Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
The candles in her chamber had burned to stubs, and Elspeth had gone looking for more rather than sit in the dark listening to the storm rattle the shutters.
She took the back stairs down, one hand trailing the cold stone wall for balance, and reached the lower corridor just as a crack of thunder split close enough overhead to make her flinch.
The flash of it lit the corridor white for a split second, long enough to reveal a shape standing further down, still and silent before a row of portraits she had never noticed on any of her previous trips through this part of the castle.
Magnus.
He had not moved at the thunder. He stood with his back half-turned to her, one shoulder against the stone, looking up at the paintings as though they might say something back to him if he waited long enough.
She approached slowly, her candle stub throwing barely enough light to see by, and he still did not turn. It seemed as though he did not register her arrival until she was nearly at his elbow.
“Ye’re creepin’,” she said, mostly to break the silence.
He grunted, which told her nothing and everything at once.
“They’re starin’,” he said after a moment, nodding once toward the portraits.
Elspeth moved closer, holding her candle up. The nearest painting showed a woman with soft eyes and a gentle, private smile, her dark hair pinned in a style Elspeth did not recognize from any current fashion.
Beside it, there was another portrait of a boy of perhaps ten, sturdy and serious even at that age, standing next to a broad-shouldered man with dark hair and eyes that matched the boy’s.
She stared at the boy’s face before the resemblance registered.
“Is that yer family?” she asked.
He did not answer at first. When he did, it was only a single nod, his eyes fixed on the portraits rather than on her.
She studied the paintings again, more carefully this time. They did not have the look of things aged thirteen years in a cold Highland corridor. The colors were too vivid, the canvas too clean, none of the fading or cracking she had expected to see in something that old.
“These were done recently,” she said slowly. “Werenae they?”
Another silence, longer this time.
Rain hammered against the high window at the corridor’s end, and somewhere below, a shutter Duncan had apparently missed banged once against its frame.
“I commissioned them,” Magnus said finally. “Some years back. From memory. There was nothin’ left of the old ones.”
Elspeth said nothing. She understood, without needing him to explain further, precisely what that meant. A man who had lost every likeness of the people he loved, and had them painted back into existence from nothing but what remained in his own head, because the alternative was letting them fade.
“Do ye miss them?” she asked quietly.
He didn’t answer immediately.
The rain filled the silence where his voice should have been, and Elspeth found herself watching the side of his face rather than the portraits, watching the muscle that ticked once in his jaw before he spoke.
“For thirteen years,” he said, “I’ve rebuilt fences. Roofs. Fields. Cottages.” He said it flatly, reciting a list he had recited to himself a hundred times before. “If somethin’ breaks, I mend it. If someone needs somethin’, I provide it.” He paused. “If I stop movin’…”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He shrugged one shoulder, and the gesture said more than any words could have.
Elspeth lowered her gaze to her candle, watching the small flame gutter in a draft that had found its way through some gap in the old stone.
“Do ye ken that I dreamt of princes when I was younger?” she said.
She felt him turn toward her then, felt the shift of his attention even without looking up.
“Princes?”
“Aye.” She let herself smile, faint and a little rueful. “Because reality was disappointin’. And princes danced with their princesses beneath the stars, and never once complained about the cold or the mud or the fact that their fathers wanted somethin’ else for them.”
He studied her, his expression unreadable in the low light, and then his eyebrow lowered.
“Princes sound exhaustin’,” he remarked.
Elspeth laughed before she could stop herself, the sound escaping soft and startled into the cold corridor. “They probably are.”
Magnus cleared his throat and shifted, some unspoken signal that the conversation had reached its natural end, and made to step past her toward the stairs.
Elspeth moved aside to give him room. Her slipper found the one patch of stone that had gone dark and slick beneath a slow drip from the roof above, and her foot went out from under her before she’d registered the danger at all.
She had a half second of pure, weightless panic, one hand grasping at empty air, and then his arm slipped around her, catching her before the thought of falling had fully finished forming.
