Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
He had slept poorly for the fourth night in a row.
He knew the cause of it. He was not interested in examining the cause of it at any length, so he did what he always did when his mind refused to quiet.
He rose before dawn, dressed in the cold dark, and went outside to where the air had enough edge to it to clear a man's head whether he wanted it cleared or not.
The courtyard was empty. The mist sat low over the northern ridge, the ground soft beneath his boots, the only sound the distant shift of horses in the stable block. He stood in it for a moment with his breath fogging and his hands loose at his sides.
His fingers found the brooch in his coat pocket before he thought to stop them.
He had retrieved it from the clan chest three nights ago. Walked all the way to her chamber door, stood in the dark corridor long enough to hear the wood settle and pop in her hearth, and then lost his nerve, turned around, and gone to bed like a coward.
The brooch had been in his pocket since, knocking against his hip with every stride, a small weight that had become impossible to ignore.
He was going to give it to her today. He just had to find the words first, and words had never been his chosen weapon.
He called for his horse.
* * *
The weaving hall lay at the far end of the east wing, past the old, disused stillroom and down a steep flight of worn stone steps.
Margaret had found it entirely by accident during her second week at the castle, tracking the deep, rhythmic, blood-like thrum of the looms through a heavy door she had assumed led out to the herb gardens.
The room was long and low-ceilinged, its whitewashed stone walls draped with rich, heavy lengths of finished cloth in deep, tallows, madders, and woad-blues.
Four massive, dark-wood looms anchored the center of the space, their timbers smooth and blackened by decades of friction.
The air smelled strongly of rich lanolin, linseed oil, and the deep, comforting warmth of a room that was occupied every single day and never allowed to go completely cold.
Six women worked in the dim afternoon light. They looked up when Margaret entered, but the rhythm of the flying shuttles never faltered. In this room, she had quickly learned, the measure of a person was whether they were worth breaking the work for.
"Lady MacKenzie." Seona, the eldest weaver, called out without pausing her hands. At sixty-two, her fingers were as precise, gnarled, and weathered as the castle's foundation stones. "The gray wool arrived from the lower glen this mornin'. Ye'll want to see it."
"I will." Margaret sat on the low wooden window bench, pulling a heavy skein of wool from the central pile. She ran the coarse, greasy fibers through her fingers, testing their strength against her palm. "For the winter cloaks?"
"For whatever ye say it's for, me Lady," Seona replied, a rare note of respect slipping into her gruff voice. "But the weight's right for the frost."
Bridie, a sharp-eyed twenty-year-old with the fastest shuttle in the wing and a tongue to match, glanced up from her warp. "Did Angus's wife come to ye yet? About the linen for the upper beddin'?"
"Maisie? Nae yet. Why?"
Bridie shot a quick, guilty look sideways at Seona. The older woman glared back with a terrifying severity, and Bridie instantly ducked her head, returning to her loom without another word.
Margaret observed the silent, tense exchange, storing it away for later. A secret was spreading through the castle, taking hold in the kitchens.
"She'll come when she's ready," Seona said firmly, closing the topic.
The steady, heavy rhythm filled the room again. The looms didn't clatter or slam; they breathed. It was a low, hypnotic percussion that lived beneath their voices rather than over them.
Margaret came here as much for that grounding sound as the work itself. It was the only truly unhurried place in the entire restless castle.
"The winter festival," Margaret said after a quiet moment, wanting to bridge the distance. "Who usually handles the garlands for the rafters?"
"Used to be Anadel Campbell's task," said Moira, a dry, observant woman of thirty who possessed an unhurried manner Margaret had come to rely on. "Before she passed two winters back. Lately, the men just throw dried heather from the stores onto the tables and call it a day."
"The hall looked bare and cold at the last gatherin'," Margaret noted, remembering how the shadows had swallowed the empty corners.
"Aye," Seona grunted, her shuttle sliding home. "It did."
"I'll take it on. If there are nay objections from the older hearths."
"Nae a one," Bridie said quickly, her head still down. "We'd gladly see some life in those rafters."
Outside the small pane of glass, the gray dawn finally shifted into a pale, watery gold, throwing long, slanted bars of light across the stone floor. Two ravens cut through the mist, heading toward the battlements of the north wall.
"He was up on the battlements again last night," Catriona remarked casually, her eyes fixed on her threads.
Margaret's hands stilled entirely on the gray wool. She didn't look up, keeping her eyes trained on the fibers, but her heart executed a slow, heavy thud against her ribs. "Was he?"
"Third time this week," Catriona continued. "Angus saw him durin' the middle watch. Says the Laird walks the whole perimeter, twice over, stops to look toward the pass, then goes back."
Catriona paused, letting the silence stretch. "Before ye came north from Dunalasdair, me Lady, he did it every single night."
Margaret turned the skein over, her skin prickling. "I didnae ken that."
"He's quiet about it. Never carries a torch.
" Seona's shuttle flew across the warp with terrifying speed.
"Angus says it's just an old soldier's habit.
A man who spent twenty years responsible for whether a hundred other men lived or died through the night doesnae stop checkin' the walls just because he's put down his sword and taken a title. "
"Angus' is bein' soft and sentimental," Bridie chimed in, unable to help herself. "I think the Laird just cannae sleep. He looks like a man haunted by his own mind."
"Both can be true," Seona said softly.
Margaret set the gray wool down and picked up a finer, cream-colored skein meant for lining.
Her hands moved mechanically, performing the task without being asked, but her mind was entirely stuck on the image of Fergus.
Walking the freezing stone battlements alone in the dark, guarding a perimeter out of a bone-deep instinct he couldn't shake, keeping watch over a castle and a wife he didn't know how to talk to.
He had been a soldier all his life.
She remembered him standing in the firelight at Dunalasdair when he had come to claim her. Cold, unyielding, and wrapped in an armor of silence. She remembered the steady, rigid rhythm of his horse on the long, grueling trek north.
She hadn't understood his silence then. She had thought it was hatred. She was beginning to realize it was something far more complicated.
"He drove the fence posts on the eastern boundary line himself," Catriona added, her voice dropping into that rhythmic cadence of castle gossip.
"In August, right after he took the Lairdship.
Hamish offered his boys to dig the earth, but the Laird refused.
Rode out alone at dawn, came back after dark.
Forty heavy timber posts in a single day. "
"Forty?" Margaret asked, her fingers gripping the cream wool more tightly.
"Aye. Hamish went out the next morning to check the depth of the holes. Came back to the stables and said it was the tightest, straightest fence line he'd seen in fifteen years."
"He never mentioned that to me," Margaret murmured, almost to herself.
"The Laird doesnae brag on his blisters," Seona said, her voice dropping lower, slipping beneath the deep thrum of the looms.
She paused her hands entirely—a rare, monumental gesture—and turned her sharp, dark eyes directly onto Margaret.
"He is a good man, Lady MacKenzie. He's learnin' how to rule a home instead of a regiment.
The men trust him because he bleeds into the same mud they do, and the women trust him because he doesnae treat their labor like fluff or pastime. "
"I ken," Margaret whispered, the words catching in her throat.
"He's nae an easy man to ken. Most daenae bother." A beat. Her shuttle lay still. "But ye're watchin'," Seona said softly. Not an accusation. Not even a question.
She picked up her shuttle and returned to her work, as though she had said nothing of consequence at all.
Margaret stared at the wool in her lap, her throat aching with an unsaid truth she couldn't possibly deny. She was watching him. She was looking for him in every corridor, listening for his heavy boots, tracing the line of his scarred jaw when he thought no one was looking.
She couldn't stop if she tried.