Chapter Nineteen
Anastasia followed Mairead downstairs to find the great hall transformed by noise and movement.
The clamor met her halfway down the stair—a tide of voices and laughter, the scrape of benches on stone, the clatter of cups, and bursts of Gaelic she couldn’t decipher.
Her hand found the cold stone wall as she slowed, suddenly aware of her unfamiliar clothes and the crowd awaiting her below.
Mairead had been civil all afternoon, though Anastasia felt less like a guest than a task to be completed before more pressing matters.
The task began with a bath: when a wooden tub and buckets of steaming water were carried into her chamber, she nearly wept with relief.
After two weeks of icy stream washes and one memorable plunge into the loch, she’d dreamed of sinking into hot water and staying there.
The tub proved the easiest part. Being cheerfully stripped by Mairead and three maids was mortifying; crossing the room nearly naked under their indifferent gazes even more so.
Personal modesty clearly meant something different here.
But then, the hair washing felt unexpectedly luxurious—someone else working warm soap through weeks of grime—but when they moved to wash the rest of her, Anna felt compelled to firmly put a stop to that.
She was twenty-eight, able-bodied, and perfectly capable of washing herself.
At a slight nod from Mairead, the disappointed maids retreated.
They descended again the moment Anastasia stepped from the bath, wielding linen towels with such vigor she suspected they’d been told not just to dry her, but to polish her.
She endured it until one ventured too near a region she’d managed independently since childhood.
She yipped, snatched the towel, and finished herself under Mairead’s raised brow.
While the maids worked on her hair, Anna had noticed the embroidery on the linen chemise Mairead held ready for her—a small thistle, worked in faded green and purple with a curious touch of red thread upon each thistle flower.
“Many mac Cailin garments and linens in this house bear that mark,” Mairead had said, catching her look. “The women of Craig na Coille have stitched it for longer than anyone remembers.”
“What is the red thread for?” Anna had asked.
Mairead’s hands had paused in their work.
“Blood of the thistle,” she’d said, and something in her voice had made Anna listen more closely.
“Long before my time, this keep was attacked while its laird and his army were away. His wife, Mòira, had only old women and boys to defend the walls. Fought bravely, they did, kept Craig na Coille for the mac Cailins.”
Anna had stilled beneath the maids' hands, her attention firmly caught.
“But aye, Mòira took a blade beneath her ribs.
Fell among thistles, they say, and pulled herself upright to kill the man who'd struck her before she fell again.” Mairead's fingers brushed the red thread almost absently.
“Her husband found the thistle still caught against the blood upon her breast. Kept it until it crumbled to dust, they say.” A faint, fierce smile followed.
“The next summer, the ground where she'd fallen grew thick with thistles—more than ever before. Blood of the thistle came to mean more than Mòira’s stubborn will.” Mairead stared down at the shift and its embroidery, a grin tugging at her mouth.
“My husband used to call stubbornness the blood of the thistle whenever Bram or Etta vexed him beyond endurance. Said there was nae curing a MacCailin of it because it ran in the blood.”
Anna smiled. “That explains a lot about Bram.”
Mairead’s eyes came immediately to hers, and Anna wished the words back.
But Mairead only said, “Aye. More than ye yet ken, I expect.”
She handed the linen to one of the maids, who promptly nudged Anna to stand and dropped it over her head.
“The tale changed over time, as tales do,” Mairead said. “But the heart of it remains: Cut us, and we grow. Trample us, and we rise.”
Anna looked down at the embroidered neckline and thought of Bram as she’d first seen him, barefoot and filthy, one wrist still locked inside an English shackle, his body carrying unmistakable evidence of what had been done to him.
He’d been starved, beaten, and imprisoned for three months.
Other men taken prisoners at the same time had all died.
Bram had come home.
Cut us, and we grow. Trample us, and we rise.
Blood of the thistle indeed.
Anna had been dressed then.
The linen shift was comfortable enough, though Anastasia couldn’t imagine why any woman required quite so much fabric simply to get through an ordinary day.
