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Then she’s gone again, dew catching at her hem, the rowan bright against her arm as she walks back into the waking estate.
I watch her go, and something settles in me as immovable as bedrock. Something I’ve been trying not to name for years—something born when she first came into my life, and only sharpened by the woman she has become.
The truth of it strikes with a certainty that feels older than Bealtaine itself: I can no more cast her off than I can cast off my own name. She’s in my mind. In my blood. I will not be rid of her, nor do I want to be.
The moment I saw her in the birches again, fate only laid a hand on what had long been there and made it impossible to deny.
I’ve wanted, with an ache I had no language for in my youth, to be something gentler in her sight.
She can roll her eyes, huff, and call me foolish all she likes, but I mean to be her daft sentimental fool so long as I’ve breath in me. I’d spend the rest of my days earning that rare, reluctant smile as though it were a treasure worth a lifetime’s keeping, if only she’d give me the chance.
CHAPTER FIVE
ELLEN
The kitchen door barely has time to swing shut behind me before Róisín’s voice carries across the room. She’d know the sound of my footsteps anywhere.
“Sun’s well up, is it?” she remarks without so much as a glance up.
Róisín has taken over the kitchen like she owns it. Her red hair is pinned up in a hasty knot, already slipping free, bright as a struck flint against all that green.
She’s at the table with a length of linen spread flat, bowls set in a tidy line, twine and ribbon coiled like tame serpents. Birch switches lie in a bundle to one side, still beaded with dew. The whole place smells sharp and green, like the morning’s been dragged indoors by the handful.
I blow out a breath, shifting the weight of the basket on my arm as I cross to her. “You could at least pretend you dinnae ken me that well.”
“If it were anyone else,” she says, hands busy with the twine, “they’d still be eatin’ breakfast. You’re the only fool daft enough to be up since before dawn and then wander in like ye’re late to your own kitchen.”
“I resent that.”
“You shouldn’t,” Róisín replies, far too pleased with herself. “Ye’re outworkin’ half the estate already. Makes sense you’d be the one stumblin’ in now.”
Róisín gives me a quick once-over as I near—brief, blunt, disapproving—then sets her eyes back on her work. “Ye’re soaked through.”
I snort. “How d’ye think I’m meant to look, with the dew settled deep?” I lean in and give her shoulder a light shove. “It’s naught. Mind yer business.”
A pleased little hum leaves her—satisfaction in the sound of it—like she’s landed a point clean: admiration in one hand, reproach in the other.
Then she reaches for the basket without asking. We’ve been stealing each other’s work since we were girls. “What have you brought me?”
“Rowan,” I tell her. “Birch. A bit more gorse. Fern.”
“And primrose,” she says, because she’s already seen the purple heads tucked beneath the greens. Her brows lift. “You went all the way up for primrose?”
“It was on my list.”
Róisín’s mouth tips into a small, knowing smile, fond of this soft, foolish corner of me. She doesn’t need me to explain why the primrose sits nestled at the centre of everything I’ve brought.
On paper, I’m a woman of sense.
But the promise primrose offers—unyielding protection—is the one foolish belief I’ve let take root in me. Deep within me, I hold a quiet certainty that those wee purple blooms carry something gentle and watchful in them. That if I leave them in enough places—on thresholds, beneath sills, near the beds of those I love—if I scatter them like blessings, then whatever hunts in the dark might pass us by.
And now there’s another trouble layered over it, bright and foolish, and it won’t sit still inside me.
Up on the hill, James Sinclair spoke of the primroses with reverence in his voice. No mockery. No indulgence. Just the unmistakable sense that he carries the same quiet foolishness—and keeps it, as I do, in a private place within him.
A small thing that a sensible woman would let pass.
Except I can’t.
