Chapter 8
The day before the wedding was the longest of Olivia’s life, but it was also the strangest because it was very nearly a happy one.
They took over the solar. Maisie ruled it from the good chair by the fire like a general in a campaign tent, Elspeth sat by the window with her needle, Anne perched on the sill with a list she had made and was refusing to let anyone else read, and Rosie held court on a folded plaid in the middle of the floor with the dog stretched out beside her as her personal fortification.
“White heather,” said Elspeth.
“For luck,” Maisie agreed. “And a sprig of rowan pinned under the hem where nay one can see it.”
“For what?”
“For luck,” said Maisie serenely, “of the sort ye daenae talk about in front of a priest.”
Anne consulted her list. “And a sixpence in the shoe?”
“That’s an English thing,” said Maisie, with vast contempt.
“It’s a lucky thing.”
“It’s an English thing,” Maisie repeated, and Elspeth laughed into her sewing.
Olivia sat in the middle of the warm room with her hands lying useless in her lap and understood, with a kind of horror, that she was enjoying herself.
That was the trouble with the whole business. She had come here to be miserable and hated. She had been fully prepared to be miserable and hated. She had, in fact, been rather looking forward to the purity of it.
Instead, her mother was arguing amiably about the heather with the grandmother of the man who had killed her husband, and Anne was writing lists, and a baby with Blythe-blue eyes was gumming the corner of her slipper, and the whole thing was so far past bearing that she had to go and stand at the window for a moment and breathe.
That was when she saw him.
He was down in the inner court with Alastair, both of them stripped to their shirts, and he had a sword in his hand and was not using it.
He was standing quite still, with his back half toward her, listening to whatever his man-at-arms was saying, and then his head turned and tilted up, and he looked directly at the solar window.
Olivia did not move. It would have been an admission.
He did not move either. The blade hung forgotten in his hand, and for a long moment, they simply looked at one another across forty feet of open air. She could not read one single thing in his face, and she had the distinct and unwelcome sense that he was reading a great many things in hers.
Then Alastair said something, and Ragnall turned back to him, and the moment closed like a hand.
“He’s been at that all week,” said Maisie from the fire, without looking up.
“At what?”
“Findin’ reasons to be under that window.” The old woman turned a page of the psalter she was pretending to read. “He’s nearly worn a track in me courtyard. I have half a mind to charge him rent.”
“Maisie.”
“Aye, lass?”
“Ye’re a wicked auld woman.”
“Aye,” said Maisie, deeply pleased. “It’s the one thing I’ve kept me whole life, and I’ll thank ye nae to take it off me now.”
Anne looked up from her list, pushed her spectacles up her nose, and then looked back down at it. Olivia had known her long enough to know exactly what that meant, and could have cheerfully strangled her for it.
The dress came up in the evening, finished at last, the seamstress having sat over the hem with a candle for two nights running to let it out where the measurements had been guessed at wrong.
Her room had filled itself while she was still downstairs. Her mother was there, and Anne, and Maisie, and a soft clutch of maids, and Rosie, awake again and propped bright-eyed on Maisie’s knee, and laid out across the width of the bed in all its quiet glory was the gown.
It was not white. The Scots did not hold with white for a bride, and Olivia was glad of it. Instead, it was the deep, soft, living blue of a loch at dusk, with her own clan’s thread worked fine and careful all along the hem and the cuffs.
Someone in this keep had clearly labored over it in secret for days on end, for it was, without any contest, the bonniest thing Olivia had ever owned in her life.
It had been finished too late in the day to be tried, and too near the wedding to be left untried, and so it had come up the stairs to her by candlelight with half the household trailing behind it.
“Try it on,” her mother begged, her voice thick.
“Och, just once, lass, before the mornin’ and all its crowd.
It’s only just come, and if it wants takin’ in at the shoulders, there’s the whole night to do it and nae a minute after.
Let me see ye in it just once, when there’s nay one but yer own to share ye with. ”
Olivia could not find it in herself to refuse her mother that request. So they dressed her by candlelight, with her mother’s gentle hands trembling over the laces, Anne pinning the gaps, and Maisie overseeing the process from her chair like a commander at war.
