Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Magnus found Duncan waiting for him at the edge of the paddock, arms folded over the top rail, watching nothing in particular.
“Ye’ve got news?” he asked, coming to stand beside him.
“Aye, me Laird.” Duncan didn’t turn.
“Walk with me a moment.”
They crossed toward the far fence line, away from the stable lads and the general traffic of the yard, until the only sound left was the wind moving through the grass and the distant clang of the smith’s hammer.
“Angus’s cousin trades in Inveraray,” Duncan said. “Deals in wool, mostly, but he hears things. The stranger came to the market three days ago, askin’ about Ben Cruachan. And the handfasting.”
Magnus kept his eyes on the fence line. “Askin’ what, exactly?”
“When. Where. Who’ll be in attendance.” Duncan finally turned to face him. “Askin’ with a Highland accent that wasnae local, and a manner Angus’s cousin didnae care for.”
The wind moved through the grass. Somewhere behind them, a hound barked once and fell silent.
“Ye think it’s him.”
“I think,” Duncan said carefully, “that we’ve had thirteen years of silence, and now that word has spread that ye’ve taken a bride, a stranger is askin’ about the date of the handfasting in a market three days’ ride from here.
” He held Magnus’s gaze. “I daenae believe in coincidence that convenient.”
O’Brien.
The name settled in Magnus’s chest heavy and cold. He had trained himself over thirteen years not to flinch at it. He had not trained himself to feel nothing.
“He vanished,” he said, more to himself than to Duncan. “After. He didnae stay to see what he’d made of us. He simply vanished and let us bury what was left.”
“Aye.”
“Thirteen years, and nae a word. Nae a sighting. Nae so much as a rumor worth chasin’.” Magnus’s jaw worked. “And now, the moment I take a wife, he surfaces to ask about the date of the handfasting.”
Duncan did not answer that. He did not need to.
They had both lived the same thirteen years, both carried the same silence that had followed the fire.
The silence of a man who had orchestrated a massacre and then disappeared into the embers, leaving nothing behind for either of them to aim their grief at but silence.
No trial. No reckoning. Only ash and a boy of sixteen learning to be a laird over the graves of everyone who should have taught him how.
They had survived only because they had been away. Training, the pair of them, three valleys over, learning swordsmanship from a master neither of them had wanted to leave home for. Magnus had spent every day since wondering what might have changed if he had stayed.
“If it’s a trap,” Duncan said slowly, “it’s a strange one. Announcin’ himself before he springs it.”
“He’s nae announcin’ himself. He’s testin’ the ground.
” Magnus’s eyes moved over the paddock without seeing it, calculating the roads into Ben Cruachan instead; the ridgelines that overlooked them, the places a man might watch from without being seen.
“He wants to ken when we’ll be occupied.
Distracted. Every guard’s attention on the weddin’ instead of the border. ”
“Ye think he means to strike durin’ the handfasting itself.”
“I think,” Magnus said, “that a man who waited thirteen years to move isnae the sort to move carelessly. If he’s askin’ about the date, it’s because the date matters to whatever he’s plannin’.”
Duncan exhaled, long and slow, and leaned back against the fence rail. “What do we do?”
Magnus turned the question over in his mind, sorting it into pieces small enough to be solved one at a time. This was not grief. He had buried that feeling thirteen years ago deep enough that it rarely surfaced except in unguarded moments. This was a threat, and threats had a shape.
Shapes could be managed.
“Double the patrols,” he instructed. “Every boundary, startin’ tonight. I want men on the western ridge, in particular. That’s the approach with the best cover, and it’s the one Tam’s already flagged a rider on.”
“Ye think it’s connected.”
“I’d rather assume it’s connected and be wrong, than assume it isnae and prove meself a fool with a burnt hall for the second time in me life.”
Duncan did not argue against that.
“No one rides alone after dusk,” Magnus continued. “Nae the shepherds, nae the stable lads, nae the men fetchin’ water from the loch. If O’Brien’s watchin’, I willnae hand him an easy target simply because a man wanted to walk the last mile home by himself.”
“And the handfasting?”
Magnus was quiet for a moment. This was the harder question, the one that mattered more than patrols and boundary lines, because it touched the one thing in this entire calculation he had no intention of treating as a piece to be moved and sacrificed like any other.
“We proceed,” he said finally. “I’ll nae give him the satisfaction of thinkin’ he’s stopped somethin’ with a rumor and a question.
