Chapter 29 #2
Duncan clapped him once on the shoulder and went back to wherever he had come from, leaving Magnus somewhat bewildered, standing in the middle of his own courtyard holding a cup and a load of feelings. He did not know what to do with either.
Liam found him there ten minutes later. He came to stand beside him, looking at the yard rather than at Magnus, and for a while neither of them said anything, which suited Magnus just fine.
“She’s well this morning,” Liam said eventually.
“Aye.”
“Katherine sat with her half the night.”
Magnus looked into his cup. “I ken.”
He had heard their voices through the wall. They spoke low, and Elspeth occasionally laughed. He had lain in his room awake, listening to it until he was sure she had stopped and fallen asleep.
Liam turned his cup in his hands. “Ye did well.”
Magnus said nothing.
“I’m saying it because it needs saying and ye’ll nae say it yerself.” Liam glanced at him sideways. “Ye did well. Now, let the day be good.”
He walked away before Magnus could find an answer for that, which was probably deliberate.
Magnus stood in the yard a while longer.
When Agnes’s voice sounded near the kitchen garden, he turned and went toward it.
She was crouched beside Morag with great seriousness, threading the last of the ribbons into the goat’s beard, replacing the one Morag had eaten yesterday.
Her tongue was pressed between her teeth in concentration.
Beside her, Elspeth sat on the low garden wall with a basket of flowers in her lap, separating stems and passing Agnes the ones with the longest ribbon of leaf for weaving. They were talking, Agnes asking something, and Elspeth answering with her whole attention.
He stopped at the garden gate.
Elspeth had her hair down, not properly dressed yet, a shawl over her shift. Her wrists were wrapped in clean linen. She was passing Agnes a stem of heather while listening intently, and she had not yet noticed him.
Magnus looked at her in the morning light and thought that a man ought to have known this feeling earlier rather than arriving at it covered in blood and considerably more shaken than was dignified.
Agnes looked up. “Morag has three ribbons now,” she announced.
Morag confirmed this by lifting her bearded chin with immense pride.
Elspeth turned. She held his gaze for a moment, reading the expression on his face, and then looked at Agnes. “Will ye take her for a walk so the ribbons settle properly?”
Agnes considered the logic of this, accepted it, and led Morag toward the far end of the garden.
Magnus stepped through the gate. He stopped two feet from the wall she was sitting on, which put them at eye level for once. She looked at him with her head tilted, her hands folded in her lap over the basket, and said nothing.
This was rather unusual for Elspeth; he understood she was giving him the space to speak first.
“Ye’re well.” It was more of a statement than a question.
“Aye. Mrs. McAulay ’s seen to me wrists. They’re nae as bad as they looked.” She turned her hands over once, showing him the linen wrapping. “Yer arm?”
“Fine.”
“Ye keep saying that.”
“It keeps being true.”
She looked at him steadily. He looked at the basket of flowers. He picked up a stem of a white bloom, turned it in his fingers, and set it back down.
“I said things in that lodge that I…” He stopped. His hand went to the back of his neck. “I wasnae at me most composed.”
Elspeth’s mouth curved. “Declarations of eternal devotion are rather effective courtship techniques, I find.”
He looked at her. “Courtship. We’re to be wed in four hours.”
“Aye, and it only took ye a kidnapping to work up to it. Most men manage flowers first, but I’ve always appreciated efficiency.”
“I did bring ye flowers.”
“Ye brought me wildflowers and called it practical.”
“It was practical. Ye wanted flowers.” He dropped his hand from his neck and looked at her directly. “I have little experience with…” He stopped again. His jaw moved once. “With any of this. As ye may have noticed.”
“I did,” she said pleasantly.
He exhaled slowly through his nose.
She was watching him, her eyes bright, the corner of her mouth quirking up. She had had ash on that cheek yesterday morning; he had wiped it away with his thumb, and she had let him without pulling back. He had had to stop himself from pressing his lips there instead.
“Are ye frightened?” he asked cautiously. “Of today. After everything.” He looked toward the gate, the yard, the castle. “After everything that happened.”
Elspeth was quiet for a moment. She looked down at her hands, where Agnes was steering Morag in a wide ceremonial circuit of the vegetable beds, and then back at him.
“I spent me whole life dreaming of princes,” she said. “Men who arrived on horseback with poetry ready and perfect hair and absolutely no opinions about livestock.”
Magnus waited.
“And I find…” She looked up at him squarely. The teasing was gone now, replaced by something else. “I find I prefer beasts. Ones who rebuild fallen cottages with their own hands and argue with sheep and are unreasonably afraid of geese—”
“Swans.”
“Swans,” she corrected, without missing a beat. “And who come charging into danger covered in blood for the women they love, even when those women were foolish enough to go out in the dark alone looking for stars.” She tilted her head. “So, nay, I’m nae frightened.”
Magnus looked at her. He thought about the ribbon in his coat pocket, the one he had carried from the stables yesterday. He reached in, found it, and held it out without speaking.
She looked at it in his palm. Then at him.
“Ye said ye wanted ribbons on the morning of our wedding,” he said.
She took it from his hand slowly, and he watched her face while she did, the thing that moved across it, bright and unguarded, and felt something in his chest that had been braced and rigid for thirteen years stop holding.
He smiled. It arrived without warning, rare enough that he felt the unfamiliarity of it, but it came, and he did not put it away.
Elspeth looked at him, smiling, and her own face did something that undid him.
From across the garden, Agnes’s voice carried back to them. “Morag ate a ribbon again.