Chapter 28
Cairn had not held a festival in living memory that did not end with blood on the grass.
For a month, Ragnall had thrown himself headlong into changing that.
He had ridden the borders twice over and settled three disputes before they could fester.
He had sent good oatmeal and better ale to the two villages that shared the river crossing, so that Cairn folk and Blythe folk might raise the festival ground together and learn, God willing, that the other clan did not in fact eat its own young.
He had worked past exhaustion every day of it, because a man who worked to the bone did not lie awake half the night thinking about red hair spread across a pillow that had been cold for a month.
A month. A month and three days, nae that I am countin’. A man who counts the days is a man in trouble, and I am in trouble enough without the arithmetic of it.
The boy had agreed. That was the wonder of it.
Ragnall had sent his reckless proposal down the glen, near certain it would come back with a Blythe arrow through the heart of it.
But young Lucas Arran had written in a careful, overly formal hand that he would bring his clan to the river at the turn of the season and that he prayed, as Ragnall did, that they might all learn to dance on the same bank for once instead of dying on it.
A good lad. A better laird than his years had any right to make him. And Olivia’s blood in every careful line of it.
“Ye’ve torn that letter near to rags,” Kate drawled.
She sat in the window of his study, with Rosie on her knee and the light coming in golden around both of them.
The sight of her there, out of her bed and out of her black silence, with color in her face and the baby’s fist knotted in her hair, was a wonder Ragnall did not think he would ever learn to take for granted.
“I am committin’ it to memory,” he said.
“Ye’re frettin’.” She bounced the baby, who shrieked her approval of the world.
“Ye’ve fretted the length of a month, Braither.
Over the ale and the games and whether Blythe folk will take offense at our piper.
And nae once have ye said the name of who ye are truly frettin’ over.
” She tilted her head, and the mischief in it was their grandmother to the bone. “Shall I say it for ye?”
“Nay.”
“Olivia.”
“I said nay.”
“She will be coming over the hill tomorrow.” Kate smiled down at her daughter. “Will she nae, Rosie? Tomorrow, yer favorite aunt will come back to see ye, and yer poor daft uncle willnae ken what to do with his own two hands.”
Ragnall said nothing to that, for there was nothing safe to say.
He turned the letter over in his fingers and looked out down the glen toward the river he could not see from the study yet always felt the way a man felt a sore tooth with his tongue.
I daenae ken what I will do when she comes.
I drove her away to keep her safe, and I’ve nae slept right since, and tomorrow she will stand on the far bank of the river lookin’ at me, and I will have to keep me promise and me distance, and smile, and keep the peace, and nae let one living soul see what the sight of her does to me.
From the door came the thump of a stick and the particular wheezing cackle that meant his grandmother had decided to grace them with her presence.
“He’s got that face on him again,” Maisie announced to the room at large, hobbling in twice as feeble as she had been in the corridor. “The constipated one. The one he gets when a lass has tied his innards in a bow, and he is too proud to thank her for it.”
She lowered herself into a chair with a great show of frailty and sharp, bright eyes fixed on him. “In me day, a man who wanted a woman simply told her so. We hadnae the leisure for all this broodin’. Half of ye would be dead of the plague by spring.”
“Yer comfort is a wonder to me, Grandmaither,” Ragnall said.
“I am a wonder all over, laddie. Ye should listen to me while ye’ve the chance.
” She reached for Rosie, who went to her gladly, and the cackle softened into something else as the wee one patted her wrinkled cheek.
“Bring the lass home, Ragnall, however ye have to do it. This keep was a tomb afore she walked into it, and I am too auld and too bonnie to die in a tomb.”
He was spared the need to answer, which was just as well since he had no answer to give her, when Alastair entered the room without the courtesy of knocking, as he had since they were boys.
Ragnall could tell from his friend’s face, even before he spoke, that whoever was working this feud from the shadows had made another move.
“The crossing,” Alastair said. “Somebody’s been at the crossing in the night.”
“What happened?” Ragnall was on his feet. “Say it.”
“The bonfire stack. The great one that the two villages built together on the near bank, which was to be lit the next day to open the festival…” Alastair’s jaw was a hard line.
