Chapter 13
Afterward, Olivia would remember the wedding itself only in pieces, bright and broken, like a dropped mirror.
The cold of the kirk flags stabbing up through her thin slippers.
The priest’s voice rolling the old, grave words out over the pair of them.
The rough warm weight of a length of Cairn plaid as it was wound around her wrist and Ragnall’s, binding her hand to his, the knot drawn snug by the priest’s steady fingers while the whole clan held its breath.
“With this cord I bind ye,” the priest intoned, “hand to hand, hearth to hearth, clan to clan. What the cord joins, let nay man and nay grievance and nay grave put asunder.”
Olivia looked down at her pale hand lashed fast to Ragnall’s broad scarred one, at the bright wool crossing both their wrists, and felt the whole impossible weight of it come down on her like snow.
His thumb moved once against the side of her hand. She did not think he knew that he had done it. It was the smallest gesture, a single stroke of a callused thumb across her skin, and it went through her like a struck bell. She hated that it did, but she could not make herself pull away.
“I, Ragnall, take ye, Olivia,” he said, and his deep voice did not shake, not at all, though his hand had shaken against hers the whole while. “To honor, and to shelter, and to keep. Against any harm, from any quarter, while there is breath left in me to stand between ye and it. This I swear.”
It was not the vow the priest had given him. She saw the priest’s eyebrow twitch at it. It was his own, plain and absolute, and he said it looking into her eyes.
Her own careful, rehearsed words turned to ash on her tongue.
“I, Olivia, take ye, Ragnall,” she said when she finally found her voice.
And then, because he had gone off the priest’s script and she would be damned before she let him out-honor her at her own wedding: “To spar with. And to suffer. And to try.” A startled ripple of laughter went around the kirk.
“It’s the best I’ve got to give for now. It’ll have to do.”
A flicker moved in his dark eyes that she had no word for.
“It’ll do,” he said quietly. “It’ll do fine, lassie.”
“Then by the cord and the kirk and the word of the Elders,” said the priest, “I pronounce ye man and wife. Ye may—”
Ragnall kissed her before the man could finish.
It was nothing like the night before. That had been a fire, a fire neither of them could stop once it had caught.
This was slow and unbearably gentle, his bound hand lifting to cradle her jaw while the cord pulled taut between their wrists, his mouth soft against hers before God and the priest and three hundred staring souls.
It lasted no longer than a single heartbeat, but Olivia felt it in the soles of her feet.
When he drew back, his forehead came to rest against hers for the space of one breath.
“Courage,” he murmured, so low that only she could catch it. “The hardest part is behind ye now.”
He was wrong about that.
The cèilidh filled the Great Hall with firelight and fiddles, and the roaring din of two clans set on drinking a wary peace into being.
Olivia moved through it in a daze, accepting cups she did not drink from and blessings she did not believe in and the careful, assessing looks of a hundred Cairn folk weighing up their Laird’s enemy bride and finding her wanting.
“Smile,” murmured Anne, materializing at her elbow with two cups and a face of perfect innocence. “Ye look like a woman countin’ the exits.”
“I am countin’ the exits.”
“Aye, well, count them with yer teeth showin’.
” Anne pressed a cup into her hand. “There’s a woman by the second pillar who has been watchin’ ye the whole night like ye owe her money.
And a man by the door with a face like a slammed gate.
And the auld one with the stick has been tellin’ anyone who’ll stand still that he buried two sons by the river.
” She sipped, serene. “So dinnae look at the pillar, dinnae look at the door, and for the love of God dinnae look at the auld one.”
Olivia laughed before she could stop herself. It was the first honest sound she had made all evening, and half the hall turned to look at her for it.
“There,” said Anne. “Now they’ve all seen the enemy laugh, and it’s ruined for them. It’s very hard to hate a woman ye’ve heard laugh.”
Her mother came and stood a while at her shoulder, saying nothing. She squeezed her hand once, hard, in the way that meant more than any of it.
Kate came too, on Maisie’s arm, moving slowly and holding herself carefully upright. The hall went quiet in patches as she passed, because half these people had not laid eyes on her in six months and had privately buried her.
“They’re starin’ at me,” she noted.
“Aye,” Olivia said.
“It’s dreadful.”
“It is.”
“How do ye bear it?”
“Badly,” Olivia replied. “And with me chin up. It’s the only way I’ve found.”
Kate considered that. Then she lifted her own chin exactly so, and the two of them stood there together in the middle of that hostile hall like a pair of fools daring anyone to say a word about it.
Maisie looked from one to the other and cackled aloud with pure delight.
From the dais, Ragnall watched his wife make his sister laugh, and found he could not look away from either of them.
“Ye’re doin’ it again,” Alastair remarked.
“Doin’ what?”
“Starin’ at yer bride like a man at a fire he’s nae sure he’s allowed to warm his hands by.” Alastair drank, unbothered by the look this earned him. “They’ll take her, ye ken. In time.”
“Will they?”
