Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
"Ye're late fer the bannocks."
Matilda opened her eyes.
Sigrid was at the door.
The candles had burned low but none had gone out, for she'd replaced them in the night, quietly, without waking her. The room was amber and warm and outside the window the sky was the pale grey of very early morning.
The steady and rhythmic the sound of steel coming from outside was and impossible to ignore.
"What time is it?" Matilda said.
"First light." Sigrid nodded toward the window. "He starts at dawn. Every mornin', rain or nae." A pause. "Ye can dae whatever ye like with yer mornin'. Come, lass. Bannocks. Kitchen. Now, or the men will have them and believe me ye’ll regret it."
She left but not before seeing Matilda’s smile.
Matilda lay on her back and listened to the steel.
It had a pattern.
The clash and pause of drilling rather than fighting, regular and controlled. Every so often, a voice cut through it.
She couldn't make out the words, but she didn't need to. The tone was enough. Sharp, short, final. The kind of voice that said a thing once and expected it done.
She knew that voice.
She got up and crossed to the window.
The glass was cold against her forehead, but the sight below made her breath hitch.
The yard was a sea twenty men or more, moving in pairs, steel catching the early light.
She could see their breath in the cold air, the controlled violence of the drilling, the way corrections landed and were applied before the next one came.
And at the far end of it, Ivar.
He had his back to her. Dark tunic, no cloak despite the cold, moving down the line of men with his hands behind his back.
He stopped in front of a pair and said something, and both men adjusted immediately, and he moved on. She watched him stop again. Demonstrate something with a blade, slow and precise, broken into pieces. Step back. Wait.
She had her hand flat on the cold glass and didn't notice until she looked down at it.
She straightened. Looked back at the yard.
He was moving again, and the morning light was on his shoulders. She was standing at a window in her nightgown, watching a man she'd known for less than a day drill his warriors before dawn, and her pulse was doing something she needed it to stop doing immediately.
I am simply observin’ a group of professional men and their laird in training.
She was allowed to observe. She was allowed to note, from a perfectly reasonable distance, that he moved like water finding the easiest path. No wasted steps, no hesitation, just the next thing and the next.
That he was broad across the shoulders in a way that the dark tunic did nothing to hide. That there was something about the way he waited after a correction, still and patient, that made the men want to get it right before he had to say it twice.
She watched the sheer, raw heat of his exertion that seemed to radiate even to the glass. She watched the way his hand moved to his sword hilt, deliberate and entirely masculine.
A sudden, treacherous heat coiled in her stomach, a physical awareness so sharp it felt like a transgression. She was standing in her nightgown, watching him through a pane of glass, yet she felt as though his gaze might burn through the stone and find her there.
He turned his head to the side, saying something to one of his men, his jaw in profile, and she took a step back from the window.
She told herself it was the bannocks and changed before going to find the kitchen.
She passed the corridors and followed the smell of bread.
The kitchen was warm and smelled of woodsmoke and oats, and bread that had just come off the stone.
Two of the kitchen women looked up when she came in and then looked at each other with the swift communication of people who had already been talking about her and had no intention of stopping.
"Me lady," the older one said. "I'm Marta. This is Betha." She was already moving toward the stone. "First batch is just done. Sit yerself down."
"I'm fine standin'," Matilda said. "Thank ye, Marta."
Marta handed her a bannock wrapped in cloth and looked at her with the frank assessment of a woman who fed people for a living and had opinions about all of them.
"Ye're smaller than I expected," she said.
"Marta," Betha said.
"I'm just sayin'. They said the Raven had chosen a Highland lass and I expected someone big." She made a gesture that encompassed something larger. "Nay offense meant, me lady."
"None taken," Matilda said. "I'm told I'm deceptive." She took a defiant bite of the bread. The honey and oats burst across her tongue, and for a moment, she forgot to be regal. "God’s breath, Marta. If the rest of the food is as good as this bread, I might never leave the kitchen."
Marta looked at her for a moment. Then she laughed and turned back to her stone. "Aye," she said. "I imagine ye are."
