Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
She was still thinking about it the next morning.
Lilly had fallen against his chest. His large hand rested on her back, steadying her instinctively. The way he looked out across the courtyard afterward, as if he needed somewhere else to focus his eyes besides her.
I'll hold her, he had said. As though it was nothing, even though it was everything.
Margaret stood at the nursery window in the early light, watching the glen below the castle wall, the long grass still silver with dew, the hills rolling away into a pale morning sky.
Lilly was behind her in the crib, breathing in the slow, untroubled way of a bairn who had been well-fed and well-held and had no concerns about the day ahead.
He is capable of it. He simply does nae ken he is.
That was the thing about Fergus MacKenzie.
He was not a cold man. She had stopped believing that within the first week.
He was a man who had been taught, by years and circumstance and God knows what else, to keep everything useful and discard everything soft.
He had built an entire identity around it.
The soldier. The Laird. The man who did not need anyone.
But she had seen his face in that nursery. She had seen it in the courtyard. She had watched him sit in the grass with a child leaning against his arm and do nothing about it, and she knew, with the quiet certainty of a woman who paid attention, that something in him was shifting.
Good. Then we keep goin'.
She went to find him after breakfast. He was in the yard, already deep in conversation with Angus about something involving the eastern boundary, his arms crossed, with an expression that usually appeared before ten in the morning—one that conveyed he had already made a decision and was explaining it as a courtesy.
He glanced at her when she arrived. She paused to let him finish the sentence he was in the middle of.
"Good mornin'," she said, when he had.
"Aye." He looked at her with the careful neutrality he had been using since the rain. "What is it?"
"We are goin' to the glen."
A pause. "I've work—"
"Angus will manage it." She looked at Angus, who had the excellent instincts of a man who understood when he was being asked to agree with something. "Willnae ye?"
"Aye, me Lady," Angus said, with a straightness of face that Maisie had clearly trained into him. "Absolutely."
Fergus looked at Angus. Then back at her. His jaw did the thing it did when he was calculating whether an argument was worth the effort.
"The glen?" he repeated.
"The glen," she confirmed. "We need flowers for the nursery garlands. And for the great hall. It will nae take long."
It took considerably longer than that. She had always intended it to.
This was not about flowers, and it was not about errands.
It never had been. She had understood something about Fergus MacKenzie in the first week.
That he was a man who could command a room, lead men into danger, and make decisions that determined the course of other people's lives, and yet had never once been asked to simply be somewhere without a purpose.
Every moment of his life had been assigned a function. Soldier. Man-at-arms. Laird. He did not know how to exist in the spaces between roles, and so he had filled them with work, and then more work, and then the performance of work when the real work was done.
She could not reach him in the spaces where he was already armored. Not in the great hall. Not at council. Not on the training ground.
But here — in the ordinary, purposeless rhythm of a morning walk, a kitchen task, an afternoon in the open air — the armor had nowhere to hang.
He could not be a Laird while kneading bread.
He could not be a soldier while picking heather.
He could only be himself, and that was the man she was trying to find.
She was not running him on errands. She was dismantling him, very carefully, one common morning at a time.
The path descending from the east wall opened into a wide, sloping meadow before narrowing toward the actual glen.
The air shifted instantly, feeling fuller somehow, less dominated by stone, smoke, and the weight of the castle behind them.
The hills rose on three sides, purple-green in the morning sunlight, with a very wide, very blue sky above.
Somewhere below, a river wove through the valley floor, its steady, low sound reaching their ears before they saw it, blending with the wind.
Fergus walked beside her with his hands behind his back and the posture of a man accompanying someone on a task he expected to complete efficiently.
Margaret slowed her pace.
Not dramatically. Just enough to make efficiency impossible.
She moved through the tall grass at a slow, unhurried pace, as if she had nowhere urgent to go, stopping when something caught her eye, crouching down to examine a cluster of wildflowers at the base of a gray rock.
First, she noticed the yellow ones, small and vivid.
She picked one up and turned it between her fingers, studying it carefully.
"Tormentil," she said, to no one in particular.
Fergus stopped beside her. "What?"
"The flower." She held it up. "Tormentil. Me mother used to put them in the window in summer. She said they were common, but she liked them anyway." She set it carefully in her basket. "She said there was nay shame in likin' common things."
Fergus said nothing. She had not really expected him to. She straightened and kept walking.
"Did she," he said, after a moment. Not a question exactly. More like a door, held slightly open.
"She did." Margaret moved toward a patch of heather further along the slope. "She had very decided opinions about most things. The windows. The bread. The correct order in which to greet guests." She smiled at the ground. "She would have had a great deal to say about this castle."
A pause. She sensed him struggling not to let the shutters down. Finally, he spoke coolly. "In what regard?"
She glanced at him. He was looking into the middle distance, his expression carefully neutral, but he had asked. That was the point. He had asked.
"The hall needs more light," she said. "She always said that. A dark hall makes for a dark household. She would have had those shutters off the south windows before the week was out."
Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Not quite enough to name. "And ye agree with her?"
"I agree with her about the windows." Margaret crouched again, this time for a stem of purple heather, pulling it cleanly from the root. "About the bread, I have me own opinions."
She heard something then—something she had not heard from him before, not quite a laugh, too brief and controlled for that, but the breath that comes just before one, quickly suppressed. She did not look up. She added the heather to the basket and moved on, giving him the privacy of it.