When they finally turned her to face the polished mirror, even she drew a breath in awe.
Who is that? That isnae a hostage of the Council. That’s a bride. God help me, that’s a bride who half wishes to be one.
Rosie took one long look at her and clapped her hands together and shrieked aloud with pure delight, and that small sound broke them all clean open.
Her mother pressed her fingers hard to her mouth, and her tears spilled over and streamed unchecked down her cheeks. “Oh,” she whispered through her fingers. “Oh, lass. Yer faither would have…”
And that was the one wound in all the world too large to be borne.
The room suddenly became airless. All those loving faces turned toward her in the candlelight, full of hope and grief, the delicate lacework pressing close around her and tomorrow waiting at the end of it like the edge of a cliff in the dark.
Olivia realized she could not stay inside it for even a second longer without falling apart in front of everyone.
“I need a moment,” she managed to get out. “Just… please, I only need a moment to meself. Daenae follow me.”
She grabbed the heavy blue skirts in both fists and ran.
Not to her own chamber, where they would only come and find her.
She went down the stairs and out through the screens passage and into the cold black air of the courtyard, still laced into her wedding gown, because the night at least would ask nothing of her.
The night before her wedding, she could not breathe inside her own skin.
Tomorrow, she would stand before a priest in a cold kirk and bind herself, body, name, and her whole future, to the Laird of Clan Cairn until one of them died.
She had been so certain she would feel rage tonight. She had counted on the rage, had stored it like winter fuel, trusting it to carry her up the aisle, through the vows, and out the other side.
Instead, she felt only a vast and lonely fear, with not one single soul she could say it aloud to. Because the only person under this roof who might truly understand the size of it was the very man she was meant to be afraid of.
She turned the fear over and over in the dark, looking for an edge to grip. It was not the wedding itself, she decided, not the kirk nor the vows nor even the long years of it stretched out ahead. It was that she no longer knew her own heart on the matter, and she had always, always known it.
She had ridden into this castle certain of everything, and in just a few days, her certainties had fallen apart one after another like teeth, leaving her the night before her wedding with nothing solid to hold on to but the warm weight of a dog by her door and the memory of a man rocking a baby by a fire.
I am to be married in the mornin’, and I’ve never in me life felt so alone in a keep so full of people.
She had not gone far across the moon-washed courtyard when a soft voice spoke out of the shadows by the brewhouse wall.
Brigid MacKee stepped out into the thin silvery moonlight. Olivia found she could not read the healer’s lovely face at all. Brigid had the beauty of a sharp, clear winter morning—all clean, cold lines and pale light and no comfort anywhere in it.
“Ye’re awake late, me Lady,” she said, with a small, polite smile that did not reach her green eyes nor warm her one single degree. “Are ye well? Is there aught ye need, this night of all nights?”
“Nay,” Olivia said. “Nothin’. I only wanted to take the air.”
“Then I will leave ye to it.” Brigid did not leave. “Though ye shouldnae wander about alone at night, me Lady. There are folk in this castle who’d nae weep overmuch to find ye’d come to some harm in the dark.”
“I didnae ken I needed leave to walk around me own home,” Olivia said, lifting her chin.
“But is it yer home, me Lady?” Brigid asked gently, almost kindly, which made it all so much worse.
“What do ye mean?”
“Truly, now? Ye will forgive me plainness. I’ve only ever ken this place as the house yer braither ruined, and yer kin bled white over long years of feudin’.
There’s fresh earth in the kirkyard yet for it, and Kate’s up in her chair like a ghost that forgot to die.
I’d have thought that it’s a hard thing to call a place home when ye’ve had so great a hand in fillin’ up its graves. ”
Olivia was too stunned to reply.
Brigid inclined her fair head, the very picture of courtesy. “Sleep well, me Lady. Ye’ve a great day ahead.”
She melted back into the dark between the buildings as quietly as she had come.
Olivia stood alone in the cold moonlight, feeling exactly as if she had been slapped across the face by a hand wearing a soft kid glove so that there was not even a mark left to show for it.
She stood a while longer in the cold, though, and turned the healer’s words over in her mind.
