Chapter 1
The whole castle had been holding its breath for a fortnight, and Olivia was heartily sick of it.
Sick of the beeswax and the scouring sand, the floors done over twice a day for a council that had not come.
Sick of the good candles burning down in the hall for nobody.
Sick of the way the maids stopped talking when she came through a door, and started again after she had gone.
It was the year the Elders met. Once in a generation, the old men gathered at the standing stones and weighed every grievance in the Highlands on their cold, invisible scales, and what they handed down was law. There was no court above them in this world but God Himself.
For two weeks, her mother had lit candles in the church every dawn and returned home with her knuckles white around her shawl. During those two weeks, everyone in Blythe whispered the same hope in the same hungry voice, passing it from person to person like a coal kept alive overnight.
Surely now. Surely now the Elders would punish the man who broke a signed peace and killed a laird and his heir in their own yard.
So when the rider came up the glen with the seal on a folded letter, half the household trailed Olivia into the hall to watch her open it.
She could feel them at her back—the maids and the men—all leaning in toward the small folded weight of their future.
She rather wished they would not. Hope, she had learned, carried more weight when it was shared with others.
She broke the wax with her thumb.
She read it once. The words rearranged themselves before her eyes and meant nothing at all—just a line of black marks, a clerk’s neat handwriting.
She read it a second time, and this time the marks made terrible sense, and their meaning was so monstrous that the paper slipped from her fingers and fluttered down through the air to settle among the rushes.
A second square had been folded inside the letter, smaller and stiffer than the rest, and it slipped free as the paper fell and landed face-up among the rushes.
A portrait, painted finely in oils, reflected the Council’s cold courtesy with its harsh edicts—perhaps so a bride could study the face she was about to be handed before she ever stood beside it at the altar.
Olivia turned it face-down with the toe of her slipper before she truly looked at it.
She had no desire to see that face a second time.
“What is it?” Her mother’s voice came from very far away. “Olivia. Lass. Say somethin’! What does it say?”
“It’s a weddin’ invitation,” Olivia said.
A ripple spread through the hall, uncertain in tone. Near the door, someone laughed—a quick, nervous laugh, as if they suspected the joke was at their expense.
“To whose weddin’?”
Olivia lifted her head. Her mother stood with both hands pressed to her chest, her gentle face already braced. Olivia hated, hated with her whole heart, what she was about to do to that kind face.
“Mine,” she said. “I am to be married. To him. To Cairn. The man who killed Faither and Magnus in this very yard.” Her voice did not shake, which she counted later as the one small mercy of the morning.
“The Elders have weighed it all, and this is their justice. They have given me to him to settle the debt.”
The laughter died where it stood. Her mother sat down very suddenly on the bench by the wall, as if her legs had simply stopped agreeing to the work of holding her up, and one of the maids made the sign against ill luck.
For a moment, Olivia stood perfectly still and let it sink in, cold and complete—like a stone resting at the bottom of a deep pond. Married to him. To the blacked-out face, the steady voice, and the closed eyes before the violence. She waited to feel the sorrow of it.
All around her, the hall had fallen into whispers, the soft, frightened hum of a household that had just realized its small, safe world was about to be remade without its permission.
A maid was weeping into her apron near the screens passage.
Old Dougal had turned the color of cold ash.
And her mother sat on the bench with the dropped letter at her feet and her hands folded in her lap, as if folded hands could hold the morning together.
What came instead was rage, clean and bracing as a winter sea, and she seized on it with both hands, because rage at least was solid enough to stand upright inside of.
Olivia did not sit down. She had never sat down in her life when she could do something loud instead.
She sent for the councilmen.
They arrived within the hour, the dozen graybeards and tacksmen who advised her younger brother now that he wore their father’s ring on a hand still too thin for it.
She stood at the head of the long table with the cursed letter smoothed flat before her, both palms pressed to the wood to keep them from curling into fists.
“I’ll say it once, and I’ll say it plain, so nay man here can claim he misheard me.
” Her voice came out ringing, and she was glad of it.
