Chapter 1
Chapter One
Nine Months Later
He was already reaching for the claymore before he was fully awake.
Thirty years of soldiering did that to a man.
The body learned to move before the mind caught up, learned to treat every sudden sound as a threat until proven otherwise.
His hand found the bedframe. Where was his claymore?
He had stopped sleeping with it drawn three months ago, when the clan had settled enough that he no longer expected to be murdered before breakfast.
He lay still for a moment, breathing.
The sound came again.
Not a threat. Not steel striking stone or a man's bark at the gate. Something smaller and infinitely more piercing, coming from the corridor outside his door.
Fergus sat up.
The room was gray with the first, hesitant light of morning. The hearth had turned to cold ash overnight. He could see his breath. He pulled his tunic over his head, found his boots, and crossed the floor to the door.
He opened it.
The maid standing in the corridor flinched so hard she almost dropped the bundle in her arms. She was young, one of the kitchen girls, he thought, though he had not yet learned all their names.
Her face was blotched from crying, the cold, or maybe both.
The bundle in her arms was the source of the noise.
It was very small and determined to make itself heard.
Fergus examined the bundle and then looked at the maid.
"Where did that come from?" he said.
The maid opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She thrust a folded piece of parchment toward him with her free hand—the hand not busy trying to contain the escalating bundle.
He grabbed the parchment and read it.
He read it again.
The writing was uneven, the letters pressing hard into the page in some places and barely grazing it in others. A man writing quickly, in pain, or both. The words were few. Euan Calloway had never wasted language, and he had not wasted it here.
The pox has taken Catriona. It will take me before the week is out.
There is no family, her mother's kin are gone, and mine will not keep a girl child.
I have thought carefully about who I trust with her life.
I trust ye, Laird, because I have watched ye these past months and I ken what kind of man ye are beneath the title.
Ye are not yer circumstances. Neither is she. Keep her safe.
He recognized the name signed at the bottom.
Euan Calloway. His clan advisor. One of the first men who had not looked at Fergus as an interloper when he inherited the title. A man who had sat across from him at the early tables and spoken plainly when everyone else chose careful words.
Fergus had respected him for that. He had meant to tell him so someday, when there was time.
There would not be time. The pox had seen to that.
He lowered the parchment.
The bairn in the maid's arms took a breath and yelled with fresh determination.
"Her name," he said. His voice came out rough. He had not intended that. "Does it say her name?"
The maid shook her head, her chin trembling. "Nae in the note, me Laird. Only that she's to be kept safe."
Fergus looked at the child. She was red-faced and furious, completely unaware that the two people standing over her had no idea what they were doing.
Her fists were clenched against the rough, undyed cloth of her wrapping, and her whole body was stiff with the effort of her protest. He guessed she was around six or seven months old, though he had no solid basis for this estimate.
He knew very little about babies, having carefully arranged his life to keep it that way.
"Where is Mrs. O'Halloran?" he asked.
"I've sent for her, me Laird. She'll be—"
"Get her. Now. And stop cryin', lass, it willnae help anyone."
The maid nodded, tearfully, and held out the bairn.
Fergus looked at his own hands. They were the hands of a man who had spent thirty years causing damage with them. They were large enough that the bairn's entire head would fit in one palm, and he did not know if that was useful information or just a disturbing one.
"Me Laird," the maid said, still holding the bairn out. "I cannae fetch Mrs. O'Halloran and hold the bairn at the same time."
This was factually correct.
Fergus took the bairn.
He held her as if she were something he was afraid of breaking, which meant poorly, with both arms and too much stiffness, lacking any natural sense of her.
The bairn sensed the change immediately.
The screaming briefly intensified, reached a pitch that Fergus was fairly sure could shatter glass, and then, without warning, stopped.
She looked at him.
She had stopped crying with the sudden finality of someone who was distracted by something more interesting.
Her eyes, which were very dark and very large for such a small face, traveled over his face with the honest, unfiltered curiosity of a creature that had not yet learned to hide its interest. Whatever she found in his face seemed to meet some initial expectation. Her brow relaxed, just slightly.
Fergus did not move. He was afraid that if he moved, the screaming would resume, and he would have to think about what to do about it.
By the time Mrs. O'Halloran arrived, he was still standing in the corridor in the gray morning light, holding the bairn with careful stillness.
The housekeeper took in the scene without showing any surprise.
She was a sixty-year-old woman with the posture of someone half her age and the eyes of someone who had seen everything a Highland castle could offer and had stored it all away calmly.
She looked at the parchment he still held in one hand.
"The Calloways," she said.
"Aye."
She bowed her head briefly, her lips moving in a silent prayer. Then she straightened. "I'll take her, me Laird."
"Good." Fergus held out the bairn.
Mrs. O'Halloran handled her with the skill of a woman who had rocked a thousand babies, settled her on one shoulder, and looked at Fergus with an expression that had not yet reached the difficult part of the conversation but was clearly on its way there.
