Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Sorcha came just after dawn with a basin of warm water, a folded gown over one arm, and an expression gentle enough to make Isobel want to turn her face away.
“Me lady,” she said softly. “It is time.”
Isobel sat beside the window, though there was little to see beyond it but pale sky and the restless gray of the sea. She had not slept. She had lain beneath the blankets with Ruaridh’s cloak folded on the chair across the room, glaring at it as though it had personally wronged her.
Now, morning had come and with it, the wedding.
“I ken,” Isobel said.
Sorcha set the basin down and moved quietly around the room. For a little while, she asked no questions. She only stirred the fire, laid out the gown, and warmed a cloth between her hands before offering it to Isobel. The kindness made everything worse.
Isobel took the cloth and pressed it to her face, grateful for the excuse to hide. When she lowered it, Sorcha was watching her with cautious sympathy.
“Ye seem sad,” Sorcha told her. “It must be hard, preparing fer a wedding without yer family here.”
Isobel gave a small, humorless laugh. Sorcha stilled.
“Me family has rarely made anything easier by being present.”
The words came out flatter than she had intended. She looked down at the cloth in her lap, twisting it once between her fingers before forcing herself to stop. She would not shred linen simply because she wanted to tear something.
Sorcha lowered herself onto the stool nearby. “Families… can be complicated.”
“Aye.”
The room was quiet, and Sorcha’s face held no hunger for gossip. And Isobel, who had spent years learning how to hold her tongue until it cut her from the inside, found that something in her had grown too tired to keep silent.
“Me faither told me we were attending a gathering,” she revealed. “He wouldnae say more. I thought it strange, but he has never explained himself tae me. Why explain when he can command instead?”
Sorcha listened.
“He put the mask on me himself,” Isobel continued, almost as if she were telling someone else’s story. “He tied it so tightly I could hardly breathe, then stood beside me while men asked questions as though I were a mare at market.”
Her throat worked.
Sorcha said nothing. She offered no foolish outrage that would require comforting. That helped.
“They asked if I was untouched,” Isobel’s voice was down to a whisper now. “And he answered… as if it were his answer tae give.”
Sorcha’s eyes shone with anger then, but not at Isobel.
“He gave a signal,” Isobel went on. “The guards took me arms. I called fer him, and he looked at me as though I had inconvenienced him by being afraid. Then… he left.”
The last word nearly broke. She hated that. She stood too quickly and walked to the window, turning her back before Sorcha could see too much. Below, the sea struck the rocks with steady violence. She fixed her gaze on it.
“I searched fer him in the hall,” she confessed.
“Like a fool. Even after everything, some part of me thought that he might at least watch what he had done.” Her mouth tightened.
“But he had already gone, or at least this is what they’ve told me, and I became even less than I had been up until then, a duty, a disappointment, a daughter where sons had once been. ”
Sorcha said nothing, but the silence was full of listening.
Isobel turned back at last. “So, nay. I am nae sad because me family isnae here. I am sad because I was stupid enough tae believe there were limits tae what he would dae with me.”
Sorcha’s face softened with such open compassion that Isobel nearly looked away again.
“And now,” Isobel said, forcing the words out before her courage failed, “I am tae marry Ruaridh MacLean. The Wolf of the Western Isles. The man whose clan is responsible for everything bad in me life.” She laughed once in a sound that was brittle and sharp.
“Of all men in Scotland, Sorcha, of all men.”
Sorcha rose slowly. Isobel braced herself for some tidy speech about duty and peace and how women must endure what men arrange. Instead, Sorcha only crossed the room and took the twisted cloth gently from Isobel’s hands.
“I am sorry,” she said.
The words were plain. They undid her more than they should have.
Isobel looked down quickly. “Dinnae be kind tae me just because yer laird ordered it.”
“He didnae order me tae care.”
Isobel’s breath caught.
Sorcha folded the cloth once, then set it aside. “And I dinnae think ye are wrong tae be angry. I think I would burn half the world down if I were in yer place.”
That startled a laugh from Isobel, small and broken.
Sorcha smiled faintly. “Maybe more than half.”
“Ye shouldnae say that. Ye are in a MacLean castle.”
“I said it quietly.”
Isobel’s mouth trembled, dangerously close to another laugh or something worse. Sorcha took her hand then, lightly enough that Isobel could pull away if she wished. She did not.
“Me lady,” Sorcha spoke, “I would be honored tae be yer friend, if ye want one here.”
The offer struck with impossible force.
Friend.
Not a servant, not a spy, not one more person deciding what Isobel owed… just a friend. Isobel looked at her for a long moment, wary by instinct, moved against her will.
“Ye barely ken me.”
“I ken enough tae begin.”
Isobel blinked.
Then Sorcha squeezed her fingers gently and released them. “May I say something else?”
“That depends on whether I shall like it.”
“Ye may nae.”
“Then I suppose ye had better say it quickly.”
Sorcha’s expression became careful, but not fearful. “The laird is MacLean. His clan has done harm tae yers. I willnae pretend otherwise. There is blood on both sides, and none of us can wash it clean by wishing.”