“I would sooner take the veil. I would sooner walk into the cold sea with stones in me pockets. I would sooner take a knife to me own wrist at this table, in front of the whole pack of ye, than take the name of the man who widowed me maither.” She let that sit. “Now, which of ye will tell me I must?”
“Ye cannae refuse it.” That was old Dougal, who had served her father for forty years and sat at his right hand on this same council, and who had bounced her on his knee when she was a bairn and slipped her honeyed bannocks behind the cook’s back.
He would not meet her eyes now. He turned his bonnet round and round in his spotted hands, and he said it again, heavier.
“Lass, ye cannae. It is an edict, sealed at the Stones. We defy the Council, and they will set every clan from here to the western coast against us, and they will be in the right to do it. We havenae the men. We havenae the grain to last a siege, nor the walls to hold one since Cairn broke the gate. There would be nothin’ left of Blythe by the spring but a name and a graveyard, and the graveyard’s full enough already. ”
“So I am to be the grain,” she said. “I am to be the coin ye lot pay over so the rest of ye can sleep easy in yer beds.”
“Ye are to be the peace,” said her brother quietly.
That was worse, far worse, because Lucas had a beard he could still only manage in patches, and their father’s ring was turning loose on his finger, and he was trying so desperately hard to be a laird, and his hands were shaking under the table where he believed she could not see them.
He made himself go on, and he made himself look at her while he did it. “Olivia, I daenae want this. God as me witness, I’d burn the letter and fight them all if I thought we’d win. But I’d be sendin’ men to die for me pride dressed up as yers. Is that what ye’d have of me?”
“It isnae pride,” she said, and heard the lie in it even as it left her.
“It is, lass.” Dougal, gentle now, which she could not bear at all. “And there is nay shame in pride. Ye come by it honest, from a long line of it. But pride’s a poor roof in winter and a worse one in war.”
Around the table, the others took it up, one after another, like water finding every crack in a wall. Hamish the smith, who had shod her first pony, said the forge had iron enough for plows or for blades but not for both, and he knew which he would choose if the choice were left to a sensible man.
The miller’s brother spoke of the grain stores, and how thin they had worn through a hard year, and how a siege would empty them by the feast of the Nativity with nothing to follow but the eating of seed corn and then of nothing at all.
An old woman who had served three lairds said that she had buried two sons in this feud already and had no third to give, and looked at Olivia down the length of the table with eyes that had done all their weeping years ago and had none left over for anyone’s pride, least of all a lady’s.
They were not cruel. That was the unbearable part. Not one of them was cruel. They loved her, in the gruff sidelong way of people who had watched her grow, and they were asking her, every weathered face of them, to lie down in the road so the rest might pass.
Olivia looked at her young brother with his ring, too large for his hand, and at the empty chair at the head of the table where her father should have sat, and at the candle her mother had left burning in the window for a husband who would never return up the glen at dusk.
They’re all right. That’s what I cannae bear. They’re all right, and I am the only wall standin’ between me people and the grave.
She had built her whole self, brick by furious brick, on the certainty that she would never bend to the man who took her family. And here was the price of that certainty laid out plain on the long table, counted in other folk’s sons.
She did not stop hating him in that hall. She was not so quick nor so soft as that. But for the first time, the hate felt like a weight she was carrying rather than a weapon she could swing, and she resented him for it, fresh and hot, for putting a price on her grief.
She opened her mouth to say something cruel, because cruelty came more easily than the grief pressing hot and thick at the back of her throat.
The hall door banged open on its hinges.
A maid stood in it, white to the lips, her cap knocked askew. She looked at Olivia and then at Lucas and seemed unable to decide which of the two she ought to be more afraid of.
“Beggin’ yer pardon, me Laird, me Lady,” she gasped out. “He’s here. At the gate. With six men and a cart.”
The whole table went still.
“Who is here?” Lucas asked, though every living soul in that room already knew the answer in their bones.
“Laird Cairn,” the maid whispered, as if saying it louder might call something worse down on them. “He says he has come for his bride.”