Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
"Stay down or get out of me way."
The voice came from the courtyard, low, unhurried, almost bored, cutting clean through the noise of steel and shouting.
Matilda stopped at the corridor's edge and looked out.
The yard was torchlit and full of violence.
Six men she didn't recognize. No MacInnes colors, no markings she knew, moving through her father's guards with a deliberateness that turned her stomach. This wasn't a raid. Someone had counted the guard rotations and chosen the night on purpose.
The night before the Raven arrives.
But it was the warrior in the center of it all that stopped her feet.
He was fighting two men at once and appeared to find this mildly inconvenient at most. No rage, no urgency, no wasted movement, just a cold and systematic efficiency that made the two men attacking him look clumsy by comparison.
He struck the first and was already turning to the second before the first had finished falling.
The torchlight caught him full for a moment. Broad through the shoulder, dark cloak, something carved and unhurried about his face.
Matilda realized her mouth was open.
She shut it.
She'd seen men fight her entire life. She'd watched her father's guards drill in this same yard every morning from her window above. She knew what fighting looked like, or she'd thought she knew what fighting looked like, but this was something she didn't have a word for.
It was almost like watching someone think. Quick and quiet and absolutely certain of itself.
She couldn't look away.
In the middle of an attack, with her father's men dying in the yard, she was standing completely still. That was what he had done — made everything else stop mattering.
Which was exactly why she didn't hear the man behind her until his arm was already across her chest.
The grip was hard and purposeful and dragged her backward toward the shadowed wall before she could get her feet under her.
She twisted, kicked backward, caught something solid with her heel, heard a grunt, but his grip only tightened and she felt the wall connect with her shoulder and then the ground connect with her knee and pain flared white and sharp up her leg.
She didn't scream.
She opened her mouth to, and then the man was simply gone.
Not stumbling, not retreating, gone, with a speed that took her a full second to account for.
There was a sound she didn't want to name and then a second man came from her left and was dealt with in the same unhurried, final way. Then the warrior was standing in front of her, not even breathing hard, looking down at her with black eyes that caught the torchlight and gave very little back.
She looked up at him.
He looked down at her.
"Can ye walk?" he said.
She blinked. Her knee was screaming. "Aye."
"Then walk."
He took her arm. Not roughly, but with the absolute certainty of someone who wasn't planning to be argued with, and moved her forward into the narrow corridor off the far side of the yard.
A storage room. She registered the shape of it, the low ceiling, the dark, and felt the first warning tightening in her chest before he'd even pulled the door shut behind them.
The latch dropped. The footsteps outside thundered past. And the darkness pressed in from every angle at once.
Matilda's breathing changed.
She couldn't stop it. She never could, not in the first seconds, not when the walls were this close and the light was this gone
Her hands found the nearest surface and pressed flat against it, and she counted the way she'd taught herself to count, one and two and three.
"Hey."
The door cracked open.
Two inches, maybe three, but enough. Torchlight spilled across the floor in a thin orange stripe, and the darkness stopped being absolute, and her lungs remembered what they were for.
She exhaled.
The warrior stood with one hand on the door and his back against the frame, on the far side of the small space
"Better?" he said.
"I'm fine."
He looked at her the way people looked at things they didn't entirely believe. "Yer hands are flat on the wall."
She moved her hands. "I said I'm fine."
A beat. He let it go. "Yer leg."
"What about it?"
"Ye went down hard on it. How are ye?"
"I'm fine." She tested her weight on it carefully, kept her expression neutral when it protested. "It's naething."
He didn't argue.
He looked at her face instead. Not the way men usually looked at her face, with that careful softness she'd learned to dread. But directly, assessingly, the way you looked at something you were trying to get accurate information from.
"Are ye hurt anywhere else?"
"Nay."
"Did they touch ye before I reached ye?"
"His arm was across me chest. That's all."
He nodded once and looked back at the door, already done with it. Outside, the sounds were shifting, the sharp violence of the first wave giving way to the ragged noise of retreat, her father's guards calling patterns to each other across the yard.
She looked at him properly for the first time.
She'd expected older. The way he'd moved through that courtyard belonged to a man who had been doing it for decades.
He was sharp-jawed, lean, with light brown hair pushed back from his face and eyes that were very dark and very still and currently examining the door crack with the focused attention of someone running calculations.
"Who are ye?" she said.
"Nae important right now."
"Ye are in me home and just saved me life. I think I'll decide what's important."
His eyes moved to her face, briefly, and a for only a moment, he seemed almost amused. "Do ye now."
"Ye're nae one of me father's men." She kept her voice even. "Ye're nae Highland. Yer speech is," she stopped. Looked at him again. The cloak. The way he'd moved. The complete absence of anything resembling deference. "Ye're Norse?"
He said nothing.
"Ye're Norse," she said again, and this time it wasn't a question.
"I told ye." He straightened from the door frame, and the small space got smaller. "Nae important right now. What's important is that there are still men in this castle who came here taenight fer a reason, and standin’ in a storage room discussing me origins willnae help us."
"Ye said willnae." She looked at him steadily. "That's a Scottish construction. Ye've spent time here. Enough tae pick up the speech."
He stopped. From the way his body stiffened, she knew not many people spoke to him in that way.
The silence lasted exactly three seconds.
"Ye're very calm fer someone whose castle is under attack," he said.
"I'm furious," she retorted. "I'm simply also curious." She held his gaze. Something crossed his face that was a mix of amusement and some respect. It was also the look of a man recalculating.
"Who are ye?"
His response did not come immediately, and she had the unsettling impression that he was deciding something. Not about whether to tell her, but about something else entirely.
Then the sounds outside shifted again. Closer. Purposeful.
"Later," he said, and his hand closed around her arm. It was not rough, yet his grip was certain in a way that her body recognized as different before she'd finished deciding how she felt about it.
"Right now we need tae move. Fast."
She moved. She told herself it was because he was right about the timing.