Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
The lairds left at first light.
The air in the yard was sharp, tasting of salt and woodsmoke—a cold, jagged clarity that mirrored the departure.
Matilda stood by the gate, her fingers digging into the rough wool of her cloak as she watched the birlinns pull away from the dock.
She followed the rhythmic dip and pull of the oars until her eyes ached from the glare of the grey morning water.
"They’ll be halfway to the mainland before the mist lifts," a brisk voice said behind her.
Matilda didn't turn. She knew the cadence of Sigrid’s step now. "The sound looks empty without them."
"It’s always empty until it isnae," Sigrid replied, stepping up beside her. She adjusted the basket on her hip. "Claricia left a mess of lavender in her chamber. I suspect she meant for ye to find it."
Matilda felt the ghost of Claricia’s hug—startling and warm.
Write tae me. I mean it.
"She’s a loud woman," Matilda murmured, though the lump in her throat betrayed her.
"She’s a woman who kens what she wants," Sigrid countered. "Like Ada. Like Isolda. They all stood where ye're standin' once, lookin' at the water and wonderin' if they’d been traded for a prison or a home."
Matilda remembered how Ada had gripped her hand and said nothing, which was its own kind of thing. Isolda had looked at her for a moment with the eyes of someone who remembered clearly.
One week, she'd said. It gets easier after one week.
Matilda had nodded. She hadn't said that easier wasn't quite what she was afraid of anymore.
Matilda finally looked at her. "And which one was it?"
Sigrid offered a rare, thin smile. "That’s up to the woman, usually. And the man she’s tied tae." She gestured toward the keep. "Come. The yard is drafty. Let’s get ye inside before ye catch yer death. Ye’re the lady of this castle now and a lady has work tae dae."
The days began to find their grooves, but the edges remained sharp. Matilda no longer pretended she wasn't listening to the drilling from the window; the rhythmic thud of feet and Ivar’s barked commands became the heartbeat of her mornings.
She spent her afternoons following Sigrid through the keep’s belly. They moved through storerooms and armories, Matilda cataloging the precision of it all. It was a map of Ivar’s mind—ordered, defensive, leaving nothing to chance.
Evenings were a steady thrum of safety. Supper in the hall, then the chamber. Ivar in the chair.
Matilda lay awake one night, her heart hammering a slow, heavy rhythm against the mattress. She listened to him breathe and thought about Claricia’s voice:
Tell him, he'll stop if ye need him tae.
She thought about the four inches of space between them, and how many days were left of the two weeks.
The dark was no longer a cage. It was a space filled with him.
She couldn't stay in bed. The silence was too thick, the awareness too sharp. She got up, her bare feet flinching against the cold stone, and headed for the kitchen.
He woke and she wasn't there.
He knew it before he'd opened his eyes. There had been some shift in the quality of the room, the absence of her breathing, the cold on the side of the bed that should have been warm. He was on his feet before the thought finished forming.
The bed was empty. Covers pushed back, pillow still carrying the shape of her. The candles burned low, but no Matilda.
He checked the corridor. The two men at their posts. She hadn't left in a way that alarmed anyone, which meant she'd walked out quietly on her own, and the part of him that had been running threat assessments since Kinlochaline briefly did something complicated before he got it back under control.
He went left. Down the stairs. The window seat was empty. The anteroom—empty. The chapel—empty. He moved through the keep with the focused patience of a man who had learned that panic was a waste of time he didn't have and found himself at the kitchen doorway.
She was at the long table with her sleeves pushed to her elbows and flour to her wrists.
Her hair had come loose on one side. There was a white smear across her left cheekbone she didn't know about.
The fire in the grate threw warm light across the table and she was working the dough with a steady, rhythmic focus, her shoulders moving with it, entirely absorbed.
The sound of his steps echoed in the stone corridor. Matilda looked up, and their gazes held. He noted the flour that was on the sleeves of her dress, her cheeks and her hair. He pushed down the desire to wipe it off, if only as an excuse to touch her.
"Ye're working it too hard," he barked instead, his voice rough and flat.
Matilda could only keep staring at him.
