Chapter 27
Her mother was in the courtyard before the litter had properly stopped.
Elspeth Arran, who did not run, ran. She had her daughter out of it and folded into her arms and was holding on hard enough to hurt the bad shoulder. Olivia let her and did not say a word about it.
“Ye’re thin,” Elspeth said into her hair. “What have they been feedin’ ye?”
“Maither—”
“Ye’re thin, and ye’re gray about the mouth, and ye’ve been greetin’ the whole road home.
” She held her at arm’s length and looked her over the way she looked over a frost-bitten seedling, thoroughly and without sentiment, deciding whether it would live.
“Right. Ye’ll eat, and ye’ll sleep, and ye’ll nae tell me a single thing until ye’re ready. ”
“I daenae ken where to start.”
“Then daenae start,” she said. “There’s nay hurry. Ye’re home.”
And that was the thing that nearly undid her—that her mother could say the word home like that, plainly, as if it were still true, as if it had not become the most complicated word in the English language in the space of a fortnight.
Lucas came out to greet her more slowly.
He looked older somehow. Not in years, perhaps. But he looked more mature. That was the first thing she noticed. And it hurt, because he had done it while she was away and she had not been there for it.
He stood in front of her in their father’s ring with his shoulders squared and his jaw set, and she watched him try to be a laird about it, and watched it fail. And then he was just her little brother, with his arms around her neck, saying her name into her shoulder.
“I’ll kill him,” Lucas said thickly. “Say the word, and I’ll ride out immediately. I daenae care if it’s war. I daenae care, Olivia—”
“Ye’ll do nay such thing.”
“He let ye come home with a hole in ye—”
“He didnae put it there.” It came out of her far too fast, far too hot, and she felt her mother go still behind her.
She made herself slow down. “One of his men put it there, Lucas. And Ragnall killed him for it in me own chamber with his own hand, and then he sat on the floor and washed the blood off me arm and never once let me see his face.” She heard what she was doing.
She could not seem to stop doing it. “So ye’ll nae ride out. Ye’ll nae ride out for me.”
There was a small, dreadful silence in the courtyard.
“Aye,” said her brother slowly. “Well.”
He looked at her a moment longer, and there was something in his young face she liked very little, because it was the look of a boy doing arithmetic and arriving at a total.
“Come inside,” Elspeth said briskly. “Both of ye. It’s freezin’ out here.”
Blythe Castle stood just as she had left it, and that was the strangest part of all.
The same gray walls, the same drafty hall, the same well in the same courtyard where she had scraped her knees as a girl. Her own chamber, with her books, her bed, and her window facing south toward the river and the lands beyond that had cost her father and her brother their lives.
Everything was in its place. Everything was as it had always been. And she walked through it like a ghost walking through a house that had forgotten her.
She had been gone a fortnight. It should not have been enough to make a stranger of her home.
But she had left this place a furious girl with a clean, clear hatred to keep her warm, and she had come back a married woman with a half-healed wound in her shoulder and a husband’s silver brooch she could not make herself stop carrying about in her pocket, and Blythe had not a single room in it that fit the woman she had become.
The quiet was the hardest to bear. She had not known, till she was without it, how much noise there had been in her days at Cairn.
The endless glad racket of a castle full of life.
Rosie’s shrieks, and Tattie’s great clumsy bulk knocking into the furniture, and Maisie’s cackle, and Kate’s slow returning laughter, and under all of it, always, the low steady weight of him.
Of Ragnall. Never far. Never quite looking at her. Never quite not.
Here, it was only silence. Her mother’s soft quiet, the servants’ careful quiet, and her own dark, roaring quiet in the night, alone in a bed that did not smell like anyone at all.
She did not speak much during those first weeks home. Her mother did not press her. Elspeth Arran had buried a husband and a son, and knew the shape of grief well enough to leave it lie, to set a cup of warm milk at her daughter’s elbow of an evening and ask nothing, and wait.
It was her mother, in the end, who put it into words.
They were sitting by the fire one night, the pair of them, Elspeth carding wool and Olivia staring into the flames, seeing another hearth altogether, when Elspeth said without once looking up from her work, “Ye’re pinin’, me darlin’.”
“I am tired, Maither. That’s all it is.”
