Chapter 10
Ragnall did not move for a long while after her footsteps had faded down the corridor.
The fire had burned down to a low red eye in the grate. Across the room, the chair she had not sat in stood empty, and the door she had fled through hung wide in the dark.
Tattie, who’d come inside some time after Olivia left, lifted his great head off the hearthrug.
He looked at the open door. He looked back at Ragnall with what could only be called reproach and released the long, gusting sigh of a hound whose favorite soul in all the castle had just walked out of the room.
“Aye,” Ragnall told the dog. “I ken it.”
He could still taste her. That was the whole trouble, laid out plain.
He had kissed his share of women and forgotten most of them within a fortnight, and he already knew, with the flat grim certainty he brought to weather and to war, that he was not going to forget this one if he lived to be a hundred.
One kiss. One foolish kiss the night before the weddin’, and here ye stand like a green lad who’s never been touched in his life. Get a hold of yerself, man.
He dragged a hand down his face, over the old scar that drew tight at the corner of his mouth whenever he frowned. He was frowning now.
He knew this road. He had walked it once already, the whole black length of it, and he had carried what waited at the end of it in his arms up a long flight of stairs. She had weighed almost nothing back then, his sister. All her bright bones gone to splinters inside her.
That was the price of letting a person matter past all good sense.
Kate had loved like that, with her whole reckless heart held out in both hands and not one scrap of it kept back.
It had very nearly killed her, and the man who did the killing had shared a name and a hearth with the woman now sleeping somewhere under Ragnall’s roof.
Ye can keep her safe. Fed, and warm, and guarded, and honored before the whole clan till the day ye die. That much is yer duty, and ye’ll do it gladly. But ye’ll nae do this. Ye willnae put into any woman’s hand the blade that almost gutted yer sister and call the wound love.
It was a solid, well-made decision. He had made it before, several times, right here in this room. It held firm until a fiery-haired hellion rose on her tiptoes, dressed in a gown the shade of deep water, and kissed him as if to settle the dispute with that gesture.
He needed work. Whenever his mind turned traitor on him, work had always been the cure, and there was a task he could see to tonight that was real, and useful, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the burning print of her mouth on his.
He would go ask the healer about his sister. Kate would want to feel better by morning. It was a good reason to leave this room, and it also happened to be true.
The castle slept around him as he went, banked low and quiet, the rushes hushing underfoot and the torches guttering in their brackets.
He passed the nursery door and slowed down without meaning to.
Within, he could hear the soft burr of the night nurse, and beneath it the small sleeping snuffle of a bairn who was not his.
She had her grandmother’s dark hair and her dead father’s worst blood and, God help them all, Olivia’s clear eyes looking up from her round wee face.
He stood there for a moment, his hand flat against the door, and did not go in. Then he walked on.
The healer’s room sat at the cold north end of the keep, and he could see a strip of warm light beneath the door. Brigid kept late hours. She always had, even as a bairn, when her father was healer before her and the pair of them ran wild together through these same corridors.
He knocked once and let himself in. The room was small and dim, green with the smell of drying herbs, bunches of them strung from the rafters. A single tallow candle burned near a stub. Brigid was bent over her worktable, grinding something to a paste with a slow and even hand.
“Me Laird.” She did not look up. “Come callin’ the night before ye wed another woman. There’s a thing to set the auld wives’ tongues waggin’ for a twelvemonth.”
“I came to ask after Kate.”
That lifted her head. Whatever edge had been gathering in her face smoothed clean away, and for a breath, she was only the healer’s daughter who had trailed after him around the castle since the pair of them were small enough to hide in the meal chests, the one who had wept harder than he had at her father’s burial.
“She is better,” she said, and there was no false note anywhere in it.
“Nae mended. Daenae go tellin’ yerself she’s mended.
But somethin’ has shifted in her this week past, and I’ll nae lie to ye about it to spare me own feelings.
” She turned the little pot of salve over in her hands.
“She ate this mornin’ without bein’ bid to.
She asked me the day of the week. She hasnae asked me anythin’ at all since the night ye carried her up off those stones. ”
Ragnall said nothing. He did not trust himself to.
“And she’s been listenin’,” Brigid continued, more slowly, as if working it out even as she said it.
“That’s the part I cannae account for. She lies there with her face to the wall, and she hears every word said in that room, and I’d have sworn on me faither’s grave a month ago that she heard nothin’ at all.
” A pause, and a small twist of her mouth.
“It began the day yer bride came up the glen. Make of that what ye like. I’ve nay wish to hand her the credit, but I’ll nae pretend I daenae see it. ”
“Then hand it grudgingly and let it stand.” Some hard knot below his ribs loosened by a degree. “Will she bear the morrow, do ye think? The crowd and the noise?”
“I will mix her a draught to settle her nerves if she will take one. She will do well enough.” Brigid wiped her hands slowly down the front of her apron and came around the end of the table.
“Ye fret over the whole wide world, do ye ken that? Yer sister. The bairn who isnae yers. This ungrateful clan to the last squallin’ soul of it. ”
She halted close to him, a good deal closer than the small room called for.
“And who frets over ye, Ragnall Crawford? Has there ever once been a soul to do that?”
He knew the look she wore. He had known it for a long while. There had been years, not so far behind him, when he had been glad enough to see it.
“Ye used to let me,” she said, and laid her hand flat on his chest where the laces of his shirt hung open at the throat.
Her fingers were warm and sure, and they remembered the road.
“Before ye decided ye were too fine and too sorrowful a man for the likes of me. I mind every inch of ye, me Laird. I’d lay good coin the wee Blythe lass cannae say the same. ”
For the span of one slow heartbeat, he stood and allowed himself to feel it. The familiar warm weight of her palm. The comfort of a touch ingrained deep down.
But nothing in him responded to it. He stood in a warm, close room with a pretty woman’s hand flat on his chest, and all of his foolish mind was elsewhere—on a mouth that had become careful and then not careful at all; on a small, ruinous sound made against his lips; on a heart he felt pounding like a war drum through a borrowed silk gown.
God help me. She isnae even in the room, and still she is the only one standin’ in it.
He grasped Brigid’s wrist gently, lifted her hand away, and then released it.
“Daenae,” he said. “Daenae do that again.”
Her chin came up. “Or what?”
“Or ye’ll be plyin’ yer trade in another laird’s hall by Michaelmas, with a fair reference in yer hand and nae a single word of complaint from me.” He stepped back, and the candle flame leaned and shivered in the draft of it.
“Ragnall…”
“Ye’ve served this castle well, Brigid, as yer faither did before ye, and for that ye’ll have me thanks as long as I draw breath.
But I am to be wed in the mornin’. Ye will treat me wife as yer Lady, with yer courtesy and yer hands both to yerself.
That, or ye’ll find yerself another roof. There’s nay third road in it.”
He had prepared himself for her anger. Brigid had a fiery temper that he knew well, all heat and sharp words, but it cooled off just as quickly as it flared up, and he had endured a hundred such storms without a second thought the next morning.
What he got from her instead dragged a cold finger straight down his spine.
She went still. Perfectly, terribly still. Still as the whole glen went in the last held breath before the sky cracked open and the storm came roaring down off the high hills. And she looked at him with those green eyes, with not one ember of heat left in them.
“Yer wife,” she said very softly, turning the word over on her tongue as if to learn the taste of it.
“Aye, of course. Yer Lady.”
Then she smiled, slow and all wrong, returned to the table, and bent back over her grinding as if he had already left the room.
“Sleep well, me Laird. Ye’ve a grand day on the morrow.” The pestle turned, and turned, and turned. “I do hope nothin’ comes along to spoil it.”