Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
“About bloody time!” she shouted, already turning her horse toward him, threading it through a gap between two struggling bodies without hesitation.
Sebastian let out a sound closer to what might have been his first laugh in weeks, rough and short, and closed the last stretch of ground between them on foot, cutting down a man who lurched into his path without so much as breaking his stride.
She swung down from the saddle before the horse fully stopped, landing hard in the mud with her sword still drawn.
Then they were there together, in the middle of everything, close enough that her shoulder instinctively touched his back, and they slowly turned in a circle to face whatever was coming at them next.
Three years of dawn drills with John in the empty east courtyard, learned in secret so the men would stop looking at her like she was made of glass, had not been for nothing after all.
“Ye couldnae have just stayed at Fergus’s,” he said, driving his blade into a man who came at him breaking through the smoke, “like a sensible woman.”
“I have never once been a sensible woman, and ye kent that the day ye took me castle.” She caught a blade aimed at his exposed side, the shock of it running up through her wrist, and shoved the attacker back hard enough for Sebastian to finish him without turning around.
“Fair point.” He grunted the words out between strikes, cutting down another man who came at them from the left, mud and rain making every footing treacherous. “Ye also stole me sleep, me appetite, and me common sense. Seems only fair ye’d steal me battle too.”
“I didnae steal anythin’.” She ducked under a wild swing, pierced through the man’s guard, and finished him. “I simply refused to be left behind. There’s a difference.”
“Is there?”
“Aye. One involves theft. The other involves me being right.”
He laughed again, and this time it carried; loud enough that a nearby Kerr man hesitated long enough for Hamish to close the distance and finish what his hesitation started.
They moved together through the havoc, their backs to each other, mud pulling at their boots, rain pouring down their faces in cold, relentless sheets.
Alba blocked a blow meant for Sebastian’s blind side with a shock that rattled up through both her arms, while Sebastian buried his own sword through the ribs of another attacker closing in on her from the opposite direction.
They moved in tandem, like they were performing a choreography they had rehearsed a hundred times instead of never once in their lives.
“I think,” he gasped, wrenching his blade free, “we’re better at this together.”
She glanced toward him for one bare second in the middle of it all, breathless, hair plastered against her face, sword still dripping in her grip. “So this is ye finally admittin’ ye need me?”
“I am admittin’ nothin’ of the sort.”
“Ye just did.”
“I said we fight well together. That’s a fact of battle, nae a confession.” He caught a blow on his forearm guard hard enough to stagger him half a step, and she was there, driving her own blade past his shoulder to end the man before he could press the advantage.
“Sounded a great deal like a confession to me.”
Around them, the fighting had begun to thin.
Fergus and Alasdair were driving the last of Kerr’s men back toward the tree line, MacGregor plaid closing ranks on every side until the small clearing where they stood had suddenly gone quiet.
The battle’s fury had ebbed, rolling past them like a wave breaking further down the shore.
Sebastian turned and stopped fighting entirely.
He caught her face hard between both hands, sword still gripped loose in one fist, the distant clash of steel still ringing somewhere behind them as if it belonged to a different night entirely.
“Sebastian, there’s still—”
“I daenae just want ye,” he said, cutting her off, his voice rough and unsteady in a way she had never before heard from him; not even in the darkness of the corridor night.
“I need ye. Every day since ye put a sword to me throat in yer own Hall, I have wanted ye, and I have spent every one of those days pretendin’ otherwise because a need that size terrified me more than any blade Kerr ever raised against me. ”
Alba froze under his hands, sword forgotten at her side.
“I love ye,” he said, and the words came out broken in the middle, like something tearing loose that had been held too tight for far too long.
“I should have said it a dozen times by now. I should have said it the mornin’ after the loch, I should have said it every time ye looked at me like ye were decidin’ whether I was worth the trouble.
I am sayin’ it now because I nearly didnae get the chance to say it at all. ”
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out; rain ran into the corner of her lips.
“Marry me,” he said, quieter now, his thumbs pressed against her jaw like he meant to hold her there by will alone.
“Nae for the Clan. Nae for Brian, nae for any treaty or truce or convenient arrangement between our lands. Marry me because I cannae imagine another mornin’ of me life where I daenae wake up beside ye.
Just say aye, Alba. Just…” His voice faltered for a moment. “Just say aye.”