“Aye. They’re stubborn, nae stupid. They’ll watch her for a year, and they’ll test her, and if she holds, they’ll take her.” He cast a glance around the hall. “The trouble is the year, Ragnall. It’s a long while to stand in a room full of folk waitin’ for ye to fail.”
Ragnall said nothing to that, because there was nothing to say to it that was not a lie.
A year of this. Of her walkin’ into a room and talk stoppin’.
Of every cup she’s handed bein’ watched to see if she drinks it.
And she’ll bear it; that’s the black joke of it.
She’ll bear it with her chin up and her tongue sharp, and she’ll never once ask me to make it easier, because she’d sooner die than ask me for anythin’.
He set down his cup.
“Where are ye away to?” Alastair asked.
“To dance with me wife,” Ragnall said, “in front of the whole hall.”
He crossed toward her, and the crowd parted for him, and her heart began to behave very badly indeed.
“Me Lady.” He held out his hand. It was a very deliberate thing, done where every soul in the hall could see it. “Will ye dance?”
“Is that a request or an edict?”
“I’ve had me fill of edicts this month.” Something moved at the corner of his mouth. “It’s a request.”
She put her hand in his.
He danced better than she cared to admit. He danced like a man who had done it since he was a boy, sure and unhurried. His hand on her waist was warm through the loch-blue silk, and the fiddles went round, and the firelight went round, and the hostile faces went round with them.
After a while, Olivia found she had stopped noticing them at all.
“Ye’re glarin’ at me,” he observed.
“I’m concentrating.”
“Ye’re glarin’ at me while ye concentrate. It’s a rare gift.” He turned her neatly and drew her back in. “Ye’ve been countin’ the exits the whole night.”
“How would ye ken that?”
“Because I’ve been watchin’ ye the whole night, as ye ken fine, or ye’d nae have asked.”
Olivia missed a step. He caught her but did not remark on it, and that small mercy was somehow worse than if he had.
“They hate me,” she said.
“Aye.”
“Ye’re meant to say, ‘Nay, they daenae, ye’re imaginin’ it.’”
“Would ye have believed me?”
“Nay.”
“Then I’ll nae insult ye with it.” The music shifted, and so did he.
“They hate ye, lassie. They’ll hate ye for a good while.
And ye’ll stand in me hall with yer chin up, and ye’ll outlast every one of them, because that is what ye are, and I’ve ken it since ye came down yer faither’s steps and looked me in the eye with yer heart in pieces.
” His hand tightened slightly on her waist. “I’d nae have wagered a bent penny on meself in yer place. ”
Olivia could not think of one single thing to say to that.
The music ended. He held her a beat longer than the dance required, and then he let her go, walked her back through the parting crowd to her mother and her friend, and bowed over her hand in front of all of them like a man laying down a marker.
Then he was called away to settle some matter of precedence among the tacksmen, and the fiddles struck up again, and the ale did its slow work.
It was past the second hour that the trouble came and found her.
She did not see them gather. One moment, she stood alone by the great hearth, catching her breath; the next, three of them were ringed around her, large, flushed, and swaying, with the bright, particular ugliness in their faces that drink brought out in men who were cruel enough sober.
“The Blythe wench,” the biggest of them said, not bothering to lower his voice. “Stood in Cairn’s hall in a Cairn weddin’ gown, bold as brass. Yer faither killed me braither at the ford, lass. Did ye ken that? Smiled while he did it.”
“I didnae ken it,” Olivia said evenly enough, though her heart had begun to slam against her ribs. “And I am sorry for it, truly. But I am nae me faither.”
“The Council,” he said. “Aye. The Council said he was to wed ye. The Council didnae say he was to ride to Blythe and fetch ye like a lad courtin’.
The Council didnae say he was to seat ye at his right hand and pour ye wine with his own hand and dance ye around this hall for the whole clan to see.
” His grip closed hard around her bare arm, hard enough to bruise, and yanked her closer.
“Yon’s nae a man obeyin’ an edict, lass.
Yon’s a man well pleased with his bargain.
And me son’s still in the ground by that river. ”
“That was the Elders’ doing.” Olivia made herself say it steadily, though her arm was going numb in his fist. “Every part of it. I didnae ask for this. I didnae want it. I stood in me own hall, and I told a dozen men I’d sooner take a knife to me own wrist than take yer Laird’s name.”
“And yet here ye stand in his colors, wearin’ it,” said the man. He had a fistful of her loch-blue bodice gathered in his other hand now, the fine fabric straining at the seams. “Let’s have a proper look, then, at what the great Laird’s payin’ such a price for. Let’s see his bonnie prize.”
Olivia heard the seam of her wedding gown begin to give. And then a great deal happened all at once.
She heard her own voice go sharp and furious. “Take yer hand off me!”
She heard a woman scream somewhere across the hall. She heard the music die in a single screech of tortured strings.
And over the whole din, cutting clean through the smoke and the noise like a blade drawn through silk, she heard Ragnall’s voice, and never in her life had she heard anything so angry.
“Take. Yer hands. Off me wife.”