Chapter 36
Olivia could not sleep the first night home.
The keep had gone quiet around her hours since, the bone-deep quiet of a household that had buried its dead and bound its wounds and fallen at last into the kind of sleep that came only after great fear had finally let a body go.
She lay in the south tower bed she had once hated and listened to the small sounds of a castle at peace, the settling of old stone, the far-off shift of a horse in the stables, the wind off the river that no longer carried the smell of smoke, and she could not for the life of her find the door to sleep.
Each time she closed her eyes, the image reappeared: the blade at the peak of its swing, her brother lying pale beneath it, her husband going rigid like carved stone at her voice, lowering the steel, and shaming himself before three hundred people because she had asked him to.
At last, she gave up. She rose, pulled a shawl around her shift, and went down the cold turn of the stairs barefoot to find the kitchens and a cup of warm milk, the way her mother had given her as a girl on the nights the dark grew too loud.
She did not find the kitchens empty.
Ragnall sat alone at the great scarred table with a single candle burning low and a basin of water before him, and he was making a poor one-handed business of unwinding the soiled bandage from his wounded forearm, his jaw set hard against it, his long black hair loose around his shoulders.
He had not heard her on the stairs. For a moment, Olivia stood unseen in the doorway, simply looking at him—the most feared man in the glen, the Laird of Clan Cairn, who sat half-dressed and weary in his dark kitchen, fumbling at his injury alone in the small hours rather than waking anyone to help him.
“Ye will make a worse job of it that way,” she said quietly.
He went still and looked up, and the candle caught the surprise in his dark eyes before he could school it away. “I didnae mean to wake ye.”
“Ye didnae.” She crossed to him before her courage could fail, pulled out the bench beside him, and held out her hand for his arm. “Let me. I’ve bound enough of them this week to have the trick of it now.”
He hesitated. She watched his old habit of wanting to refuse, trying to pull back his arm, dismissing it, and sending her up the stairs.
The old wariness closed over him like a shutter.
Then she watched him decide against it with what seemed like real effort.
He laid his forearm across the table into her two waiting hands, and the trust in that small surrender warmed her like a fire.
She worked silently, peeling the last of the old linen away and cleaning the angry line of the cut with a cloth dipped in warm water, her head bent close over the task. He remained very still beneath her hands.
She was aware of him the entire time in a way that made her feel clumsy—the heat radiating from his bare arm, the slow rhythm of his breathing, the closeness of him in the candlelight.
When she looked up momentarily from her work, she saw him watching her face with an expression that took her breath away.
“It’ll scar,” she said, her voice low.
“I’ve got a few of those already.” His mouth twitched. He watched her gaze move to the old white seam that ran from the corner of his eye down to his lip, her brother’s parting gift, and then came back to meet his. “One more willnae spoil me looks.”
“Nay,” Olivia agreed softly before she could think better of it. “It willnae.”
The word hung in the warm darkness between them.
She bent again over his arm, her cheeks flushed, and wrapped the fresh linen around it slowly and carefully, over and under.
His free hand lifted of its own accord, and his fingers brushed once, gentle as a moth, against the back of her wrist where she worked.
She felt the touch go all the way to the soles of her bare feet.
Neither of them moved. The candle guttered. The whole keep seemed to lean in close around the two of them in the small ring of its light.
Olivia lifted her face. He was so close, and his eyes were on her mouth now—dark, certain, and undone. She understood that all she needed to do was stay exactly where she was and let it happen at last.
A coal cracked and fell in the dying hearth, loud as a shot in the stillness, and Ragnall drew back his hand as if her wrist had burned him, and the moment shattered into pieces on the kitchen floor.
“Ye should go to sleep,” he said roughly, rising, not meeting her eyes. “It’s late, and ye are owed yer rest more than most. I will see ye in the mornin’, lassie.”
And then he was gone into the darkness of the passage before she could find a single word to call him back, leaving her alone at the scarred table with the guttering candle, her thundering heart, and the fresh-bound truth of him still warm beneath her fingertips.
Tomorrow, then. Or the next day, or the next.
Ye cannae run from me forever in yer wee keep, Ragnall Crawford.
Ye held me wrist tonight like a man holdin’ the one thing he was afraid to want, and I felt yer hand shake doin’ it.
Whatever it is that lives behind that locked door of yers, it’s comin’ loose.
I’ve only to wait and nae flinch when it does.
Cairn woke the next morning to a quiet it had not known in three generations.
Olivia stood at the window of the Great Hall in the early light, watching her husband’s people discover it slowly, one by one—like a body waking from a long fever and lying still for a moment, half afraid to trust the cool of its own brow.
There was no dread in the yard. That was part of what made it strange.
No watch was doubled on the south wall, no one was muttering about Blythe sails on the river, and no hand was reaching for a weapon with the creak of the gate.
People went about their usual morning routines, with hens clucking, the byre busy, and smoke rising straight and gray from the kitchen chimney.
The quietness blanketed the whole keep like the first snow of winter.
And then a watchman’s call came down from the wall, not the muster, only a single voice, puzzled more than afraid. “Riders. Off the south road. Blythe colors.”
Olivia’s heart climbed into her throat. She was in the yard with the rest of them by the time the gate was opened, and her brother rode through it at the head of a half-dozen men, under no flag of truce nor parley, carrying nothing in his hands.
He had come openly into the heart of a Cairn keep, a Blythe laird with his head bare, because a man did not ask permission nor carry a white flag to ride to a friend’s home.
The meaning of it was not lost on anyone standing in that yard.
Olivia saw it land on the Cairn faces around her, the slow dawning wonder of it, and her eyes stung.
“I’ve brought yer dead home to ye,” Lucas said to Ragnall, swinging down from the horse, “to bury with yer own, in yer own ground, with Blythe standing bareheaded at the gravesides if ye’ll have us there.
And I’ve come to ask to bury ours the same, on our bank, with Cairn lookin’ on.
It seems to me…” His young voice caught, then steadied.
“It seems to me that both our clans have buried enough men in secret and in anger. I’d see these last three put down in the open, and in peace, with the other side bearin’ witness that we meant it. ”
They did it that afternoon at the ford, where the river flowed shallow and clear between the two clans’ territories.
The three were laid to rest in sight of each other, two on the Cairn bank and one on the Blythe, and the people of both clans performed the long rites on their own shores, bowing their heads over the flowing water.
The priest’s words echoed clearly across it, the same words spoken for Cairn and Blythe alike.
Maisie walked down alone afterward to the old boundary stone above the ford, the gray weathered stone where a skinny laddie had once laid his whole heart down in the gloaming and had it handed gently back to him, and she stood there for a long while with her hand on its cold surface, and what she said to it, if she said anything at all, she kept to herself.
Olivia found herself beside Ragnall at the water’s edge as folk drifted back up the banks, the two of them left for a moment in the hush with the river flowing between the newly turned graves.
“It’s a strange peace,” she murmured, “that is bought with this much buryin’.”
“Aye.” He was quiet for a moment, his bound arm stiff at his side, his dark eyes fixed on the water. “Lassie, there’s a thing I’ve been meanin’ to say to ye since—”
“Me Lady!” Greer was puffing down the bank toward them, red-faced and apologetic. “Beggin’ yer pardon, but the kitchen’s at sixes and sevens with the Blythe folk stoppin’ to sup, and Cook’s in a state, and… Would ye come?”
The moment shattered like a reflection disturbed by a stone hitting the water.
Ragnall swallowed his words.
Olivia climbed up the bank to tend to the kitchens, carrying the tension lingering in the air behind her, heavy as a held breath.