Chapter 30
CHAPTER THIRTY
“Christ.”
The paperwork had not stopped for the killing.
This was something Noah had not anticipated, or perhaps had not allowed himself to think about.
That the morning after would still find him sitting at his desk, working through the accumulated correspondence. And the morning after that, and the one after that, because the clan didn’t pause for grief, guilt, or whatever else filled his chest when he thought about William.
He had written to the relevant parties.
He had the body handled quietly and with dignity, which William had not earned, but that Noah offered anyway because it was the right thing to do, since Esther would be old enough to understand someday, and he wanted to do it the right way.
He had told Elliot, who had said nothing for a moment and then said aye, Laird, with the particular quality that meant he understood everything that wasn’t being said.
He had not told Esther. Not yet.
She knew William was gone. Had been told simply that her father had left and would not be coming back, which was true in the only way that mattered to an eight-year-old.
She had received this information, looked at Noah steadily, and then gone to find Ava.
He had watched her go and thought that she already knew. On some level, she had always known that her father was not a man who stayed.
Three weeks out, the paperwork was largely done.
The guardianship was formalized. The estate in William’s name, including a rented property in the south and a substantial amount of debt, had been settled. Noah had paid the debt, which he did not resent, and released the property, which he did not mourn.
It was over.
The castle felt different.
He noticed it the way he noticed things, without making much of it, just filing it away as fact. Lighter. As if something that had been requiring constant low-level maintenance had simply stopped needing it.
He slept without the particular vigilance he hadn’t realised he’d been carrying.
He woke up in the mornings, and the first thing he thought about was not the border dispute or the accounts or William’s last known position. More often than not, it was Ava.
He was getting married.
He was still slightly surprised by this, in the way of a man who had wanted something for long enough that when it happened, he kept expecting it to be taken back.
It hadn’t been taken back.
Every morning, it remained simply true, settled and real, waiting for him at breakfast with her hair pinned up, her green eyes calm, and that particular expression she wore when she had already thought through most of the day before it had properly begun.
He had decided to find this reassuring rather than terrifying. He was mostly succeeding.
Elliot arrived on a Thursday morning with reports from the eastern boundary and the look of a man who had something he wanted to say and was deciding how to say it.
Noah let him deliver the reports first.
“All clear,” Elliot said, folding the last one. “MacAllister’s men passed through last week, no trouble. And the granary count came in; we’re up from last harvest, so it should carry us until spring with plenty to spare.”
“Good.” Noah made a note.
Elliot did not leave.
Noah looked up. “Say it.”
“I wasnae goin’ to say anythin’.”
“Ye’ve been hoverin’ for ten minutes. Say it.”
Elliot sat down without being invited, which was a habit Noah had given up trying to correct fifteen years ago. “I heard there’s to be a handfastin’.”
“There is.”
“A specific handfastin’.”
“Elliot.”
“I’m just confirmin’ the details.” He leaned back in the chair with the air of a man settling in comfortably. “So... Ava. Ye’re marryin’ the lass who arrived on our land few weeks ago with nay horse, nay family, and a child that wasnae hers.”
“I’m marryin’ the woman who arrived on our land a few weeks ago and made Esther laugh for the first time in two years,” Noah said. “Aye.”
Elliot was quiet for a moment. “Good.”
“Good?”
“I said good.” He met Noah’s eyes. “She’s the right woman for ye.
She doesnae let ye get away with anythin’.
She’s smart, and she’s honest, and she loves that bairn as if she birthed her herself.
” A pause. “And she makes ye less of a terror to be around, which is appreciated by everyone in this castle.”
Noah looked at him. “Are ye finished?”
“Almost. I want to say one more thing, and then I’m done.”
He folded his hands. “Ye’ve been holdin’ things together in this clan since ye were seventeen years old. Ye fixed yer father’s debts and yer father’s wars and yer brother’s messes, and ye did it without complainin’ and without askin’ for help and at considerable cost to yerself.”
He said it plainly, without performance. “Ye deserve somethin’ that’s just yers, Noah. Nae a responsibility. Nae a problem to manage. Just somethin’ good.” He stood. “That’s all I wanted to say.”
He picked up his reports and walked out.
Noah sat with that for a moment. Then he looked back at his desk and got on with the morning.
Esther appeared at his study door at two in the afternoon.
This was not unusual.
She had developed the habit over the past several days of arriving in the mid-afternoon when her lessons with Ava were done, sitting in the leather chair by the window, and doing her reading while Noah worked.
Usually, she brought a book.
Today she brought questions.
She came in, climbed into the chair, and looked around the study with the focused attention she gave to things she was seeing properly for the first time. Which was odd, because she’d been sitting in this room for days.
Then she pointed at the large map on the wall behind his desk.
“What’s that?”
“A map of the territory.” He turned to look at it. “The clan’s land. Everythin’ within these lines is MacGregor.”
She studied it seriously. “It’s big.”
“Aye.”
“Is all of it ours?”
“All of it.” He paused. “Yers too. When ye’re grown, ye’ll ken it as well as I do.”
She absorbed this with a small nod, as if adding it to an ongoing inventory. “What are those marks?”
“The circles are villages. The lines are boundaries, where our land ends and the next clan’s begins.”
He came around the desk and crouched beside her chair so they were at the same height. “See this one? That’s us. MacGregor Castle. And these here...” he traced the villages. “These are the families that come under our protection.”
“Protection from what?”
“Disputes. Unfair treatment. Other clans who might want their land.” He looked at her. “Being a laird mostly means makin’ sure people are safe and treated fairly. The swordfightin’ is a small part of it. Most of it is paperwork.”
Esther looked at the map for another moment. “I thought it was mostly swordfightin’.”
“Most people think that.”
She seemed to find this satisfying.