"I couldnae sleep," she said, He noted how she fixed her gaze entirely on the flour-dusted wood.
"Aye." He looked at her hands. The flour on her wrists, her forearms, the cuffs of her nightgown. The smear on her cheek again. "How long have ye been at it?"
"A while."
He studied the dough. " Ye're pressing instead of pushing." He reached past her—close enough that she'd feel the warmth of his arm near hers—and set his hands beside hers on the dough. "Like this. Heel of the hand, forward and fold. Nae down."
She watched his hands.
He was aware of exactly how close he was standing. He was aware of her breath catching slightly and then evening out again with the careful deliberateness of someone who had decided to control it. He was aware of the specific distance between his arm and hers, which was not very much.
"Try it," he muttered, his breath close to her skin.
She cleared her throat and tried it.
"Aye." He didn't move back. "Like that."
They stood like that for a moment — her working the dough, him standing close enough that the warmth between them had become its own thing, the kitchen quiet around them, the crackling of the fire the only sound.
"Ye've done this before," she said.
"Me maither made bread. I was in the kitchen constantly. She complained about it."
She glanced at him sideways. Something in her face shifted—not quite a smile, something quieter. "She sounds like Marta."
"Perhaps." He turned his attention back to the dough.
She pushed, folded, pushed again. Her elbow shifted and caught his forearm, leaving a white smear of flour across it. She stared at it. So did he.
"Ye did that deliberately," he said.
"I was adjusting me grip."
He watched her. She had fixed her gaze on the dough with the studious attention of someone who was absolutely not thinking about him, and the corner of her mouth had gone tight in the way that meant she was fighting something.
He reached past her and picked up a pinch of flour from the table. Let it fall onto her hair.
She went very still.
"That," she said, with great dignity, "was uncalled fer."
"Ye started it."
She turned her head and met his eyes fully for the first time since he'd walked in and they were closer than she'd apparently calculated, because she stopped.
The kitchen went quiet in a different way.
His arm was still near hers on the table.
Her face was upturned. There was flour in her hair and a smear on her cheek and her eyes were very steady, and the distance between them was the length of a decision
"The dough's ready," she said.
His eyes dropped to her mouth. Just for a moment. Just long enough.
"It isnae," he said.
"It looks ready."
He looked back up. "Matilda. The dough isnae ready."
She held his gaze. Then she reached deliberately into the flour on the table, picked up a pinch, and dropped it onto his arm.
The next thirty seconds were not his most dignified.
The air filled with flour and the sound of her retreating around the table and his following, and when it was over they were both breathing harder than the situation warranted and the kitchen looked like it had been visited by a particularly chaotic weather event.
She was laughing
Not the pressed-lip version he'd been watching her suppress for a week. Not the almost-laugh she deployed when something caught her off guard. A real one––open, startled, her head tipping back with it, flour in her hair, cheeks flushed, entirely unguarded for one unrepeatable moment.
He stood across the table and watched it happen and did not move and did not speak and did not examine what it did to him to see it. Some things he had decided to take one day at a time, and this was one of them.
She gathered herself. Looked at the flour everywhere. Looked at him.
"Marta is going tae be furious," she said.
"Aye. She is."
A beat. She was still flushed. Her hair was a disaster.
She looked, he thought, like she should look.
Not the composed version she wore in the hall, not the careful version she deployed when she was managing a room.
Just her. Standing in a ruined kitchen at four in the morning, dusted in flour, looking at him.
He reached across the table and brushed the smear from her cheek with the side of his thumb. Slowly. She went very still under it, and he kept his hand where it was a moment longer than he'd intended, his thumb at the edge of her jaw, and she looked up at him and did not pull back.
He had a rule about this. He'd made it in the storage room the first night and he'd kept it every day since: he did not reach for her. He waited. He let her come to whatever conclusion she was going to come to in her own time, and he did not push it.
He dropped his hand.
"The dough's ready," he said.
She looked at the table. "Ye just said it wasnae.”
"It is now."
She said nothing. She was watching him with something in her expression he had to figure out and left before he did something that wasn't waiting
In the corridor, he stopped.
The cold air helped. Somewhat.