Chapter 20
He went to her early in the morning, before the castle was fully awake, because a task like this was best done quickly and quietly without an audience.
Brigid was in the healer’s chambers, as she ever was. She looked up from her grinding when his shadow fell across the door, and a shadow moved behind her green eyes, quick and gone.
She smiled. “Me Laird. Twice in two days. Folk will talk about ye spendin’ more time with the healer than ye do with yer wife.”
“Ye spoke to Olivia yesterday,” Ragnall said. “About me. About us.”
She didn’t bother to deny it. That was Brigid; she’d never been a coward. She set down the pestle, crossed her arms, and looked him right in the eye.
“Aye, I told her the truth of it,” she said. “Is the truth a crime now in Cairn? Should I have lied to the lass? Sent her off to her marriage bed believin’ she was the first and only woman ever to warm yer bed?”
“Ye told her this to wound her.”
“I told her because she ought to ken what it is she has walked into.” Brigid’s voice rose, and the cold polish cracked. Under it was something raw and old and burning.
“Still, ye had no right to do that!”
“Have ye lost yer wits, Ragnall? Do ye hear yerself? Ye’ve wed the sister of the man who broke Kate’s body in pieces.
Ye’ve seated a Blythe in yer maither’s chair at the head of yer table, and now ye come down here to scold me!
Me, who’s bound this clan’s wounds and birthed its bairns and stood at yer side through every black hour that ever came!
And now, because I bruised the feelings of yer enemy’s daughter—”
“She is me wife.”
“She is the reason for every ill that’s ever befallen this clan. She and her blood and her kin. Her braither—”
“Is dead.” The two words fell flat and final into the room. “I killed him meself. Ye were there to set Kate’s bones after. Ye’ve nay grievance against that man left livin’, Brigid, for he is six months in the cold ground.”
“And Kate’s still broken!” Her voice cracked. “He’s dead, and Kate’s still not far from a ghost, even when she tries, and that lass sleeps soft in yer bed with her braither’s eyes starin’ out from the bairn’s face every blessed day, and ye’d have me curtsey to her—”
“Leave Kate out of it.” Ragnall’s voice was very quiet now.
“Ye daenae care a whit for me sister, and we both ken it. Kate has come further in a fortnight under that lass’s care than she has in half a year under yers.
So daenae stand there and dress yer spite up in me sister’s name.
Ye’re nae angry for Kate, Brigid. Ye’re angry for yerself.
Say that much honesty at least, between the two of us, after all these years. ”
She went white. Then red. Her mouth opened and closed.
“I am sendin’ ye to Laird Munro at Kilmory,” Ragnall said, more gently than perhaps she deserved.
“They lost their healer to the winter fever, and they sorely need a good one, and ye are the best one I ken. I willnae pretend otherwise to spare either of us. Ye will go with a full purse and a letter in me own hand sayin’ as much. Ye will want for nothin’.”
“Ye’re sendin’ me away.” It came out in a whisper. “After all these years, ye’re castin’ me out. For her.”
“I am thankin’ ye for yer long service,” he said, “and partin’ with ye well, which is more than many a laird would bother to do, and a great deal more than ye earned with yesterday’s work.
Ye put yer two hands to me niece and saved her life, and for that ye’ll have me gratitude to me dyin’ day.
But ye put yer tongue to me wife to wound her, in spite and in malice, and that I willnae have under me roof from any soul that tries to harm her.
Ye taught me yerself that a wound left to fester takes the whole limb in the end. ”
For a long moment, Brigid did not answer.
Then she gathered herself as she would gather over a hard birth or a dying man, drawing all her strength up cold and quiet into her spine, and looked at him out of those clever green eyes with a light in them he had never seen there in twenty years of knowing her. It chilled him to the bone.
“As ye say, me Laird,” she said softly. “I will go to Glenmara. I will go wherever it is ye send me.” She turned back to her worktable and took up the pestle again, calm as standing water.
“But ye’ll mind, one day, that I kent this clan and its grievances long afore yer red-haired lass came to charm the lot of ye soft.
And I will mind, wherever I am sent, that ye chose her. Over all of us. Over everythin’.”
“What are ye talkin’ about, Brigid? Enough with this nonsense.”
“It’s nae nonsense.” The pestle began to turn. “Folk are watchin’, Ragnall. Yer own folk. They’re watchin’ how their Laird sets his enemy up above his own blood. And nae every grievance in this glen is buried so deep as ye’d like to believe.”
“I will hear none of this any longer. Ye’ve till the morrow to be gone from Cairn,” he said, already turning for the door. “And daenae let me set eyes on ye again until ye are. We’re long past pretendin’, ye and me.”
She did not look up again. And Ragnall, walking out into the cold, bright morning with the deed done and dusted, could not shake the feeling that he had won nothing at all, that he had only kicked over a stone, and that what he could not yet see had already begun to crawl very quietly out from beneath it.
I’ve made meself an enemy today. Aye. But she was never a friend, was she? And there are worse things watchin’ this castle than one cast-off healer with a grudge. I can feel the weight of them. I just cannae yet see where they stand.