Matilda ate the bannock standing at the kitchen window.
It was good. Better than good. Warm all the way through, the outside just slightly crisp, the inside soft enough that it gave when she bit into it.
She took another bite.
"There's more," Marta said. She was already moving toward the stone. "Sit down, lass. Ye're making me neck ache, standin' there like ye're ready tae bolt."
"I'm nae."
"Ye're standing at a window with yer cloak on." Marta set a second bannock on the cloth and held it out. "Sit."
Matilda sat.
She took the bannock and looked out the window, which faced the yard, which was, she told herself, purely a coincidence of architecture.
The drilling was already well underway.
Even through the glass, she could read that the men were good at fighting. Not performing effort but actually working, adjustments landing and being applied before the next correction came. The yard was loud with steel and cold breath and the controlled energy of men being pushed past comfortable.
And at the far end of it, moving down the line with his hands clasped behind his back, was Ivar.
She'd seen him fight. She'd watched him work in her father's courtyard with a cold efficiency that had made two trained men look clumsy by comparison. She'd thought she understood what he was.
She hadn't understood this. This was him on the other side of it. The part that made the fighting possible. The part that made twenty men better than they'd been the morning before, and the morning before that, and every morning going back as far as he'd been doing this.
He stopped in front of a pair of men. Matilda couldn't hear the words, but she could read the shape of it. Ivar’s short question, followed by the younger one's answer.
She watched Ivar take the man’s practice blade. He demonstrated the arc—once, twice, three times—his movements fluid and patient. He stayed there, his body close to the lad’s, guiding the steel until the boy finally caught the rhythm.
There was a quiet, unshakable strength in that patience that was far more intimidating, and far more drawing, than anger.
He stepped back and waited.
The young one tried it and got it wrong.
Ivar showed him again. Same pace. Same precision. No impatience in the line of his body, no shortening of the demonstration, just the same movement offered again as many times as it needed to be offered.
The young one finally got it on the fourth attempt.
Ivar moved on without ceremony, which was its own kind of acknowledgment. She realized she'd been holding the cloth the bannock had come in so tightly that she'd creased it completely.
She put it down.
She was at the yard door before she'd made a decision about it.
The cold air came at her face. Two of the men near the door noticed her immediately, their eyes moving to her with the attention of people encountering something unexpected in a familiar space.
She didn't acknowledge it. She moved to the low wall on the near side of the yard, positioned herself where she could see the full line of them, and watched.
Up close it was something else entirely.
The authority she'd read from the window had a physical weight to it here, a presence.
Ivar moved through the yard with the absolute certainty of someone who had never once in his life needed to prove what he was. When he spoke, men adjusted before he'd finished the sentence. When he stopped walking, the nearest pair stopped working.
He hadn't smiled. Not once. His face was still and cold and entirely focused and she was looking at the Raven of Mull, the real one. The one the maids in her father's garden had whispered about, and she understood now, completely and without question, why they'd said what they'd said.
She also couldn't look away.
That was the part that frightened her.
She was standing in a training yard in the cold of a Mull morning watching a man she'd known for less than a day and her pulse was behaving in a way she needed it to stop and she was furious about all of it because she knew exactly what it meant and she didn't want it to mean that.
Not this man. Not now. Not when she was still finding the walls of the place she was supposed to live in.
He turned.
Not toward his men. Toward her.
Oh nay, he’s seen me starin’ like an idiot.
Those dark eyes found her across the yard with the immediacy of someone who had known she was there before he turned. They held hers for one long moment, steady and direct, and she stood very still and kept her face composed and tried not to give anything away.
His eyes moved to the two men nearest her. Then to three others further along the line, who had significantly reduced the quality of their footwork.
His expression shifted slightly before he glanced back at her. Then at his men.
"That's enough," he said. "Break."
He crossed the yard toward her with the same economy he appeared to bring to everything—as though effort were a resource he refused to waste. She had approximately eight seconds to arrange herself into a person who had simply been passing through.
She didn't quite manage it.