Epilogue
“Ye’re shakin’,” Caitlin said.
“I’m nae shakin’.”
“Ava.” Caitlin set down the ribbon she was holding and looked at her directly. “Yer hands are shakin’.”
Ava looked at her hands.
They were, in fact, trembling slightly, which was irritating and also apparently impossible to stop.
She pressed them flat against the skirt of her gown. Blue, as Caitlin had drawn it days ago, with the MacGregor tartan sash pinned at her shoulder, and breathed carefully.
“It’s cold in here,” she said.
“It’s nae cold. There’s a fire.” Caitlin picked the ribbon back up. “It’s all right to be nervous.”
“I’m nae nervous. I’m...” She stopped. “Fine. I’m a little nervous.”
“Of course ye are. Ye’re about to stand in front of the whole clan and hand yer wrist to the most terrifyin’ man in the Highlands.” Caitlin began weaving the ribbon through the end of Ava’s braid with the focused expression of someone who has been practicing this. “Anyone would be nervous.”
“He’s nae terrifyin’.”
“He is a little terrifyin’. Even ye thought so at first.”
“I thought he was...” Ava paused. “Intense.”
“That’s a polite word for it.” Caitlin tied off the braid and stood back to look at her work.
Her eyes went slightly bright. “Oh,” she said. “Ava.”
“What? What’s wrong?”
“Nothin’s wrong.” She pressed her lips together. “Ye look beautiful.”
Ava looked at herself in the glass.
The gown was simple. She had requested simplicity, had been firm about it, and had resisted three different attempts by the seamstress to add embellishments.
The blue was the right blue, and the tartan sash sat across her shoulder with the clan colours vivid against it, and she did look, she admitted privately, like someone who belonged here.
That was the part that still surprised her, some mornings.
A knock came at the door. Caitlin went to it and opened it slightly.
“Lady Annabeth’s here,” she said, turning back with a slightly awed expression. “And she brought the Laird MacLennan.”
Ava looked up. "The MacLennans? Noah's allies?"
"Aye." Caitlin lowered her voice. "The Laird MacLennan and Noah spent years mendin' what our previous laird broke between the clans. They're close now — as close as men like that get, anyway. And Lady Annabeth is..." She paused, searching for the right word. "Ye'll see."
“Send them in,” Ava said.
Esther was already in the room, sitting on the window seat in her good dress, watching all of it with the quiet attentiveness she brought to things she considered important. She had been there sinceafter her bath and breakdfast and had not been asked to leave.
Annabeth Reid came in first. Small, warm-faced, with the kind of energy that suggested she was always in the middle of something interesting. She crossed the room in four steps and took both Ava’s hands in hers.
“Look at ye,” she said. “Oh, look at ye.”
“Lady Annabeth.”
“I’m allowed to be emotional. I helped, ye ken. In a general, spiritual sense.” She squeezed her hands. “Marcus said I had no involvement whatsoever, and I told him that supportin’ the general atmosphere of love in the region absolutely counts.”
Marcus Reid appeared in the doorway behind her. Large, dark, with the particular quality of a man who took up more space than his actual dimensions required.
He looked at Ava with the direct, unhurried assessment of a man accustomed to sizing people up quickly.
"So we finally meet the soon-to-be Lady Ava Macgregor. Ye look well," he said.
"Aye indeed, Laird Maclennan. And I finally meet ye and the lady Maclennan."
"I can see why Noah would fall hard for ye. " He said it without warmth but also without malice — simply as a statement of observed fact. "Marcus. Laird MacLennan is so formal."
"Then ye must both call me Ava." She held his gaze.
Something shifted almost imperceptibly in his expression. Not a smile exactly, but the suggestion that a smile was somewhere in the vicinity.
He paused. “Annabeth told me to say ye look beautiful. I’m sayin’ ye look well because that’s true, and also I daenae say beautiful to women who arenae me wife.”
“I told him he could say bonnie,” Annabeth said cheerfully. “He refused on principle.”
“Bonnie is also for me wife.”
“He’s very possessive,” Annabeth told Ava, as if reporting a mildly interesting weather phenomenon. “It’s one of his better qualities.”
She turned to look at Ava more carefully. “Are ye ready? Truly?”
“I think so.” Ava looked at her own hands, steadier now. “I’ve been ready for longer than I let meself ken.”
Esther slipped off the window seat and came to stand beside Ava without a word. She took her hand. Ava looked down at her. "Ye look nice," Esther said.
"Thank ye, sweetheart."
"Uncle Noah will be waiting downstairs," she added, with the air of someone reporting useful intelligence.
