Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
The tower stood at the crest of the hill, half its stones scattered where the winter frost had heaved them loose. Elspeth sank onto a flat slab of rock near its base the moment they arrived, her legs done with climbing for one morning.
Magnus set to work without further ceremony, shrugging off his jacket and laying it over a dry patch of grass, rolling his sleeves back over forearms already marked with the fading black of yesterday’s fire.
He tested each loose stone with his palm before lifting it, turning it over, and fitting it back against its neighbors with a patience she hadn’t expected from a man who barked orders across a burning yard the night before.
She watched him work for a long while and found she didn’t much mind the silence of it. There was something settling about watching a man mend a thing with his bare hands, unhurried, absorbed, with no council waiting for his decisions and no fire demanding his attention. Only stone and mortar.
“Ye may return to the castle whenever ye please,” he said eventually, not looking up from the stone he was setting. “I ken that watching a man stack rocks isnae much of an outing.”
“Nay.”
He glanced over at her, surprised enough that his hand stilled on the stone.
She didn’t offer anything further. She only tipped her face back toward the sky, where the morning had gone soft and pale. She let him return to his work, which he did after a moment, though she caught him glancing her way rather more often than the masonry strictly required.
“No poetry today?” he asked a while later, setting another stone.
“Nay.” She said it almost lightly, though there was something underneath it she hadn’t quite meant to let show. “I’m tired of tryin’.”
He stopped working altogether.
She felt the stillness of it before she looked over and found him watching her with an expression she couldn’t immediately place.
He rose, crossed to where his satchel sat propped against the tower’s base, and knelt beside it. When he straightened, he had a book in his hand, and it took her a moment to place it, because she hadn’t expected to see it again at all.
It was the volume of nature poetry she’d gifted him weeks ago, its spine creased from handling, a ribbon marking a page well past the middle.
“Ye keep it with ye?”
He shrugged, too casual about it, though he didn’t quite meet her eyes. “It’s heavy. Useful for holdin’ things steady while I work.”
“Ye carry a book of poetry up hillsides to use as a paperweight.” She raised her eyebrow just a little.
“Aye.”
“Magnus.”
The corner of his mouth twitched, some small, reluctant thing he seemed to be actively suppressing.
“It’s a practical book,” he said, and held it out to her. “Read to me.”
She stared at him. “What?”
“That way, we both enjoy ourselves. I work.” He nodded toward the tower. “Ye read.”
She slowly took the book from him, turning it over once in her hands as though it might explain itself.
Instead, she found only the familiar weight of it, the ribbon marking a page well past where she’d left off before gifting it to him, which meant he had read considerably further into it than “holding things steady” required.
She said nothing about that. She only opened it to where the ribbon lay and began to read.
Her voice found its rhythm within a few lines, falling into the cadence she’d used a hundred times reading to Katherine in another life.
Magnus returned to his work beside her, setting stone after stone while she read of moors and morning mist and larks rising at dawn, his hands steady and sure even as his head, she suspected, was only partly on the mortar.
She caught him glancing over each time her voice dropped into something softer, some particular turn of phrase that pleased her, and each time he caught her noticing, he looked back at his stones with a swiftness that fooled neither of them.
“Ye’re nae listenin’ to the poem,” she said midway through a stanza about a stag crossing a frozen loch. “Ye’re listenin’ to me readin’ it.”
“Can a man nae do both?”
“Nae with that expression on his face, nay.”
He didn’t deny it, which was answer enough, and set another stone with rather more focus than the previous one had required.
She read on.
The bees from the lower slope had followed the wildflowers up as far as the tower’s shadow, working the small yellow blooms that had rooted between the stones. Somewhere below them, a curlew called, long and mournful and lovely in the way of things that had no notion they were being listened to.
She read a poem about heather in bloom, and one about a fisherman’s wife watching for a boat that didn’t come. Magnus set the last of the loose stones back into place just as she reached the closing lines of that one, and sat back on his heels to survey his work.
“There,” he said. “That’ll hold another fifty years, at least.”
“Ye say that with such certainty.”
“I built the first half of it. I ken its bones better than most.”
She smiled at that, closed the book over one finger to mark her place, and looked out past him toward the glen spreading green and silver below, the loch catching what pale light made it through the morning haze.
“This was a fine outing, Magnus.”
“Better than an inspection ride?”
“Considerably. Though I confess I’m still uncertain what precisely we’ve inspected today, beyond a tower and yer capacity to carry a poetry book without reading it.”
“I’ve read it,” he said quietly, not looking at her. “More than once.”
She opened her mouth to press him on that—on which poems, on why, on when exactly a man who claimed to have no patience for verse had found the time to read an entire volume more than once.
It was in that pause, book open on her lap, his admission hanging unanswered between them, that she noticed the light had changed.
The pale morning haze had thickened, the soft grey gone heavier, darker at the edges, rolling in low and fast off the western hills the way weather did in this country when it meant business rather than merely threatening it.
A gust caught the pages of the book and nearly tore them from her grip.
Magnus was already on his feet, his gaze fixed on the same darkening sky. Whatever ease had settled over the last hour was gone from his face in an instant, replaced by the same flat, assessing look she’d seen him wear the night the furnace shed burned.
