lairdacross a table like I’m a stranger come to buy a horse.
“Olivia.”
“Me Laird?”
“Look at me.”
She did.
That was the worst of it. She looked at him with her chin up and her face perfectly composed and perfectly polite, and there was nobody behind it, and Ragnall discovered that he would rather she had thrown the salt cellar at his head.
Then she looked away almost as quickly as she’d looked at him. That was a first. Olivia, who met every soul she had ever crossed full in the eye, who had stared down a council and a clan and him, now kept her gaze on her plate and her words to a clipped polite nothing.
He told himself it was because of the wedding night, the strangeness of it, the morning after. He told himself she wanted time, and that a wise man gave it. He told himself a great many patient and reasonable things, and watched his wife turn to frost across his own table, and felt the lightness go out of the day by inches.
He gave her the day. He had a hundred duties, and he buried himself in them, the tenants and the tithes and the long grim aftermath of a wedding that had ended in a killing, and he did not seek her out, because he had learned young that one did not chase a thing that was bolting. One stood still and let it come back.
She did not come back.
She was awake when he went up to the room that night. Not feigning it this time. She sat up against the headboard with the candle still burning and her arms wrapped round her drawn-up knees, and she watched him come in with a look he could not read at all.
His stomach dropped.
“Say it,” he said, shutting the door at his back. “Whatever it is. Ye’ve been sharpenin’ it the whole day. Say it and be done with it.”
“Brigid MacKee,” Olivia said.
Ragnall understood everything in a single sick instant, before she ever said another word.
“What did she say to ye?” he asked quietly.
“Does it matter? She didnae lie, did she?” Olivia’s chin lifted. “Ye and she. For years. Until two years ago. In this castle. Under thisvery roof.” Her voice did not break, but it was a near thing, and the nearness was worse than the breaking.
“I ken I’ve nay right to it. I ken I am the one who drew the line and said nay touchin’. I ken what’s between us is a bargain and nae a marriage, and I’ve nay claim on yer history, nor yer heart, nor anythin’ else of ye.”
She drew a breath. “But she stood there with yer niece’s wee life in her two hands, and she made certain I kent exactly whose place it was I’d taken in yer bed, and she did it on purpose, to wound me, and it…” Her jaw worked. “It wasnae respectful to me. Was it? Whatever it is I am to ye.”
Ragnall stood very still in the middle of the room and felt a cold, clean, absolute calm settle over him.
