Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Four days in that chamber was three days longer than Ivar found acceptable.
He’d said so on the second day, his voice a low grate of frustration, and Oswin had looked at him with the flat, unimpressed expression of a man who had heard this argument a thousand times before.
The healer had developed an effective counter to it. He simply didn't move and waited for the man making the noise to remember that he had a fresh hole in his side and couldn't enforce a single command.
Matilda had been worse.
She had been there every time he surfaced from sleep, watching him with that level, hazel gaze that he had learned to read by now.
Every time he’d suggested he was well enough to rise, she’d said nothing at all.
Her silence was a heavy, suffocating weight, somehow more conclusive than any argument he could muster.
On the fourth morning, he got up anyway.
He did it with the grim, agonizing care of a man walking a tightrope. He dressed slowly, jaw clamped tight as he wrestled his boots on. He stood upright and took a full, testing breath.
The wound pulled, a sharp, hot reminder of the steel. The fever had left a gritty residue in his joints that made him feel as though his own body had been borrowed by a stranger who didn't know the mechanics of his frame. Yet he was functional. He had been functional under far worse conditions.
He put his hand on the heavy oak door, pulled it open, and walked out into the keep.
The hall was already in motion. He could hear it from the corridor. Voices running a register lower than usual, that pitch of men who were measuring their words and watching the corners. He knew that register well.
He found Torvald in the Great Hall.
Torvald looked up from the document in his hand. He took in the sight of Ivar, upright, dressed, moving under his own power.
"Ye're up," he said.
"Aye."
"Ye're dressed."
"That tends to come with bein' up, Torvald."
Torvald set the document down slowly. He looked at Ivar the way he looked at things he was deciding whether to argue with. His jaw shifted once.
"Daes Matilda ken?"
"She was asleep when I left."
A pause. Torvald looked at the far wall briefly, in the manner of a man performing a calculation he already knew the answer to. "So when she wakes and finds ye gone, she'll come down here."
"Probably."
"And she’ll find ye here, standin' up, havin' conversations."
"She'll manage."
"She'll murder ye," Torvald said, with the calm certainty of a man stating a fact of nature.
"Four days at yer bedside, nay sleep tae speak of, and she'll walk in here and find ye discussin' harbor security.
I'm nae sayin' it willnae be deserved. I'm just sayin' I'd like some warning so I can be in a different room. "
"Noted." Ivar held out his hand for the document.
Torvald looked at the hand. Then at Ivar's face. Then he gave him the document, with the air of a man who had said his piece and washed his hands of the consequences. "Fer what it's worth," he added, "ye look terrible."
"Thank ye."
"I mean it as information, nae an opinion."
"I ken." Ivar looked at the document. "The envoy?"
"Waiting. He's been sharpening his quill since yesterday."
"The Council?"
"Assembled an hour ago." Torvald paused, scanning Ivar’s pale face. "They wouldnae start without ye."
"Then we’ll start."
They went towards the council room and Torvald updated him on their finds.
They had uncovered documents taken from intercepted messengers linking Callum directly to the mercenaries involved in the harbor fire.
The seals matched. The payment marks were clear.
The evidence was undeniable. When they arrived, Ivar sat at the head of the long table.
Henry, the King’s man with the perpetual quill and clinical eyes, laid out the Crown’s position in the measured, bureaucratic tone of someone who had rehearsed his speech and was thoroughly enjoying the performance.
The fire had been deliberate, the evidence unmistakable.
Ivar could still smell the acrid scent of burning timber in the air, feel the oppressive heat of it clinging to his clothes.
The harbor had been in chaos, smoke curling thickly against the night sky, men scrambling in the disarray of the flames. He could picture it now. Figures in the dark, moving with purpose, slipping into the shadows, their knives hidden beneath layers of cloaks.
They had known exactly where to strike, where the fire would create the most damage, the most distraction. And all the while, the harbor's layout, the paths between the piers and the warehouse corners, the blind spots, each one had been studied and memorized.
The question the Crown now found itself compelled to ask was how men with such intimate knowledge had managed to infiltrate a public gathering.
The harbor was not some back alley, it was a hub of activity, always under watch.
Yet, these men had slipped past unseen. Henry’s voice was heavy with mock sympathy as he asked, his quill still poised above the paper.