His other arm came up to brace on her shoulder, steady and sure, and she found herself caught against him with her feet not quite settled beneath her, the whole of her weight given over to his hold.
The storm hammered on above them, thunder rolling long across the roof, but it seemed, for the space of several heartbeats, to belong to some other part of the castle.
Here, in this narrow corridor, there was only the low guttering candle between them, the warmth of his hands through her shift, and the sudden awareness of exactly how little distance remained between his mouth and hers.
His expression gave nothing away. But his hands were warm, warmer than she’d expected, and something about the stillness of him, the careful, deliberate way he held her upright without moving to release her, sent heat through her chest.
Her breath came uneven.
“Thank ye,” she managed.
Magnus swallowed. She watched his throat bob, watched him search for something to say that wasn’t what he was clearly thinking and finally land on: “Daenae fall again.”
“That almost sounded carin’.”
He didn’t answer that. Instead, he leaned down slowly, and she thought—she was almost certain—that he meant to argue the point, to tell her gruffly that it had meant nothing of the sort, that concern for a woman’s safety on a slick floor was simply practical, the way flowers on a nightstand were practical.
He kissed her instead.
It came without warning. His mouth found hers hard and sure, one hand sliding from her shoulder up into the loose fall of her hair, and she made a small startled sound against him that dissolved almost instantly into something else.
His arm tightened around her waist, drawing her fully against him, and she felt the solid heat of his chest through the thin fabric of her shift, felt the low sound that rumbled in his throat when her fingers curled into the front of his shirt and held on rather than pushing away.
She kissed him back with everything she hadn’t known she’d been holding in reserve. Her free hand slid up along his jaw, feeling the rough stubble beneath her palm.
Magnus angled his head to deepen the kiss, and a small distant part of her noted that this was considerably more than the kiss at the loch, considerably more dangerous, standing here in a dark corridor with the storm raging above them and nothing but his arms keeping both of them upright.
His hand slid from her hair down the line of her spine, slow and deliberate, and she felt it everywhere.
Every inch of skin beneath the thin shift was achingly aware of exactly how close he stood, how little separated them, how thoroughly he had stopped pretending this was anything but exactly what it was.
Thunder cracked directly overhead, close enough to rattle the shutters at the corridor’s end, and the flash of it lit the space between them white and stark for the length of a single heartbeat.
In that flash, she saw his eyes. They were dark and utterly without the distance he wore like armor every other hour of the day. What she saw there instead was hunger, plain and unguarded, a want he had clearly been fighting since the loch and had just catastrophically lost the battle against.
It stole the breath clean out of her.
And then, just as quickly as it had begun, he stepped back.
The retreat was abrupt enough that she swayed, catching herself against the wall.
He stood a full pace away now, his chest rising hard, one hand dragging back through his disheveled hair as though he could physically pull himself back into order.
He looked, for one unguarded moment, genuinely alarmed. Not at her—she understood that even before he spoke—but at himself, at whatever line he’d just crossed without permission from the careful, controlled man he insisted on being at every hour that wasn’t this one.
His eyes moved over her face, quick and searching, checking her for some injury she didn’t have.
“Are ye well?” His voice came out rough.
She nodded, because she couldn’t trust her voice to do better.
He held her gaze a moment longer, something flashing behind his eyes that she couldn’t read and he clearly had no intention of explaining. Then he inclined his head once, short and formal.
He turned and walked back down the corridor toward the stairs without another word, his stride quick and even. He did not look back once, not at the turn, not at the last flicker of candlelight before the dark swallowed him whole.
Elspeth stood alone in the corridor, one hand pressed flat against the cold stone wall, her candle guttering low in the draft, and listened to the storm beat on overhead while her pulse hammered considerably louder in her ears.
* * *
The armory smelled of oil and cold iron, a narrow stone room lined with racks of blades that caught what little light came from the single lamp Magnus had lit before settling into the chair at its center.
He’d taken Jinny and set to work with the whetstone in long, even strokes, the sort of task that required just enough attention to occupy a man’s hands without requiring anything at all from the rest of him.
It was not working particularly well.