Somewhere behind them, Fergus’s voice rang out over the last of the fighting, ordering men to fall back, hold the line, and tend to the wounded.
The usual business of a battle winding down went on without either of them, as if the entire world had not just shrunk down to the small space between his hands and her face.
Alba’s eyes burned, and this time it was not because of the rain. “Ye couldnae have asked me somewhere dry?”
“I couldnae wait that long. Will ye, then?”
A laugh broke loose, cracked, wet and entirely undignified, and she pressed her palm flat over the back of his hand where it still cupped her jaw.
“Aye,” she said, and it came out steadier than she expected, steadier than anything had felt in weeks. “Aye, ye impossible man. Aye.”
He kissed her before the words had fully left her mouth, firm and confident, one hand sliding into her rain-soaked hair while the other kept his sword loose at his side, both of them standing in the mud and the dying light of a battlefield that had nearly cost them everything.
Somewhere close by, Hamish’s voice cut through the moment without a shred of mercy. “Ye couldnae have picked a better time for that, could ye?”
Sebastian did not break the kiss. Alba’s hand found a fistful of his ruined cloak and held on.
“Give them a moment, man,” Fergus said, though there was no real bite in it, only the rough, tired satisfaction of a man who had just watched his own plan hold together against every odd stacked against it. “The lass earned it. So did he.”
* * *
Victory tasted mostly like blood and exhaustion by the time they rode back through Dunalasdair’s Gates near dawn.
The sky was still a bruised gray, rain finally thinning to a fine mist that clung to everything it touched; hair, cloaks, the flanks of the exhausted horses picking their way through the last stretch of mud toward the gatehouse.
Margaret and Isobel were already waiting in the courtyard, blankets bundled in their arms, a pair of healers hurrying out from the keep behind them with baskets of linen and salve.
Torches guttered along the walls, half-drowned by the damp, throwing more smoke than light across the churned mud of the yard.
Somewhere behind them, a dog barked twice, sharp and anxious, before a stable boy hushed it.
The moment the gates swung wide enough to show the riders coming through, Margaret’s hand flew to her mouth.
“Fergus!” She was moving before anyone could stop her, skirts hiked clear of the mud, and she reached him just as he swung down from his saddle, throwing both arms around his neck hard enough to nearly topple both of them off.
He caught her against him, one hand cradling the back of her head, his face pressed into her hair like he meant to stay there a while and had no intention of being rushed out of it.
“I am whole,” he murmured against her ear, voice rough. “I am whole, lass.”
“Ye’d better be, ye great fool, ridin’ off into the dark without so much as a proper goodbye.”
“There wasnae time for a proper goodbye.”
“There’s always time for a proper goodbye.” She pulled back just far enough to look at him, eyes wet, hands still fisted in his tunic. “Ye send word next time. Ye hear me? A note, a boy on a fast horse, anythin’.”
“Aye. I hear ye.”
“Ye’re only sayin’ that to end the argument.”
“I am sayin’ it because it’s true, and because ye look about to weep again if I argue further, and I have had enough weepin’ women for one night to last me a year.”
Margaret let out a wet, indignant laugh and swatted his shoulder before finally letting go of him, although her hand stayed against his chest a moment longer, as if she needed the proof of his heartbeat beneath her palm before she could fully believe it.
Then her gaze found Alba, still on horseback, mud-splattered and bruised and swaying slightly. Margaret crossed the yard in four sharp strides, reaching up to seize Alba’s arm the moment she’d swung down from the saddle, boots sinking into the mud.
“Ye stubborn woman.” Margaret’s voice cracked, more furious than relieved, or perhaps entirely both at once. “Ye rode into battle.”
Alba laughed, a short, shaky sound that pulled at a bruise along her ribs she had not noticed until that exact moment. “Apparently, I did.”
“Ye could have died. Ye could have…” Margaret’s grip tightened on her arm, and then, without any further warning, she hauled Alba into an embrace fierce enough to drive the air from both their lungs. “Daenae ever do that to me again.”
“I make nay promises.”
“Alba.”
“I make nay promises I daenae intend to keep, Margaret. Ye ken that about me by now, surely.”
Margaret pulled back, swiping roughly at her own eyes with the heel of her hand, half a laugh breaking loose despite the tears still standing in them. “Aye. I do. Doesnae mean I have to like it one bit.”
“Ye daenae have to like it. Ye only have to forgive me for it, eventually.”