“Mm.” The cards went on, scratch and pull, scratch and pull. “I pined just so for yer faither, the year he went off to the long war. Couldnae sleep for the want of a man I spent half of me wakin’ hours wishin’ to the devil.” A small, sad smile.
“I am nae… I daenae…”
“I ken. It’s a particular misery, lass, the missin’ of a body ye arenae even sure ye like. I’d nae wish it on me worst enemy.” She looked up then, gentle and shrewd. “And I’d nae waste it either, were I young again and had it to spend.”
Olivia said nothing. There was nothing safe to say.
I willnae miss him. I willnae. I am allowed to miss the bairn, and the daft dog, and Maisie, and Kate.
But I willnae waste one tear on a man who looked me dead in the eye and told me he felt nothin’ at all.
Then why is it his face I see the moment I close me eyes?
Why is it his voice in the dark I am listenin’ for, every blessed night, in a castle he will never once set foot in?
The letters were the one thread that held. Kate wrote nearly every week, in a careful mending hand, of Rosie’s new tooth and the first word she’d very nearly said and how Tattie still pined at Olivia’s old door and would not be coaxed away from it.
She never once mentioned Ragnall, and Olivia never once asked after him. They were both, she thought, stepping wide and carefully around the one name that mattered.
She read them in the garden, most weeks, because her mother was always in the garden.
That was the thing she could not find a way to live with.
Elspeth would be three feet away with her hands in the dirt, and Olivia would be sitting on the wall with a letter in her lap that said, She has her first tooth through and she bit Maisie with it, and she would fold it up and put it in her pocket and say nothing at all.
She has a granddaughter. She has a granddaughter with her son’s eyes, and she is kneelin’ in the dirt nae three feet from me, and I have the whole of it in me pocket.
Every week she did not say it, it became harder to say, because now there was the not-saying to explain as well.
I’ll tell her when she’s stronger. When I’ve found the words that daenae have Magnus’s crime buried in the middle of them like a stone in bread.
That’s a lie, and I ken it’s a lie, and I tell it to meself every Tuesday when the letters come.
It was a full month before the day that changed it all came.
She was in the kitchen garden with her mother, both of them kneeling in the cold, turned earth, planting the late kale, because Elspeth believed that no grief on God’s earth could not be eased a little by planting living things in the ground.
And across the courtyard, behind a closed door, her brother sat in council with their clan’s elders for the fourth time since she had come home wounded.
She wondered, not for the first time, what they could be at in there, hour upon hour, the door shut and the voices all pitched low.
She found out when Lucas came out.
He crossed the courtyard to them slowly, a young man trying with all his might to carry a weight too heavy for his shoulders. Olivia sat back on her heels in the dirt and watched him come, and read the war in his tired face before he ever said a word of it.
“What’s happened?” she asked. “Lucas, what is it?”
He crouched down beside her in the cold garden and rubbed both hands hard over his face.
“They want war,” he said simply. “They’ve wanted it since the day ye came home with a cut in yer shoulder. They call it proof. Proof the marriage was a trick from them, that Cairn never meant the peace, that they tried to murder ye in yer bed and send ye home in pieces to spite the whole clan.”
“Who said that?” Elspeth asked in shock.
His jaw worked. “Noah’s the loudest of the lot. The eldest of them all. He’s been at the council day and night this month, drivin’ them on, and they’re near enough driven. They’d have me call the men up afore the first snows.”
Cold dread churned in Olivia’s gut at the name.
Noah. She had never liked the old man, with his soft voice and watchful eyes, and his habit of being in every room where important matters were decided.
He had stood at her father’s right hand, then her brother Magnus’s, and had smiled that same cold, gentle smile through every funeral the long feud had brought.
“It’s nae true,” she said, her voice low and fierce.
“What are ye sayin’, Sister? Ye were nearly killed. I cannae ignore that.”
“Lucas, listen to me. The man who came into me room was a Cairn guard, aye, but it wasnae Ragnall who sent him. Ye ken this, did ye nae tell them? Whoever’s tellin’ ye that Cairn tried to murder me is lyin’ to yer face.
There’s someone who wants this war, Braither.
Someone feedin’ it carefully on both banks of the river.
And it isnae Ragnall. He’s the one laird in this whole cursed glen who’s tried to put a stop to it. ”
Her brother looked at her for a long moment, and a shadow shifted across his tired young face.