“Ye’ve had so great a hand in fillin’ up its graves.”
It was not true, not in the sense Brigid had meant it, and Olivia knew as much. Still, it had found the soft place under her ribs and lodged there like a splinter, because the cruelest lies were the ones cut from the same cloth as a fear a body already carried.
She had wondered the same herself, in the darkness of this castle. Whether she was entitled to even a single happy hour under a roof her own blood had helped to ruin.
She did not step outside again for air. Instead, she returned inside for shelter.
She did not go back up to her chamber. She could not have borne the faces.
She went down the first corridor her feet found, around a dark corner, and through the first door her hand touched.
She shut it behind her and leaned her full weight against the wood and gasped, trembling in the dark.
Then she realized she was not alone.
A single candle burned low on the sill by the window, and in the chair turned for once not toward the bare wall but toward the door, her eyes not fixed and empty but alert, sat Kate.
Olivia froze where she stood. Of all the rooms in all the cold castle, her blind feet had carried her to this one.
“Forgive me,” she said. “I didnae mean to… I wasnae thinkin’ where I was going. I only needed somewhere they wouldnae find me, and I…” She stopped, helpless, her hand still on the latch behind her.
And then, because the silence stretched on unbearably and the girl in the chair watched her so steadily, she let go of the door and turned a small, foolish circle in the candlelight, her deep blue skirts whispering out around her ankles and settling slowly.
“The whole keep has been desperate to see this,” she said softly.
“I needed a respite from all the stares.” She let the skirts fall still.
Kate had not moved, had not spoken, only watched.
“I’m Olivia, by the way. I daenae ken if anyone has thought to tell ye.
Nay one in this keep tells me anythin’ either, so we’re even in that at least.” She swallowed hard.
“Did ye mind me bargin’ in on ye like this?
I can go. I will go, only say the word. It’s only…
Are ye all right with it, Kate? With me marryin’ yer braither in the mornin’?
Because if ye arenae, then that makes the two of us, and I’d rather ye told me true to me face than have ye hate me quietly across the table for the next forty years. None of me kin are truly here, ye see.
“Me faither’s gone, and Magnus, and Lucas couldnae come for all he wished it, and I just… I daenae have anyone to ask. And I daenae even ken why I am askin’ ye of all the souls in this keep. Ye’ve every reason in the world to wish me straight to the devil and good riddance.”
Then she caught herself, heard how much she had just spilled at the feet of a near stranger, and made some rough effort at a smile.
“Anyway. Listen to me ramble. Half the castle’s been wild for a look at this, and ye are the first to have it.” She smoothed her palms down the blue silk. “Does it sit well, do ye think? Honest, now. Does it look good on me?”
She drew one long, shaky breath when she didn’t get a reply. She didn’t know what she had expected.
“I am sorry. I will leave ye in peace now.”
She turned for the door.
“It looks good on ye, Olivia.”
Olivia went absolutely still, her hand frozen on the cold latch.
The voice was raspy and faint, barely more than a thread passing through a needle’s eye, belonging to someone who had not used it in a very long and terrible time. But despite its frailty, it was unmistakable, and it had said her name—her own name.
Olivia slowly turned around to find Kate watching her, a flicker of life stirring behind those deep green eyes.
“Ye ken me name,” she said stupidly.
“I ken everythin’.” Kate’s voice cracked and held. “That’s the part nay one in this keep has worked out yet. I daenae speak, but I have never once been deaf.”
Olivia could not move at all.
“I ken ye ride like a man and ye have a tongue on ye like a whip. I ken ye told me braither he’d never lay a hand on ye, and I ken he agreed to it, for the maids talk in the passage and they think a shut door is the same as a shut ear.
” Kate’s hands lay quiet and still on the coverlet.
“For half a year they’ve stood at the foot of that bed and talked over me about what’s to be done with me, and nae one of them has once asked me a question and waited for the answer.
” Her chin lifted a fraction. “Ye asked. And then ye stood there like a fool in yer weddin’ gown and waited. ”
“Kate—”
“So aye. I ken yer name.” Something moved at the corner of her mouth. It was not a smile, but it was the country that a smile came from. “Olivia.”