Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
The kitchen smelled of woodsmoke and the dregs of Mrs. McAulay ’s chamomile.
Elspeth sat wrapped in a blanket someone had pressed on her sometime past midnight, watching soot settle into the grain of the worktable each time she moved her hands.
“Ye did well tonight,” Mrs. McAulay said, refilling her cup without being asked. “Better than half the grown men out there, from what I saw.”
“I mostly carried goats.”
“Aye, and kept yer head while doing it, which is more than I can say for young Fergus, who tried to save the chickens and the ale barrel in the same armful and dropped both.” Mrs. McAulay ’s mouth twitched. “Ye’ll do.”
A kitchen girl hurried past with an armful of scorched linens destined for the wash, and behind her, a stable lad limped in favoring one ankle, waving off Mrs. McAulay ’s attempt to sit him down and look at it.
The whole household moved through the room in fits and starts, soot-blackened and wide awake despite the hour.
Elspeth was still working out what to say to Mrs. McAulay when the door opened and Magnus filled it, black to the wrists, his shirt torn at one shoulder. His eyes went to her first, before the room, before anything else in it.
“The watch has been doubled,” he said, to no one in particular. “Men will be stationed at the eastern border by nightfall. Duncan’s seeing to the rotation now.”
“Good,” Mrs. McAulay said, unbothered, and went back to her kettle as though lairds announced troop movements over teacups every night of the week. “Anyone hurt bad?” she added, not looking up.
“Nothing Fergus’s pride willnae recover from.” Magnus’s gaze had already flicked back to Elspeth, moving over her—quick, thorough, cataloging what’s still standing. “Ye’re nae hurt.”
It wasn’t a question. She answered it anyway.
“Aye. A goat stepped on me foot, and I believe I’ve ruined this dress beyond saving, but otherwise I’m whole.”
Something in his jaw eased fractionally, though he said nothing further about it.
He crossed to where she sat instead. He crouched, which put him well below her eye level for once, and reached out before she’d braced herself for it, tucking a loose curl back behind her ear with two fingers gone rough and blackened at the knuckle.
Her pulse did something inconvenient at the touch, warmth spreading under her skin exactly where his fingers had been.
She went very still, the way a person went stiff when they did not trust themselves to move without giving something away.
Across the room, Mrs. McAulay suddenly found a deep interest in the kettle.
Magnus didn’t seem to notice, or didn’t let on that he had.
His hand fell back to his side, and the memory of his mouth against hers—hours old now, and nowhere near as distant as it ought to have felt—rose up so clearly that Elspeth had to look down at her own hands to keep it from showing on her face.
Say something. Ask him to stay for a moment.
She didn’t.
“Ye’re covered in soot,” he said.
“So are ye.”
“Aye.” He stood up, his jaw set. “Come. Ye should be abed. Ye’ve been sitting out in wet skirts half the night.”
“So have ye.”
“I’m nae the one who nearly fainted hauling a goat twice her own weight.”
“I didnae faint.” She stood up anyway, if only to prove her point, and swayed only very slightly, which she elected not to mention. “I set the goat down deliberately.”
“Mm.” He didn’t argue further, only offered her a hand she hadn’t strictly needed.
Once she’d taken it, he kept it tucked in the crook of his arm as they left the kitchen behind.
That was the last easy thing between them for the length of the walk that followed.
He kept her hand steady in the crook of his arm through the dim corridors, careful of the uneven stone underfoot where a servant had dropped a lamp earlier amid the chaos.
No one had yet swept up the oil-slicked shards, and they both said nothing.
Not about the fire, not about anything that might have required him to look at her rather than the corridor ahead.
Elspeth held herself upright, chin level, and told herself that was simply good posture and not an attempt to look like a woman who hadn’t spent the better part of an hour replaying a kiss she wasn’t meant to be thinking about.
A shutter banged somewhere above them, loosened by the storm, and Magnus didn’t so much as glance toward it, which told her plainly enough where his attention actually lived tonight, and it was not on loose shutters.
She glanced sideways at him twice and got nothing back either time—his gaze fixed ahead, his grip on her hand no different than it might have been on a servant’s elbow steadying her over a loose flagstone. She found herself wanting, absurdly, to trip on purpose just to see if it changed anything.
