“Ye’re tryin’ to kill me,” Alastair observed, dodging a blow that would have cracked a rib. “What did the poor lass do?”
“Nothin’.”
“Liar.” Alastair stepped back, breathing hard, and lowered his blade. “Ye’ve a face on ye like a man at his own burial. The whole castle’s talkin’. Ye sent away Brigid, and now they say ye’ve put yer bride in her own chamber three nights wed. What in God’s name are ye doin’, Ragnall?”
Ragnall did not answer right away. He drove the point of the blunt blade into the cold ground, leaned on it, and gazed across the awakening glen, where the mist clung low in the hollows and the first smoke curled up from the village chimneys.
“I daenae hate her,” he said.
“I should think nae. Half the clan has seen how ye look at her.”
“That’s the whole trouble.” He grunted. “I daenae hate her, Alastair. And nae hatin’ folk is what brought me sister within an inch of the grave. I let Kate love where she pleased. I let her run to the boundary stone in the gloamin’. I was too busy bein’ a laird to see what it cost her, and it nearly killed her, and I swore on her broken body I’d never be such a fool with me own heart. Yet here I am, lost over a Blythe.”
“And ye think,” Alastair said slowly, “that if ye let yerself care for her, she will be like Kate one day?”
“I think I am more afraid of what I’d do,” Ragnall said. “Of what I’d become. A laird who cares for anything past all reason makes poor choices for everyone else. I’ve a clan to protect. I cannae be a man who’d burn the glen down to keep one woman warm.” He paused. “And I am very close to bein’ exactly that man. So, aye, I am stayin’ away from her while I still can.”
Alastair was quiet for a while. Then he sheathed his blade and clapped a great hand on Ragnall’s shoulder and said the words Ragnall would turn over and over in the dark for nights to come.
“Ye forget somethin’, me Laird. Ye’re nae her braither, and she isnae yer sister. Magnus was a viper that crept in low to do his worst. Yer lass came through the front gate with her chin up, callin’ ye a murderer to yer face. The danger to Kate was that she never saw it comin’. There’s nay danger on this earth yer Olivia willnae see comin’ and spit straight in the eye of.”
He squeezed once and let go. “Ye’re nae protectin’ her by holdin’ her at arm’s length, Ragnall. Ye’re just makin’ the pair of ye miserable, and handin’ the clan a cold, unhappy lady to sharpen their knives on. Think on it.”
Ragnall reflected on it throughout the day, during his duties. From his thoughts, he derived one good idea, something practical he could do that was not about loving her or deceiving her.
The festival.
Every year, the two clans kept the same river festival, at the same turning of the season, on opposite banks, never together, never once in living memory. A celebration of the very water they had bled each other over for three generations.
And it occurred to him, while sharpening a blade that needed no sharpening, that a man who would show two clans that they could share a border might do worse than show them first that they could share a feast.
He would write to Olivia’s brother. To young Lucas, the new Laird of Clan Blythe, the solemn lad trying so hard to be a leader.He would put to him the proposal no laird had dared put to another in a hundred years.
One festival. Both banks. Both clans. A peace they could dance to.
It was a good plan. A laird’s plan, clean and useful and all about duty.
And some small traitorous part of him knew that it would also throw him and his wife together again and again, in the music and the firelight, all day long.
He did not look too closely at that part. Lately, he had become very good at not examining the parts of himself that loved her.
“Ye’re nae her braither, and she isnae yer sister.”
Alastair’s words echoed over and over in his mind.
Aye. And yet we’ve found a way to ruin each other all the same, she and I. A whole new way Magnus never thought of. We’re goin’ to break each other’s hearts with kindness and call it stayin’ safe.
CHAPTER 24
The first nightwas the worst of it.
She had not expected that. She had expected shouting. She had braced for it the whole afternoon after he had walked out of the nursery and had a different room prepared for her, and she had gone down for supper with her chin up and every weapon she owned sharpened and ready.
He passed her the salt.
“Thank ye,” she said.
“Aye,” he uttered.