Isobel’s shoulders tightened.
“But Ruaridh himself,” Sorcha continued, “isnae the man who took yer brithers from ye. He isnae the faither who sold ye. He isnae every grief that brought ye here.”
Isobel looked away.
Sorcha let the words settle before adding. “That daesnae mean ye must fergive him. It only means ye neednae give him sins that are already heavy enough on other men.”
Isobel inhaled deeply. Ruaridh MacLean was supposed to be simple: enemy, captor, wolf. He was a man to hate cleanly because clean hatred was easier than confusion, and confusion was dangerous.
But she remembered his cloak over her shoulders, his silence when she wore her brooch and his hand braced beside her on the boat, close enough to catch her, far enough not to claim comfort from it.
She hated that Sorcha’s words found anything inside her.
Morning had brightened while they spoke. The sea beyond the window was no less gray, the castle no less MacLean, the day no less impossible. But she was not quite as alone in it as she had been when she woke.
“Help me dress, then,” Isobel acquiesced, lifting her chin. “If I must walk intae this wedding, I willnae look as though they dragged me there.”
Sorcha’s smile was warm and fierce. “Nay, me lady. Ye willnae.”
The wedding was exactly as Ruaridh had ordered it. It was quick and small. There was no music, no bright ribbons, no flowers, and no smiling crowd pretending this was anything other than necessity wrapped in sacrament.
There was only the priest, the required witnesses, Torin, Brodie, a handful of councilmen, Sorcha standing near the wall with anxious hands clasped before her, and Isobel.
Ruaridh had expected her to look furious, and she did.
But there was sadness beneath it, and that sat in him worse than anger would have. Anger had teeth. He knew what to do with teeth. Sadness was quieter and harder to meet, especially when she held herself so proudly beneath it that most in the hall would likely miss it entirely.
She stood beside him in a gown Sorcha must have found for her, pale and severe and far too fine for a wedding neither of them had chosen.
For one strange moment, Ruaridh thought she looked like some sorrowful fairy creature from the old stories, caught by mortal hands and forced to stand beneath Christian vows and human witness.
There was something otherworldly in her stillness, in the dark fall of her hair and the grief she would not let anyone see, as if she had been stolen from a hidden realm and could not find the path back.
And now she was trapped here among men, among stone, blood, bargains, and names, pretending not to mourn the magic she had lost.
At her shoulder, as before, she wore the MacDonald brooch. No one spoke of it. No one dared.
Father Calum’s voice moved through the little chamber, steady and solemn.
The words were old, older than their feud, older than the blood soaked into both their names.
Ruaridh repeated what was required of him.
His voice did not falter. Isobel repeated her part with a calm so cold it might have frozen the candles.
Only once did her hand tremble.
It was when the priest bound them by the spoken vow, that Ruaridh saw it.
He was close enough to see the tension in her fingers, the faint pallor around her mouth and the way she kept her eyes fixed ahead rather than look at him.
He wanted, absurdly, to tell her that this was not the worst thing that could have happened to her.
He did not, because she would have hated him for it. And perhaps she would have been right to.
The last words were spoken. The witnesses murmured. Torin looked grimly relieved. Brodie looked as though he had swallowed a nail and intended to call it breakfast.
Then Father Calum turned to Ruaridh. “Ye may kiss yer bride.”
The room sharpened around them. Ruaridh heard the small shift of bodies, the waiting breath of the councilmen and the crackle of the hearth. He turned to Isobel. She turned to him, too, slowly.
Her face was composed, but her eyes were not. Her eyes promised violence, ruin, and possibly his immediate death if he made one wrong move.
He stepped closer. Isobel’s hair had been left partly loose, dark and heavy over one shoulder. As he lowered his head, she shifted just enough for that fall of hair to curtain their faces from the others. To any watching, it might have looked demure.
Ruaridh knew better.
“If ye touch me lips,” she hissed so softly no one else could hear, “I will kill ye.”
The threat should not have amused him. It did. A laugh escaped him, low and entirely unwise.
Her eyes widened in outrage. “Dinnae laugh.”
“I am trying nae tae,” he whispered back.
“Try harder,” she squeezed through clenched teeth.
“Ye are a very demanding bride.”
“I am nae yer bride.”
“The priest may disagree.”
“I will kill him, too.”
That nearly undid him again. Ruaridh bent closer, enough to satisfy the watching room. He did not touch her mouth. Instead, he let his lips brush the air beside her cheek, near enough that only she would know he had not claimed what she had forbidden.
“Ye are safe from me lips,” he murmured.
He straightened. The room saw what it expected to see: a laird kissing his bride, a marriage sealed, a political wound bound shut before it could bleed. Only Ruaridh saw the furious color rising in Isobel’s cheeks. Only he heard the breath she released when he stepped away.
Father Calum gave some final blessing. Ruaridh scarcely heard it.
His wife was standing beside him with murder in her eyes and his name now tied to hers before God and men. It should have felt like victory. Instead, it felt like holding a blade by the edge and knowing he had not yet begun to bleed.