She did not do it. Pride, if nothing else, forbade it.
They reached her door in silence, and he stopped and released her hand the moment they’d crossed the threshold, as though her touch had become something to be set down rather than held.
Her hand went cold at once, missing his warmth.
“Ye should rest,” he said.
She studied his face, looking for whatever had been there in the armory, the low, unguarded thing that had watched her come apart on a weapons chest not six hours ago. She could not find it now.
What she found instead was a man standing at parade rest outside her door, jaw set, eyes fixed somewhere past her shoulder, as though the corridor wall had suddenly become the most interesting feature of the castle.
Say it plainly, then. Ask him outright.
“And ye?”
He looked toward the window at the end of the corridor, where the last of the lightning was flickering faint and distant behind the hills, more memory of a storm than the storm itself.
“Someone wished to frighten me people tonight.” A pause, brief and deliberate. “I intend to find out who.”
Her chest tightened. She pressed her palms flat against her skirts to keep from reaching for him.
“Magnus.” She kept her voice low, for no reason she could have named except that the hour seemed to call for it. “About earlier…”
He stepped back before she’d finished the sentence, putting the width of the doorway between them as neatly as if she’d raised a blade.
Her breath caught.
“I apologize.” His voice had gone flat, formal, a stranger’s voice wearing a familiar face. “I lost control of meself. It willnae happen again.”
“Ye’re apologizing.” She said it slowly, testing the shape of it, because surely she’d misheard. Something cold settled low in her stomach, the kind of cold that came from wanting one thing badly and being handed the opposite of it, wrapped politely. “For that.”
“Aye.”
She dug her fingers into the folds of her skirt, out of his sight, and made herself hold his gaze.
“For which part, precisely? The part where ye carried burning beams out of a shed with yer bare hands, or the part before it?”
Something flickered across his face at that, gone before she could name it. “Ye ken which part.”
She did.
But she’d wanted him to say something else. She wasn’t certain what, only that “It willnae happen again” had landed in her chest like a door shutting, and she hadn’t been fast enough to get a hand in the gap before it closed.
“I do.” Her voice came out steadier than she felt. “I’d like to hear ye say it aloud, so we might both be clear on what it is ye’re so determined to apologize for.”
He did not oblige her. “It willnae happen again,” he repeated instead, as though that might make it truer, and inclined his head to her the way he might have inclined it to a visiting dignitary he’d just as soon not entertain twice. “Sleep well, me Lady.”
Then he turned and walked back down the corridor, his boots even and unhurried on the stone. He did not look back once, not even when she quietly called his name.
She stood in the doorway with the blanket around her shoulders and the ghost of his fingers still warm against her ear, and found she was trembling. Not from the fire, not from the cold stone under her bare feet, not from anything approaching fear at all.
* * *
The eastern wall took the entirety of the morning to inspect properly, stone by stone, mortar by mortar.
Magnus ran his palm along seams that had stood since his grandfather’s time, looking for anything soft enough for a man to have worked at with a blade in the dark. He found nothing.
That told him less than he wanted it to. A patient man left no marks a hasty one would.
“Ye’ve gone over that same stretch twice now,” Duncan said, falling into step beside him with two horses in tow, Jinny’s edge freshly whetted and belted at Magnus’s hip where she’d stayed since dawn. “Ye’ll wear a groove in it with yer hands before ye find anything the fire didnae already tell us.”
“The fire told us someone got close enough to lay oil and leave again without a soul the wiser.” Magnus took the reins of the grey gelding and swung himself up into the saddle. “I’d like to ken how.”
“Through the postern gate. Half the household forgets it exists most days, us included.”
“Then we start there. Double the watch on it, and put a bar across it besides, one that cannae be lifted from outside.”
They rode the border at a walk.
Magnus read the ground. A broken bracken stem here, a hoofprint half-filled with rain there, none of it conclusive, all of it worth noting.
Three separate times, he stopped his horse and sat still in the saddle, listening to nothing in particular, the way he’d learned to do at seventeen when listening was the only thing standing between his people and whatever might have come for them out of the trees.
He nudged the gelding forward, and Duncan followed.