“Give me a week at least before I manage that.”
Nearby, Isobel had reached Alasdair with rather more composure than Margaret had managed, though her hands shook faintly as she took his face between them, inspecting the shallow cut along his cheekbone.
“Ye’ll want that stitched,” she said, voice steady even as her thumb brushed just beneath the wound, gentle enough to belie the briskness of her tone.
“It’s naught but a scratch.”
“It’s naught but a scratch that will scar if left untended, and I will nae have ye lookin’ more roguish than ye already do, else I will spend the rest of me days fendin’ off every lass in the glen.”
“Would that trouble ye?”
“Immensely. Now hold still.” She pressed a kiss to the uninjured side of his jaw before he could argue further, brief and certain.
Then she allowed the healer forward to see to the injury properly, though she kept one hand resting against his shoulder the entire time, as if letting go entirely was still one step further than she could manage yet.
Alba watched them both—Margaret still fussing over Fergus’s split knuckles now, wrapping them in linen with hands that trembled only slightly, Isobel guiding Alasdair firmly toward the nearest bench despite his protests—and felt a sense of relief in her chest for the first time since Kerr’s men had dragged her from the clearing hours earlier.
Then she caught Isobel’s eye across the yard, and the older woman’s gaze shifted, purposeful and knowing, from Alba’s face to Sebastian standing just behind her shoulder, mud-caked, blood-streaked and completely unfazed by either.
Alba felt heat climb up her neck despite the cold morning air.
“Well,” she announced, turning to face the gathered women before anyone could comment further, forcing brisk cheer into her voice the way she had once forced steel into it before a Council meeting she had not wanted to attend. “I suppose ye’ll all need new gowns now.”
Margaret’s head came up so fast. “New gowns? Whatever for?”
“A weddin’, apparently.” Alba tilted her head toward Sebastian, who had the decency to look faintly startled that she had announced it before he had had the chance to do so himself. “At the MacLaren’s.”
“MacGregor’s,” Sebastian corrected firmly, stepping up beside her with mud still drying along one shoulder of his torn cloak.
“We’ll see about that.”
“There is nothin’ to see about it. It’s me name she’ll be takin’, and besides me Hall has the better hearth for a proper feast.”
“Yer Hall smells permanently of wet dog and old smoke. Mine has a hearth large enough to roast a full ox and a Hall that doesnae flood every spring.”
“It floods once a decade, and only the West Corridor.”
“Once a decade is once too often for a weddin’ feast, MacGregor.”
Margaret let out a delighted, watery laugh that had nothing left of the fear in it from moments before.
“A weddin’! Oh, Alba,” She pressed both hands to her mouth, eyes bright, already halfway to some private calculation of guest lists and flowers despite the mud and blood still drying on every person in the courtyard around her.
“At the MacLaren’s, at the MacGregor’s, I care nae which Hall, only that it happens soon, and that I have proper warnin’ to have somethin’ decent made to wear. ”
“It will happen,” Sebastian said, “the moment I can drag her in front of a priest before she changes her mind.”
“I have nae changed me mind in me life,” Alba said. “I simply enjoy watchin’ ye argue with me over hearths and floors and whose Hall smells worse.”
“I have noticed. It’s become somethin’ of a habit for ye.”
“Only because ye make it so easy.”
Isobel, still standing beside Alasdair while the healer worked at his cheek, shook her head slowly, though the small smile she wore gave away exactly how little she minded the delay in seeing to anyone’s wounds properly. “The whole Clan will hear of this by midday, mark me.”
“The whole Clan,” Fergus said, finally releasing Margaret’s hand long enough to clap a heavy palm against Sebastian’s shoulder.
“They already heard of it the moment ye rode into that clearin’ alone for her, MacGregor.
The weddin’ is merely the part where the rest of us get fed properly for once, instead of standin’ about in the rain. ”
“There’s always somethin’ in it for ye, Fergus.”
“Aye. Usually food. Sometimes wine. Tonight I will settle for both, and gladly.”
Sebastian’s arm slid around Alba’s waist, settling there with the growing familiarity of recent days. It was as natural as breathing, as if her body had always belonged pressed against his side and he had only now realized it.
Alba leaned into it, mud, blood, exhaustion, and all, and realized with a clarity that owed nothing to the gray dawn spilling slowly over the courtyard walls that she had everything she had ever needed, wrapped completely and finally in his arms.