Chapter 29
She came. Over the hill and down to the water with her chin up and her clan at her back and that red hair catching the climbing sun like a struck match.
For one breath, Ragnall forgot the burnt fire, forgot the watching clans, forgot every careful word he had meant to say.
He had said her name clear across the river before he had thought better of it, and now it was said, and both clans had heard him say it, and he found he did not care.
Then the moment passed, and the duty came back, because it always did.
He turned away from her, focused intently on what mattered first. He walked along his side of the river to the spot where the burnt stack still smoldered.
Then he bent down, picked up the Blythe plaid that had been pinned there for his people to find, and held it high in both hands so everyone on both banks could see.
“There’s some folk,” he called out, “on both banks, who have been waitin’ all day for me to do a particular thing with this.
To hold it up and name it Blythe treachery.
To say there’s the proof, there’s the enemy’s true face, and send ye all home to sharpen yer dirks.
” He let his gaze sweep across the silent crowd, the way his father had taught him, face by face. “I willnae give them the pleasure.”
He crossed to the brazier that should have lit the festival fire, and he thrust the corner of the plaid into the coals, and he held it while it caught, and he let the whole bright lie of it burn to nothing in his fist.
“A man burned our fire in the night and hung a stranger’s colors beside it,” he said over the rising murmurs.
“A Cairn fire that Cairn hands and Blythe hands built together. He didnae do it for Cairn, and he didnae do it for Blythe. He did it because there is a man somewhere who grows fat on the two of us hatin’ each other and has done for longer than any feud can rightly explain. And I will say what I think of him.”
He ground the last smoking scrap of the plaid under his boot heel. “I think we should build the fire again. Now. Both of us, the one stack, in front of God and the whole glen. And we light it in the night, and we dance round it till the dawn, and we let him choke on the sight.”
Nobody moved.
So Ragnall turned his back on his own men, which no laird in that glen had done in living memory, and walked down the bank to the edge of the water. He stopped there and looked across the ford at Lucas Arran.
“I’ll nae ask yer men,” he said. “It isnae me place, and I’d nae have the right of it if I did. I’m askin’ ye, Laird Blythe, afore yer clan and afore mine.”
The whole ford went silent enough to hear the water.
“Ye’ve every cause to refuse me,” Ragnall continued.
“I killed yer faither. I killed yer braither. There’s nae a man livin’ who could stand where ye’re standin’ and be blamed for tellin’ me to go to the devil, and if ye do it, I’ll turn around and take me people home and I’ll nae come back at ye for it.
” He reached out his hand across the shallow water.
“But I’m askin’. One fire. Both banks. And whatever’s owed between us, we’ll say it out loud in the light instead of payin’ for it in the dark for another fifty years. ”
Lucas stood for a long moment on the far bank with his father’s ring loose around his finger and three hundred faces waiting for him.
He was very young. Everyone there could see how young he was.
Then he stepped down into the ford in his good boots without so much as glancing at the water, and he waded out to the middle of it, and he took Ragnall’s hand in front of God and the whole glen.
“One fire,” he said. “And I’ll take the first log.”
Old Tavish spat on his hands and reached for it.
Tavish, who had carried a Cairn spear at this ford before Ragnall was born, who had buried two sons in this feud, and who had told his Laird to his face not a month past that the clan would never warm up to a Blythe witch in the south tower.
If Tavish moved, the clan moved. Every man on the bank knew it.
Then a Blythe man across the ford spat on his hands and reached for another, and it tipped, the way such moments did, all at once, and both banks of the river came down to the water to build a fire together.
Ragnall let out the breath he had been holding, looked up, and found Olivia watching him across the ford with an expression that undid more of him than the whole month apart had managed.
Daenae look at me like that, lassie. Nae here. I have a festival to hold together and a saboteur to hunt and a promise to keep, and I cannae do any one of them if ye look at me like I’ve just done somethin’ grand. I only did what was needed. That’s all a laird ever does.
The ford was just a stone’s throw wide, no more, and shallow enough in the middle to wet a man no higher than the knee. Across it, by the unspoken law that had lasted for three generations, no soul from either clan had set foot in the other’s territory peacefully in living memory.
Ragnall walked into the water.
He heard the inhale of three hundred people.