Over it came a wool gown of deep blue that Mairead had evidently decided suited her—fitted closely through the body and sleeves, which felt surprisingly flattering despite the volume of skirt pooling at her ankles.
The embroidery at the cuffs and neckline was so finely worked that even Anastasia, whose sewing experience began and ended with replacing buttons, could recognize the labor it represented.
Her hair had taken nearly as long as everything else combined.
Freed from two weeks of grime and indifferent braiding, it had dried considerably lighter than she remembered, and Mairead had been almost visibly affronted by Anastasia’s suggestion that they needn’t fuss over it.
Some portion had been drawn back and braided; the rest hung loose down her back.
Mairead had pronounced herself satisfied only when shoes and hose had been added to the ensemble, so that Anna felt she was wearing ten pounds of clothing. In truth, she felt less like herself than like a reasonable facsimile of someone else entirely, someone Mairead had decided to present her as.
She had no intention of complaining. No one at Craig na Coille owed her any of this, and Mairead had produced a chamber, a bath, clean clothing, and the promise of a hot meal within an hour of meeting her, even if every kindness had arrived with a measured scrutiny that made clear Bram’s mother had not yet decided what to make of the strange woman her son had carried home.
Anastasia could hardly blame her. She wasn’t entirely sure what to make of herself anymore.
Presently, she followed Mairead down the wide stone staircase and searched the hall below.
Her gaze swept the crowded hall, finding Bram almost immediately, and a sudden, fluttering warmth bloomed low in her stomach at the realization that his eyes were already upon her.
He stood near the raised table at the far end of the hall with several other men, one hand resting upon the back of a chair while he listened to something a middle-aged man was saying.
She had a very satisfying suspicion that he wasn’t listening to anything said. His gaze remained fixed upon her with an intensity that nearly caused her step to falter.
For several seconds, she forgot entirely that she was supposed to be angry with him.
He had bathed.
That alone would have made a difference after two weeks on the road and three month of captivity before that, but sometime during the afternoon Bram had also shaved away the dark beard he’d worn since the day they met.
The man revealed beneath it seemed almost unfamiliar—a stronger jaw, cleanly defined beneath high cheekbones, and a mouth she already knew too well.
His hair was clean as well, damp and carelessly pushed back.
But it was the clothing that altered him most completely.
The ragged fugitive was gone, and in his place stood the laird of Craig na Coille in a clean linen shirt and dark wool breeches, a sword at his hip as naturally as another man might carry keys in his pocket.
A heavy plaid was secured over one shoulder with a silver brooch pinned at his chest.
It struck her that suddenly he looked less like a man from another century than he looked profoundly complete now. Standing among his men, clean-shaven and armed, entirely at ease while others deferred to him, Bram looked every inch what he was.
And, damn, apparently being a medieval Highland chieftain suited him exceptionally well.
As he made no effort to look elsewhere, neither did Anna bother to drag her gaze away.
Whatever he had expected Mairead to produce after carrying Anastasia upstairs filthy, exhausted and dressed in the battered remains of her twenty-first-century clothing, evidently it had not been this.
His eyes moved over her with a slowness that made heat creep upward from beneath the neckline of the borrowed gown, lingering for one unmistakable moment upon her hair before returning to her face.
There was nothing cold in his expression now.
Anastasia reminded herself that Bram had been reunited with his family, his men, and his home after three months of captivity and another two weeks spent running from the English.
Of course he was different tonight. She had seen him smiling in the courtyard, had heard him laugh with the men who surrounded him, and had watched some burden she'd not fully appreciated he carried begin to fall away almost from the moment they'd ridden through the village.
He was home. He was safe. For tonight, at least, nobody was hunting him, nobody was trying to drag him to York to hang him, and nobody expected him to sleep beneath a tree with one hand on his sword.
His improved mood had nothing to do with her, she assured herself.
That didn't stop her pulse from jumping when his gaze met hers again.
She turned her attention determinedly to the hall instead.