There. That is what I am lookin' for.
Not the grand gestures. Not the moments of obvious softness, like the bairn against his chest or the step forward into the courtyard.
Those were important, but they were the visible surface of something much deeper.
What she was searching for were the small ones.
The question he had not intended to ask.
The almost-laugh. The moment when his guard accidentally came down.
She moved further into the glen, unhurried, her basket filling slowly.
He stayed close without needing to be told.
She asked him questions as they came to her, not the big ones she actually wanted answers to, not yet.
Small ones. What was on the eastern boundary she and Angus had been discussing.
Whether the storm had damaged the lower wall or just the shed.
Whether the MacAlister steward had written again.
He answered these readily. This was safe territory, the language of the castle and the clan, and he moved through it with the ease of a man on solid ground.
She listened, watched, and noted the exact moment when his shoulders dropped slightly, when his hands emerged from behind his back and hung loosely at his sides, and when he ceased walking like someone headed somewhere and instead began walking like someone simply walking.
There it is.
"Did ye always want to be a laird?" she asked.
The shoulders went back instantly. She had pushed too far. She watched him recalculate, the ease fading, the careful neutrality sliding back into place.
"It wasnae a matter of wantin'," he said.
"I ken that." She kept her voice even, her attention on the flowers. "But before ye kent. When ye were still at Alasdair's side. Did ye ever think about it? A place of yer own?"
A long pause. The river below filled it, steady and unhurried.
"I thought about..." He stopped. "There was land. Near the western coast. I rode through it once on patrol. It was..." Another stop. She could feel him searching for the word and not quite finding it, or finding it and not quite trusting it. "Good land," he said finally.
It was not what he had been going to say. She was certain of it.
"Good land," she repeated quietly, and let it rest there, and did not push further.
She crouched for a stem of white clover, and he stood beside her in the open glen, and the hills held them on every side.
He has never talked about himself to anyone. Nae like this. Nae even in these small, unfinished sentences. This is goin' to take longer than flowers and one mornin' in the glen.
It was noon across the hills when Margaret sat down in the grass and did not get up.
Fergus looked at her, then at the path back to the castle, and then at her again.
"It's late," he said.
"It is." She set the basket beside her and tilted her face toward the fading sky. "Maisie has Lilly. Sit down, Fergus."
He did not sit down right away. He stood for a moment with his hands at his sides, acting like a man who had not yet made up his mind. Then he sat.
The fire he built was small and efficient, just like everything else he did. No wasted flame. The space between them was narrower than it had been all day, with the dark pressing in from the edges of the glen, and the warmth of the fire drawing them closer without either of them acknowledging it.
Margaret watched the sky change from gold to gray to the deep, specific blue that appeared just before the stars came out.
She was aware of him watching her. She had known about it for most of the afternoon, how his gaze kept returning to her when he thought she wasn't looking.
She let him look. She said nothing about it.
The first stars came out.
Then one that stopped her entirely. She was on her feet before she thought about it, her hand out, pointing. "There," she said. "Look at that one."
It sat low on the horizon, brighter than anything nearby, and it did something she had never seen a star do: shifting between white, amber, and something almost red, pulsing faintly.
She heard him rise behind her. He moved closer than she expected, close enough that his warmth reached her before he spoke, his breath softly brushing the curve of her ear, with his presence enveloping her without actually touching her.
Her breath caught, and she stayed perfectly still.
"‘Tis the Ghoul Star," he said, his voice lower than usual.
The certainty in it was different from the certainty he used for land disputes and council decisions, something that belonged to a different part of him entirely.
"The severed head of the Gorgon Medusa. Held in the hand of Perseus.
" A pause. "They say ‘tis unlucky to see it. "
Margaret looked at the star. "I've been unlucky for quite some time," she said softly. "I think I'll be the one to decide me fate."
A silence. Then his hand found her waist. It arrived without ceremony, resting there at first—nothing more than contact. But her body responded to it with a shiver that moved through her, which she could neither stop nor hide.
His breath changed. She felt that too.
She turned. His eyes met hers first, dark and close in the firelight, then briefly dropped, just for a moment, to her mouth. His hand was still at her waist. Neither of them moved.
Choose it. Just this once. Choose it.
He stepped back.
The cold came in immediately where the warmth of him had been.
"I'll nae have me head filled with foolishness." His jaw was tight, the words coming too fast, too hard for the quiet of the glen. "I am a laird. Lyin' in the grass, starin' at stars." He exhaled sharply. "That is nae what I am meant to do."
Margaret looked at him. The firelight flickered across his face, revealing the effort he was making, the way he was piecing himself together in real time. She had felt the shift. She had been inside it with him. She understood what it had taken for him to step back.
That was almost worse.
"I am yer wife," she said quietly. "Ye gave me yer word. Yer presence."
He said nothing. She held his gaze a moment longer. Something settled in her chest, not anger—something colder than that.
"But I cannae demand that ye want to stay." The words came out even, carefully placed. "Only ye can do that."
"It's time to go," he said. Controlled. Distant. The voice he used when a conversation was over.
"Of course, me Laird," she answered.
She picked up her basket. She did not look at him again. She walked ahead of him back up the path toward the castle, her back stiff. She did not let him see that her hands were not entirely steady.