They found the tenant families gathering split kindling near the mill, old Tam directing three of his grandsons. Magnus reined in long enough to ask after the roof he’d mended a fortnight ago.
“Held through the storm fine, me Laird. Better than the church roof, if the priest’s grumbling is to be believed.
” Tam squinted up at him, taking in the soot in the creases of his knuckles despite a full morning’s scrubbing.
“It looks like ye took care of the fire yerself, me Laird, rather than ordering others to.”
“Someone had to carry the beams.”
“Aye, but nae usually the Laird himself.” Tam said it mildly, but there was something under it, a question shaped like an observation.
Magnus chose not to answer the question underneath. He never had been much good at leaving that sort of work to other men, not since the year he’d learned exactly how quickly a household could be left with no one to do it.
He checked the mill wheel, the grain stores, the shepherd’s near pasture where the ewes had scattered wide during the storm and needed counting twice before he trusted the number.
He found a lame ewe and splinted her leg himself with two lengths of green willow, kneeling in the mud with Jinny’s hilt digging into his ribs.
Duncan held the animal’s head and made unhelpful observations about how a man who’d sworn off softness had certainly found his way back to nursing livestock quickly enough.
“It’s an ewe, Duncan, nae a philosophical position.”
“Never said it was.”
By midday, he’d covered the entire border and found nothing further, no second oil-stain, no broken lock, no sign that a man had come or gone anywhere he oughtn’t.
That should have settled something in him. It didn’t.
A single point of entry, cleanly used and cleanly abandoned, was not the work of a man testing his defenses once and giving up. It was the work of a man who had gotten exactly what he came for and had no reason yet to try again.
Fear.
That was what the oil had wrought. Not damage, not truly.
The furnace shed could be rebuilt in a fortnight, and would be.
What couldn’t be so easily rebuilt was the quiet that had settled over the household since dawn.
Servants moving a little faster than usual, voices dropping a little lower near the windows, old Tam’s grandsons casting glances at the tree line they wouldn’t have bothered with a week past.
O’Brien—if it was O’Brien—hadn’t needed to burn the castle down. He’d only needed to remind Ben Cruachan that it could burn.
Magnus stopped the gelding on the rise above the loch.
He sat there for a long moment, looking back at his own walls, thinking of the year he’d rebuilt every one of them stone by stone with his own hands because there’d been no one else left to do it, and thinking of exactly where he had been standing when the fire started.
He had been in the armory. He had been in the armory with his hands full of Elspeth and his attention elsewhere, and a man had walked close enough to his own furnace stones to pour oil on them without a single soul raising an alarm.
That would not happen again. He had already given the order. Doubled watches, armed men at the border, Jinny back at his hip where she’d stayed for thirteen years before he’d let himself set her aside even for an evening.
He would not be caught unarmed in his own home a second time, and he would not again let himself go so far into anything, or anyone, that the walls around him ceased to exist.
Which unavoidably brought him to Elspeth.
He turned the gelding back toward the keep and let the animal pick its own pace down the slope while he turned the matter over in his mind.
He had said what he’d said at her door because it was true. He could not afford to lose himself again, not with O’Brien testing the walls, not with an entire household depending on him keeping his head. That part he stood behind.
But it sat considerably less well.
He had walked away from her looking wrecked and wrapped in another woman’s blanket, with soot still on her cheek, leaving her with an apology that had sounded even to his own ears like a man apologizing for a fault rather than trying to explain a necessity.
He had not meant it to land as regret, but he suspected it had.
Duncan, riding beside him, seemed to read something of it on his face, because he didn’t offer his usual commentary. He only said, after a while, “Ye’re broodin’.”
“I’m thinkin’.”
“Aye.” Duncan said nothing more.
Magnus owed her an apology. Not the one he’d already given, which had been true in its substance and clumsy in its delivery, but a different one.
For the manner in which he had left, for the careful distance he’d kept the length of that corridor as though touching her again might undo every order he’d just given about watches and borders and armed men.
He knew exactly where to find her.
He turned toward her chamber, and found that he had absolutely no notion what he intended to say to her once he arrived. Only that whatever it was, it would need to be a good deal more honest than anything he’d managed the night before.