Annabeth’s expression softened. “Isn’t she so sweet?” She lingered on Esther fro a moment, before turning back to Ava.
“Aye,” she said. “That’s how it works, usually.”
She glanced at Marcus. “Ye daenae see it comin’ and then all of a sudden ye look around, and it’s already happened, and ye wonder how ye ever thought it wasnae goin’ to.”
“The man is still terrifyin’,” Marcus said. “I say that with respect.”
“He’s nae,” Ava stopped. “He’s a little terrifyin’.”
“Aye,” Marcus said, with the grim satisfaction of a man whose assessment has been confirmed. “He is. Good match.”
The great hall had been dressed for it.
Greenery along the stone walls—pine, ivy, and rowan berries, bright red against the dark.
Candles everywhere— in iron sconces, along long tables, and in the chandelier overhead—casting warm gold light across the gathered clan.
They lined the walls, filled the benches, and stood three deep at the back because the MacGregor clan had turned out in full.
There was a quality to the gathered crowd that Ava had not expected, not merely curiosity or duty but something that felt, unmistakably, like goodwill.
She walked in with Caitlin at her side. Esther walked on her other side, her chin up, her dark hair ribboned, holding Ava's hand.
Noah was waiting at the front of the hall, beside the elder who would conduct the ceremony.
He was dressed in his formal plaid, with the MacGregor tartan draped over his shoulder, a dark coat, and a clan brooch at his chest. He looked exactly as he was: a Laird, every bit of him, the kind of man who had been managing something important for so long that authority had become part of his very structure.
And then he looked up and saw her, and something in his face changed. Not softened. That wasn’t the word. Settled. The way a man’s face settles when something he has been waiting for has finally arrived.
She walked to him.
She was aware of the hall—the crowd, the candles, the weight of it all. And none of it really mattered because he was looking at her like that, and she was looking back at him; everything else was just surroundings.
“Ye came,” he said, low enough that only she could hear.
“I said I would.”
“Ye did.” His eyes moved over her, the gown, the tartan sash, and came back to her face. “Ye’re wearin’ the colours.”
“It seemed appropriate.”
“Aye.” Something moved in his expression. “It does.”
The elder, gray-haired and broad, with the unhurried gravity of someone who has led many such moments and understands their importance, stepped forward, and the hall went quiet.
“We gather today,” he said, his voice carrying easily through the stone room. “In witness of the joinin’ of Noah MacGregor, Laird of this clan, and Ava Harris, before this clan and before God.”
He looked between them.
“The handfastin’ is a bindin’ of two people in partnership, nae one above the other, but side by side. It is the willin’ choice of two free people to stand together, in witness of all who love them.”
He produced the cord.
It was the MacGregor tartan, twisted with a white thread, the length of it wound between his hands. He looked at Ava first.
“Give me yer right hand.”
She gave it. He placed it palm-up, and she felt the cord settle across her wrist, soft, lighter than she’d expected.
“And yer left,” he said to Noah.
Noah placed his left wrist against hers.
The elder wound the cord around them both. Once, twice, three times. Crossing it between their joined hands, and tying it with a slow, deliberate knot that Ava felt rather than saw.
“Do ye, Ava Harris,” the elder said, “Take this man as yer partner? To stand beside him, to speak plainly with him, to hold his counsel and give him yers, in the full knowledge of who he is and who ye are?”
She looked at Noah.
“Aye,” she said. “I do.”
“And do ye, Noah MacGregor, take this woman as yer partner? To stand beside her, to speak plainly with her, to hold her counsel and give her yers, in the full knowledge of who she is and who ye are?”
Noah looked at her. The hall was entirely quiet.
“Aye,” he said. “I do.”
“Then by the joinin’ of yer hands and the bindin’ of this cord, in witness of yer clan and before God, I declare ye handfasted.” The elder placed both his hands over theirs. “Let what is bound here hold.”
The hall erupted, with the full-throated sound of a clan that had decided it approved of something and was expressing this without reservation.
Esther was in the front row beside Elliot, who was clapping with considerably more enthusiasm than a man of his composure usually allowed himself.
Esther was not clapping. She was watching Ava with an expression that was simply, quietly, satisfied.
Ava startled slightly at the volume of it, and Noah’s mouth curved.
“Surprised?” he said.
“A little.”
“They like ye,” he said. “They’ve liked ye for a long time. Ye just werenae payin’ attention.”
“I was payin’ attention to other things.”
“Aye.” He paused. His expression was warm, certain, slightly amused at her. “Ye were.”
The elder unwound the cord from their wrists and handed it to Noah, who pocketed it with the particular care of a man who intends to keep it.