“She kens fine who sneaks her honey cakes,” Olivia quipped.
Her mother had not spoken.
Olivia turned her head. Elspeth was looking at the baby in her arms with an expression Olivia had never once seen on her face in all her life, and could not read, and did not want to.
Then it was gone, and her mother was smiling and reaching out to let the wee one grip her finger.
“She’s a bonnie thing,” Elspeth cooed. “She has yer eyes, lass.”
“Aye,” Olivia said. Her mouth had gone entirely dry. “She does.”
Kate smiled at that.
She had come back to herself by inches, the way spring comes back, arguing over nothing and stealing the last bannock and teasing her brother till he reddened, and somewhere in the middle of it, she had picked up her own daughter off the nursery floor and not set her down since, except to sleep.
Tattie, the great daft hound, wove between their legs with his tail going like a flail, following Olivia and the baby step for step around the hall in the hope of falling cake, and every soul he near upended only laughed and let him by, for the beast had long since appointed himself Olivia’s shadow, and there was no arguing him out of the post.
Maisie watched it all from her chair by the fire with a cup of something she was not by rights meant to have, her old eyes bright and pitiless and pleased, missing nothing, as she never had in her long life.
When the wee honey cake was brought in at last, Cook carrying it high and fierce through a gauntlet of grasping small hands and one hopeful hound, it was Maisie they called upon for the blessing, as the eldest soul beneath the roof. She heaved herself up on her stick and fixed the whole company with a gimlet eye until the hall went quiet for her.
“To the bairn,” she said, lifting her cup, “who came into this world in the black middle of a feud and has spent her first year teachin’ these two thrawn clans how to sit at one board without reachin’ for a dirk. There’s nae a general in all of Scotland who has done more for the peace than this wee dumplin’ here.” She raised her cup higher, and her old voice cracked with the effort of it. “To yer health, lass.Slàinte mhath!”
Three hundred cups went up, and the hall roared it back at her in one voice, Cairn and Blythe together,“Slàinte mhath!”
Rosie, delighted past bearing by the noise she had caused, banged both fat fists on Olivia’s shoulders and crowed.
Ragnall came through the press of dancers toward them, and even now, half a year from the night the two of them had truly become man and wife, the sight of him crossing a room toward her still did something foolish to her breathing.
He set his hand on the small of her back and pressed his mouth to Rosie’s dark curls and then to Olivia’s temple, and Maisie cackled aloud by the fire at whatever she read in the pair of them.
“A letter came this mornin’,” he said low, for her ear only, so as not to trouble the day with it. “From the religious house at Kilmory. Brigid’s taken the veil there.” She went still against him. “She wrote me a while back, when the whole black business with Noah came out into the light. The auld man had been in her ear for a long while, feedin’ the bitterness in her, turnin’ what she’d once felt into somethin’ he could put to his own use. She was ashamed of it, and I think, for the first time, afraid of what she’d let herself become. She sent word of a thing or two of his doings that helped us be certain of the shape of it, and then she informed me that she planned to leave Laird Munro’s castle and go somewhere quiet and be done with the world of men entirely.”
“Ye showed her mercy,” Olivia said.
“I showed her a door that wasnae a grave.” He looked down at her, and the old scar caught the candlelight. “I’ve grown right fond of doors that arenae graves this past year. A red-haired woman taught me the way of them, when I’d nearly forgotten there was such a thing.”
Before she could find an answer to that, Alastair stepped up on the low dais at the hall’s end and called for quiet, red to the ears and grinning like a raw lad, and the fiddle and the pipes scraped to a ragged halt.
“I willnae keep ye long from the dancin’,” he said, “for I am nay hand at speeches, and me betrothed will tell ye so herself and charge ye a penny for it.” A roar went up at the wordbetrothed, and Kate went pink to the ears and lifted her chin and did notdeny a word of it. “Kate’s done me the honor she had nay reason on this earth to do me, and we’re to be wed at the turn of the year. And there’s but one wee soul in this hall whose leave I’ve nae yet thought to ask.” He stepped down from the dais and crossed the floor to Olivia and held out his big scarred hands to the baby, grave as a man stood before a council of Elders. “Rosie Crawford, will ye have me for a faither and let me spoil ye rotten for the rest of me days?”
The whole hall held its breath.
Rosie regarded him from the safe high fortress of Olivia’s neck, sucking on two fingers, weighing the great fool up and down.
Then she took her fingers out of her mouth with a wet pop and pitched herself forward out of Olivia’s arms and into Alastair’s, and flung both fat arms around his neck and squeezed for all she was worth, and the hall erupted in cheers that nearly lifted the beams off the walls.
Kate pressed both hands to her mouth and wept and laughed at once, and Maisie thumped her stick on the flagstones in approval, and even Lucas was grinning like the boy he still half was.
It was in the very thick of that cheering, with the fiddle starting up afresh and the whole hall surging in to clap Alastair on the back and pass the baby hand to willing hand, that the floor tilted gently under Olivia, and the golden light went silver and swimming at the edges, and she reached out and caught the back of a chair.
She was not on the floor. Ragnall had her before she even reached it, one arm like an iron band around her waist, the color draining from his face.
“Olivia.” He cast his gaze round the crowded hall as if for a throat to set his hand to. “What is it? Who? Where’s the healer? Someone fetch… What’s wrong with ye? Tell me. Who did this? Who do I?—”
“Ragnall.” She lifted a hand to his jaw and turned his wild face back to her own. He was in full black temper, the old dangerous stillness up in his eyes, a man casting frantically about for an enemy to put down because the woman in his arms had swayed on her feet, and she loved him so much in that moment that she could scarcely draw breath around it. “Ragnall, ye great fool. Peace. There’s nay one here to kill.”
“Ye nearly went down.”
