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She couldn't tell.

That was the problem.

That had been the problem since the moment he'd said and ye must be the bride they forgot tae deliver with his hand on her ankle and his eyes unsettling her composure in a way that she had no intention of examining.

"I'm nae going willingly," she said, for the record.

"Noted," he said.

"I'm going because I've nae better option in the dark."

"Also noted."

"And in the morning, I intend tae be considerably more difficult about this."

She heard, or thought she heard, a quiet laugh in his breathing that made her pulse quicken.

"I expect nothing less," he said.

She looked at the road ahead and told herself that the warmth at her back was just warmth and the arm around her was just practicality and the man behind her was just an enemy she happened to be riding with until she could find a way to stop.

She told herself all of that.

She didn't entirely believe any of it.

The stars were cold and the road was long and the horses moved through the Highland dark, and she sat very straight and very still and thought about choices and the particular difficulty of making them when the person you were supposed to be choosing against kept being something you hadn't prepared for.

She thought about Fearchar's face when he'd brought her to MacRath's gate. The way he braced himself. The way he hadn't looked at her, she wasn’t sure he had known Cailleach would bar the door against her.

She thought about Cailleach MacRath's pleasant smile.

There is something wrong here, she thought. Beyond Fearchar's stubbornness, beyond old grudges and a war that ended a year ago. There is something wrong and I dinnae have enough pieces yet tae see the shape of it.

But she would.

She always did.

The horses' hooves were loud and then quiet as the road changed beneath them, and the forest closed in again. She sat on Marcas MacKinnon's horse with his warmth at her back and twelve hours of captivity behind her, and an entirely uncertain future ahead, and thought that whatever came next, at least it would be of her own making.

Or close enough to count.

CHAPTER FIVE

Struan was two streets, a kirk and an inn with more reputation than it deserved, the kind of place a man rode through and forgot unless he had reason to stop, and tonight he needed to.

Neilina had said nothing for the better part of an hour. That worried him more than argument would have. Argument meant she still had something left to spend.

He drew the party up outside the inn's low stone front, dismounted, and turned to lift her down before she could attempt it herself and rediscover, the way she had at MacRath's postern gate, exactly how much her legs currently disagreed with her intentions.

She let him. That told him something too.

"MacKinnon." Her boots found the ground and her voice came out steady, though he could hear the effort it cost her. "Where are we."

"Struan." He kept his hand at her elbow a moment longer than was strictly required, watching her weight settle, watching her decide not to need him. "There's an inn. Ye'll have a room tae yerself, and a door that locks from the inside, nae the out."

Her eyes came up to his face fast at that, sharp even through the exhaustion sitting heavy behind them.

Good, he thought. Let her hear it. Let her test it against everything else she's been told this day and find it holds.