“It’s burned. Burned to black ash before it was ever lit.
And a Blythe plaid was pinned to the post beside it, nice and plain, for our folk to find at first light. ”
He let that sink in.
“So Clan Blythe rides tomorrow to a burnt welcome and their own colors hung up as a confession. Somebody means for this peace to die in the first hour of it, Ragnall. And they’ve nearly made certain it will.”
Olivia had crossed this glen once before, a bride in a cart with her head high and her heart in pieces, certain she rode toward a prison. She had not expected the second crossing to be so much harder than the first.
“Ye’re doin’ it again,” Anne murmured from beside her.
“Doin’ what?”
“Worryin’ a hole in yer pocket with that wee brooch.” Anne’s dark eyes were gentle behind her spectacles and far too knowing. “Ye’ve had it out and back a dozen times since the ford. Whoever gave it to ye, I’d say the poor man never stood a chance.”
Olivia took her hand off the silver brooch as if it had bitten her. “Nobody gave it to me. It was pinned to a gown that got torn, and I forgot to give it back, and that’s the end of it.”
“Mm,” said Anne, maddening as only a friend of twenty years could be.
They came down to the river in the clear, golden light of the morning, the entire Blythe party stretched out along the waterway. Olivia saw the festival ground spread across both banks and felt her breath grow strange in her chest.
Booths and trestles. Bright awnings fluttered in the wind from the hills.
A field prepared for the games stretched out, with the dark river beyond—the boundary that their two clans had fought over for three generations.
And on the near bank was a great black scar of ash where a great fire had burned and died.
She felt the change run through the Blythe party like a current. Heard the low growl of it, men’s voices going hard. Saw on the far bank the Cairn folk gathered in a wary knot and the burnt bonfire between the two clans like an accusation laid out on a table.
“What is it?” She leaned from the cart. “Lucas, what’s happened?”
Her brother rode back to her, his young face grim under the weight he carried so carefully.
“Somebody burned the festival fire in the night,” he said, “and left our plaid beside it so it would look like we did it.” His hand was white on the reins.
“Half me men are already saying we should turn the horses around and go home, that it’s a trap, that Laird Cairn means to shame us on our own land and call it a feast. And I cannae rightly say they’re wrong. ”
“They’re wrong,” Olivia said before she had decided to.
“Ragnall didnae do this. He’d sooner cut off his own hand than burn the one peace he has spent a month buildin’.
Somebody’s done it to him as much as to us.
Somebody who wants exactly what yer men want, Lucas, which is for us to turn the horses around. ”
Lucas looked at her for a long moment, that sad, knowing look he had learned somewhere in the last hard months. “Ye’d stake the clan on it. On him. How could ye do that?”
“Nay. I’d stake meself.” Her heart was pounding, and she could tell how much of it was the burnt fire and how much was the distant bank. “Ride in. Daenae give whoever did this the satisfaction of seein’ us run.”
And so they rode down to the very edge of the water, where the two banks came closest and a broad, flat ford was the only place within twenty miles where a body could cross dry-shod.
The Cairn folk came down to meet them on their side, and for a long moment, the two clans simply stood and stared at each other across the shrinking water, with the burnt fire smoking faintly between them and the air growing thick enough to cut.
Then the Cairn folk parted, and Ragnall came through them.
Olivia had spent a month telling herself she had built him up in her memory, that no living man could be what the empty nights had made him.
She watched him come down to the water’s edge in the golden light, tall and dark and unhurried, his plaid tossed over one shoulder, his black hair loose, and the pale scar on his brown face prominent.
She understood, with a sudden jolt that knocked her certainty loose, that she had not built him up at all.
She had been kind to herself and had left things out.
His eyes found her across the ford in the first second, the way they always had, as if no number of clansmen between them had ever made the smallest difference. And he did not look away. And neither, God help her, could she.
He stopped at the very edge of the water, where every soul on both banks could see him, and he raised his voice so it carried clean across the river.
“Olivia.” Not me Lady. Not a word for the clans or the Council or the burnt fire between them. Just her name, said plainly, in front of three hundred staring people. “Ye came.”