“We need to move,” he said. “Now.”
The rain didn’t build gradually. It simply arrived all at once, the sky opening like something had cut a seam in it. Elspeth had barely tucked the poetry book inside her cloak before Magnus grabbed her by the wrist and led her down.
“The path,” she said, already half-slipping on wet stone. “It’ll be treacherous now.”
“Aye. So we go carefully and quickly, both at once.”
He didn’t let go of her wrist the whole way down, taking the worst of the scree ahead of her, angling his body between her and the steepest drop without once making a show of it.
By the time they reached the horses, her slippers had given up, soaked through and squelching with every step.
Magnus lifted her into the saddle rather than waste the time it would take her to manage it herself, his hands closing briefly around her waist in a way that would have undone her more thoroughly had there been a spare moment to notice it properly.
They rode.
The rain came sideways before they’d cleared the first mile, driven by a wind that hadn’t been there an hour ago.
Elspeth bent low over the mare’s neck and let the animal find her own footing on ground gone treacherous and dark, trusting Magnus’s shouted directions over her own judgment, since his came from thirty years of knowing this land and hers came from four days of largely getting lost in it.
“Left at the burn!” His voice carried back to her, half-swallowed by wind. “The ford’s washed if the water’s up. Daenae try to cross where ye did before!”
She followed him left.
The burn had indeed risen, brown and fast where it had been a clear trickle that morning, and he led her a quarter mile upstream to a narrower crossing before doubling back toward the castle at a pace that left no breath for conversation.
By the time Ben Cruachan’s walls rose grey and solid out of the downpour ahead of them, Elspeth had stopped feeling the cold, her whole body singularly focused on staying in the saddle and keeping the mare’s head pointed the right direction.
It was only once they’d clattered into the shelter of the stable yard, the roof cutting the worst of the rain off all at once, that she felt the full weight of how soaked through she’d gotten settle over her at once, heavy and cold and without dignity.
Magnus swung down first and was at her side before she’d worked out how to dismount without her legs betraying her, his hands finding her waist again to lift her down and set her on her feet.
She looked up to thank him and found the words caught somewhere behind her teeth.
His dark hair had come loose from whatever order it usually kept and clung to his forehead and temples, rain running in rivulets down the column of his throat and disappearing beneath the collar of a shirt gone transparent enough at the shoulders that it hid nothing of what lay beneath.
His leather coat hung open, forgotten, one side slipping off his shoulder. He hadn’t noticed, too busy checking the horses were settled, too unconcerned with his own state to spare it a thought.
Elspeth was not so unconcerned. She stared considerably longer than any strict standard of propriety would have permitted, warmth blooming somewhere beneath her ribs that was at odds with how thoroughly cold the rest of her currently was, and only recovered herself when he turned and caught her at it.
She did not look away fast enough to pretend otherwise.
He didn’t remark on it. Something in his face shifted instead, a stillness settling over him that hadn’t been there a moment before.
She swallowed, her throat suddenly tight.
“Thank ye for today,” she said, and was pleased that her voice came out steady despite everything currently working against it.
He stepped closer. Close enough that she caught the smell of rain on him, clean and cold, underneath it the same warmth she’d started cataloging without meaning to over these past days.
Close enough that for one suspended moment, water dripping from both of them onto the stable floor, she was certain he meant to break the promise he’d made her not four days ago.
She did not step back.
He didn’t kiss her. Instead, he reached for her hand—the one not fisted in her ruined cloak—and turned it gently in his own, his thumb brushing once across her knuckles before he bent his head and pressed his lips to them, slow and deliberate, his eyes never leaving hers as he did it.
“Ye’re welcome, me Lady,” he murmured against her skin.
Then he straightened, released her hand, and was gone, crossing the yard toward the keep at a pace that suggested he trusted himself considerably less than his measured exit implied, disappearing through the door without a single glance back.
Elspeth stood alone in the stable yard, rain hammering the cobbles beyond the roofline, her cloak soaked through and her slippers ruined beyond any hope of saving, and found she could not move.
Her hand still burned. Not painfully. Not in any way she could have explained to Mrs. McAulay , or Becky, or anyone who might have asked what was wrong with her that she stood dripping in an empty yard staring at her own knuckles as though they’d done something remarkable.
But the mark of his mouth sat there regardless, warm against skin gone otherwise cold from the ride. She found herself curling her fingers inward, as though she might hold the feeling there a moment longer before the rain and the cold and the ordinary business of the day inevitably washed it away.
A stable boy hurried past her with an armful of dry blankets for the horses, glanced at her standing motionless in the downpour’s shelter, and paused.
“Ye alright, me Lady? Ye’ll catch yer death standing about soaked like that.”
“Aye.” She didn’t move. “I’m quite well.”
He didn’t look convinced, but he had horses to see to and didn’t press the matter, hurrying on toward the stalls.
Elspeth remained where she was a moment longer, listening to the rain drum steadily against the roof above her, thinking that a man who’d promised not to touch her had somehow found a way to leave her considerably more unsettled with a kiss to her hand than any number of stolen kisses to her mouth might have managed.
She also thought of the way he’d looked at her in that suspended moment before he’d bent his head.
She wasn’t certain how many more such margins either of them had left in them.