Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Steel met steel, and Fergus drove forward, forcing Angus back three steps before the man found his footing and answered with a lateral cut that came close enough to be a genuine problem.
"There ye are," Angus said, breathing hard. "I was beginnin' to think ye'd gone soft on me."
Fergus said nothing. He reset his stance and came again.
The yard was full. Six of his men working in pairs, the rhythm of it all blade and breath and the dull percussion of boots on hard ground.
Good sound. The sound of a clan that could defend itself.
He had built this into them over months, the discipline of daily practice, no exceptions, no rank excused.
Angus pressed left. Fergus read it two moves ahead and was already moving, steel locking, breaking, circling. His body knew this. His body had always known this. It was everything else he was less certain of.
He had stood in that doorway and watched her humming, low and soft, her lips close to the bairn's hair.
Lilly's eyes had been closing. Margaret had not hurried her.
She had just kept moving, kept humming, her hand steady on the bairn's back as though there was nowhere else in the world she needed to be and no one she needed to be it for.
As though the bairn was hers.
The thought had arrived without warning and settled somewhere it had no business settling.
He had left before she could turn around.
He turned the thought away. Angus came hard from the right, and he answered it cleanly, the impact traveling up through his wrist and shoulder with a familiar, grounding ache.
He had gone looking for them because the nursery was empty and the healer had told him Margaret had taken Lilly for a walk an hour ago.
An hour was long enough to get turned around in this castle, long enough to end up in the older passages where the torches sat empty, and the floors were uneven.
He had told himself it was practical. He had told himself this while already moving toward the east corridor.
He had found them by the light under the door.
He had stood in that doorway and watched her move between the shelves in the low, slanted light, Lilly against her shoulder, her hand trailing the spines of books she was reading aloud as she found them.
Her voice had been barely above a murmur, steady and unhurried, shaped more for the bairn than for meaning.
The child had been almost asleep. Margaret had not known she was being watched.
He had known the room held maps and old clan records. He had been in it once, years before he took the Lairdship, looking for a boundary document. He had felt it was not worth staying or returning to.
Now, with her there, he had not wanted to leave. Still, he left anyway. He came here instead and grabbed a sword, which was the only reliable way he had to deal with thoughts that would not behave.
Focus.
Angus broke left again, a feint, and Fergus did not take it. He stepped inside the arc of the move and brought the flat of his blade down on Angus's shoulder, controlled, decisive.
Angus raised a hand. "Aye. Aye, all right."
Fergus stepped back. He was breathing hard. Good.
Movement at the edge of the yard caught his eye.
A boy, around seven or eight years old, stood near the wall holding a stick with both hands.
His stance was almost completely wrong—his feet were too close together, and his grip was too tight.
His chin was tucked in, like children did when they were concentrating very hard on something they doubted they could do.
He was watching the men with an expression of total, devoted attention.
As Fergus watched, the boy tried a strike. The stick swung wide and nearly took him off his feet. He caught himself, reset, tried again.
The boy reminded him of when he was a lad, learning to hold a sword. Fergus was already moving before he decided to move.
The yard stilled as he crossed it. His men stopped. The boy looked up and froze, the stick gripped at his side, his eyes very wide.
Fergus crouched to his level. He took the stick, turned it, and placed it back in the boy's hands, adjusting the grip with two fingers, repositioning the small fists without a word. Then he stood, stepped behind him, and nudged his feet apart with the toe of his boot until the stance was right.
"There," he said. "Try it now."
The boy tried it. The strike came true this time, straight and clean.
His face split open with it, the pure, uncomplicated joy of a body doing what it was asked to do.
Fergus straightened.
He looked up and found Margaret at the edge of the yard. She was standing in the shade with Lilly against her chest, still and quiet, her eyes on him with an expression that looked almost like recognition.
He held her gaze.
He held it the way he held his blade after a bout that had cost him something, steady and without apology.