Olivia found her mother in the herb beds at first light, on her knees in the dirt in her traveling clothes, doing violence to a rosemary bush that had done nothing to deserve it.
“Ye’re leavin’ in an hour.”
“Aye,” said Elspeth, not looking up. “This will want cuttin’ back before the frost, and there’s nae a soul in this castle that kens it, and I’ll nae leave it to die out of spite.” She sat back on her heels and looked at her ruined hands. “There. Now I have somethin’ to do with meself besides weeping.”
Olivia knelt down in the dirt beside her in her good gown and did not care.
They worked a while in silence. It was easier that way. It had always been easier that way with her mother, who had never once needed to fill a quiet.
“He’s nae what I expected,” Elspeth said eventually.
“Nay.”
“I wanted to hate him.” She said it plainly, the way she said everything. “I wanted to hate him for a good six months. I lay awake wantin’ it. And then I came here, and I watched him kill a man for puttin’ his hands on ye, and I watched him carry ye up those stairs like ye were made of glass, and I found I couldnae get the hatred to sit right inside of me any longer.” She snapped a dead stem. “I daenae ken what to do with that, lass. I’ve nae worked it out yet, but I’ll nae lie to ye about it.”
“It doesnae make it all right. What he did.”
“Nay,” her mother agreed. “It doesnae. Two things can be true. That’s the whole trouble with bein’ alive.” She turned and tucked a loose red curl behind Olivia’s ear with a dirty hand. “Are ye safe here? That’s all I’m askin’. Ye can lie to me if ye like. Ye’ve always been a terrible liar, but ye can try.”
“I’m safe,” Olivia said. “I daenae ken if I’m anythin’ else, but I’m safe.”
“Aye.” Elspeth studied her a moment longer. “Well, that’s more than I had at yer age.”
The cart was loaded, and the horses were stamping. Anne stood on the mounting block, adjusting her spectacles for the fourth time in as many minutes, which was her entire vocabulary of grief.
“Write,” she said.
“I’ll write.”
“The true things, mind.”
“God, ye sound like me maither.”
“Yer maither,” said Anne, “is the only person in this glen with any sense, and I’ll thank ye nae to insult us both.” She hugged Olivia hard enough to crack a rib and spoke into her hair quick and low, so nobody else could catch it. “He looks at ye like a man lookin’ at a window in a burnin’ house, Olivia. I’ve been watchin’ him the whole week. Ye’ve nae seen it because ye’re too busy bein’ furious, but I have.”
“Anne—”
“I’m only sayin’ I’ve seen it.” She let go, pushed her spectacles up her nose, and climbed into the cart.
And then it was her mother, in the courtyard, with the whole household turned out and Maisie holding the baby not ten feet away.
Olivia stood with her mother’s hands in her own. Rosie was ten feet from them, chewing on a fistful of Maisie’s shawl, with her Blythe-blue eyes and her fat starfish hands.
Elspeth had not once asked whose child she was because Elspeth did not ask questions like that. Because Elspeth had been raised to believe that a great house had children in it and that it was nobody’s business but the house’s.
Tell her.
The words came up in Olivia’s throat like something she had swallowed wrong.
Tell her. That is Magnus’s daughter. That is yer grandchild, standin’ ten feet from ye in an enemy’s arms, with yer husband’s eyes in her head, and she is the only piece of him left in all the world, and ye are about to ride away from her.
But then she would have to say the rest of it.
And I cannae give ye the one without the other. I cannae give ye a grandchild without givin’ ye what Magnus did to get her.
Her mother’s face, upturned in the cold morning. Gentle. Grieving. Still, after everything, believing that things fell the waythey fell for a reason. Still believing her son had died a soldier’s death in a stupid old war.
It would kill her. Not quickly. It would go into her like a splinter, and it would work its way in for years.