“Ye defend him,” he said slowly. “Yer enemy. The man ye were forced to wed. Ye kneel there in the dirt, and ye defend him with fire in yer eyes.” A faint, sad, knowing smile, so like their dead father’s that it caught her under the ribs. “Maither told me how it was with ye. I didnae believe her.”
Olivia’s face flushed to the roots of her hair. “I defend the truth. That’s all there is to it.”
“Ye do,” said her mother.
Both of them turned.
Elspeth had not stopped planting. She pressed in the kale firmly with her thumbs and drew the earth up around it and did not look at either of them.
“Ye defend the truth,” she said. “And the truth is that ye’re in love with him.
Ye’ve been in love with him since afore ye came home, and ye’ve been walkin’ around this castle for a month with yer heart in yer mouth, waitin’ for somebody to say it out loud so ye can deny it.
” She sat back on her heels. “There. Somebody has said it.”
“Maither.”
“I’m nae finished.” Elspeth wiped her hands slowly on her apron.
Her voice had not risen at all, and that was what made it unbearable.
“He killed yer faither. I’ll say that once, and then I’ll nae say it again, for I’ve nay wish to spend what’s left of me life sayin’ it.
He killed me husband in me own yard, and I saw it through that window there.
I daenae expect I’ll ever be free of it, nae for a single day. ”
The garden was very quiet.
“I’ve thought about it every hour since ye came home,” she went on.
“And what I keep comin’ back to, God forgive me, is that me son did somethin’ so vile I cannae bear to have it said in front of me, and every soul in this glen kens what it was but me, and ye all step around it like a hole in the floor and think I daenae notice ye steppin’. ”
Olivia’s blood ran cold.
“Maither, I—”
“Nay.” Elspeth held up a dirty hand. “Nay. I’m nae askin’.
I’ve decided I’m nae askin’, and I’d thank ye to let me keep that, for it’s the only thing I’ve got left to stand on.
” She picked up her trowel again. “But daenae ye ever stand in me garden and tell me ye’re defendin’ the truth, lass.
Ye’re defendin’ him. Have the courage to ken the difference. ”
She bent back to the kale.
“Go to yer festival,” she said. “Both of ye. Go and dance on the river and let them all look at ye. It’s more than yer faither ever did for this clan.”
“Aye. Well.” Lucas got to his feet, and there was a new steadiness in him now, some small strength she had handed him without meaning to.
“I’ve held them off, for now. I told them we’d nae spill one more drop of blood till we’d tried the other road first. For I have received word from Cairn this week, as it happens. From the Laird himself.”
He drew a folded letter from inside his coat, and Olivia’s heart stopped clean in her chest at the sight of the black slashing hand scrawled across the face of it.
“He has put a thing to me that nay laird has put to another in a hundred years,” Lucas said.
“One festival for both clans. Both banks of the river, together, at the turn of the season. A peace ye can dance to, he calls it. I thought it pure madness when I first read it.” He paused and turned the letter over in his hands.
“Now I am nae so certain. Ye ken the man better than any soul at Blythe, Sister. Tell me the truth. Is it a trap? Or is it real?”
Olivia kneeled there in the cold turned earth with her brother’s question hanging over her and her husband’s black handwriting close enough to reach out and touch, and she thought of Ragnall standing at an altar with his great hands shaking, of him telling her that the feud would end on the worst day of her life, of him lying to her face about his heart with his jaw set like a man holding a door shut against a flood.
And she knew the answer with a certainty that frightened her more than any blade ever had.
“It’s real,” she said. “Whatever else the man is, whatever lies he tells himself in the dark, he wants the killin’ stopped more than he wants to draw his next breath.
Go to the festival, Lucas. Take the whole clan.
Dance on both banks of the cursed river, and let old Noah choke on the sight of it.
” Her voice caught and steadied. “I will come with ye.”
Her brother raised one eyebrow. “Will ye, now? And here was I thinkin’ ye’d sworn never to lay eyes on Laird Cairn again so long as ye drew breath.”
“I daenae want to,” Olivia said. “God help me, I daenae. I…” She stopped, looked down at her dirt-blackened hands, and gave up the lie when it was but half out of her mouth.
“I have to see him. Just once. I have to stand in front of him one more time and say me piece. And then I will be done with it. I swear to ye, I will.”
It was, she thought, very near the bravest lie she had told since the morning of her wedding.