Three men dead a mile from his own gate. His people carrying corpses up to the kirkyard in broad daylight. The whole castle talking about it, the widows keening, the men taking down blades that had been hung up for a season.
And not one soul had come to tell him.
That’s nae an oversight. Ye daenae forget to tell a man that his people have been murdered. Somebody stood in the way of it. Somebody has been standin’ in the way of a great many things, and I’ve been too taken up with me own bride and me own black heart to see the shape of him.
And now three of me men are cold, and every soul under this roof believes I heard of it and did nothin’ at all.
That was the true wickedness of it, and he saw it whole in that moment.
The killings were not the point. Thesilencewas the point. Someone had murdered three Cairn men under a flag of peace and then made certain that Laird Cairn said nothing about it, so that his own people would look at him and see a man who had gone soft on the enemy, who let Blythe blades take his fishermen and slept easy with a Blythe woman in his tower.
Somebody was building him a reputation, patiently, out of other men’s corpses.
And it was working. It had just put a knife in his wife’s chamber.
It was the same cold patient hand he had felt moving behind Brigid’s parting words, and behind the muttering of his own folk, and behind every fresh small wound the glen had taken since the day of the wedding. A hand he could not yet put a face to.
“Did Blythe men do this?” he asked. “Did ye see it with yer own eyes? Or were ye told about it?”
“I…” The man faltered. “I was told. There are folk who ken the truth of ye. Folk who watched ye sell this clan to the enemy for a red-haired?—”
“Told by whom?” Ragnall interrupted.
But he saw it then, the same shadow he had noticed behind Brigid’s green eyes—the presence that had been watching this castle from the shadows all along.
He knew this poor, blind, hate-filled creature on the floor did not have the name for it; he had only been pointed at like a dog and loosed. And no mercy he could show would prevent his wife from being killed in her sleep some other night by another loosed dog.
“This isnae how I want to lead,” he said, almost to himself, almost with grief. “God witness it. This isnae the man I want to be.”
And then he killed the man.
It was very quick. He did not make a speech or a spectacle of it.
Afterward, Olivia could not have said with certainty what she had seen, only that there had been a man kneeling on the floor of her chamber and then there was not.
Ragnall lowered the body onto the boards carefully, the way one would set down something that might break. He wiped the dirk on the dead man’s plaid. Then he stood there for a moment with his back to her, breathing, and she watched his shoulders rise and fall twice, three times.
Then he turned, his face perfectly calm, and went to her.
She was pale and shaking on the edge of the bed, with her hand clamped to her shoulder. He knelt down in front of her and gently pried her fingers away and looked at the wound, and his hands, which had not shaken on the sword, shook now.
“It’s nae deep,” she whispered again. “Ye see? I told ye so. I am?—”
“Be quiet,” he said, pressing a fold of the bedsheet hard to the cut. “Just for a moment. Be quiet and let me… God, Olivia. A wee bit lower, a wee bit harder, and I’d have come in here to find ye…” He could not say it. His jaw worked. “Be quiet. Let me tend to yer wound.”
He carried her to his chamber, where the fire was warm and the door was thick and he could put his body between her and the whole murderous world, and he cleaned the wound and bound it with hands that were not quite steady. She let him, watching his bent dark head the whole while with a look he was too undone to read.
And when it was done, when she was bound and warm and safe in his bed at last, she said the words that finished him.
“I have to go home, Ragnall.”
He went still.
“They’ll never stop.” Her voice was exhausted and certain and terribly gentle. “Yer people will never accept me, nae if ye send away every healer and kill every guard in the glen for me sake. By now, the whole clan believes we’re truly wed in every way, that the edict’s kept, and that the peace is made. Ye’ve done what the Elders asked of ye. Ye daenae need me under yer roof for them to be satisfied with it.”
She drew a shaky breath. “Every night I stay, another soul will decide to come through me window. I should go back to Blythe before one of them does the job properly. It’s the sensible thing. Ye ken that it is.”
And Ragnall, who had spent three days and three nights driving her away with both his hands carefully so she would be safe, looked at her asking for his leave to walk out of his life forever, and found that he would rather die than give it.