But we double the guard within the walls that day, nae just the boundary.
Every entrance watched. Every stranger accounted for before they’re within a hundred yards of the Great Hall. ”
“And Elspeth?”
The name landed differently than the rest of the conversation had, and Magnus felt something in his chest tighten.
“She kens nothin’ of this,” he said.
Duncan’s eyebrows rose. “Ye mean to keep her in the dark.”
“I mean to keep her safe.” Magnus’s voice came out harder than he had intended, and he made himself soften it, though the certainty underneath it did not soften with it.
“If she kens O’Brien’s name, she’ll ask questions.
She’ll want to understand it, the whole of it, and there’s nae a version of that conversation that doesnae end with her lookin’ at me differently. ”
“She’s nae a fragile woman, Magnus. Ye’ve seen that yerself, plain as I have.”
“I ken that.”
Magnus looked out over the paddock, at the low stone walls he had rebuilt with his own hands, at the smoke rising steadily from the kitchen chimney, at all of it. The whole slow, stubborn thirteen years of rebuilding something out of what O’Brien had left behind.
“It isnae her strength I’m protectin’. It’s her peace. She’s had precious little of it, by her own account, and I’ll nae be the one who hands her a threat to carry alongside everythin’ else she’s already carryin’, when there’s nothin’ she can do with the knowledge but worry.”
Duncan studied him. The teasing was gone from his face, replaced by something quieter and more careful.
“Ye ken,” he said, “this isnae about vengeance for ye. I’ve watched ye long enough to see it plainly. Most men who lost what ye did would want the man’s head on a pike the moment his name surfaced.”
“I daenae want his head.” Magnus said it flatly and meant it.
“I want him gone. I want peace for me people, for this land, for the woman I’m to wed in a week, and if O’Brien is foolish enough to bring himself within reach of that peace, then aye, I’ll end him, and I’ll nae lose sleep over it.
But I’m nae huntin’ him for the satisfaction of it.
I hunted that feelin’ out of meself thirteen years ago, because a man cannae rebuild a clan with one hand on a sword and the other in the ashes. I had to choose.”
“And if he forces the choice back on ye?”
Magnus’s jaw set. “Then I’ll make it again, same as I did the first time.
But I’ll make it for them.” He nodded toward the Great Hall, toward the smoke and the stone and the sound of Elspeth’s laughter drifting faintly from somewhere within it, carried on the wind.
“Nae for what he took, but for what I’ve built since. ”
Duncan held his gaze for a long moment, then nodded once, the matter settled between them the way matters always had been—without excess words.
“I’ll see to the patrols meself,” he said. “Startin’ tonight.”
“Good.”
He pushed off the fence rail, took two steps toward the yard, and paused. “Magnus?”
“Aye.”
“If it is him.” Duncan’s voice now carried its usual ease. “If he’s truly comin’ back, I’ll stand beside ye same as I did the last time. Only this time, we willnae be three valleys away, learnin’ swordsmanship from a man who couldnae teach us fast enough to matter.”
Magnus looked at his cousin—he was the only family he had left in the world—and for once found that he had no ready answer.
“I ken it,” he said finally. “I’ve never doubted it.”
Duncan nodded and walked off toward the stables, already calling for the stable lads to ready fresh mounts for the western patrol.
His voice carried easily across the yard with its flat, practical note, as though he had not just offered to stand between Magnus and a man who had once burned their entire world to the ground.
Magnus leaned against the fence a while longer, looking out over the land he had rebuilt stone by stone, field by field, thirteen years of labor standing between him and the ash O’Brien had left behind.
He thought of Elspeth’s laughter drifting out of the Great Hall. Of small MacKinnon hands tugging at her ribbons. Of a bundle of wildflowers left on a nightstand, and the way she had looked at him afterward, warm and startled and unguarded.
He had spent thirteen years convincing himself he needed nothing beyond what he could build and defend with his own two hands.
He was no longer certain that was true, and the timing of that particular discovery, with O’Brien’s name surfacing after thirteen years of silence, felt considerably less like fortune and considerably more like the sort of cruelty the world seemed determined to visit on him whenever he came close to wanting something.
He turned from the fence and made his way back toward the Great Hall, formulating in his mind the order he would give the guards at first light.
* * *
The sky had turned the color of a bruise by midafternoon, and Elspeth knew, even before Mrs. McAulay came bustling out of the kitchens wiping her hands on her apron, that the calm of the last few days had run its course.