Chapter 17
Olivia woke warm.
That was the first mistake. She woke feeling warm and heavy, her cheek resting on a surface that moved gently up and down in a steady rhythm—solid, bare, slightly rough with dark hair, and clearly not a pillow.
Her hand was spread flat on it. Her fingers had, at some hour of the night, found the warm skin and decided to hold on.
A chest. She was half-lying on her husband’s bare chest with her hand over his heart, which was beating slow and strong and wide awake.
A low rumble vibrated under her cheek.
“Good mornin’ to ye too, wife,” Ragnall said, sounding far too pleased with himself. “Did ye like sleepin’ on me side of the bed?”
Olivia jumped off him as if he had caught fire.
She scrambled to the far edge of the bed in a tangle of loose hair and torn wedding gown and outraged dignity, clutching the coverlet to her chest. He had the gall, the absolute brass-faced gall, to fold his arms behind his head and watch her do it with the smug, lazy satisfaction of a cat in a creamery.
“Ye were the one,” she informed him, scarlet to the very roots of her hair, “who crept to me side of the bed in the night.”
“I never moved a muscle,” he said. “I sleep like a fallen oak. Ye’re the one who burrowed into me like a wee animal seekin’ warmth. Twice. I have witnesses.” He paused. “Well, I have Tattie. He came up in the night and saw the whole shameful business.”
The great hound, curled in a vast disreputable heap at the foot of the bed, thumped his tail once at the sound of his name and did not otherwise stir.
“He’s nae a witness; he is a traitor,” Olivia said, and flung a pillow at her husband’s insufferable face.
Ragnall caught it one-handed without looking, grinning. The grin transformed him so utterly, so wickedly, that her breath caught and her anger was forgotten. She had to turn her face away.
She made him turn around so she could get dressed. He went, with huge and dramatic reluctance, and stood facing the wall with his arms crossed and his bare, scarred back to her. She was pretty sure he was still smirking at the stones.
“Daenae,” she said, struggling into the borrowed morning gown someone had left over the chair. “Ye daenae get to look. Nae after… nae after…” Her face flamed afresh at the memory of last night, of his voice low at her ear, of what she had done at its low, relentless bidding.
“After what?” he asked, all innocence.
“Ye ken fine what.”
“I daenae ken anythin’,” he said piously. “I slept like a fallen oak. I told ye so before.”
She threw the second pillow at his back. He laughed, a real laugh, low and warm and startled clean out of him.
It was such a strange sound in the grim, cold castle that Tattie lifted his head and barked at it.
They went down for breakfast together, which she had not meant to do but simply happened, his hand hovering over the small of her back the whole way down the stairs without ever quite landing.
Kate was in the hall. She was sitting at the table in the morning light, with Rosie in the crook of her arm and a bannock in her free hand.
She looked up when they came in, and her thin, worn, half-starved face did what it had not done in half a year.
It smiled. A real smile, small and crooked and astonished at itself.
“Well,” she said, looking from her brother’s face to Olivia’s and back again, missing not one thing, sister to the bone. “There’s a sight I never thought to see. The pair of ye, come down together, and nay blood spilled between ye.” Her smile widened. “Did ye sleep well, Braither?”
“Like a fallen oak,” Ragnall said, straight-faced, and pulled out a chair for his wife.
Olivia choked on nothing at all and had to be pounded between the shoulder blades.
They ate. The dog begged without a shred of shame and was indulged by every soul at the table.
Rosie flung a fistful of bannock at Ragnall and caught him square between the eyes and was pleased with herself beyond all telling, and Ragnall, the Laird of Clan Cairn, the man who had opened a clansman like a fish not twelve hours ago, wiped the crumbs from his face and growled low at the baby until she shrieked with delight.
Olivia watched him as the morning sunlight bathed the worn table in gold. Watched while her brother’s child laughed in her enemy’s sister’s arms. Her enemy was foolishly playing with a baby who was not even his.
At that moment, she sensed her deepest hatred crack and fade.
This warm, bright hall is a trap. And what frightens me most is that I daenae think he set it. I daenae think a soul set it. I think I am just walkin’ into it on me own two feet, eyes open, and lettin’ it close behind me.
“Let’s take her out,” Olivia heard herself say to Kate, nodding at the baby. “Into the gardens, while the sun holds. She should feel it on her wee face on a day like this one.”
Kate’s whole face lit up like a window at dusk at being asked, at being included, at being treated as a woman who might walk out into a garden with her own daughter on an ordinary morning.
“Aye,” she said. “Aye. I’d like that. I’d like that more than I can rightly say.”
As they rose, gathering up the baby and her blanket and a long-suffering Tattie, Olivia felt the cold draught of being watched.
She turned and found Brigid standing in the far doorway with a basket of herbs over her arm, perfectly still, looking at the four of them—Olivia and Kate and the laughing child and the great daft dog—with an expression that had no warmth in it.
The healer smiled, slow and pleasant, inclined her fair head, and went on her way.
Elspeth was at the table too, and Anne sat beside her. Olivia understood the moment she saw their faces that the pair of them had been awake half the night talking about her.
Elspeth did not fuss. She simply reached over as Olivia sat, turned her wrist gently, and looked at the black fingermarks that had bloomed on her forearm overnight. Her face did something terrible and quiet.
“It’s nae as bad as it looks,” Olivia said.
“It looks like a hand,” her mother remarked.
“Maither—”
“I ken.” Elspeth let her go and smoothed the sleeve back down over the bruises with great care, as if covering them were a kindness she could still perform.
“I ken, lass. I’ll nae make a scene at yer husband’s table.
” She picked up her cup, her hand not quite steady.
“But I’ll be thinkin’ about it the whole road home, and ye may as well ken that too. ”
Anne said nothing at all. She had not said much since the feast. She only pushed the honey across the table toward Olivia without being asked, and pushed her spectacles up her nose, and watched everything the way she always did.
Olivia felt the whole bright warmth of the morning go cold around her.