He felt the cold of the river seep over his boots and soak the hem of his plaid, yet he did not slow down.
He crossed the entire width of the river to the Blythe bank and stopped in front of his wife, close enough to touch, which he did not do because he had given his word.
“Welcome to the festival, me Lady,” he said quietly, for her and not the clans. The corner of his mouth, the scarred one, quirked up. “Ye look like ye rode in expectin’ a fight.”
“I rode in expectin’ to talk sense into three hundred fools,” she said, her voice not quite steady. The crack in her famous composure nearly broke him. “I see ye’ve done it for me. How disappointing. I’d sharpened me whole speech.”
“Ye could give it yet.”
“To whom?” She said it lightly, but it did not come out light at all.
“I’m nae a Blythe, Ragnall. I gave that up in a kirk in front of a priest, and me braither’s Laird now, and he doesnae need his sister at his shoulder tellin’ him his business in front of his men.
” She looked out at the two banks and the one fire and would not look at him.
“And I’m nae a Cairn either. Ask any soul on yer side of the river.
I’m the Blythe witch in the south tower, and I’ve the maids’ word on it. ”
He said nothing. There was nothing to say that was not an insult to her intelligence.
“So I’ve nay clan at all,” she continued. “That’s the plain arithmetic of it. There are three hundred souls at this ford, and I’m the only one standin’ here who doesnae belong to a single one of them.” She lifted her chin. “It’s a rare position. I daenae recommend it.”
“Give it to me later. I’d nae waste a good speech of yers.” He let his eyes move over her face once, helpless, every freckle of it he had given a month over to trying to forget. “Ye’re well? Truly? How is yer shoulder?”
“Healed.” Her gaze had gone to the scar on his face, softened, and hardened again. “I am well, Ragnall. Ye need nae fuss.”
There it was again. His name on her lips, plain as a hand laid flat on his chest. He felt it go through him exactly as it had the last time—past every guard he had.
A piper struck a tune behind them on the Cairn bank, and cheers rose from both sides, and the festival, against every odd and every burned fire and every patient hand working in the dark, began.
“Come,” Ragnall said, and did not offer his arm because he did not trust himself to feel her hand on it. “There are folk on both banks who need to see their Laird and their Lady stand on the same ground and nae draw blood. Can ye manage that, lassie? A whole day at me side, and nae a single knife?”
“I make nay promises,” Olivia said.
She stepped off the Blythe bank to walk beside her husband, and the two clans watched their enemies cross the water and did not, for once, reach for their steel.
Olivia had intended to speak her mind at the water, in front of everyone, and he had taken that from her with just three gentle words and a walk into a cold river. So she bided her time.
She bided it through the rebuilding after the fire and the first awkward mingling of the clans, through a cup of Cairn ale pressed into her hand by a woman who could not quite meet her eyes, through the length of a walk around the booths with her hand not quite touching her husband’s sleeve and half the festival pretending not to watch them.
And when the piper led a knot of dancers off toward the green and the press of bodies thinned, she put her hand on Ragnall’s arm at last, light as anything, and steered him without a word into the cool green shadow of the alders where the festival ground gave way to the river path.
He went where she steered him. That was the first surprise.
Laird Cairn, who bent for no living soul, let a Blythe woman walk him out of the sight of his own clan as biddable as a led horse, and when they stood alone in the dapple with the noise of the festival soft and far behind, he turned to her and waited, and said nothing, and let her have the ground.
“Ye said ye’d hear me speech later,” Olivia said. “Well, it’s time.”
“Aye,” he said. “It is.”
“Then hear it.” Her heart was pounding hard, and her voice came out lower and fiercer than she had planned, a month of it pressing up behind the words.
“Ye married me to stop a war. I kent that goin’ in, and I willnae fault ye for it, for I did the same.
But the mornin’ after, ye put me up in that cold tower like a sword hung back on the wall, and ye barely gave me the time of day for a fortnight.
“And when a man came into me room in the night and nearly put me in the ground, ye didnae sit at me bedside and ask if I was afraid. Ye decided me fate. Ye looked at me lyin’ there with me blood barely dry on the bed, and ye decided all on yer own that the safest thing was to send me back to Blythe like a parcel posted to the wrong house. ”
“That’s unfair. I would never treat ye like a parcel.”