She turned her attention to his desk and surveyed the contents with the methodical interest of someone conducting a survey.
“What’s in that box?”
“Sealin’ wax. For letters.” He lifted the lid to show her. “When ye send an official letter, ye seal it with wax and press the clan seals into it before it dries. It tells the person receivin’ it that the letter hasnae been opened.”
“Can I see the seal?”
He handed it over. She turned it, found the embossed face of it, and pressed it experimentally into her palm.
She looked at the faint mark it left on her skin.
“It didnae work,” she said.
“Ye need the wax.”
“Could we do it?”
He looked at her. She looked back at him with the particular expression that meant she had decided something was happening and was waiting to see if he’d argue.
He did not argue.
He melted a small amount of wax onto a scrap of paper, let it pool, and handed the seal to Esther.
She pressed it in with both thumbs, very seriously, and lifted it. A clean impression of the MacGregor crest.
She stared at it.
“That’s the clan crest,” Noah said. “The stag. It’s been the same for six generations.”
“Why a stag?”
“Strength. The ability to hold yer ground.” He looked at it. “And because me ancestor who chose it had an encounter with one that apparently left an impression.”
“What kind of encounter?”
“The kind he survived, which is the important part.”
Esther pressed her lips together in an almost-smile, which was something she often did. She kept her amusement briefly in check, as if still getting used to the idea that it was allowed. Then she looked at the crest again. “Can I keep this?”
“The seal is the official one. I’ll have a copy made for ye.”
She folded the paper carefully and put it in her pocket.
The afternoon went on like this. Her surveying, him explaining.
She spun the globe in the corner, found Scotland, and traced the outline of its coast with a small finger.
Then she moved to the decanter on the side table.
“That’s dram, it’s for adults.”
Then, to the stack of legal correspondence.
“Boring, but necessary, I’ll teach ye someday”.
The to the wooden practice sword propped against the wall that he’d entirely forgotten was there.
She looked at it for a long moment.
“Is that for fightin’?”
“For practisin’.”
“Could I practice?”
He considered this. She was eight.
Ava would have opinions about it that he would need to navigate carefully. But she was also a MacGregor, or close enough, and MacGregor women had never been discouraged from knowing how to defend themselves.
“When ye’re a bit older,” he said. “I’ll teach ye meself.”
She seemed to accept this as a reasonable timeline.
She went back to the chair and picked up her book, which meant the survey was complete, and she was now simply occupying the space again.
He went back to his correspondence.
They worked in companionable quiet for an hour. Him writing, her reading, the fire doing its work in the background.
At some point, she moved to the floor beside his chair rather than the window chair, sitting with her back against his desk and her book in her lap.
He did not remark on it, and she did not explain it, and they both simply let it be what it was.
Dinner was for the four of them.
This had become the usual routine of evenings in the weeks since everything had settled. Noah, Ava, and Esther sat at the main table, with Elliot joining when he wasn’t elsewhere, which was most nights.
It was domesticity of a kind Noah had not expected, had not arranged, and had not been entirely sure he wanted until he had it.
Tonight, Esther told Ava about the clan seal with the focused authority of someone reporting an important discovery.
“He let me make an impression,” she said. “In the wax. It’s the stag.” She produced the folded paper from her pocket and laid it on the table next to Ava’s plate.
Ava examined it with appropriate seriousness. “It’s very well done.”
“I pressed it with both thumbs. He said ye need even pressure.”
“Good advice.” Ava looked at Noah over Esther’s head with a warm, slightly amused smile. “And what else did ye learn this afternoon?”
“The territory is very large. The swordfightin’ is a small part of bein’ a laird. Most of it is paperwork,” she said this last part with the tone of someone delivering mildly disappointing news.
Elliot, across the table, made a sound that was not quite a laugh.
“Ye disagree?” Noah said.
“I would never,” Elliot said. “It’s mostly paperwork. Very glamorous. Nothin’ like what the songs say at all.”
“What do the songs say?” Esther asked.
“Terrible lies,” Noah said.
“Heroic tales,” Elliot said at the same time.
Esther looked between them.
She had the expression she wore when adults were being entertaining, and she was not entirely sure whether to laugh.
She had been wearing it more often lately, which Noah counted as a kind of progress.
Ava passed the bread.
Noah poured the wine and water for Esther.
Elliot recounted a story about the boundary dispute from last month that he hadn't been able to share while it was happening, and it turned out to be much more absurd than it sounded in the reports.
Involving a misunderstanding about a fence, two extremely stubborn farmers, and a goat that Noah had not previously known, was at the centre of the whole affair.
Esther laughed at the goat. It was a real laugh. Open, unguarded, the kind she’d been producing more often these past weeks as if she’d been practicing and had now decided she could do it without checking first whether it was allowed.
After dinner, Ava took Esther upstairs, as was the habit, and Noah sat for a while with Elliot over the last of the wine.
“She’s happy,” Elliot said.
Noah didn’t ask which one he meant.
“Aye,” he said. “She is.”
Elliot looked into his glass. “Ye did that.”
“Ava did that.”
“The two of ye did that.” He set the glass down. “I kent yer mother, Noah. Nae well, I was young. But I remember what she wanted for this clan. What she wanted for ye.” He paused. “She’d have liked this.”
Noah said nothing for a moment.
“Aye,” he said finally. “She would have.”
They finished the wine in silence, which was the particular kind of silence that belonged to men who had been friends long enough that nothing needed to be said to be understood.
Outside the window, the last of the evening light was going out of the sky.
Noah looked at it and thought that this was what it was all for.
Not the title, not the land, not the long years of fixing what his father broke. This. A table with people at it, a child’s real laugh, a woman upstairs putting his niece to bed as if she had always belonged here and always would.
He pushed back his chair and went to find them.