"I'll need to speak with ye," she said. "About what's to be done."
"I've told ye what's to be done. Care for her. Find her a nurse. Use whatever resources are needed."
"Me Laird." Mrs. O'Halloran's voice was patient in the specific way of women who were being patient because the alternative would be impolite.
"We have four maids and a cook and a kitchen girl, Maisie, who is currently cryin' in the corridor because she's sixteen and has never seen a bairn left at a door before.
We have half the linen we need, none of the specific things a bairn of this age requires, and the nearest woman who is nursin' her own bairn lives two hours' ride south.
I can stretch what we have, and I will, because that is what I do.
But I want ye to understand what stretchin' it means. "
Fergus looked at her in question.
"It means Maisie willnae sleep," Mrs. O'Halloran continued. "It means the kitchen runs short-handed. It means we manage, me Laird, but only barely, and only for so long."
"Then say plainly what ye're sayin'," Fergus said. "Ye've never had trouble with plain speakin' before."
"This castle needs a mistress," Mrs. O'Halloran said. "It needed one before today. Today it is simply more obvious."
Fergus examined the parchment in his hand. He folded it once, then again, and slipped it into his pocket.
"I'll take her," he said.
Mrs. O'Halloran blinked. "Me Laird?"
"Give her back." He held out his arms, and after a brief pause in which the housekeeper reassessed everything she thought she knew about him, she complied.
"Ye have work to do. Make a list of what's needed for the bairn and bring it to me by midday.
We'll see what can be sourced before the week is out. "
Mrs. O'Halloran looked at him holding the baby. Her expression flickered with something complicated and then settled into professional neutrality. "Aye, me Laird."
She left.
Fergus carried the bairn down the corridor, through the door at the end, and into his solar, which was the only room in the castle that was reliably warm before the rest of the fires were lit because he had paid attention to the placement of the hearth when the repairs were made.
He set her down on the wide chair near the window, wedged between his plaid and the arm of the chair so she could not roll, then he stepped back and looked at her.
"Yer name is Lilly," he said. He had decided this in the corridor and felt no need to explain his reasoning. "Ye'll nae remember me tellin' ye, but that's what ye'll be called."
Lilly considered this. She grabbed a fold of the plaid with one small fist and pulled it toward her mouth.
"Daenae eat that," Fergus said.
She ignored him. He suspected this would become a pattern.
He moved to the window. The morning had fully arrived now, pale and cold, with the ridge to the north cutting a dark, jagged line against a sky that could not decide between gray and blue.
He had stood at this window on a hundred mornings, contemplating the work of the day—the endless, granular, unromantic work of being a laird.
The fences. The stores. The men who were slowly learning to trust him, one small proof of competence at a time.
He thought about Margaret.
He had been thorough about not thinking about his wife.
He had buried her memory—her steadiness, the particular quality of her voice that night in the hall, the way she had looked at him without flinching when he said things he was not proud of.
He had pushed it down beneath everything else to do in a day, and there was always enough to do in a day, and it had mostly worked.
Mrs. O'Halloran was right. She was right, and he had known she was right for six months, and he had been choosing not to act on it because acting on it meant returning to Dunalasdair and walking across a courtyard toward a woman he had abandoned on her wedding night, and he did not have a clear picture of how that conversation would go.
He had one now.
He could already feel the shape of it, the specific, controlled courtesy she would offer him: the straight spine.
He strongly doubted that the woman he left behind would run to him, and when he examined that thought honestly in the gray morning light, he realized he did not want her to.
He desired the woman who had stood in that hall and told him plainly what she thought of him because that woman was the kind of person a castle like this needed, a clan like this needed, and maybe, though he was not ready to admit it outright, the kind of woman he himself needed.
Behind him, Lilly made a sound.
He turned.
She had loosened the plaid from the arm of the chair and was concentrating intently on it, as if she had a clear goal. She had not cried again. She was simply there, steady and warm, completely indifferent to the significance of what she symbolized.
Fergus crossed the room. He sat down in the chair beside her, elbows on his knees, and looked at her properly for the first time.
She was small in a way that made you careful, but she was not fragile.
There was something in her that was already insisting on itself.
She had Euan Calloway's stubbornness about her, and then he had to look away from the window for a moment because that was a thought with an edge to it.
"Yer father was a good man," he said. His voice was quiet. "I daenae say that about many. I should have told him."
Lilly pulled the plaid over her face. Fergus reached over and moved it aside so she could breathe. She grabbed his finger in the process, the grip sudden and startlingly firm, and did not let go.
He sat with his finger in her grip and looked at her. She looked back at him with the dark, serious eyes of someone who had not yet been taught that the world was complicated and was therefore entirely certain about it.
"Aye, all right," he said. "I'm goin' to get Margaret."
He was not certain if he was talking to the bairn or to himself or to some version of the conversation that was already beginning in his chest, working out its shape, finding its words. He supposed it did not matter. The decision was the same either way.
He needed to go south.
He needed to bring his wife home.