He didn't look up. He didn't blink. He sat with his shoulders perfectly square, his spine a rigid line against the back of the heavy oak chair.
His quill remained motionless, the tip hovering a hair's breadth from the parchment, as he watched Ivar with the flat, unblinking stillness of a predator waiting for a pulse.
There was no warmth in his gaze, only a clinical, sharpened focus that traced the tension in Ivar’s jaw and the set of his shoulders, recording every twitch of a muscle as if it were a tactical error.
He was a man looking for a crack in the stone, his face an impenetrable mask of cold ink and judgment.
"A curious thing, Laird Gunnarsson," Henry murmured, the scratch of his quill finally breaking the silence as he made a single, slow mark. "That yer own harbor, a place ye claim tae rule with such… Norse efficiency… could be turned against ye so easily."
Beside him, the two flanking observers sat like statues carved from the same cold marble.
One held his breath, his chest frozen mid-rise, his eyes darting toward Henry with every shift in Ivar’s expression.
The other kept his hands locked, white-knuckled, over his knees, his face a total void of emotion.
They were mirrors waiting for an image, their gazes never straying from Henry’s profile, ready to mimic whatever scowl or nod he offered first.
Ivar met Henry's stare with a gaze that had weathered North Sea storms and Saxon steel.
"The harbor was turned against us because the enemy was invited intae our house," Ivar said, his voice a low, dangerous vibration. "They didnae slip past me watch. They were carried in on the payroll of a man who kens our blind spots because he helped map them."
He let the silence hang, thick as the oil smoke that had choked the piers. Henry finally lifted his head, the light of the fire catching the sharp, calculating glint in his eyes.
"And ye have proof of this invitation?" Henry asked, his voice thin as a blade. "Or are we tae rely on the word of a Raven who finds himself suddenly grounded by a fire he didn't see coming?"
Ivar let him finish, the heat of his temper rising to match the sting in his side.
"The men entered as traders," he said, each word a cold stone dropped into a deep well.
"We’ve confirmed three names from the mainland.
Two are known associates of Callum MacDougall.
The third was the man taken in the passage.
" He paused, leaning forward just enough to make Henry blink. "He’s being held."
"Has he spoken?"
"He will."
Henry’s quill moved in a frantic scratch. "The Crown’s concern, Laird Gunnarsson, is not merely the attack. It is the pattern. This is the second coordinated strike since the marriage was announced. The court finds it difficult to––"
"The court," Ivar interrupted, his voice dropping into a dangerous, quiet rasp, "finds it difficult because it’s looking in the wrong direction."
He kept his gaze iron-steady. "Callum MacDougall has been working tae fracture this alliance since before the wedding.
We have the names, the payments, and a living man in our custody who was there.
What the court should find difficult is explaining why a Highland laird has been allowed tae run this kind of campaign while Mull has been the one fielding the consequences. "
The room went tomb-quiet. Henry’s quill stopped mid-sentence.
"Ye will have a full account, in writing," Ivar said.
"In the meantime, the Council will convene, the harbor will be secured, and ye are welcome tae remain as an observer.
" He let that sit for a heavy moment. "Or ye can return to the mainland and wait there fer the written account. Either is acceptable."
Henry looked at him, performing that same clinical assessment, searching for a crack. He didn't find one.
Ivar was in pain from the base of his ribs to the top of his hip, and his head was a swirling mist, but none of that was visible. He sat like the stone of Duart itself.
The Council that followed was longer. He sat through it, his side thumping with a dull, rhythmic ache. He answered what needed answering, dismissed what needed dismissing, and when it was finally done, he walked toward his study.
He intended to speak to the man they’d taken from the passage, the mercenary who had remained unconscious since the harbor fire.
Einar was standing outside the door. The look on the man’s face told Ivar what he needed to know before a word was spoken.
"Still out," Einar said shortly. "Oswin says maybe taenight. Maybe tomorrow."
Ivar stood in the corridor and breathed, saying nothing as his jaw tightened.
"He took a bad blow to the head when Torvald brought him down," Einar offered. "Oswin says there’s nay way tae ken if he’ll wake."
Ivar pushed into the study and stood at the window.