Rosie let out a shriek of pure joy from her aunt’s arms that nearly shook the slats off the gatehouse roof.
Tattie came down the steps like a landslide of devoted hound and nearly knocked Olivia off her feet in the helpless ecstasy of his welcome. She dropped to her knees in the muck of the yard, laughing, and let the big, goofy creature wash her bruised face raw while she cradled the baby against her other side.
Ragnall stood back from the whole bright tangle of it and watched his wife laugh in the mud of his courtyard with his niece and his dog in her arms, and felt the last of his careful defenses give quietly way beneath him.
Old Tavish was there at the edge of the yard, leaning on his stick. He looked at Olivia, with the bairn on her hip and the dog at her heel, and then he gave one slow nod, grave and deliberate, and turned away and went in to his supper without a word to anybody.
It was the first thing he had given her in a year, and it was everything he had.
Even Isla’s husband stood by the well with his bonnet in his hands when Olivia passed, and ducked his head to her and said, “Me Lady,” rough and shy.
The word had changed its weight in their mouths overnight. They had all stood on that ground in the dark and watched their Lady throw herself between two lairds to stop the killing, and a clan did not forget a thing it had seen with its own eyes.
“Well?” said his grandmother at his elbow, who had risen from her bed of a near-murder with an energy that frankly alarmed him and was watching him watch his wife with bright, pitiless eyes.
She had buried people and outlived a war, and very little in this life got past her.
“Are ye goin’ to stand here in the muck of yer yard till ye are as auld and as daft as me, grandson, or are ye goin’ to tell yer wife the thing ye’ve been chokin’ on since the night of yer weddin’?”
“I daenae ken how, Grandmaither.”
“Ye open yer great stubborn mouth,” said Maisie, unmoved, “and ye let the truth fall plain out of it, the way ye’ve let every blunt and graceless thing fall out of it yer whole life. She willnae be needin’ it pretty, that one. She will only be needin’ it true.” She thumped him square on his good arm with the head of her stick. “Away with ye, now. Afore I die of waitin’, which at me age is nay idle threat.”
CHAPTER 36
Olivia could not sleepthe first night home.
The keep had gone quiet around her hours since, the bone-deep quiet of a household that had buried its dead and bound its wounds and fallen at last into the kind of sleep that came only after great fear had finally let a body go.
She lay in the south tower bed she had once hated and listened to the small sounds of a castle at peace, the settling of old stone, the far-off shift of a horse in the stables, the wind off the river that no longer carried the smell of smoke, and she could not for the life of her find the door to sleep.
Each time she closed her eyes, the image reappeared: the blade at the peak of its swing, her brother lying pale beneath it, her husband going rigid like carved stone at her voice, lowering the steel, and shaming himself before three hundred people because she had asked him to.
At last, she gave up. She rose, pulled a shawl around her shift, and went down the cold turn of the stairs barefoot to find the kitchens and a cup of warm milk, the way her mother had given her as a girl on the nights the dark grew too loud.
She did not find the kitchens empty.
Ragnall sat alone at the great scarred table with a single candle burning low and a basin of water before him, and he was making a poor one-handed business of unwinding the soiled bandage from his wounded forearm, his jaw set hard against it, his long black hair loose around his shoulders.
He had not heard her on the stairs. For a moment, Olivia stood unseen in the doorway, simply looking at him—the most feared man in the glen, the Laird of Clan Cairn, who sat half-dressed and weary in his dark kitchen, fumbling at his injury alone in the small hours rather than waking anyone to help him.
“Ye will make a worse job of it that way,” she said quietly.
He went still and looked up, and the candle caught the surprise in his dark eyes before he could school it away. “I didnae mean to wake ye.”
“Ye didnae.” She crossed to him before her courage could fail, pulled out the bench beside him, and held out her hand for his arm. “Let me. I’ve bound enough of them this week to have the trick of it now.”
He hesitated. She watched his old habit of wanting to refuse, trying to pull back his arm, dismissing it, and sending her up the stairs. The old wariness closed over him like a shutter. Then she watched him decide against it with what seemed like real effort. He laid his forearm across the table into her two waiting hands, and the trust in that small surrender warmed her like a fire.
She worked silently, peeling the last of the old linen away and cleaning the angry line of the cut with a cloth dipped in warm water, her head bent close over the task. He remained very still beneath her hands.
She was aware of him the entire time in a way that made her feel clumsy—the heat radiating from his bare arm, the slow rhythm of his breathing, the closeness of him in the candlelight. When she looked up momentarily from her work, she saw him watching her face with an expression that took her breath away.
“It’ll scar,” she said, her voice low.
“I’ve got a few of those already.” His mouth twitched. He watched her gaze move to the old white seam that ran from the corner of his eye down to his lip, her brother’s parting gift, and then came back to meet his. “One more willnae spoil me looks.”
“Nay,” Olivia agreed softly before she could think better of it. “It willnae.”
